Languishing

The most-read New York Times story of 2021 was about the dominant emotion many of us felt. Blair and David just hit record for this episode, without any plan for this conversation about the pandemic and how they feel about the new year.

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“There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing”

Transcript

David C. Baker: Okay. I'm going to start this, right?

Blair Enns: All right. Okay. Let's go.

David: Are you recording?

Blair: I'm recording. Why wouldn't I be recording?

David: Because somebody didn't in London one time and, hopefully, we've learned our lessons.

Blair: Yes.

David: That was me. Not you.

Blair: Yes.

David: Just to clarify. Okay. For everybody listening, this is going to be different. We both just hit our record buttons as soon as we logged on. Usually, we chat for five minutes, sometimes 30 minutes, and then we'd realize, oh shoot, we ran out to time to record an episode, but that was a good chat. We're just starting them early. Normally, in fact, always, except for one time we've always had a topic and there's a designated questionnaire and a designated answer, sort of a Q&A where I'm asking Blair about this topic and I'll insert some things or the opposite.

It seems like some of the most popular episodes are ones where we just talk and it becomes a little bit more organic and less planned. That's part of what we're trying to create here. We did this once before, I don't know exactly when I think it was more than a year ago and I don't even remember the episode. At the time I was terrified to record it and I've never gone back and listened to it that I can recall. I just like, I can't do it. I do not want to hear what I said. Now it's not a terror of what to say. It's more a terror of, is there anything to say about a particular topic, which I'll talk about in just a minute.

The theme is really around-- I think this is a word that you've used a lot languishing. A lot of principles are going through the same thing so we thought we'd just talk about this in an unplanned way. My wife, Julie, got me a Christmas gift, a pair of socks that says, if I stop drinking, I'll probably start murdering.

I had another friend send me a hat. I only got three Christmas presents, one from a daughter-in-law, because we draw names. It was a beautiful piece of wood I'm going to turn something with, and then the pair socks. Then from a friend that said, I pretty much like one person and three dogs, and I think there's a typo. I don't know what the person is like. Who is that? Or who the third dog is? Yes. What's the message of those Christmas gifts? Anyway, that's my introduction. We're just going to talk about this.

Blair: Yes. Languishing was the word of the year. I think it was the number one most read and shared article of 2021 on the New York Times website was Adam Grant's piece in the title looking at right now, it's called, There's a Name for the Blah You're Feeling: It's Called Languishing.

I'll read the definition of languishing. He says in psychology, we think about mental health on a spectrum from depression to flourishing. Flourishing is the peak of well-being. Languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health. 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. You're not functioning at full capacity. Languishing dulls your motivation disrupts your ability to focus and triples the odds that you'll cut back on work.

I remember this came out I think it was it was April of 2021, I remember reading this. It resonated so strongly with me about what I was feeling. Yes, that's it. It's not depressed. I'm not suicidal. I'm not anxious. I'm just like feeling and we thought we'd talk about that here because here we are, this is early in the new year. We're recording this in early January of 2022.

I'm typically really excited about the threshold of a new year. I love the blank slate of a new year. I set goals at like anything is possible. I get a good break over the Christmas holidays. I charge into the new year with vigor and excitement. That just has not happened for me this year. You and I were checking in via text days ago and it was like, "Okay, we're back to work," but it's like, it's still just blah. Yes.

David: Do you remember what it felt a year ago when you were entering 21?

Blair: No, I don't. Do you?

David: No. I want to coin a new term called, instead of sad, seasonal, affective disorder, I want to call it PAD, pandemic affective disorder.

Blair: Oh, yes.

Blair: It's just like it changes the whole ushering in of time. I don't know how to explain it because I haven't been as affected as most people. I've really been insulated from a lot of the impact of the pandemic, but it just feels like what it feels like when you're trying to hold things together for a long time, let's say you're on a high school sports trip and you're the adult, and something goes wrong and all of a sudden you forget everything in your personal life, and you're trying to hold it together and think of everybody else, and anticipate problems and solve them.

That's what leaders do, right, but leaders don't usually have to do that in a focused time, over two years. It's a disconnectedness with life and what needs to happen. Then it manifests itself in different ways often anger, impatience, not me, of course, but other people.

Blair: Other people turn into idiots.

