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.
