This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. When Edwin Arlington Robinson published his first book of poems in the late 19th century, a critic decried the poems for their bleak outlook, for painting the world as a prison house. The poet responded, the world is not a prison house, but a kind of spiritual kindergarten, where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.
In time, Edwin Arlington Robinson would go on to win the first spirit surprise in poetry. In one poem, that would later be celebrated in song by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, he tells the story of a man named Richard Corey, who had every advantage in life. The poem, told from the perspective of people who admired and envied Richard Corey, goes like this. And he was rich, yes, richer than a king, and admirably schooled in every grace.
In fine, we thought that he was everything, to make us wish that we were in his place. But things were not as they seemed. Beneath Richard Corey's success lay a hollow emptiness. The poem ends this way.
So on we worked and waited for the light, and went without the meat and cursed the bread. And Richard Corey, one calm summer night, went home and put a bullet through his head. Today on the show, we explore the puzzling phenomenon of people who have all the ingredients to live a happy life, yet find themselves drifting through it. Empty, invisible, directionless.
Philosophers may call this an existential dilemma. People of a certain age might describe it as a midlife crisis. Young people may say they feel adrift. What goes on in our minds when we feel this way?
And what is the remedy for these feelings? The science and solutions for emptiness. This week, on Hidden Brain. What does it mean to live a good life?
For some, it might mean traveling the world, or starting a family, or finding that dream job. We all have different interests, but ultimately, we want the same things. To live a life that feels rich, fulfilling, and joyful. The sociologist Corey Keyes has studied how people find satisfaction in their lives.
Over many years of research at Emory University, he has explored why the feeling of well-being doesn't come easy, even when it seems like it should. Corey Keyes, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you for having me. Corey, you have a friend named Denise.
She became a new mother, and she really wanted to become a mom, but she started to have troubling feelings. Can you describe them for me? Well, she and her husband decided to move from Austin to a suburb outside of Austin, in what they call the Hill Country there in Texas. And so, she began to feel a bit overwhelmed.
And I got the sense from Denise that this new motherhood stage of her life wasn't everything it was built up to be. This was a planned pregnancy and birth. And this child was welcomed into the world. It was wanted.
And despite all of that, Denise still felt a loss. So, Denise talked to a doctor and, I suppose, wanted to explore whether she was suffering from postpartum depression. Was she? No.
They gave her a psychiatric questionnaire, and she did not fit the criteria for depression. And I think she felt a bit of betrayal may not be too strong of a word, because she had a sense that something was wrong. And I think what was happening was that she was experiencing what I call a postpartum emptiness, a sense that life isn't quite the way I want it to be or expected it to be. I get this sense that there is some external pressure, if not some internal stereotypes that mothers and fathers bring to the table when they're having children.
And that is, they're expected to feel overwhelming joy, and that this joy is somehow supposed to endure. And I don't think it leads them to be prepared for the challenges, and even sometimes what I think is momentous changes that take them away from their old life that was giving them meaning. I don't think she was experiencing depression, but I think it was this sense of loss and emptiness, and even feeling a little stagnant and stuck, like what to do next, because she was being orchestrated by a very demanding infant. You have another friend, Jonas, who also experienced this feeling of being adrift.
Tell me his story. Yes, Jonas, I love him. When I was writing the book, he was in his 80s, and so I had a chance to talk to him on what it was like to be living past what is his life expectancy and doing quite well, because in his first decade of retirement, roughly 65 to 75, he was active, bubbling, engaged in the world. But then came the 80s, and all of a sudden I noticed something shift in Jonas.
He began to retreat, and it was a very subtle shift that began to creep into his life. And all of a sudden when I asked him, he had this rather, I found it, startling statement. He told me that he had begun to think that his life was over, and that living any longer would not be a gift, but in fact he used the word curse, because he sensed he had nothing left to give to the world. He wasn't being challenged, or he didn't have a sense of growth anymore.
And that's a very, very important warning sign that somebody is beginning to give up on life. What I find striking both about Denise's story and Jonas's story is that both these people have so much to be happy about, so much to be grateful for. Neither of them was suffering from any major trauma or major setback, and it must have felt puzzling to them. You know, things are generally going pretty well.
