That’s the new favorite word being bandied about by those savvy folks in the know in pop-psychology circles. Languishing is waiting without something to wait for, feeling forlorn and forsaken in the absence of actual abandonment.
Languishing is a psychological symptom of COVID that is linked with the involuntary dormancy of lockdown, and is commonly seen among those who have never had the virus. It presents in the uninfected when they have been forced to slow down, and the emptiness of their lives begins to show through the patina of perpetual distraction.
Languishing leaves the person with a penetrating and deceptive sense of purposelessness—deceptive in that real purpose is no less lacking than it has ever been, only now, after Netflix and PornHub have lost their palliative value, it is difficult to pretend otherwise.
Waiting without something to wait for. Feeling forlorn and forsaken in the absence of actual abandonment. I wonder whether languishing might in fact be a symptom of civilization itself. Maybe something more than a symptom: the reason we still allow it to exist.
The campus of the college where I work was, along with every other built structure on the North American continent, constructed on indigenous land. A few of my more thoughtful and compassionate colleagues have adopted the practice of explicitly acknowledging that fact in various ways, for example by including a blurb below their email signature line, or by giving a brief statement to that effect at the start of important meetings. To the extent this enhances cultural awareness and all of that, this is probably a good thing to do. At the very least, it isn’t a bad thing to do. Nevertheless, I am bothered by it on some level—actually, on several levels.
First, the psychologist in me knows that with continued repetition information you are not required to do something with can quickly lose what little potential impact it may have once had. Think of the complete vacuity of IN GOD WE TRUST that has been scrawled across paper currency since 1957. Or, perhaps a better example, think of when the cashier at the grocery store tells you to “have a nice day.”
Also, written or verbal acknowledgement of a patent historical truth is not a meaningful form of action to begin with. Despite this, there seems to be an implicit assumption that overt recognition of the facts somehow makes a difference. Let’s be clear, acknowledging that the land you are standing on was stolen does absolutely nothing to mitigate the consequences of the theft.
Even worse, it can actually serve as subtle validation of the status quo. And this is particularly disturbing, the fact that this acknowledgement is being offered by people who are at the very same time, as a contractual requirement of their employment in an institution of public higher education, supporting and actively promoting a way of life that has been constructed out of the products of colonization and genocide (two words for variations in intensity of the same thing), slavery (in both its physical and economic forms), and the persistent oppression, exploitation, and immiseration of people everywhere on the planet. There is a troubling ingenuousness lurking here, a latent insincerity that mirrors in nontrivial ways the hidden treachery of the original land treaties themselves.
Of course, I am no different than any of my colleagues when it comes to supporting an exceedingly corrosive way of life through my coerced participation. And I suppose what bothers me the most is that I am unable to sustain the illusion that mere awareness of that fact makes a difference.
Two stories appeared in succession on my news feed today, and there was something about the two of them appearing in such close proximity that struck a nerve—something like the pairing of two flavors that don’t belong together, only with fingernail-on-the-chalkboard overtones.
One story was about a traffic accident on a bridge in which a baby was ejected from a car and into the Maryland bay. The other story was about a Colorado woman who was killed and partially eaten by a bear and her cubs while walking her dogs. The baby was apparently rescued, although there was no word at the time on the infant’s condition. And the bear and both of her cubs were tracked down and “euthanized” on the outside chance they might have acquired a taste for human flesh.
We should be happy for the baby and grateful that the bears are no longer a potential danger. However, if you put these two stories side-by-side, and then think about them in terms of how the risk to human life is being dealt with (or not dealt with, as it were) in each case, there is a glaring disconnect that is difficult to ignore, one that shines a light deep into the expanding glacial fissure separating civilized humans and wild nature.
Bear attacks are extremely rare. And people actually dying from bear attack are even rarer: there were only four in the whole of US and Canada in 2020. Car accidents, on the other hand, happen with the dizzying frequency of one every five and a half seconds in the US, with more than 100 deaths each day. In Colorado, the bear and her two cubs were immediately killed to prevent future deaths. In Maryland, the wrecked cars were removed from the bridge, and any damage to the guardrail will be repaired so that traffic can proceed as usual.
For wild animals, there is apparently no level of risk that is acceptable, but ejecting an occasional infant off a bridge is just the price we pay for progress.
