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In this episode, Chip Conley defines a midlife makeover and how to redefine success and happiness after 40. He shares how the most difficult stretches of his life ended up being the start of something completely new. Chip also explains the pull of the ego, the search for identity and how letting go of traditional success can open the door for something more meaningful. If you’re in a season of life where things feel uncertain, or if you’re wondering what this phase of life is really for, this episode will help you feel a little more hopeful.

Key Takeaways:

• Personal experiences and challenges faced during midlife, including burnout and loss.
• The importance of perspective on aging and reframing societal perceptions of midlife.
• The concept of a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset in personal development.
• The relationship between time management and personal autonomy in midlife.
• The physical and emotional changes associated with aging, particularly for men.
• The role of purpose in maintaining energy and engagement in life.
• The significance of gratitude and specificity in practicing gratitude.
• The idea of positive commitments versus commandments in guiding life choices.
• Navigating disappointment and expectations during midlife transitions.

Chip Conley is on a mission. After disrupting the hospitality industry twice, first as the founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, the second-largest operator of boutique hotels in the U.S., and then as Airbnb’s Head of Global Hospitality and Strategy, leading a worldwide revolution in travel, Conley co-founded MEA (Modern Elder Academy) in January 2018. Inspired by his experience of intergenerational mentoring as a ‘modern elder’ at Airbnb, where his guidance was instrumental to the company’s extraordinary transformation from fast-growing start-up to the world’s most valuable hospitality brand, MEA is the world’s first ‘midlife wisdom school.’ Dedicated to reframing the concept of aging, MEA supports students to navigate midlife with a renewed sense of purpose and possibility. A New York Times bestselling author, Conley’s 7th book Learning to Love Midlife: 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better with Age is about rebranding midlife to help people understand the upside of this often-misunderstood life stage and he was asked to give a 2023 TED talk on the “midlife chrysalis.”

Connect with Chip Conley:  Website | Instagram | LinkedIn

If you enjoyed this conversation with Chip Conley, check out these other episodes:

Life Transitions with Bruce Feiler

Successful Aging with Alan Castel

The Happiness Curve with Jonathan Rauch

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Episode Transcript:

Eric Zimmer 00:02:18  Midlife has a way of sneaking up on you. I know because I’m in it, and it’s not without its challenges. But talking with Chip Conley shifted something in me. In this conversation, he shares how the hardest stretch of his life. Burnout, personal loss, and near-death experience ended up being the start of something completely new. We talk about the pull of ego, the search for identity, and how letting go of traditional success opened the door to something more meaningful. His idea of moving from return on investment to ripples of impact especially struck me. If you’re in a season where things feel uncertain, or if you’re wondering what this phase of life is really for. I think you’ll hear something in this episode that helps you feel a little more hopeful. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, Chip, welcome to the show.

Chip Conley 00:03:14  It’s great to be here, Eric.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:15  I’m really excited to talk with you. Your book is called Learning to Love Midlife 12 Reasons Why Life Gets Better With Age.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:24  And what a great topic. And is somebody who’s squarely in the middle of midlife. I’m your target audience. We’ll get to the book, though, in a minute after we start in the way that we always do, which is with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second, and they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Chip Conley 00:04:09  As is true for so many things in life. I’m not sure it’s binary. There’s nothing that says we can’t feed both, and it doesn’t necessarily mean you want to feed both, but it does mean that we do possibly feed both.

Chip Conley 00:04:21  And there’s certain parts of our life. In my life, I’ll just speak for myself. Certain parts of my life are that have a voracious appetite. So there’s certain times in your life where your ego wants to be fed incessantly and frankly, as is true with the hedonic treadmill, the psychology theory that just when you thought the thing you wanted was good enough. Once you get it, you want something more. Yeah, I think that that is very true of the ego, as is true for many things. The ego in moderation is wonderful. Feeding your sense of accomplishment, feeding your sense of having an identity in the world that differentiates you is very important. But it’s when it gets out of balance and you realize that there’s never enough. That’s when you got to be very careful with, with with feeding that wolf. The other wolf, you know, often isn’t asking for anything. It can get along on a steady, small diet. It’s quieter. It’s not demanding. And that, wolf, though in the long run, is what nourishes you the most.