I ought to feel lucky. I ought to feel grateful. And yet I don't. I know.
In Jonas's case, we might be quick to judge. In fact, he's still alive. He still has another day to engage with folks and look out the window and enjoy nature, or he actually go out and take a walk and sip some coffee, right? All those simple pleasures.
And yet, I wouldn't describe him as ungrateful, but I think what happens is that there is this disconnection between a life that was engaged and had purpose, had belonging and growth, and suddenly a shift to what feels like a fundamentally different way of being in the world, almost a different life. And in between those two different seeming lives is this sense of loss. And that gap, that empty gap, I think is a challenge for anybody, no matter how good they have it. Something very similar happened to Corey himself years earlier.
He was in graduate school, working on his dissertation. He was thrilled to be honing his craft as a thinker and researcher. But even as he was doing something he deeply loved, even as he was wildly exceeding the expectations of a first-generation college student and a first-generation graduate student, he would look up some days and know that something was seriously off. I asked him what these moments of epiphany felt like.
Well, I was not living what I was studying. And in particular, my dissertation was about a particular form of well-being called social well-being. And so there I was talking about social integration and social contribution, connection and belonging, and I felt adrift and disconnected and lost, almost lost. And I did not feel mentally, emotionally well.
And it was such a jarring moment. I said, how can I tell others to do what I think I want them to do, given my research, when I don't actually live it myself? So after a year or so, your wife began to notice you weren't yourself. What did she suggest to you?
She said I should go see a doctor. And this was another jarring moment that I remembered throughout my lifetime and career. The doctor used the typical, you know, he measured my anxiety levels and he measured my depression levels. And I didn't meet the criteria for any anxiety disorders or any mood disorders.
So he said, Corey, you're fine. There is nothing wrong with you. Here's my recommendation. And that's literally what he said.
Go home, make yourself a cup of tea and sit down and talk to your wife. That's the best medicine I can recommend. Now, I didn't take that very well. I didn't say anything to him.
I left there pissed off. I was perturbed. The way he said it wasn't to say, you know, go connect with your wife. I had a good relationship with my wife.
That wasn't the problem. So I felt unseen. I felt invisible after that medical encounter where everything was fine if you're not mentally ill. When we come back, an explanation for the feelings of emptiness many of us experience, even when our lives give us little justification for such emotions.
You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
We all know what it feels like to be very sad. Most of us recognize that depression is a serious problem and many of us seek treatment for it. We also know what it feels like to be joyful and happy. But the sociologist Corey Keyes says lots of us live in an emotional netherworld that falls between these two poles.
We are not depressed, but still feel unfulfilled. Look, Corey once had a woman on TV who was reaching out to Oprah Winfrey. Here's what she said. Dear Oprah, I'm a happily married woman and a mother of two children.
I've been blessed with my health and my financial stability. I'm looking for ways to satisfy an unsettling feeling. It's like a void in the center of my soul. Corey, you say that what this woman is describing, this feeling of a void in the center of her soul, this feeling is far more common than many of us realize?
Yes. In fact, I was surprised by the number of people who fit the criteria for what I came to call languishing. Languishing is that unsettling feeling, that void that we feel in our soul that she describes about. And as I was listening to that clip, my eyes began to tear up because I remember watching that clip so many years ago.
And feeling like I identified with what she was going through, because I've been there myself. You know, when we hear things like this, we sometimes think, you know, maybe this person doesn't really want the things she said she wants. Maybe she's unhappy in her marriage. Maybe she doesn't really want children.
But what you're saying is it's actually more complicated than that. We might actually want those things very much, but still feel adrift. Yes, I think it's tempting to look at somebody's life, like hers, who has everything that you might expect and maybe is more for a good life. But those are often what we would call in the business external features of life.
And even though people may want them, they may think they want them because they may think that brings their life meaning, purpose and even joy and happiness. When you suddenly have them, you realize sometimes that they're not the solution to all the questions you had about what will create a good life. And so rather than dismiss somebody as saying, well, they're either being disingenuous, even lying to us. I would take the attitude of exploring it deeper, because I think people languish not just because they have the deficit of those good things in life, sometimes because they have all the accoutrements that we think make up for a good life.
