Hidden Brain - Why You Feel Empty

Episode Date: June 10, 2024

Have you ever had an unexplainable feeling of emptiness? Life seems perfect - and yet - something is missing. This week, sociologist Corey Keyes helps us understand where feelings of emptiness come from, how to navigate them and why they're more common than we might assume.If you missed it, make sure to listen to last week's episode on Why Trying Too Hard Can Backfire On You. Thanks for listening!

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.

He tells the story of a man named Richard Quarry, who had every advantage in life. The poem, told from the perspective of people who admired and envied Richard Quarry, 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, 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 a drift. 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 Keys 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 Keys, 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 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 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 she was experiencing depression, but I think it was this sense of loss and emptiness and even feeling a little stagnant as 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. When I 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 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' 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 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 widely 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 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 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 there pissed off. I was perturbed. The way he said it wasn't to say, but 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 Keys says lots of us

live in an emotional netherworld that falls between these two poles. We are not depressed, but still feel unfulfilled. Corey once heard a woman on TV who was reaching out to Oprah Winfrey. Here's what she said. but still feel unfulfilled. Corey once heard 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 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 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 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 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 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 wellbeing 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 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, well did she tell you, Corey? We were sitting out there in a park and she said, well what are 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. 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, you know, 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 belt'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 know, you're not the pilot, you're not the air traffic controller. You don't get to decide when the plane lands. You know, 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 sort of set and wait. I know it's, 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, right. You can't move from that plane seat, right? 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 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 have tried to speak to the same idea. There was a popular song by M. Byhold, Numb Little Bug, which has this wonderful line, like, your body's 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 talked 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. You know, we might imagine that this afflicts

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 Andre Agassi, the tennis 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 success, external success in itself, is no defense against languishing. No. And 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 my... 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 malfunctioning, sleeping too much and 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 or absence of very negative sides. 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. absence of both the negative and the positive. Corey thinks people are most likely to experience languishing in adolescence and in their early twenties, 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 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. Hmm. And in some ways, Corey, 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 found it intriguing that there is this public health 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're not welcomed and you don't feel you belong, and when you don't have warm, trusting relationships, that, for me, gets at the heart of pathological loneliness. pathological loneliness. Corey says languishing, like depression, can be a driver of self-harm. 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 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, Corey. Yeah, 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. 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 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 endures, that lasts longer at least than an hour.

And tell me the longest period that you stayed happy and how you did it. And they go out there. 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 describe 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, allowing the next motion, the next so-called breeze to come and blow the windsock. Kory 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 if 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. 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 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. Researchers once ran a study looking into the wellbeing 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 that Elissa Epple had done and some of it was with Elizabeth

Blackburn and they were studying mothers who were caregivers 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, 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 yet 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. 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, 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 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 three medical specialties are emergency medicine, general surgery, and obstetrics and gynecology. 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's 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 coworkers who understand that you will sometimes have bad days. In other words, we all have bad days. Three, they work with coworkers 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, stressable 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 of 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. Hmm.

And there's a larger lesson here, which is the lesson of self-improvement and 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 this 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 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, Cory 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. 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 help 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, 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. Shankara, I was rescued because my wife came home early one night and I had thought I would literally come very close to ending my life. And because I was, I really was convinced 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.

But 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 and stagnant

like a pool of water that's trapped. Because there is everything in nature, and we were a part of nature, was planted here to grow. And not only to feel alive, but to beget and generate and give life to other things. Kori Keys is the author of languishing, how to feel alive again in a world that wears us down. Kori, 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 9 8 8 hidden brain is produced by hidden brain media our audio production team includes Annie Murphy Paul Kristen Wong Laura Quirell Ryan Katz autumn Barnes Andrew Chadwick and Nick Woodbury Tara Boyle is our executive producer.

I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero today is Katie Gold. She's an audience growth coordinator at SiriusXM, our distribution and ad sales partner. Katie works closely with us on a variety of projects designed to introduce new listeners to Hidden Brain. She's one of those people who make you say, how did we ever survive without this person's help?

She's so responsive and organized, and we truly appreciate her support. Thank you, Katie. If you enjoy Hidden Brain and want more of the show, you can now find our podcast subscription, Hidden Brain Plus, across podcast platforms and devices. Hidden Brain Plus is where you'll find exclusive episodes of the show, including our segment Your Questions Answered, where we pass the mic to listeners to post their follow-ups

to some of our most popular guests. You can find Hidden Brain Plus on Apple podcasts or by going to apple.co. slash hidden brain. You can also find us via our Patreon page, especially if you're using an Android device, by going to support.hiddenbrain.org. At either site, support.hiddenbrain.org or apple.co. slash hidden brain, you can sign up for a free seven-day trial of Hidden Brain Plus. Your support helps us to bring you many more episodes of the show. We truly appreciate having you in our corner.

I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.