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 Pulitzer Prize 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 this place.
But things were not as they seemed. Benete's 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 Kees 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 Kees, 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 that 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 plan, 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 wanted 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 so supposed to endure. And that 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 the 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 is like 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. He was writing the book. He was
in his 80s and so I had a chance to talk to him what it was like to be living past what is his
life expectancy and doing quite well because he 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 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. 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. They 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, social contribution, connection and belonging. And I felt a drift 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 in 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, Cory, you're fine.
There is nothing wrong with you. Here's my recommendation. And this 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, but I left their
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 Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. 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 Keeze says lots of us live in an emotional, nether world that falls between these two poles.
We are not depressed, but still feel unfulfilled. Corey wants her to woman on TV who was reaching out
to Oprah Winfrey. Here's what she said. Theuropa, 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. When we hear things like this,
we sometimes think maybe this person doesn't really want the things she says 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 if it persists too long, even a person
like we just heard describe the external features of a good life, but yet she's has this unsettling
feeling and void. Those people often fall off the proverbial cliff and become seriously mentally
ill if not suicidal. And so to call it privileged 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 respect 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 had 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're 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, well, what are you working on? I
saw a tutorial 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. If 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.
In the 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 seat belts 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 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 you 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 the human beings need to feel this sense of agency or to feel alive.
Now the moment you describe this wonderful metaphor that Andrea gave you, it feels like there are
so many references in popular culture that I've tried to speak to the same idea. There was a
popular song by M. By Hold, Numb Little Bug, which has this wonderful line like your bodies in the
room, but you're not really there and that really captures this feeling of almost being like a ghost.
Yeah, a word that 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 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 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.
We might imagine that there's a flicks ordinary people, but we often imagine 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 Andre Agassi, the tenest star, and 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 external success in
itself is no defense against languishing. No, in fact, having just said that person you want to be,
sometimes isn't the person when you arrive that you realized that you really wanted to be.
And 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
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 and 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, Corey? 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 and absence of some very negative things, persistent sadness. And then a whole
host of what they call mouth functioning, sleeping too much, sleeping too little, eating too much,
eating too little, no longer wanting to live when before you had no reason to think of suicide.
Depression is all about the presence of absence of very negative signs.
All of the questions for languishing and 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.
Corey 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 you may have this sense of belonging, but you know it's
all temporary. Life is very fluid when you're young and you're moving in, 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 any 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 there I say wants.
You have to 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, he 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 a 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.
And in some ways, Corey, this points to perhaps 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 found it intriguing that there is this public health, a recognition and growing awareness
of the importance of loneliness. And loneliness is 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 welcomed 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.
Cori says languishing, like depression, can be a driver of self-harm.
And there's a study that I review in my book for among Hungarian teenagers who were 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
wanted 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 the Sociology of Happiness, and on the first day
of each semester, you would give students a very curious assignment. Tell us what you did, Cori.
Their assignment was to go out and spend time finding ways to feel happy.
And they giggled and 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. But it was a short, I called them journal assignments.
It was no more than three pages. And then 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 last
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 the, this country said, well, pursuing happiness,
relentlessly, endlessly. And they marched off 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 wind sock out there on the landing
strip that planes come to land. They are moving gently 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 all the way. They go away. Allowing the next emotion, the next so-called breeze
to come and blow the wind sock.
Corey asked his students to think about what it meant to flourish. Was it about having purpose,
social connection, or was it merely happiness, feeling good? And here is 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 functioning well often feel good about a life that's worthy of feeling
happy about. But there are students that I've 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 Vedanta.
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. At some point in your life, you might have had 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's 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 in flourishing. Research has once ran a study looking into the well-being of mothers who
were 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 that Lisa Eppel had done and some of it was with Elizabeth Blackburn.
They were studying mothers who were caregivers for a child who had serious disabilities.
They were studying exposure to chronic stress. 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 from family, friends, and others and that had more years of
caregiving were slightly protected against the damage. And what they found was that 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 flows it down. And so something about supportive,
caring relationships when you're undergoing challenge and adversity gets under our skin
and does for us 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 is 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 is looking at three forms of medicine that are extremely demanding. These two,
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 were 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 coworkers. I call that you get along. The 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 of 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. 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,
Corey. Yes. And when we typically talk about play and studying play, most play researchers focus
on children. And for good reason, that's the period where we expect and desire play to happen.
But play is still an important ingredient, even in adulthood. I write about 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 University of Wisconsin about a man who saved pinball because the pinball machine
was created during the Great Depression. And 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 larger lesson here, which is the lesson of self-improvement in personal growth.
In some ways, when we are 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 skill is what we do that's comparable
to what plants do by photosynthesizing the sun. It's our form of photosynthesis and we
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 in our heart
and in our minds are in the right direction, what grows within us, we give to others.
So I've always thought of flourishing as the epinical 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 maybe 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. Cory 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. Shankar I was rescued because
my wife came home early one night that I had thought I would literally come very close
to ending my life. And because I really was convinced she didn't need me. The world didn't
mean me. And I was exhausted having worked so hard to prove my worth and belonging.
But she came home found me and I told her what was going on. And 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 meet 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. It was planted here to grow.
And not only to feel alive but to be get and generate and give life to other things.
Corey Kees is the author of languishing how to feel alive again in a world that wears us down.
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. Our audio production team includes
Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quarelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick and Nick
Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.
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designed to introduce new listeners to Hidden Brain. She's one of those people who make you say,
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appreciate her support. Thank you Katie.
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