And yet they find that that's a false promise. I want to raise one other issue, which is I think sometimes when we hear stories like this, we say, you know, this person is being self-indulgent. You know, they have everything. They have a happy marriage.
They have a wonderful family. They have their health. They have their financial stability. How dare they feel unhappy or how dare they tell us they feel adrift?
There's a sense that people might be self-entitled. And I think this might keep people from actually expressing the fact that they feel empty. I agree wholeheartedly. And I think we're often too quick to judgment.
And I think it's a dangerous thing. The risks that come along with this emptiness, this condition of languishing, it persists too long. Even a person like we just heard describe the external features of a good life, but yet she has this unsettling feeling of void. Those people often fall off the proverbial cliff and become seriously mentally ill, if not suicidal.
And so to call it privilege isn't to acknowledge the suffering that comes with this condition, whether you have all the external means or whether you don't. And it's a serious risk factor for a lot of problems. How have you come to define this term languishing, Corey? How would you define it?
I think the best way to make sense of it is to begin, if we can, with how I diagnose flourishing or what I call mental health. To be mentally healthy, you have to have at least one of the three signs of what I call emotional well-being that is either happy, satisfied or interested in life. Every day or almost every day that you have warm, trusting, personal relationships, you may have liked most parts of your personality. We call that self-acceptance.
In addition to that, you may feel a sense of belonging or integration to a community. The things you do on a daily basis matter or contribute things of worth and value to people or your community. Your life has purpose, meaning it has direction, or you might feel a sense of personal growth. That is, you're feeling challenged to become a better person.
And so languishing is the absence of some very important things that make our life meaningful and worthwhile, and the absence of feeling good about a life where you can function well. You have a friend, Andrea, who gave you a powerful metaphor for this feeling. What did she tell you, Corey? We were sitting out there in a park, and she said, What were you working on?
I told her, I'm working on this book of languishing, and she said, Is it something like this? Imagine yourself on a flight, and you're going somewhere, and you're almost there, but suddenly you can't land. And you spend hours and days and months just circling. And you start to feel like you're never going to get to where you want to be, and you can't go back to where you started.
So you start to feel stuck, loss of control. There's no use of feeling mad because it won't solve any problem. So you don't feel anything negative, but you sure don't feel anything good. And there's several elements of that metaphor that I like.
For one thing, it's not like the plane is crashing, so it's not like you are in terror or you're really afraid for your life. You're sitting in a comfortable seat, your seatbelt's on. You're just circling, so it's not like something terrible is happening. And also, you don't have very much control over when the plane lands.
You're not the pilot. You're not the air traffic controller. You don't get to decide when the plane lands, and so all you can do is set and wait. I know.
I talk about this condition of where you're forced into sort of a condition of being still. And even though that plane is moving, you can't move from that plane seat. You can't unbuckle and suddenly move about. In fact, you'll get into trouble.
So, I mean, you're forced into this stillness, and you're just waiting to be where you thought you wanted to be. And that, I think, puts people in a situation of feeling, well, less than human. Because human beings need to feel this sense of agency or to feel alive. now the moment you described this wonderful metaphor that andrea gave you it feels like there are so many references in popular culture that are trying to speak to the same idea there was a popular song by m byhold numb little bud which has this wonderful line like your body's in the room but you're not really there and it really captures this feeling of almost being like a ghost yeah or the people used quite frequently when i talk to them about languishing and is this sense that i am dying inside or that i feel dead inside that you're you're half alive you're kind of receding into the background you're becoming invisible and i think sometimes they mean invisible even to themselves but especially invisible to other people because i think what happens when you start to languish is that you start to act like um a person who's not really there when the conditions and circumstances of life take away the person you want to be and begin to replace it with a person you never imagined you could ever become you know we might imagine that there's a flicks ordinary people but we often imagine you know very successful people people who've reached the top of their game people who are celebrities that this doesn't affect them but i'm reminded of that line from andrea odyssey the 10 star in his biography he says feeling depressed after a loss is one thing but feeling depressed about nothing about life in general is another thing altogether and it reminds me in some ways that success external success in itself is no defense against languishing no and in fact having just that person you want to be sometimes isn't the person when you arrive that you realized that you really wanted to be i think success sometimes isn't everything that it's baked up to be andre agassi you know he had a very disciplined father who really worked him through the paces and i think um part of his loss of the joy of success came from having to sacrifice so much in order to become nearly perfect and i think there's something about it if i had a chance to talk to him is there something about becoming so successful and sacrificing