The Big Blah Theory: Five Ways to Quit Coasting and Start Flourishing

Corey Keyes shares insights from Languishing: How to Feel Alive Again in a World That Wears Us Down.

How’s your life going? Is it great? Terrible? Or, like for many of us, is it somewhere in between, just kind of “meh?” That feeling of low-grade mental weariness can affect your self-esteem, relationships, and motivation, and it's described in detail in the book Languishing: How to Feel Alive Again in a World That Wears Us Down by Corey Keyes. Corey is a professor emeritus of sociology at Emory University in Atlanta, GA, where he held the Winship Distinguished Research Professorship. He was a member of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Aging, and you can read or listen to 5 of his big ideas below:

The 5 Key Insights:

1. We are born into a world where others have defined what is and what is not important.

2. Languishing has been described as feeling “meh” or being “blah.”

3. Languishing is as important and serious as mental illness.

4. Flourishing is so much more than happiness.

5. There are five activities that flourishing individuals do more of each day, each week.

1. We are born into a world where others have defined what is and what is not important.

What is considered important gets our attention. What is deemed unimportant remains invisible. Nobody studied mental health before me. What serious scholars studied was mental illness. Mental health was the absence of mental illness. Mental health was an empty category that was, therefore, invisible.

Astronomers launch satellites with better telescopes to discover what’s never seen before. We social scientists make discoveries when we create measurement tools to observe and study what was invisible to prior generations. Over 20 years ago, I created a measurement tool with 14 questions to diagnose the presence and absence of good mental health, which I called flourishing and languishing. Both need more of our attention if we ever hope to solve the growing crisis of mental illness.

Listen to Corey’s 5 big ideas here: