Human beings are like most living things in this world.
We are created to feel emotion.
And whether we like it or not, whether it's good or bad, at least when you feel emotion, you feel alive?
Our guest today, Corey Keys, is a renowned sociologist and psychologist, best known for his research on flourishing and languishing.
At his groundbreaking work, explored in his book, Languishing, how to feel alive again in a world that wears this down.
When you're languishing, And suddenly you stop doing and you rest and suddenly you don't feel anything.
And when you feel this way, it's telling you, you've left behind the good things that gave your life meaning.
So the single languishing, like, I think I kind of get it.
How do I know if I have it?
You can feel it when you've lost some of those things.
You're starting to feel like Like what was a fullness to your life is empty.
So I'd love to drop into that a little bit more.
The risk of depression and anxiety among other mental disorders is so much higher among those who are languishing, and yet we're not taking it serious at all.
We're not even measuring it in our public health system.
You know strict safety regulations come with the job.
It's why you partner with Grainger.
Grainger helps you find the high quality and compliant products your business needs to inspect, detect, and help correct issues.
And the sweetest part is, everyone gets a product that's as safe to eat as it is delicious.
Call 1 -800 -GRAINGER, click Grainger .com, or just stop by Grainger, for the ones who get it done.
And my project is sponsored by Wonderful Pistachios.
I am always looking for super yummy snacks that are packed with nutrients, especially protein.
And I've been thinking about how those small daily choices add up to helping you feel your best. That is why I'm a long time fan of Wonderful Pistachios.
Each one ounce serving packs six grams of protein.
That's over 10 % of your daily value, making it one of the highest protein nuts out there.
Plus they bring this perfect combination of protein and fiber and better for you unsaturated fats that help keep me feeling fuller, longer.
And what really clicks for me is also how they just kind of fit into any moment.
Whether you're deep in creative work or sharing stories with friends or outside.
I often take these in my pack when I'm hiking.
If you're looking just for grab and go ease, they're no -shells varieties, give you all that nutrient rich goodness without missing a beat.
And come on, they just taste amazing.
So if you're ready to elevate your snacking, visit wonderfulpastachios .com to learn more.
So you know those moments when you're just craving something that feeds both your mind and soul that's exactly what happened when I started listening to self -conscious with Chrissy Teigen on audible.
It's this just wonderfully fresh take on wellness where Chrissy brings her signature humor and realness to conversations about personal growth.
And what makes this show special is how it really just creates this judgment -free space where we can all explore what it means to grow and evolve.
Each week she sits down with brilliant minds like Mel Robbins and Adam Grant turning complex ideas into practical wisdom that we can actually use in our daily lives.
Think of it as having coffee with that friend who just always knows how to make you feel seen and understood while also teaching you something new about yourself.
The conversations are honest, sometimes vulnerable, and always illuminating.
So are you ready to join the conversation?
Visit audible .com slash Chrissy Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts and start listening today.
New episodes I didn't know about depression, so that was a godsend, because I think what happens to a lot of people is they don't have a word for it and they can't describe it.
And so I think a lot of well -intentioned clinicians and psychiatrists will just lump it in with depression.
But what I was feeling then, and I still experience it personally several, many days, is this gnawing sense of emptiness.
Like there's a huge void.
Literally, physically there's this void in me, and the desire is that I want to fill it up immediately and get rid of that feeling.
And so, that sense of emptiness and that sense of a void being inside of me is what helped me understand.
And I think that we were talking about something different from depression and especially from not only depression, but burnout as well.
Yeah. I mean, that makes a lot of sense.
I know you write, it was more like I was on autopilot compelled to keep doing to throw myself at activity after activity, leaving little room for the thoughts that rose up when I was alone with myself.
And I have to imagine that a lot of people listening to that and probably nodding along, thinking to themselves, oh, yeah, I felt that or I'm feeling that or some version of that.
But really not understanding like, what that's what that means, like, how to describe it in a meaningful way, or whether even...
is there something wrong with this?
Or is this just grown up life?
It's been with us. It's part of life, Jonathan.
And that's what I learned as I began to go down the historical road to understand whether there was any equivalent in prior centuries.
And it turns out, yes, I write about this eighth, deadly sin that did exist prior to the 12th century in Christianity, and it was called acedia.