so much for a game that ends up being something you leave behind it isn't really your life afterwards sometimes you thought you wanted that and then you get there and you realize this doesn't bring you any more purpose and joy than you thought it would you say there are crucial differences between languishing and depression what are some of these differences cory it's true that there's one question that i ask that overlaps with what psychiatrists use to diagnose depression and that is interest in life but all of the remaining other eight questions that diagnose clinical depression are the presence absence of some very negative things persistent sadness and then a whole host of what they call malfunctioning sleeping too much sleeping too little eating too much eating too little um no longer wanting to live one before you had no reason to think of suicide depression is all about the presence or absence of very negative signs all of the questions for languishing flourishing are about the presence of good things or the absence of things like purpose belonging integration growth autonomy you can be free of those negative signs of depression and yet not be filled with the positive symptoms of flourishing and that is why i along with adam grant have described languishing as this middle child depression is the presence of negative things only languishing is the absence of both the negative and the positive cory thinks people are most likely to experience languishing in adolescence and in their early 20s and again later in life after they reach retirement age at the beginning i think to be a young person is the sense that you're really not needed and there's not much of a purpose for you right and and you may have this sense of belonging but you know it's all temporary because life is very fluid when you're young and you're moving and you know you're going not going to stay here long and you're in this long prolonged stage of becoming an adult in fact it's taking longer for people to get married and have a full-time career and they're not even married to the ages of 28 to 30 so there's a prolonged period where they're sort of like you're not the person you want to be or society expects you to be and at the end of life you're not the person society needs or dare i say wants you have to find find your own way we have no need and i remember a haunting phrase a book that i've loved sebastian junger in his book tribe at the beginning said the modern world is very hard on people because it tells them they're not necessary that sense of you aren't necessary we don't need you i found that very haunting i went back and read the introduction to tribe and it blends well into what we're talking about at the beginning and the end of life society says well you're not necessary in some ways cory this points to perhaps you know the first factor that leads to languishing i mean broadly defined social isolation or social exclusion is one of the drivers of languishing yes and i i found it intriguing that there is this public health recognition and growing awareness of the importance of loneliness and loneliness is it for many people a big part of languishing there are three questions in my functioning well category that get at whether or not you feel really deeply connected the first one is that do you have warm trusting relationships with other people second do you have a sense of belonging to a community and third do you do things or have the ability to contribute things to others in your community we sociologists call that mattering and when you don't matter when you're not needed and when you don't feel you belong even though you're part of a community but you don't you're not welcome and you'll feel you belong and when you don't have warm trusting relationships that for me it gets at the heart of pathological loneliness cory says languishing like depression can be a driver of self-harm and there's a study that i review in my book among hungarian teenagers who are languishing and the more severely they were languishing the more likely in the past month they were engaged in various forms of non-suicidal self-harm pinching pulling hair cutting and so forth and my sense is when you feel nothing or feel empty it's an undesirable situation that you want to distract yourself from or if you're feeling nothing you would rather feel pain than nothing i want to talk about a paradoxical source of languishing and that might be our perennial search for happiness you once had a course called sociology of happiness and on the first day of each semester you would give students a very curious assignment tell us what you did their assignment was to go out and spend time finding ways to feel happy and they giggled they thought well this is the way this course is going to be this is easy oh and of course they have to write it up um but it was a short i called them journal assignments it was no more than three pages and i gave them a little prompt tell me about how you went about feeling happy and the point i made was find a way to be happy that that endures that lasts longer at least than an hour and tell me how the longest period that you stayed happy and how you did it and they go out there as our framers of this country said what pursuing happiness relentlessly endlessly and they marched off um smiles on their face thinking this is going to be the easiest semester ever and they come back and almost every journal was i failed i failed and they're like what's going on here this sounded like the easiest assignment they don't understand that emotions were meant to be very time limited they weren't meant to endure emotions are as i described in the book they're like that windsock out there on the landing strip that planes come to land they are moving gently and with every change in the wind telling us at any moment what is going on and what we might do to adjust or manage in that moment and then they go away they go away allowing the next emotion the next so-called breeze to come and blow the windsock cory asked his students to think about what it meant to flourish was it about having purpose social connection or was it nearly