Noble Leisure Is the Antidote To Languishing
Rediscover an ancient concept to fight off stagnation and start flourishing again
Mental health is a continuum. Not being mentally ill doesn’t necessarily mean you are healthy.
Usually, we don’t really think or talk much about mental health, except in the context of serious issues (and even then we, unfortunately, have a tendency to ignore it).
But the pandemic has put a spotlight on mental health — and not just on the extreme ends of the spectrum.
While anxiety, burnout, and depression have certainly been on the rise over the past year, even more pronounced (albeit less obvious) has been the increase in people — myself included — who are just feeling ‘kinda off,’ not exactly suffering but also far from their mental peak.
In a widely shared New York Times article from April 2021, organizational psychologist Adam Grant put a word to what so many of us were (and still are) feeling: languishing.
While Grant didn’t come up with this term, he certainly popularized it and helped us all to name and better understand what we were collectively experiencing.
Languishing is neither burnout nor depression, those twin afflictions which lie on one extreme end of the mental health spectrum.
If you are languishing you are not necessarily emotionally exhausted and low on energy, as is the case with burnout, nor are you bound to feel the hopelessness of depression. But you are certainly not thriving either.
Everything is just kind of ‘meh.’
Or as Grant puts it in his article:
“Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. […] It’s the void between depression and flourishing — the absence of well-being. You don’t have symptoms of mental illness, but you’re not the picture of mental health either.”
Part of what makes languishing so problematic is that it is less obvious than its more serious cousins. It creeps up on you slowly like a grey fog gradually settling over your life, and it doesn’t feel quite bad or disruptive enough to warrant intervention or seeking help.
The predominant feeling is dullness rather than genuine suffering.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look for a way to stop languishing and start thriving again.
In his article, Grant himself proposes a potential antidote to languishing: flow.
“During the early days of the pandemic, the best predictor of well-being wasn’t optimism or mindfulness — it was flow. People who became more immersed in their projects managed to avoid languishing and maintained their prepandemic happiness.”
Flow is that elusive state when you are “in the zone” — challenged yet at ease, effortlessly focused, and fully immersed in what you are doing.
I fully agree with Grant on flow being an excellent cure for languishing, but I would like to expand or complement his recommendation.
Rather than just flow, I believe that the best antidote to languishing is noble leisure.
Noble leisure (which also happens to be the name of this column) is an ancient concept that goes all the way back to Aristotle. I have previously written about why I think it is so important for well-being and success.
In a nutshell, Aristotle argued that noble leisure comprises all those activities that fill you with a deep sense of meaning. This is in stark contrast to mere rest, which in his definition just prepares you for more work, which in turn enables noble leisure.
“We give up leisure in order that we may have leisure, just as we go to war in order that we may have peace.”
— Aristotle
Counter to what most people might think of when they hear the word “leisure,” noble leisure is often very active. To quote my previous article,
“True leisure, noble leisure, is far from passivity or relaxation.
It is an activity in which we can find our greatest fulfillment as humans. Rather than mindlessly filling our free time with distracting pastimes — in the literal sense of the word — we actually put our undivided attention and full energy behind something we deeply care about. The more energy we put into this kind of activity, the more energized we feel.”
It is this active aspect of noble leisure, entwined with the strong focus on purpose and meaning, that lends itself to flow. But I believe that noble leisure is broader than just flow.
The sense of meaning you get from noble leisure permeates every part of your life — not just the hours you actually spend in flow.
In addition, noble leisure is one of the surest ways to reach a state of flow.
I’m sure that Grant would likely agree with this. In a recent Instagram post, he wrote that:
“A Netflix binge is a temporary escape from languishing, not a cure.
Passive engagement in a fictional world doesn’t offer a lasting sense of meaning, mastery, or mattering.
Flourishing depends on active participation in the real world: creating, connecting, and contributing.”
In other words, it depends on noble leisure.
Instead of just resting and relaxing, like during a Netflix binge or mindlessly scrolling on Instagram (which ironically is what I did when discovering the above post), ask yourself what activities get you into a state of flow and fill you with a sense of meaning. Then try to prioritize them.
I myself have directly come to experience both the power of noble leisure, as well as the dullness of its absence, over the past year.
During the early days of the pandemic, when most people around me fell into anguish followed by languishing, I was actually thriving.
I was in the final stages of writing and publishing my book Time Off, which I had been working on together with John Fitch for well over a year, and which was to launch in late May 2020.
Never before (or in the short time since), has a project filled me with such a deep sense of purpose and meaning. Yes, it was hard work, but it was also noble leisure in its purest form. I put a lot of energy into it, but I got even more energy out in return.
Social distancing and sheltering at home were almost welcome to me, removing much of the peer pressure and FOMO I previously had to fight against in order to stay focused on my book.
But then, once the book was published in late May and the buzz of the launch had worn off, by July I was faced with a void, an ever-looming question of “now what?”
Despite being seen as a newly minted “expert” in time off and noble leisure, I struggled.
Like so many others in 2020 (and 2021), I failed to find a fulfilling answer to the “now what” question and fell into a deep hole, which I often tried to plaster over with distraction rather than true noble leisure. The fact that I had just started a new job which — as I realized in retrospect — was not fulfilling to me, also didn’t help.
I previously described the feelings I experienced as anxiety (and wrote about some of the ways I dealt with it), but I now think that, while there was certainly some component of anxiety, what I experienced was mostly languishing.
Languishing, largely due to a lack of true noble leisure in my life.
I am currently in the process of making some significant changes to re-align my life with noble leisure in order to stop languishing and start thriving again (and I’m excited to write and share more about some of these soon).
I invite you to join me on this journey.
Let noble leisure be your guide, your shining beacon, out of the deep and dark valley of languishing and towards flourishing.