[laughter]

David: I don't think it's winter so much. I think it's just like, oh my God. Like last year we thought, okay, vaccinations, that's gonna change a lot of things and we'll get loosened up. We'll go back to normal living and maybe we'll get along better. Maybe we won't be doomed, scrolling political rags every day. You know, it just doesn't feel that way. This is something you and I were texting about. Does it even feel like we would handle the next pandemic better than we did this one? Have we learned anything at all?

Blair: I was saying to you after the first year of this and when it was clear that we, the Royal we, the greater we, all levels of government and individuals, various groups that we have not handled this well. We're not communicating properly. There's a void of leadership all over the place. After a year of that, I thought, well, this is the trial run of a serious pandemic and we'll learn how to deal with the next pandemic through this one. I texted you the other day and I said, "There's no way, we're worse off. We are less prepared for a real serious pandemic than we were two years ago." It's like, we haven't even learned anything from this.

I don't say that pointing fingers at anybody. One of the things I really appreciate about living through a pandemic is a lot of people have very strong opinions on exactly what we should do and most of those people are people I wouldn't take advice on pretty much any topic, let alone health or public health.

They are so adamant and there's so much outrage and I'm just not gonna traffic and outrage. I respect that these are complex problems and there have been screw-ups everywhere. There are all kinds of entities that we just don't trust the way we used to. We all had a higher regard for two years ago than we would do today, but my overarching thought on all of this is, it's really complicated. It's really complicated. It's been a two-year expression of the Dunning-Kruger effect where people who know jackshit are just so adamant about what we should do.

David: Twitter epidemiologists.

Blair: [laughs] So your point, have we learned anything? No. Here we are like we're two years in, so it's January 2022. I remember in March almost two years ago, I remember talking about, we were trying to predict how long is this going to be with us, and I think I said, basically, I'm not planning to get on a plane before January of 2022.

David: I laughed at you. That was such ridiculous. I thought that's your typical overdo it in one direction or the other and it turns out, damn it, you were right.

Blair: I did get on two planes in the last couple of months. Let's talk about travel for a little bit because I think a lot of what ails me and you is we used to live these lives of going wherever we wanted, whenever we wanted. I don't know about you, I'd like to hear your comment on this, but from my point of view, for the first 12 to 16 months, it was like, yes, I'm really happy to be home. I looked at my calendar from the past few years and I thought, who is this person who lived this life? How did you travel so much?

The answer was, I got sick all the time so it was really nice to be home for a while, but then I'm so far past that point. How are you feeling about travel?

David: Oh, travel's been such a part of my life that it's nearly consuming in a way. I don't miss the business travel too much, but I really miss the rest of it. When I think about Julie and I going to Austin and spending a week with some of our best friends from high school, and going to Chile with Jonathan for a week, and then going with both boys, Jonathan and Nathan to Switzerland for hiking for a week, and meeting you in London. Having an amazing Indian meal, and then meeting you in Australia and going to that bar, that specialized in-- What was it? Those were amazing.

Blair: The vermouth bar in Sydney. I don't remember what it's called. God, these are such 1% problems. [laughs]

David: Now you wish you hadn't asked them.

Blair: Yes, what was us?

David: Meanwhile, people are struggling with their kids while they're trying to maintain a Zoom conversation, but that's part of the issue.

Blair: Exactly.

David: Because you feel like it sounds so selfish to talk about what you miss when so many other people are so more deeply infected by it, and that's part of the tension you have.

Blair: That's part of that languishing. It's like, "I've got these problems. I can't say them out loud because I'm so privileged to have these problems." Yes, what was us. Here we are, early January. We've been talking for two years about, "When this thing's over, we're going to do something. We're going to throw a party and call it a conference or we're going to do something else."

We've been talking about these ideas of dinners. What do you think? Where are you today? This is just me and you talking about some of the ideas we've been kicking around privately. When this is over--

David: Is it going to be over?

Blair: Yes. My sense is there is going to be no feeling of a threshold being crossed or a finish line. It's just going to be sloughing into a new normal that's just depressingly similar to what it is today.

David: It feels like there are some signals that are going to be real for us. For instance, when there's just not any question about kids going to school, and how sick ones will stay home, but that would be a measure of when the boundaries between countries go back to the way they were two years ago. It feels like that's what we're looking for even though there'll still be COVID everywhere, but I am dying to do something with people. I miss being on a platform, I miss connecting with people, I miss laughing, I miss different cities, so it's going to have to happen.

