The Life Beyond Achievement

The Empty Self A decades-old critique of American psychology helps explain why focusing on just the self never seem to be enough. By Victor Counted • The Flourishing Journal • 9 min read You finally buy the thing you have wanted for months. For a few days, perhaps a few weeks, it works. Something inside you settles. There is usually a rush of excitement. You feel more confident about your purchase. Then the feeling fades, and another object takes its place in your imagination. We usually explain this pattern as materialism or poor self-control. If you are a Marshmellow Test's fan, you perhaps might say that it is a lack…

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Anti-Foreigner Protests and the Problem of Broken Native Belonging

Place & Belonging The Stranger at the Door The anti-foreigner wave sweeping three continents is being read as a story about hatred. Underneath it is something the science of belonging can name, and there may be a solution in sight. VC Victor Counted The Flourishing Journal · July 2026 In Johannesburg, a pregnant woman from the Democratic Republic of Congo has taught her children a drill. If the marchers come, she tells them, run and hide, because there is nothing she can do to protect them. She has been turned away from clinics where protesters now stand at the doors deciding who deserves care. She fled one country to survive.…

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They Bombed the Cathedral. The Sky Is Still Open.

They Bombed the Cathedral. The Sky Is Still Open. | The Flourishing Journal Place & Flourishing They Bombed the Cathedral.The Sky Is Still Open. A study of religious believers reveals something unexpected about resilience: when the places we hold sacred are taken from us, a great many of us can still find holiness underfoot. By Victor Counted, Ph.D. The Flourishing Journal A refugee leaves a war-torn city. The mosque where she prayed is rubble. The streets that oriented her childhood are checkpoints now, or gone. On every conventional measure she has lost her place in the world. And yet she still has the moon that marks her prayer times, and…

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