Corey Keyes
Corey Keyes on how “the middle is languishing too,” why happiness isn't enough, and what it actually takes to flourish
THE TAKEAWAYS
Keyes now thinks he misnamed the middle group. That huge "moderately healthy" category - the kids who seem fine - are actually mildly languishing.
Once you measure whether a kid is functioning well, whether they report being happy stops predicting much. It just drops out of the model.
Play matters, and you don't have to call it play. Call it "doing something fun just because it's fun." But adults have to actually model this, not just preach it.
A chip on the shoulder can be fuel. Good coaches stoke that fire - they hear the bad message someone gave the kid, then ask: are you going to believe that?
—
Corey Keyes is professor emeritus at Emory University and the person who popularized the term "languishing." His 2002 paper on the Mental Health Continuum has been cited over 4,000 times. When Adam Grant wrote about languishing in the New York Times during the pandemic, it became the most-read article of 2021. Keyes has since published Languishing: How to Feel Alive Again in a World That Wears Us Down.
I spoke with Keyes about what his framework means for teenagers, why the "moderate middle" is a bigger problem than we think, and what it would take to actually promote flourishing rather than just treat illness.
I. The Origin Story
It's been over 20 years since the landmark paper. Where did the idea come from?
That paper, if I had to say there's one paper in my entire career that meant something: I invest a lot in all my papers and take very good care to write them. Yet that paper represented something I had been envisioning, to some degree, ever since I was an adolescent myself.
I start my book by honoring that starting point where I was sitting on my bed as a teenager in my Nana and Papa's mobile home, shortly after they had adopted me, listening to some music I'd never heard before. Jackson Browne, writing about the very thing I was feeling. Running on empty. I just felt like I kept moving. Yet I felt empty.
I never imagined being a professor at that time. I'm first generation from my family to get a college degree, let alone a PhD. So I felt really privileged to do something in science that might help people like me. That paper represented a whole different understanding of what I was feeling as a teenager. And I came to call it languishing because there was no other word for it.
That was the beginning of the mental health continuum, because nobody was paying attention to that. Everyone was talking about mental illness or ignoring everyone who was not mentally ill. Literally 80 to 90% of people completely ignored and assumed to be doing okay. And I knew as a teenager, long before I knew depression, I knew languishing. It did not feel good. It got in my way.
There's something empirical, but also almost spiritual, in your academic writing. How did those two parts communicate?
It is deeply spiritual. There's this saying in Alcoholics Anonymous that comes from a fellow alcoholic: "Religion is for people who want to go to heaven. Spirituality is for people who have been to hell." I realized very early on that I was trying to understand how to grow out of pain and suffering. And the only way to grow when there's pain and suffering is to seek out wisdom.
As a scientist, I wanted to paint a beautiful picture for the world using science so that people take this seriously, so that we can measure it. Because if we don't measure it, it will never leave the closet of invisibility.
II. Feeling Good vs. Functioning Well
Your Mental Health Continuum is built on a counterintuitive claim: the absence of mental illness does not mean the presence of mental health.
On the scale of languishing, the middle, and flourishing: what does good mental health actually look like?
In the book there are 14 items. Those 14 items are reduced from a long line of empirical research. When I started that 2002 paper, I think there were 40 items. In order to maintain integrity to each element that goes into flourishing, I had to reduce it down to one item per concept.
Yet imagine that to get at mental health, you have to get at more than just the feeling good stuff, the hedonic stuff. You have to get way beyond. We're stuck there.
If you pay attention to anything positive: oh, happiness, happiness. Parents might get mad at me. Yet I'm sick of hearing about happiness. Because just because your kid is happy does not mean they're flourishing.
In your empirical work, feeling good wasn't as predictive as functioning well. Can you say more about that?
What I'm really trying to do is tamp down the noise around the feeling good stuff. When I started into the literature, everyone was saying feeling good and happiness is what predicts everything, including preventing premature mortality. Yet they weren't measuring this stuff Carol Ryff and I were talking about: social well-being, psychological well-being.
Then we come along with a complete list of the well-being measures and voilà: paper after paper was showing that if you just put in the feeling good stuff alone, yeah, it predicts mortality and all these other things. Yet as soon as you add any of the functioning well stuff, feeling good just drops out of the equation. It doesn't predict anything because it's the functioning well stuff that really matters.
III. The Ignored Middle
One of the things I was struck by in the 2002 paper, and then subsequent follow-ups, was the distribution. Most teenagers, for example, aren't necessarily either flourishing or languishing properly understood. They're in the middle. Is that a stable place to be?
That middle group, properly understood: they're languishing. There's levels of severity. If I were to go back and do this again, I chose a rather rosy word for that middle group. When I first created the mental health continuum, I said they were "moderately mentally healthy" because I wanted to give some hope.
Yet the truth is anyone who's not flourishing is languishing to some degree. That middle group combines mild and moderate languishing. What I used to call just "languishing" is properly understood as severe. So there's mild, moderate, and severe.
What we really need to focus on is that almost there is better than being severely languishing. Every step up towards flourishing results in slight improvements. Yet hundreds and hundreds of studies here and around the world show flourishing, what I call mental health, is the place you want your kids to be.
IV. The Two Wolves
In your book you talk about the two wolves, this idea that we're feeding the wolf of illness and death instead of the wolf of health and life. What would it look like to feed the other wolf?
The story goes: there were some children in a Native American tribe who were becoming really confused by the way adults behaved. When I look at my mom and dad or my teachers, often I can see them and admire them because they do really good things. And then I see them talk about people in a very negative and nasty way. I'm confused. Are you a good person? Are you a bad person?