And acedia, when it's described by these religious adherents and the monks, particularly, they were the desert monks as they were known back then.
They were writing about this feeling.
thinking of having no feeling.
That's the irony. We have to talk about it as a feeling but really when you're languishing, suddenly you stop doing and you rest, and suddenly you don't feel anything.
And that's the amazing thing.
Human beings are like most living things in this world, we are created to feel emotion.
And whether we like it or not, whether it's good or bad, at least when you feel emotion, You feel alive, because you're responding to the vicissitudes of life.
Languishing back then was this stagnation and emptiness and feeling numb.
And it often led these religious adherents to stray from the path, which is not good if you're seeking God in this life.
And so it was considered a source of sin, and it got removed in the 12th century.
I could tell you the exact pope, Pope Gregory the Great, but we don't know why.
We don't know why, and I can only speculate that it didn't quite fit neatly in the other deadly sins that we now know as the seven.
So it's there. It's been with us, and it will always be with us, because here's the way I think of it.
It's an existential wake -up call or an alarm clock.
When you feel this way, it's telling you that you've left behind the good things that gave your life meaning, direction, purpose, and all those good things that make life worth living.
So it's like an alarm clock that goes off when you started to do things that take you away from those things that were giving your life purpose, belonging, contribution, and meaning.
And it's telling you… It's like knocking on the door saying, Wake up!
You don't leave me behind too long!
Because if you stay there at this point of emptiness too long, As I say, it becomes pathological.
Previously, it's a normal response telling us, You need to go back to doing the things that we're giving you, meaning, or you need to stop devoting all your time to things that are taking you away from those things that gave your life meaning.
So I think what happens is that we hit the snooze buzz button on that existential alarm clock, much like we hit the snooze button when we say, I want to get up at six o 'clock and exercise.
I go I don't want to.
And when we do that, then it goes from a normal response to the loss of meaning to a pathological place where lots of bad things start to happen as I detail in the book.
It seems like you also, you describe, this is actually straight out of, I think it's some of the research that you did, I think you published around 2002 where you were analyzing some data from 1995.
Like this data set of midlife experiences, and kind of identified this spectrum from flourishing to moderate mental health to languishing to depression.
So it does seem like this is sort of like a state that falls within the broader spectrum of mental health?
Yes. The way I think of it is it's a state of being mentally unhealthy.
You don't necessarily end up and go from being mentally healthy to immediately mentally ill.
Right? You sort of, you can fall in this in -between category where you spend a lot of time being mentally unhealthy.
And as we know, the equivalent is we do a lot of physically unhealthy things that don't immediately create disease and health, physical illnesses, but if you persist, don't get enough sleep, your diet isn't very good and you don't exercise and you smoke or you drink too much alcohol for too long.
Eventually it creates, it goes from physical unhealth to physical illness.
And that's the way to think of languishing.
It's a place where you are mentally unhealthy, and in and of itself it's not very good for you to be there.
But if you stay there too long, you can begin to slide into what we now consider, you know, the mental disorders that we now are taking far more serious.
So it's almost like a, not necessarily a leading indicator of where you're heading, but a warning light, to a certain extent, of where you might head.
Does that land? And I love the way you put that.
That's exactly, or, it's sort of a diversion of the wake -up call.
And it's telling us, okay, this can go one of two ways.
It's telling you, you need to engage in activities that restore, restoration of good mental health, which I call flourishing, or you are going to persist in doing the things that are leading you away from those things that create flourishing because you think they're more important, right?
They're part of your career.
They're part of a variety of other things that society has taught you.
Those are far more important.
And if you do that far too long, well, it'll go in a much worse direction.
So it's a leading indicator in the sense that we should be, as a society, I even argue public health needs to take this far more serious.
Because we need to respond to it before it leads to even worse problems. I know in that same early data set, we learned that the risk of major depressive episode was two times more likely among languishing than moderately mental healthy adults and nearly six times greater among languishing than flourishing adults.
So that is huge. That But that is quite the wake -up call.
You would have thought so.
And I want to step back and correct something that I should have thought about ahead of time.
I use the word moderate mental health and that sounds like it's okay.
That's good enough.
What it really means is that you're languishing mildly to moderately.