I don't know exactly what it will look like, but it's going to have to happen, but my own personal perspective is-- I'm not saying this is normative or what you should have, because we're all in different places and we have different family obligations and so on, but I've had both the first and second vaccination and I've had a booster and I'm not going to fight wearing a mask where they want me to. I don't necessarily enjoy it, but I'm just going to do it and be a good boy, but after that, it's like, "Fuck it. Whatever happens, happens. I'm just going to live."

I could, but I don't want to live this life indefinitely. Part of what that means is we need to start getting back together with some of our crew like the people that we have always enjoyed being around as well even if it's just impromptu. I'll bet right now we could pick a city and a date and 100 people would show up, and it's not about money. It's not about making money, it's just about connecting. I definitely want to do it at some point.

Blair: I agree with you. I'm double vaccinated too. I'm getting my booster shot early next week. I do wish everybody would get vaccinated, but I'm not going to get on a stump about it, but my own motto just for myself is: "Get vaccinated, live your life." I was saying I've been to a couple of places, Scottsdale and Palm Springs in the last couple of months, being a Canadian, I'm going south and seeking sun and it's been so great to be there.

Getting there is hard, especially crossing international borders. The number of times you have to take tests and everybody in the whole travel testing, supply chain, including the airlines, and security people, they're all dealing with new regulations every day. You go into an airport and you just see angry people everywhere and I was on the verge of becoming one of those angry-- I was feeling this anger well up as I witnessed somebody's incompetence that almost forced me to miss my plane, but I didn't say anything. I just thought, "You know what? She's having a--"

She didn't appear to be having a rough day. She was enjoying herself a little bit too much, but I thought-- This is my thing as I get into my mid-fifties now and moving to the second half of my fifties, I'm just not going to traffic an outrage. We all need to be better about how we talk to each other. I'm suppressing my building rage and I got through it, and it's all fine, but it was traveling to someplace in the same time zone as me.

Now, there were three flights, and given where I live, it's a long car ride so I got to do the car ride a couple of days early, then I got to get to test, and et cetera. This isn't more what worries me, I'm just saying the actual travel part's quite difficult, but once you're there, once you're somewhere, it's really nice.

Now, if you're in a country traveling somewhere else in that country and it changes from country to country, it's easier. I don't remember if I said this on a podcast before, but I'm on the first plane that I've been on in almost two years and on the television screen, on the seat in front of me--

David: The three-and-a-half-inch television screen?

Blair: Yes. There's a Marriott Bonvoy commercial, and I don't have the sound on, but it's got beautiful pictures of people in beautiful places hugging, people who haven't seen each other in a while and it's a commercial book travel, and then the tagline comes up and I almost sobbed. The tagline was: "Travel makes you whole again." And I thought, "Oh my God, whoever wrote that line, that's just--" When I saw it, I just thought, "Oh my God. I'm missing so much."

If you don't travel a lot, your void is other things, but as two people who've spent 20 years circling the globe, doing the work that we do, that I realized that a lot of my closest friends, like you, are in different countries, let alone different. Like, I've got my cohort of friends here in the village I live in.

David: Yes.

Blair: Then a lot of my closest relationships are spread out around the world and these are people that I'm used to seeing once or twice a year.

David: I'm thinking of New Zealand friends that I both share where one of their children died tragically from a health issue, and you couldn't be there for them.

Blair: Yes. You just want to get on a plane.

David: We've seen such interesting deep transformative innovation that have happened in service model delivery in our space, forced on us by the pandemic, and it's been really good. I don't think there's been anything negative about it, but I wonder if we've done as much of that around our own particular roles with our business as well. Thinking about, at what point do you put your own oxygen mask on first in a time like this.

Here's a personal example, maybe TMI, I don't know, but in my continuing quest to try to self-diagnose my mental problems, the best thing to do is to go to Wikipedia. I don't know if you've discovered that, but then you'll always find something.

Blair: I got your diagnosis right here. You're crazy. That'll be $100.

David: The other day I read the definition of what hypervigilance means.

Blair: Oh yes, you sent it to me.

David: Yes. It's like, oh my God, that is me. Like always aware of threats and what's happening next and trying to predict the future. One of our two dogs has that. Anything will set him off where just the simplest noise, or there's a click on a lock in a door. If a TV show is on and it sounds like that, he jumps up. I think leaders, even if they haven't normally suffered by that have been in a hypervigilance mode over the last two years where they feel like they've gotta hold this together. My clients, my employees, the finances, my family, and my friends, it's a little bit too much, but I don't know what to do about it.

