James' World 2

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Need to know

Do you feel blah? Not exactly suffering, but lacking interest and excitement? Do your days feel like a monotonous toil, akin to toothbrushing, but stretched over the entire day: same routines, same tiny annoyances? Are you unable to find motivation to do the activities that used to give you joy? If this describes your experience, then you may be going through a period of languishing.

People often think of mood as a battle between well-being and illbeing: either you feel good or bad. But if you don’t feel much of either, that’s the territory of languishing. It’s ‘the neglected middle child of mental health’, as Adam Grant put it in The New York Times in 2021. Whereas depression is active illbeing – feeling sad, powerless, and drained – and flourishing is active well-being – feeling engaged, excited, and empowered – languishing sits in between. It is a sense of stagnation where nothing is too wrong or painful but everything feels a bit boring and uninteresting. The world is grey.

A brief taxonomy of well-being states

To further understand languishing, it helps to recognize that an absence of illbeing does not mean the presence of well-being. Psychological research has shown that positive and negative feelings are partly independent processes – even neurologically and biologically. In moments of flourishing, you are high on excitement and joy, and low on negative feelings. In moments of suffering, there is not much joy but only sadness in our life. But there are also bittersweet moments where we feel strong positive and negative emotions simultaneously – such as feeling excited about one’s new job while feeling sad about leaving the old work community. Then there is languishing – moments when we don’t feel much of either. Languishing is thus about feeling low – but low on both positive and negative feelings.

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Katharina Merian, attributed to the 16th-century painter Hans Brosamer. Courtesy the Met Museum, New York

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