You stay up late binge-watching Robbie Williams’s Netflix documentary, when you really can’t stand Robbie Williams. Or, for that matter, documentaries. But there’s nothing else you want to watch, and the stairs looks a lot like Mount Kilimanjaro. You know you have to get up for work tomorrow for that job you used to like, but now can’t quite remember why you did.
Objectively, there may not be much wrong with your life. By most measures, you’re a model of functioning, productive adulthood – you’ve ticked off the boxes of job, family, friends, somewhere to live, reasonable good health. Yet you feel empty and no amount of Minervois or Maltesers is filling the void. You’re not burnt out. It’s actually worse than that: you’re languishing.
Oh, here we go. From the generation who brought you “quiet quitting” and “shift shock” (the latest TikTok workplace trend to describe your disappointment when your job doesn’t live up), surely this is just another name for the state of wishing you didn’t have to work?
In fact, the concept of languishing long predates TikTok. Once known as “acedia” (derived from the Greek term for “absence of care”), what you might call “feeling blah” was regarded until the sixth century as the eighth deadly sin, the one that drove Dante to the edge of hell. Now it is a recognised psychological state, the opposite of flourishing.
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It was given the name “languishing” by Corey Keyes, a sociologist and professor emeritus at Emory University in the US, and (wildly) popularised by a viral New York Times article during the pandemic. It is not to be confused with depression, Keyes says in a new book called Languishing: How to Feel Alive Again in a World That Wears Us Down, but it can be a precursor to it. And it’s not burnout – although work-related burnout can leave you languishing.
Reading through the symptoms, it does sound like a very contemporary malaise: a restless emptiness, a sense of being emotionally flattened. Getting in touch with friends feels like too much work. You’re paralysed by the smallest decisions. “You’re standing in the shower, trying to remember whether you have washed your hair yet,” he writes.
In a way, what he describes could just be the condition of being alive in what Maureen Gaffney brilliantly calls “the rush hour of life”, the period in your 30s and 40s when you may be juggling a busy career and several children, sandwiched between two generations. Honestly, who has time for flourishing? But Keyes makes a compelling case that we do not invest enough resources in understanding the emotional brownfield between good mental health and mental illness.
No generation is immune from what might colloquially be called the “mehs”, which he says can affect 50 to 60 per cent of us, but three demographics are particularly vulnerable.
Unenthused, irritable, always mindlessly scrolling: if you thought languishing sounds a lot like being a teenager, you’d be right. But teenagers seem to be – well, doing more teen-ageing than ever. Ireland’s most comprehensive study of youth mental health revealed that levels of anxiety and depression rose among 12- to 19-year-olds between 2012 and 2019, while self-esteem, resilience and optimism fell.
A recent study of 15,000 transition-year students in three counties found that their wellbeing and mental health declined between 2018 and 2022, and a frightening one in three had self-harmed.
The outlook isn’t much better for those aged between 25 and 34. It’s no wonder, as they deal with the stress of a housing crisis, a relentless workplace culture, the societal expectation that they will “do better” than their parents, not to mention everyone on Instagram.
New mothers are prone to languishing, as no new mother in the history of bleary-eyed humanity will be surprised to hear. Those in their late 70s are vulnerable too, as the urgency of work and family recede, and they face losing some of their independence.
And then there’s pretty much anyone who has a job. Keyes offers up a grim metric: sociologists consistently find that everyone, regardless of pay or the number of hours they work, reports higher levels of workplace stress now. That’s partly down to, I suspect, a culture of work that constantly nags us to do more, be better, earn more, reply to that email, check your Slack, respond to that Teams chat, join that Zoom. It is possible to thrive even in high-stress work environments, but only if you’re already flourishing.
Compounding it all is the dull thudding of the post-pandemic hangover.
In fact, just about the only cohort that Keyes identifies as reliably enjoying a fleeting period of flourishing are those between 60 and 65.
So what is to be done? Keyes offers five prescriptions. Unsurprisingly – he is a yogi – one is spirituality. Maintaining real, warm and trusting social connections is vital, as is having a sense of purpose and belonging in your life, and challenging yourself to learn a new skill. I’ll admit my own heart sank at the last one: rediscover play and have more fun.
The bad news is that in order to escape languishing, we have to stop languishing – which means fighting the discomfort that comes with making changes. It means resisting the gravitational pull of the couch, the dull anaesthesia of the mindless scroll, the bottle of wine, the bingewatch, and the lure of Robbie Williams promising to entertain you into a 3am stupor.
The age of Netflix and chill has left us caught in a very modern trap: namely, “we keep making decisions that lead to our being and feeling more alone”, when what we should be striving for is “a meaningful life with meaningful connections”.