Lan·guish (verb): to suffer from being forced to remain in an unpleasant place or situation.

The last 5 years, and more broadly the last decade, has largely been defined by a constant feeling that's hard to place but is shared between us all. Major Depressive Disorder is a feature of my day-to-day, and has been for nearly a third of my life. But even with Prozac and therapy managing keeping symptoms well under control for the last 2, I could not shake the hopelessness, apathy, and general exhaustion, especially when looking at the world around me. There has been a specific unique experience with a sense of solidarity, which diverges significantly from standard feelings of depression.

Makenzy Smith on TikTok shared that she's felt stuck under a weight of a depression for the last couple months, but it's not a feeling in line with the mood disorder or seasonal mood shifts. "I'm just feeling this wall. It's like all I wanna do is rot." Mike Mytnick described this, somewhat profoundly (to me, a person who is incredibly bad identifying and naming emotions), as the feeling of languish, as an experience somewhere stuck between not really being depressed but also not being actively happy, content, or flourishing.

Our parents like to say that our 20s would be the best decade of our lives—young enough to go out and have fun but old enough to be stable and have a job with disposable income. I joked to my own mom that the years since I graduated college have been the worst of my life so far. In disbelief, she asked why. Ongoing pandemic, war in Europe, war in the Middle East, a diabolical economy for the average American, people being stripped of their fundamental rights, a government that's barely holding it together. In reality, my 20s have largely been spent languishing, stuck in a place of constantly being bombarded by the world's pain and not having the individual power to incite legitimate change.

The existential dread is seemingly never ending. We got left with the worst of everything and everyone is feeling it. All hope any of us ever had about really thriving in our 20s has slipped away. The biggest issue here is figuring out how we get out of this pit of despair. Mike, in his video on languish, recommends reducing consumption in favor of creation, the latter using a relatively loose definition. At the core of this suggestion, is advice that is generally in line with that given to people experiencing depression: work on limiting mindless consumption of traditional and social media and work towards doing more things, regardless of the size of the task, and noting that things will likely feel worse before they get better.

On an individual, day-to-day level, that advice holds truth. Establishing momentum, no matter how small, is essential to moving on to the next thing. On a larger scale, however, the anger that sits beneath the languish is the real fuel we need. Anger at the state of the world and directing it in a positive direction is prime motivation for seeking community and learning what you can create rather than consume and expending what little energy is left after the necessities are taken care of. It's impossible to give your full attention to everything all the time; we should never expect that of others or ourselves. More than anything else, everyone deserves a little grace, support, and solidarity, all of which can be born out of this perpetual languishing.