If you're not flourishing, here's the thing.
You're languishing to some degree.
and even if you're languishing in the moderate category you have a much higher elevated risk for a variety of problems not the least of which is if you've never had depression your risk has gone up pretty high compared to people who are mentally healthy that is flourishing.
So even with those who are moderately mentally healthy who are languishing moderately need to be they need our attention because it will continue to get worse.
They will go from moderate and slide into what I call now severe languishing.
What I used to just call languishing is a severe form of languishing.
And that's where you get risk and odds ratios that go to five to six times of what you just talked about.
That's alarming risk.
And yet, here I am.
25 years later from publishing that data and publishing more studies, and I'm not the only one showing this, that the risk of depression, anxiety, among other mental disorders is so much higher among those who are languishing.
And yet, we're not taking it serious at all.
We're not even measuring it in our public health systems. I want to get more granular and understand this more and also understand how to really suss out maybe how it's showing up in our lives and what we can potentially do about it.
But also, I want to zoom the lens out before we get there and explore, how did we get here?
You know, from a societal level, you described that all the way back there was a cent that kind of functionally equated to languishing and then was it doesn't appear in the literature anymore.
But the human condition, and really focusing sort of on the moderate state of the human conditions, what do you see as really the significant contributors to this experience?
and are you seeing this become a more pervasive experience in people?
I wish we had the historical data to answer that question that it's becoming more pervasive.
I can say that during the pandemic it was very clear that languishing was among the most severe problems when it came to the mental health area.
For instance, I can cite you some data that in Australia where they were using my measure along with measures of depression, anxiety and measures of stress and stress, anxiety and depression rose roughly 10 to 13%.
So stress was around 10.
Anxiety was around 12.
Depression was 13 to be exact.
Yeah. I'm surprised actually it wasn't higher.
Yeah, no, but this was, now this was 2019, comparing 2019 to 2021.
Got it. So, I'm pretty sure that was just within the first year.
And what happened was that languishing increased by 24 % within that same timeframe.
And there's now data that I just saw published within the last six months on teenagers within the first year.
and across 15 different countries within 2021, roughly eight to 13 % increase in languishing among females and males.
And even though males were doing slightly better—male teenagers on average—than the females, they had a slightly larger increase in languishing than the females.
But it is very responsive to changes in our life.
And so I suspect historically we could actually go through some monumental changes that have really sort of happened in our lifetime.
Not the least of which was that a fundamental change in the basis of our economy.
In our lifetime, we saw our economy shift from a primarily manufacturing to a primarily service -driven economy, where in the latter educational attainment and more of it is critical if you're going to succeed.
If you don't have access to good education and continued education and achieving higher levels of education in this economy, you will end up in the low level end of service jobs where you have to cobble together more than one job just to get through.
But here's the thing.
And I read about this in the book.
People who have high education have more work than they've ever had.
They're working more hours than ever.
This leaving behind the sacred stuff that we've, we've kind of are uncomfortable with.
And not putting something in its place is going to leave us languishing in this world and without answers to those existential questions.
Yeah, that's such an important notion.
Yeah, it is talking to a dear friend of mine who's a Buddhist teacher, in the lineage of Tibetan Buddhism.
She's studying, teaching 30 years now, and we've had a similar conversation.
As you described, so often, just the meditation, the mindfulness, has been kind of sanitized and just dropped as this standalone solo practice.
Now, there's nothing wrong with doing that practice.
It's research, it has some really powerful benefits.
But when you take it out of the bigger basket of ethical considerations, and thoughts, and ideas, and explorations, we just lose so much, as you described in yoga.
So many people come to yoga for the postures, the asana.
Right? Not realizing that part of the traditional eight fold path of yoga is well, they're also, you know, like the Yamas and the Niyamas, the ethical considerations.
Like, you know, like what, how we show up and don't show up.
Like, they're the outer limbs that move us towards, you know, like focusing and Samadhi.
The experience of unification and that this was that, that core of just the physical part of it, that was just intended to get you ready.
Like, so you could actually, you know, like sit long enough and be comfortable to explore the other things.
And, again, those pieces have standalone value.
They're good. But when we strip all the other stuff out, they're not enough.
SL. No, and there's some research that shows this.