So they went to the elders in the tribe. And the elder said: it turns out we are made of two wolves. One is very dark and negative, driven by fear. If you tap into fear, it will do all kinds of bad things: jealousy, aggression, unforgiveness. Then there's this other wolf, beautiful, light, driven by love.
The kids knew these seemed like polar opposites. So they asked: which one are we really? Long silence for dramatic effect. And the elder says: it's the one we feed.
Here's the problem. Our buttons of fear are almost always being overactivated. Problems get our attention. We feel quite effective. Yet they're whack-a-moles. You just whack one out and another one comes up. That's all you do. It's a whack-a-mole life. Yet if you focus on the positive stuff, you will prevent a lot of those bad things from starting up in the first place. They can only be crowded out by good.
V. Play and Having Fun
In your book, you're ironically, perhaps, very serious about play. One of the vitamins is play. We think play is a useful word up to a certain age.
But I have teenage daughters now. I'm not sure they would comfortably use the word play. So how do we operationalize that spirit for teenagers?
Here's another problem. When I imagine myself as a young person looking out at the adult world, I wouldn't use the word play. And what I observe adults doing more often than not, I wouldn't call it play. The word I would use for teenagers is: let's do something fun just for the sake of having fun. That's it. Let's do something that brings you joy just because it brings you joy. Because it doesn't accomplish anything.
It's hard to see that in the adult world because I don't think we model it very well. We take ourselves very seriously and we take our jobs way more seriously than our life. Our jobs aren't our life. We confuse the two. Our jobs are for our life. Yet our job is not our life. And yet our kids see us almost always engaged in some form of what we consider something very serious.
There's nothing worse than being a young person and seeing what you might not have the word for yet: hypocrisy. 'Go have some fun.' 'Why?' 'Because I gotta do more work. I'm serious. I got things to do. That fun stuff, you need to get out of my way because I have something important to do.' What did you just tell the kid? That fun is not important.
So where does the phone fit into this?
I think we've closed off the world for a lot of young people from doing autonomous things. I'm convinced that's why they're on their iPhones. That's the greatest sense of autonomy they have left: to create some structure in their own life. They can't go out in the world and do it for themselves. There's nothing more empowering than clicking and connecting with the people I want to connect with, when I want to connect with them. Because as soon as I get off that thing, I have adults negotiating and intervening in everything that I want to do.
There's something very autonomous about that thing where I get to do what I want to do. Nobody's helping me scroll or click or tell me where to be on that thing. And I didn't need that because me and my buddies were off in the park and in the woods and creating jumps and trails and changing our bike seats and tires and rims every day to go do something that we wanted to do that day, and then we'd come home to eat. That was about it. We were out. Doing what we wanted to do. We didn't need anything else to make us feel autonomous.
VI. Stoking the Fire
For the teenager who is languishing and can't find that fire: what would you say to that young person?
I've seen coaches stoke that. Really good coaches can, and teachers will stoke that fire. It goes something like this: that young kid will come to you and tell you somebody just gave them a bad message about themselves and their future. Okay, I want to hear that. I want to talk about it. Now: are you going to believe that? Because you have a choice to let it in or keep it out. Let's work on believing in what you can do to prove them wrong, and everyone else who's going to doubt you. Because everyone's been doubted. Everyone. Some more than others.
I think we need to, as adults, get comfortable with the fact that we want kids to have a bit of a chip on their shoulder when it comes to the world giving them the message that they're not worthy, they don't belong, that they're not good enough.
I want kids to fight back. I want them to literally and figuratively flip them off and say: this isn't over. Yet that's not enough. You've got to tell them: this is not enough. Now we've got to do the work because the proof is actually showing them in your accomplishments. Now let's find something you really want to devote yourself to and let's prove the world wrong. I want to stoke that fire. That fire is in a lot of them.
—
You followed flourishing as your North Star for decades. What do you know now that you didn't then?
I used to think all the stuff that had happened up to age 12, the abandonment, all the nasty abuse, that I was doing well despite all of that. Yet there's this element most recently that I've realized: it was because of that. And I don't know what the switch is.
My life is about two big declarations. One is: I'm going to succeed to say "fuck you" to the world. And the other is: I'm going to succeed to say "thank you" to the world. The "fuck you" stance is: you all are wrong about me. I do belong here. Because I had a professor I write about in the book who said after my freshman year that I don't belong there.
That was a turning point in my life. I could have listened to that and failed and everything could have gotten worse. You know what I did? I said, "I'm gonna fucking prove you wrong. And everyone else who's ever doubted me."
And I didn't just say that. I came back that next year with a plan. I took my papa's lunch pail, figuratively, and went to work. Every lecture, I took notes and recorded it. After classes, I'd have dinner with friends, then go back down to my classroom where it was dark and nobody was there. I sat and rewrote my notes while listening to the recordings.
One week before every exam, I'd start reviewing—five or six days of going over every note. I went from a C minus to an A plus. It took a long time. But if you're going to say "I'm going to prove you wrong," you get your lunch pail out and get to work. I was not afraid to work.
And then it was also to say thank you. Thank you to the people like my Nana and Papa, whose life I want to honor because they, out of everyone else, saw the good, saw the potential, saw my future. They treated me with the dignity and respect and love that any young person needs in order to move towards flourishing.
This interview was originally published by the Center for Teen Flourishing. Cross-posted at Michael Goldstein's Substack.
—
REFERENCES
Academic: Keyes (2002) "The Mental Health Continuum" · Carol Ryff's Psychological Well-Being Scales · Emmy Werner's Kauai Study
Books: Keyes, Languishing (2024) · Lembke, Dopamine Nation (2021)
Media: Adam Grant, "There's a Name for the Blah You're Feeling" (NYT, 2021) · PBS Frontline, "The Lost Children of Rockdale County" (1999)
