This essay, Flourishing in the Absurd, by Rodney King, PhD, asks whether genuine human flourishing is possible inside systems designed to fracture and commodify human development, and maps a path to cultivate it anyway. Picking up where Living in the Absurd left off, King argues that modern institutions don’t merely fail to support flourishing, they actively prevent it by colonising each stage of becoming and selling back simulations in their place.

Core mechanisms of diminishment:
 
The Machinery of Diminishment: We are kept functional enough to produce and consume, yet structurally impeded from integrating a life that feels good and does good. The result is engineered non‑flourishing disguised as opportunity.
The Commodification of Selfhood: Identity is packaged as a personal brand long before authentic selfhood can form, destabilising all later development.
Experience as Product: Lived experience is curated and performed for content, stripping it of the friction and surprise that mature into wisdom.
The Wisdom Crisis: Information and optimisation masquerade as discernment, while true wisdom requires slowness, paradox, and long horizons.
Manufactured Meaning & the Architecture of Almost: Purpose is pre‑packaged; we perform “almost‑flourishing,” always one purchase away, and blame ourselves when it doesn’t arrive.

A reclaimed developmental arc:

Selfhood → Experience → Wisdom → Meaning → Purpose → Flourishing.
 
This is not a ladder to optimise, but contested territory to be cultivated against the grain of institutional logic. Real flourishing is integration, not performance.

Practices that create space for the real thing:
 
Deliberate Deceleration & Attention: Walking at human speed, ambient awareness, and simple field notes that restore presence the machine can’t monetise.
Dialogue as Conspiracy & Communities of Resistance: Conversation that seeks understanding over victory, and small circles that privilege process over product.
Embodied Resistance & Zones of Autonomy: Trusting bodily knowing; creating protected times and places where different values can breathe.
The Discipline of Incompletion & Strategic No: Choosing depth over dispersion; saying no to machine‑generated obligations to say yes to integration.

Bottom line: Flourishing in the Absurd doesn’t promise escape. It offers a map for conscious navigation: walking the arc awake, integrating what cannot be bought, and cultivating lives that truly feel good and do good within, and despite the machine.