And I love the way you've described this, because I think the other part of the ethical path, and why we need to quiet the mind and the body before we can really work on those things, is because if we can become non -reactive to the things that have nothing to do with us personally, then we can direct our attention on ourselves and our own weaknesses, our own shortcomings, our own sins and vulnerabilities, and not be overwhelmed by them and understand that, you know, that too can pass if I work on them.
So, to me, the quiet mind is to become a better person, so that you become a better person in the world.
And I've always said this in the book, If you want to flourish, you can't just demand these things to come to you.
You have to give them, as well.
Like, if you want a sense of belonging, which is one of the 11 indicators of functioning well in this life, a sense of social belonging or integration, I challenge you, when was the last time you welcomed anybody into your own community or circle and said, you belong here, I want you here, you're a part of my community.
Especially people who might not think and look like you.
So if you want a sense of belonging and you want to be welcomed, the question is, start with yourself.
How welcoming and are you and do you invite others in?
It's an amazing thing that we seem to want to throw that away.
And we think the world needs to give us all these things.
Well, they're going to come if you give them as well.
Wow. I have to live that lesson myself.
I don't say this in a preachy way.
I have to learn those lessons and I have to work on it every day.
I think we all do. Like nobody gets dropped out of this.
It's like, we're all stumbling forward in our own unique ways.
What I'd like to do is narrow our focus a little bit.
I think it's been really interesting to look at macro picture here and the broader notions, but you know, no doubt within the world, you're confident languishing is the loss of that good stuff.
And that's why I said, it's a one learned call because suddenly you can feel it when you've lost some of those things.
You're starting to feel like what was a fullness to your life is empty.
It's disappearing. And languishing is the absence of those good things – purpose, belonging, contribution, confidence, autonomy, growth, all of those things – along with, you're suddenly not feeling interested in life, not satisfied much, not happy.
Depression is all about the presence of negative things, negative emotions and malfunctioning.
Like psychiatrists measure it as the presence of either sadness or a loss of pleasure and the things that used to bring you pleasure.
That's kind of close to interest, but you know.
And then there's seven signs of malfunctioning.
Things like you're sleeping more or less than you used to, you're eating more or you're eating less than you used to.
You're thinking about not wanting to live much more or even ending your life when you never thought about that before.
So when you're not depressed it means you don't have any of those negative symptoms or you don't have enough of them.
But the absence of depression doesn't mean suddenly you have all those good things, right, purpose, belonging.
You can land right in between.
There's nothing bad, there's nothing good.
And that's why I called it, and Adam used this phrase, it's the middle child.
It's the middle child way between depression and flourishing or good mental health.
Now, Bernalte's an interesting one because that's when we feel completely exhausted from having gone through a period in life where we have had a lot of demands and challenges.
And that happens for people of all walks of life, even the high -end professionals with high educational degrees, right?
The difference is that a lot of people who have a lot of high challenges with really good jobs and good education have a lot more discretion and can manage those challenges.
And they can have choice over how and when.
Sometimes they do those things compared to people with lower prestige or lower socioeconomic standing and jobs where they don't have choice or discretion over anything that has to do with their work.
So Bernard is about when you meet a lot of challenges with very little personal discretion or choice or support.
And I love the fact that there's lots of studies that have come out, and I write about many of them, and that I like the use the word people can do hard as long as they have support and camaraderie and choice and discretion.
And there's also lots of data now showing that when people are flourishing, they can handle a lot more challenge.
So, Berna is what happens when we meet challenge without good mental health, when we're languishing, and when we don't have much support or very little control over our life, and very little discretion over when things happen and how they happen.
And so I like to think, you know, burnout can land you in languishing, but languishing can also be a source of burnout.
You can feel completely without control and without any sense of choice over your life.
And so you just are dealing with all of this adversity without any sense of agency over handling it and how to handle it, and so you...
Report finding high -quality candidates, and promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants.
So post your job for free at linkedin .com -slash -prepared.
That's linkedin .com -slash -prepared to post your job for free.
Terms and conditions apply.
When you sort of think about then looking forward, okay, so, you know, we've developed this tool to help identify the experience of languishing, the 14 -point questionnaire that you walk through.