Blair: Yes. You know what, I think Marriott's right. I think travel makes you whole again, I think that's what you do about it. As you're talking, I'm hearkening back to the beginning of the pandemic and it was like crisis mode. I realized, "Oh yes, I'm a wartime general. This is me at my best." When shit has hit the fan, half of the business is blown up. We don't know what's going to happen next. I turn the emotions off and go into a full logic mode. It's like, this is me at my best.

But then at some point, there's an emotional cost to that because you're basically suppressing these feelings. So we got through the crisis part, and then it's back to normal. No, not even normal, like whatever the new normal is like a realization that we're going to be okay. That not only are we going to be okay from a business point of view, but this pandemic thing is also the best thing, it's the best forcing function that's ever been thrust upon me to force me to make some decisions. It's like not only okay, things are great. We had a great year. We had a really good year two years ago. We had a great year last year.

At some point, I get through the crisis mode, then I'm just burned out like I took three months off. I think I talked about this story.

David: I can attest to the fact that you did, you didn't do shit for three months.

Blair: Then in the time that I've been back, I haven't done much since and so I have the sense of guilt because, A, I've finally stepped up and delegated things that I should have delegated years ago so I'm left with really just the things that I should be doing, but I look at how hard the team's working and I feel a little bit guilty. I feel a little bit semi-retired right now. I'm joking, I'm just a writer and a podcaster. There's other things I do but I look at how hard the team's working and I realize it's not like I carried anybody in the early days, but I think I got us through this stuff in the early days. Now I feel like they're carrying me.

David: Yes. If you more fully understand how you are feeling as a leader, everybody in a family, for instance, is also a leader of a different kind and it helps you see how they are still dealing with their world and so on.

If I were going to go back and do something differently, myself, over the last two years, I don't mean from a business standpoint but more from a personal standpoint, I would be a lot choosier about what I listen to or what I expose myself to. Because when I contrast what I read every morning and I'll skim seven or eight publications, when I contrast that with the people I meet at the farm bureau or target something, it's different. These people don't seem to hate me as much as I thought they did.

That would be the one thing I would do a little bit differently and try to mix in more gratitude in the whole thing because you can't say this about the 800 and some thousand people in the US who died alone and all the people that those impacted, but this could have been so much worse than it was. We still have so much to be grateful for.

That's the only thing I know of other than travel that gets my head back in the right place. I feel like, I don't know, it's like every time I walk by the flag, I unfurl it again. It's like, I just know the wind's going to come back up and it just gets a little bit tiring. I think I could probably last indefinitely, but it's going to take a lot more intentional management of myself as a person if this is going to last much longer.

I think I'd probably give myself a B-minus or something through all of this. My clients, the ones I talk to, I'll have five or six phone calls a day, substantive phone calls. They're pretty much in the same place. I'm just so proud of them though. I'm just so proud of how well they've balanced all of the competing demands and there's been no blueprint for this. Never. There's no blueprint at all.

This is where I think our industry, the leaders in our industry really shine. They just figure out, they're kind of can-do people that have this endless optimism genuinely, and they just translate it to solving the problems. In that process, if you do that for two years, you've shoved down a lot of things that you would normally deal with in your personal life. As a leader, you want to catch up, you don't want that pressure cooker to start leaking around the edges and then explode. You want to figure out what that means for you personally, just for the sake of the people around you, so that you don't start murdering when you quit drinking.

[laughter]

Blair: Part of this languishing effect for me is that it feels like every day is the same. It's like, why I can't get excited about the new year. It's like, "Okay, well, it's just going to be more of the same." If you're a creative person, you thrive on variety and you hate routine. The idea that you get up and it's like, "Oh, more the same today," going back to the mill to shovel coal into the fire or whatever job you get that gives you a repetitive stress injury that a creative person couldn't do, because there's too much of the same, there's not enough variety. Like how are creative people in general, I put myself in that category, but I don't think of myself as one of the more creative people I know.

I think of our clients are highly creative people. How are they handling with the fact that well, "Tomorrow looks all out like today?"

David: When you talk with people, your clients, and friends, how are they feeling about the business prospects of '22?

Blair: There might be a selection bias here. I've said this before, where we're talking to people who can afford training. What does that mean? There might be a bias toward a positive attitude in my sample, but I just see so much positivity. I've seen so much business success in the last couple of years and so much optimism for the time ahead. I think two years in, you've either adapted and you're thriving or you've been put out a business or you're still waiting for some normalcy. If you're waiting, it's like you're done.