happiness feeling good and here's what happened the feeling good stuff came in first place students put feeling good as far more important for their life than functioning well and that's where happiness sometimes gets us in trouble because if you put happiness first i think it impedes if not prevents people from going out and working and doing some hard work of functioning better in life belonging contribution acceptance growth autonomy all those things those take work they require you to become a better human being and become better for people not just better than other people and so i'm echoing something that i learned from aristotle he didn't deny that pleasure was the basis of a good life but what he was really against was putting it first for aristotle putting happiness first would discourage us from working to become excellent at this business of being a human being prioritize excellence that is functioning well and you will have something meaningful to be happy about that's far more sustainable and that's the point i want to make to your question because people who are who are functioning well often feel good about a life that's worthy of feeling happy about but there are students that i found upwards of 22 who are feeling happy and feeling good but they're not flourishing when it comes to the criteria of functioning well and guess what they have three times the rate of mental illness than the young people who are flourishing so feeling good were enough wouldn't you think they would be no more depressed or anxious than the kids who are flourishing you would but they're not when we come back how to fight languishing you're listening to hidden brain i'm shankar this is hidden brain i'm shankar vetanth at some point in your life you might have a strange feeling even when things were going well and you had every reason to be happy you felt empty and adrift you might have asked yourself do i need a new job should i leave my spouse do i need to have children sometimes we find the answer by making radical changes often we don't the sociologist corey keys is the author of languishing how to feel alive again in a world that wears us down he says a variety of factors shape whether we languish or flourish corey we've talked at some length about the role that social connections play in both languishing and flourishing researchers once ran a study looking into the well-being of mothers who are looking after children with serious health issues but some of them had social connections and some of them did not tell me about the study and what it found yes this was research um elissa apple had done and some of it was with elizabeth blackburn and they were studying mothers who were caregivers with for a child who had serious disabilities and so they were studying exposure to chronic stress and of course what they found was the more years of caregiving and meaning exposure to this chronic stress and especially that exposure without support from family or friends accelerated telomere damage which is a measure of aging so they were aging faster without support but the mothers who had more support for family friends and others and that had more years of caregiving uh were slightly protected against the damage and what they found was that um being exposed to supportive caring loving relationships as a mother who's going through this challenging thing being exposed to that seems to activate a protective enzyme called telomerase that protects the ends of our telomeres against the damage of stress it's not a perfect solution the stress still happens but it slows it down and so something about supportive caring relationships when you're undergoing challenge and adversity um gets under our skin and and does for us um at the biological level what's needed to be protected against stress i find that a beautiful beautiful example of just what caring and support does for us because it's suggesting of course that it's not the absence of stress that keeps us from languishing but social connection in the face of stress indeed i have a colleague who's a medical doctor who was looking at um three forms of medicine that are extremely demanding these three medical specialties are emergency medicine general surgery and obstetrics and gynecology and what she and her colleagues found was that the level of work demands in that nonetheless demanding three specialties wasn't correlated with whether you were flourishing or languishing it was whether you were working in a supportive work environment and if you weren't working in a supportive environment you're much more likely over time to languish and here if you were working in a demanding profession but had a supportive environment you could sustain flourishing and here is the four things that make up a supportive environment you work in a calm pleasant atmosphere with co-workers i call that you get along second is you have co-workers who understand that you will sometimes have bad days in other words we all have bad days three they work with co-workers who are there for them when they need it and they have those bad days and last they had what i call genuine collegiality meaning they experienced warm open and trusting relationships among their colleagues so it wasn't being exposed to very demanding stressful conditions it was being exposed to demanding stressful conditions without a supportive environment that created languishing one of the components of flourishing that you say is really important is the idea of play um there's been research that's looked at this idea that in some ways play and playfulness are essential components of flourishing talk about this idea cory yes and when we typically talk about play and studying play most play researches focus on children and for good reason that's the theory where we expect and desire play to happen but play is still an important ingredient of even in adulthood i've read about um the story of the creation of the pinball machine of all things and there's a book that was written by someone from my alma mater at the University of Wisconsin about a man who saved pinball because the pinball machine was created during the Great Depression.