There's also a bit of a new flourishing framework that you offer.
Now, I'm familiar with frameworks like Pirma or PermaV or PermaPlus4, which I think is the Claremont modification of that that has come out of the world.
The positive cycle for the last 30 years or so.
How do you look differently?
When you look at that, do you have an adaptation or showing a modification of that model when we think about, okay, so this is what really needs to be present to fully be in flourishing.
My work proceeded by over a decade, all those other models that came out like .perma and others later, and they all share in common. the roots of the well -being literature that when I sat down to look at them, I was bringing together what was two very separate research traditions in psychology.
There was a whole one tradition that focused all on the hedonic stuff, the feeling good and the happiness satisfaction.
And they called that subjective well -being.
And then I ended up working at Wisconsin when I was getting my PhD in Sociology with Carol Riff, who was championing suddenly this other tradition of well -being that came out of Aristotelian philosophy, which was about human excellence, right?
And she created those six dimensions of psychological well -being.
And she was arguing, and her classic article said, happiness is not everything, right?
That's the type—there's more to it—to this well -being stuff.
And I remember in our first meetings, and I said, well, we can test this empirically.
Do these two traditions sort of, do they really sort of operate independently, but need to be brought together empirically?
And it turns out, yeah, we did research on it, that there's lots of people in the world who are feeling good, but they don't have very high psychological well -being.
There's a whole bunch of people who are doing well on the psychological well -being, but they're not feeling all that happy or satisfied.
And then there's a whole group where they brought it together.
They feel good about a life where their life also has high levels of psychological well -being.
That was the beginning of what I saw— the opportunity to build a model of mental health.
Because the way psychiatrists deal with mental illness is to look at anhedonia—that's depression— combined with malfunctioning.
And when I finally started to work with Carol Riff, I realized the literature offered us this opportunity to look at feeling good and functioning well.
And my ah -ha moment was, you know what?
When you put those together, that's mental health.
And so that's always been my framework.
When I use the word flourishing, I'm talking about mental health, not something that anyone else is talking about, I offered a diagnosis.
Nobody else offers a diagnosis.
So to me it's not enough to just create measures of flourishing without providing some basis in either engaging what came before you that somehow you're adding to mental health or you're saying something different from what I first proposed.
So I think there's some unnecessary confusion that was created in the field because there's now all these people measuring flourishing, but they don't mean the same thing.
I've been very clear.
I'm measuring mental health and its absence from the get go, and I will not change because I think the feeling good and the functioning is just like turning depression on its head and we need to do that because we need to focus on mental health and and its absence to prevent the very things that were not doing a good job fixing, which is mental disorders.
So yeah, I'm happy that people are interested in this field, but I'm not happy because they never really bothered to offer any distinction from what I met by flourishing, and I published this 10 to 12 years before anyone else.
And I'm like, well, if I had to do what you were doing, I would be asked to say, well, what do I mean by flourishing and how am I different from what came before me?
And so, you know, that's, it's just confusing to the world right now.
And I think I'm glad I think we'll sort this out.
But I'm not going to change because I think it's clear.
I'm talking about mental health, and it's absence.
I don't know what everyone else is talking about when they're talking about flourishing.
Yeah, it is interesting how everyone puts their own stamp in their own model and their own naming convention.
And then you have to figure out like, are we all talking about the same state, or are we talking about like something slightly to the left, something slightly to the right?
So if we shift gears a bit into some of the things that we might think about saying yes to.
Like, to help us move from languishing to flourishing.
And one of the things that you explore that is really interesting is this notion of the importance of self -narrative.
The stories that we tell ourselves about who we are.
And how that shapes how we feel, how we move through life.
Talk to me a bit more about this.
Yeah, I love that. That we start there, because I think that's all based on this.
What makes human beings feel alive, isn't just about feeling an emotion, that's part of it.
But the fact that we like most living things, we're planted here to grow and we grow when we learn.
And when we're learning, it is something we want to learn and grow on, you see it.
People act like they're fully alive.
You use the word passion.
We see passion coming out of them.
And it's not all great because it's hard sometimes to learn and to grow, but I think that narrative The ability to always learn and the ability that means we can always change is that I will tell you, I just came back from one of my regular meetings that I go to almost every day, my AA meeting.
