There was in the last several months a spate, several articles in a wide variety of publications on languishing.

Probably the best was the April 21st New York Times article by a

psychologist named Adam Grant and he called it there's a name for the blah you're feeling it's called languishing. So if you get the chance and you'd like to check that out

it's a good article but I'll be summarizing some of it a little bit of it and then moving on to put in

insights from both Buddhism and clinical psychology as well as some of my own proposals.

So, languishing is a feeling of apathetic monotony,

a muddling through life, a kind of a limbo state between, on the one end,

thriving at the peak of well-being and on the other end the pits of depression, misery, panic and anxiety,

there's this kind of third poll which would be the absence of affect, a kind of listlessness, what the French call

on we. So if you've ever had any image or sense of what on we is, then you know what languishing is.

It's just, it's a lack of excitement, but without signs of mental illness, simply a lack of engagement with life, a kind of prevailing apathy.

This idea goes all the way back 2,500 years.

The Buddha noted five hindrances

to what he called both Enlightenment and peace of mind

and a kind of reliable happiness.

Some of the hindrances, these five hindrances

are pretty obvious to us. There's addiction, there's hatred and aversion, there's extreme

self-doubt, and there's

anxiety,

anxiety, but the fifth was essentially languishing,

what the Buddha called meida and a kind of lack of engagement and apathy

a wandering through life without any degree of excitement or involvement.

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