It was created to help people feel better during a time when almost uniformly they felt despair and a lack of hope. Now, why? You would think something that's a game and meant for play was created to create happiness and joy in the midst of misery and hopelessness? Well, the creator, the originator of the game, pinball, was asked, and there's a wonderful movie I highly recommend it to watch, what makes a game good?
And I was astonished by his answer. He said the following, it provides people with a sense of accomplishment. A really good game makes people happy and helps them flourish because the game requires them to accomplish something. The second is a good game requires the person playing it to develop some skill in order to accomplish those goals.
So you become aware that you are a source of cause and effect in the world. And last, a good game makes people feel that what they do matters. And there's a lot of lesson here, which is the lesson of self-improvement and personal growth. In some ways, when we're experiencing those things, it feels incompatible to feel like we're languishing at the same time that we're growing.
Yes, there is something about the sense of getting better at something that makes people feel alive. The way I think about it is that sense of growth that comes from learning and developing skills is what we do that's comparable to what plants do by photosynthesizing the sun. It's our form of photosynthesis, and we've come to feel like we're alive. I remember coming across the quote, nothing in nature lives for itself.
The river doesn't drink its own water. The fruit trees do not eat its own fruit. Only human beings have the choice to live only for themselves. But when we are growing, and our heart and our minds are in the right direction, what grows within us, we give to others.
So I've always thought of flourishing as the pinnacle of life, because when it seems to me that when people are flourishing, they can't keep it to themselves. It's almost like it's contagious. Flourishing does not always mean that you are happy, Corey says. A life of meaning, purpose, and social connection often involves loss and grief.
When you mourn a beloved dog who has died, you might not be happy, but your grief reminds you that you had a deep connection with another creature. When students tell Corey that they are sad to be graduating, he tells them this. That feeling of sadness is telling you you should also feel happy about what has happened here. You feel sad because you're leaving behind something that mattered to you, where you invested some of yourself, and you made really meaningful connections and had really positive experiences.
And now they're done, and you have to move on. And you're going to experience sadness because it's telling you you should also be happy about what this meant to you. Take it with you. And that's why that sadness is there, even when we lose people who are close to us and they die.
And I did this with my grandmother. She lives on with me to this day, even though she died in 1986. And I still feel sad that I still can't have her here. But that sadness reminds me of something good that I carry with me from her.
So I think there are sometimes sadness and these negative emotions we lean into them. And we should because they're there to teach us there are good things that we take from moments that we feel sad about. Languishing and flourishing is not just about us. All of us can have others feel wanted and needed to give them cause to flourish.
Corey remembers one difficult time in his own life where he felt he had lost his way and things looked very bleak. The immediate thought that came to mind was, well, no, I'm no longer needed here. And I lost my sense of purpose. And so that moment became a very dangerous one because I had a purpose.
And suddenly I felt it was gone. But I was rescued, literally. I was rescued because my wife came home early one night that I had thought I'd literally come very close to ending my life. And because I was, I really was convinced that she didn't need me, the world didn't need me.
And I was exhausted having worked so hard to prove my worth and belonging. She came home, found me, and I told her what was going on. I said, I can't do this anymore. I'm just, I've worked so hard.
And, you know, other people are doing this now that you don't need me. And she said four words that I'll never forget, but I need you. And that shocked me back into, it brought me back right into life. And I said, oh my God, really?
We need to feel alive, not stuck in stagnant, like a pool of water that's trapped. Because there is everything in nature. And we were, we're a part of nature that was planted here to grow. And not only to feel alive, but to beget and generate and give life to other things.
Corey Keyes is the author of Languishing, How to Feel Alive Again in a World That Wears Us Down. Corey, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you so much for having me, Shankar. If you're struggling with feelings of languishing, depression, or thoughts of self-harm, please reach out to someone who can help.
Get in touch with a parent, a friend, or a spiritual advisor. In the United States, you can call or text the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988 to connect with counselors who can offer free, confidential, and immediate emotional support. That number again is 988. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media.
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