Now in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, there are hundreds of thousands of stories of redemption.
Redemption doesn't happen without the ability to change your narrative from what Dan McAdams called contaminated in a bottom, to the fact that I can get through this, not only can I get through this, I can learn, I can grow, and that I can continue that throughout my life.
So, hitting a bottom doesn't mean the end.
Sometimes for many people, it's the beginning of a redemption story.
And redemption only happens because we're always capable of learning and growing and changing and becoming better.
If that wasn't true, I don't know why we would keep doing it.
Why not end your life really?
Once you've failed, if you don't have the ability to change your own narrative, which happens because you have the ability to learn and grow, I don't know why we would keep at it.
I guess that's why some people hit that point and they ask that very question because they don't have the ability in that moment to see a possibility that is to see them living a story that is different than what they're currently feeling, which often I think is when other people can be so helpful in this equation, you know, and it's kind of one of the next things that you reference which is this notion of the importance of those warm and trusting relationships.
That's the perfect segue, because I mean, none of us would have ever believed that we could, the story of alcoholism can be transformed into sobriety and recovery.
If we didn't see and enter those rooms and see other people having worked together and helped each other, and using sayings like the following, I'm going to love you till you learn to love yourself again.
And we do that. And they believe it.
And we do that for each other.
And we couldn't change that narrative of shame due to an addiction, into a story of recovery where we could help others without others having come before us and wanting to share all the gifts that they've been given.
I just think that's an amazing language and a story.
And I, you know, I'm not being anonymous here, not because I wanted, you know, I simply am one of many in different ways who have found a way out of something that I thought was impossible.
And I did it because I had warm trusting relationships.
And I had a place where I belonged.
And I had a place where I could contribute.
Those Those are three questions I ask that are part of my inventory of flourishing and languishing and those are three qualities of connection that we need in our lives in order to flourish.
A place where I belong and a place where I can contribute and a place where there's warmth and there's trust. Yeah, I mean, so powerful.
And I guess part of the challenge there also, is that at the moments where we probably need that most, we often find ourselves having the greatest amount of trouble.
I don't want to say finding it, because I want to say seeing it.
Because often it is there, but there's something about the state that we're in that doesn't allow us to see the fact that this is actually available to us in the here and now.
Yeah, because we don't feel we deserve it anymore.
We've gotten the message, because of the pain that we're - it's usually some form of pain that we're dealing with.
It has to do with some form of vulnerability in us that hurts so much that when people touch it and trigger it, we react.
And we hurt other people.
And then if you add addictions on top of that, we really do make ourselves hard to be loved because we want to disappear.
And so we get, we've, we get to that place where when people do extend more trust, a sense that you belong here, we can't see ourselves as worthy of it.
And so that's why the message that I'm going to love you because you're worthy of loving belonging until you get in and relearn that.
So others have to believe that we're worthy of it before we can even see it.
Yeah. I think probably everybody has felt that at some point.
Gosh. Yeah, I think we have. which actually brings us in an interesting way to one of the other ideas.
It's this idea of transcending.
But it's not transcendence in the way that I think a lot of people think about it.
It's not sort of transcending the human condition or like being enlightened.
My understanding is it's more this idea that there can be a lot of twists and turns in your life.
And it's the capacity, and tell me from getting this right, to know that there will be adversity and challenges that drop and that we have within ourselves.
Like, some capacity to actually find our way through.
Yes. And I talk about all these forms of religious practice and spiritual practice as rehearsal.
I try to see that right now.
We need guidance. We need standards of excellence.
We need constant reminders that we're working towards this, not alone, but for something bigger than ourselves, a place called a community, a society, which doesn't work unless we are aspirational and are constantly doing the little work that you just talked.
It's big work, actually.
Even the most misunderstood philosopher in the well -being literature, Epicurus said, we need constant reminders of the things that really matter, that are good for us, and usually that is what you're talking about.
I need to be around mine too.
I could be a better version of myself.
I love Dark Times works at this concept of collective effervescence is just we can come together as a collective and just feel this just stunning feeling of you know it's almost like non -duality like brought into the modern age.
Oh you just remember I saw a picture I didn't know the Dodgers won last night look at the pictures those people collectively had But that effervents is they felt the belonging to their city, they felt the belonging to each other.