David: Yes. I don't think people have a really clear idea, but they're cautiously hopeful and just praying that they're not going to be disappointed, but thinking that this is probably going to be a pretty good year. They're busy, they don't think things could get worse. They might stay the same for a while, but eventually, they'll get better and we should be back to normal sometime by the summer. Something like that. That's just the general consensus of what I have.

In the next six months, why are we even recording on this? Well, I'm not even sure just honestly, except maybe there's some comfort in just talking about where people are apart from a very specific topic. Like this is not an evergreen topic, but this is you, you are on your exercise bike, or you're walking or you're driving to work. We're just saying, we're in the same place you are like, "It's okay."

The languishing that you're feeling is a natural reaction from trying to hold things together as a leader for a year or two, and it's okay. It's okay to be really destroyed inside or emotional by that. It's okay. As a leader, you've got to connect with people who love you, who can be honest with you, maybe have nothing to say to you except they're in the same shit you are. There's a lot of comfort in knowing that you're not the only one that people are singling out, so hopefully, there's some value in us just talking about what it feels like for us and what it feels like for the people that we talk with regularly. I don't really have a message other than you've got to pay attention to these signals, and there's only so much you can do as a leader before you stop and do some self-protective things as well.

I would hope that more people take sabbaticals this next year than they ever have. I would hope they'd be more reasonable about the time they need to spend. Overall, I think this is a really good thing for our industry, in spite of the personal pain that it's caused.

Blair: Really?

David: Yes, I think we're so much clearer in what we want to do. We're not lying to ourselves the way we were about who a good client or a bad client is. The water table has dropped and now we've seen the wrecks under the surface, and they're gone from the staff. We understand our financial performance so much better than we did before because we've looked into it. We've had to look into it. We couldn't just sloppily keep saying, "Well, there's money in the bank, we must be fine." [chuckles] We're having to really track it. I don't want to minimize the personal pain, but I think this has been really good.

This has been a business plague that has spread like wildfire through this industry and the firms that are still here are so much stronger and better off and being led by better people as well.

Blair: Yes, and the forcing function of having to make decisions that we deferred for or long or ignored, it's been beneficial. I'm not ending this recording until you and I agree on where we're going and what we're doing and are we inviting anybody. [laughs] The hardest part is, it's so hard to make plans. You and I have been talking for a year about, "Well, maybe in two months, we can go here."

David: Maybe we should set a tentative time in place, and then say, "Okay, we'll provide final confirmation two weeks beforehand or something."

Blair: Can we do something as soon as March?

David: Oh, yes.

Blair: Mid-March.

David: Which would be the two-year anniversary of when you and I were doing a live podcast recording in front of an audience in New Orleans at this amazing theater for the Bureau of Digital People, Carl.

Blair: You want to go to New Orleans?

David: Well, I think I'm more flexible than you are just because it's so much easier for me to travel anywhere. You've sometimes got to drive eight hours before you get on a plane so you need to pick where.

Blair: I'm kind of thinking Austin.

David: That would be a great choice. Probably something fairly central, big city, easy to fly to so like a Denver, Chicago, Austin. Austin would be awesome.

Blair: Austin in March, what are we going to do? Are we're going to actually have an event with curriculum or--

David: No, I can't do that. Maybe we just have what do you call that thing where everybody stands up for just a couple of minutes and make some presentation about what's going on at their firm and then the next person gets up really quick turn. Not Machu Picchu, that's the--

Blair: Pecha Kucha.

David: PechaKucha, yes, something like that. [laughs] That's why I'm not in charge of it. It has to involve really good food, some drink, for sure, maybe some other things, who knows, and then just a chance to connect with people, and no assholes are allowed.

Blair: I've got a whole list we can cross-check against. [laughs] Okay, that's probably enough for now. I like Austin, middle of March. We should put our friend Mark O'Brien on this because he loves to organize events.

David: Yes, and he knows food and drink.

Blair: I don't think he listens to this podcast, so he doesn't know he's been nominated for this. We'll reach out to him.

David: For those of you who are regular listeners and you think that we are headed down a languishing path by being very disorganized, I promise we'll only do one of these once a year at the most so we'll be back with a fantastic topic.

Blair: We'll be back with substance.

David: Thanks, Blair.

Blair: All right, David, thank you. We'll talk to you soon.