They felt part of something bigger than themselves.
And that's when sports does what religion, according to Durkheim, was doing for us.
It gave us a symbol of something that represented society that was good.
And we attach to it and we realize we're in this together.
We're a team. you. Throughout this conversation, you referenced the notion of purpose a number of times.
And I think this is probably something that most a lot of people probably connect with and this notion of purpose, and also as an interesting way to help us navigate out of languishing.
But I think the, you know, the sort of teased out nuance, here, at least in my reading, is this notion of we're not talking about one big unifying capital P life purpose, right?
Which I think a lot of people are stymied by.
They feel rejected by it.
Like, I don't have it.
I can't find it. And you know, therefore I can't ever feel the way I want to feel or live the way I want to live.
It's much more about like just having a sense of purpose in everyday life, in every activities, everyday interactions, which pretty much everyone does have some level of access to.
That I talk about how I think I sometimes and I did this.
We're very good at we humans, at complicating things.
And purpose is really about wanting to help something or someone in this world.
Or think of it this way, in your own little way, in your own little part of the universe, you want to leave the world as good or even better than what you found it.
And normally, what's good about helping or taking it up to the level of purpose, when I say purpose, I'm saying you've chosen to devote a part of your life to helping something that has no direct value to you, but you care about it.
And you want to help somebody else or something else be better, or you want to address some form of suffering or injustice in the world.
There's all kinds of ways.
But I think what happens is we don't think it's a purpose unless it's grandiose.
And I don't believe that's true.
You could be leading an amazing purpose quietly in a small community of 100 people.
Right there, all right?
The sad part of it is that here I am coming up to you from North Carolina where just a 100 miles down the road, they were devastated by Helene and sometimes it takes enormous disasters like that for people to be reminded that, you know, I can be as useful right here in my community because I have to, that sense of like, I have some agency on autonomy in this process which I think is really powerful.
It feels like a good place for us to come full circle in our conversation as well.
So in this container of Good Life Project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life.
or what comes up? I use the phrase, and I know other people have used this phrase, to me flourishing is what I consider the good life.
It's always been my North Star, and I think it's really what people deserve when they think about a good life.
Cuz I think right now I think we're satisfied with something.
A good version of life is good enough.
At least, it's not terrible.
But there's so much more, and I don't think it's a luxury at all.
The research makes that very clear.
And so I think you have to believe that you deserve more.
And that's good mental health.
Because that's what I mean when I talk about flourishing.
A good life is being mentally healthy.
It's more than the absence of illness.
It's the presence of flourishing.
Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode safe bet, you'll also love the conversation we had with Daniel Kahneman about the way we make decisions.
You'll find a link to that episode in the show notes.
This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers, Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields.
Editing help by Troy Young, Christopher Carter, crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelly Adele Bliss for her research on this episode.
And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life project in your favorite listening app or on YouTube, too.
If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did because you're still listening here.
Do me a personal favor, a seven second favor, share it with just one person.
I mean, if you want to share it with more, that's awesome too.
But just one person, even.
Then invite them to talk with you about what you've both discovered to reconnect and explore ideas that really matter, because that's how we all come alive together.
Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.
it. Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors.
With LinkedIn Ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title, and more.
We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign.
Get started today at linkedin .com slash results.
Terms and conditions apply.
If your job at a healthcare facility includes disinfecting against viruses, you know prevention is the best medicine, and maintaining healthy spaces starts with a healthy cleaning routine.
Grainger's world -class supply chain helps ensure you have the quality products you need when you need them, from disinfectants and cleaning supplies to personal protective equipment, So you can help deliver a clean bill of health call.
1 -800 -GRANGER click ranger .com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done This episode is brought to you by progressive insurance Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash?
Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies Try it at progressive .com progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates potential savings will vary not available in all states It's Marc Maron here, host of WTF with Marc Maron on ACAS.
When I started this podcast, I didn't have a lot of expectations.
But somewhere along the line, podcasting became a serious business.
And if you're serious about making money doing a podcast, there's only one place to do it, ACAS.
ACAS generates more revenue, more reliably, than any other platform.
Join ACAS, the number one podcast platform for monetization, by visiting go .acas .com www.