Chip Conley 00:05:32  And so for me, in my life, just to sum up, I was very, very focused on ROI, the return on investment as an entrepreneur for much of my life. But I have come to see that the ROI that I really appreciate these days is ripples of impact and the return on investment mindset I had sometimes meant that I was feeding the ego and feeding the greed. Greed. I’ve never been very greedy, but. But certainly feeding the desire for accomplishment. And today, what I want to feed is that part of me that really is giving back and having a profound impact on other humans as my primary way of feeling success in life.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:17  Wonderful. Let’s start with maybe setting up how you got to the place where you wrote a book about midlife. You have the Modern Elders Academy. Let’s talk about how you got there, and you describe it in the book as the tale of two midwives, one very bad, followed by one very good. Talk to me about that.

Chip Conley 00:06:38  Yeah, I went to college and graduate school at Stanford a couple of years out of Stanford Business School.

Chip Conley 00:06:44  I started a boutique hotel company at age 26 called joie de vivre Vive joy of life! And French ran that company for 24 years, based in San Francisco. We had 52 boutique hotels around California, became the second largest boutique hotelier in the US. But I really was struggling in my late 40s. At the time, I had never heard of the You Curve of Happiness, which shows that the low point on the U curve is around 45 to 50. And yes, that was the era I was in, but I didn’t know anything about that. What I thought was, oh man, I’ve hit my midlife and I’m having my crisis. But it was not just the internal feeling like something wasn’t right, but it was also externally I had I had friends committing suicide. I had an adult foster son going to prison wrongfully. I had a long term relationship ending. I was running out of cash during the Great Recession with my boutique hotel company, so it was both internal and external. And then I had an NDE near-death experience due to an allergic reaction to an antibiotic.

Chip Conley 00:07:40  And that was the hotelier wake up call. That was when I finally said, like, I’ve got to make a transition in my life, but I just don’t know how to do it. You know, I felt now a deep sense of a catalyst from that NDE over the next two years, with some help from one of my best friends who was a coach, I, between age 47 and 50, pretty much changed everything in my life. Some of it was not at all easy. It was in fact very difficult. But by age 50, I sort of hit the reset button and I was ready for something new. And then my 50s were spectacular. So the tale of two midlife were late 40s was rough. My 50s were spectacular. And, you know, I spent from age 52 to 59 helping the founders of Airbnb take their little tech startup and turn it into the world’s most valuable hospitality company, which is where I earned the title Modern Elder. I didn’t like it at first, but then they said, Chip, you’re as curious as you are wise, and that’s a modern elder.

Chip Conley 00:08:40  And I was like, okay, I like that. And next thing I knew, I was ready to create the Modern Elder Academy, the world’s first midlife wisdom school. So I would just say midlife is a complex time. It’s a time that hasn’t been given a lot of attention. Part of what I’ve been doing as a midlife activist now is to help to demystify and elevate and and maybe operationalize. How do you go through midlife differently? And what are the tools that are available to you. And the key themes that are often going on in people’s lives during this time? And that’s why we have 7000 graduates from 60 countries who are part of the MBA alumni crew.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:16  So let’s define midlife real quick. Like, what are we talking about here? What years, what characteristics? How do you think about determining yep, somebody’s in midlife or they’re not in midlife.

Chip Conley 00:09:28  Well, technically, midlife is the life stage. That is a bridge. So think of it as a bridge between early adulthood and later adulthood.

Chip Conley 00:09:36  Make sense? Right? I mean, the middle age is between early and late. So early adulthood was originally conceived as 18 to 30 and now 18 to 35 by some sociologists. So you could say that maybe midlife early midlife starts around mid 30s. Let me be clear that my definition of midlife, which is defined by a lot of sociologists, is at odds with the historical definition, which has been 40 to 60 or 45 to 65. But I’m saying maybe mid 30s, it starts to creep up on you, and then you have this very long bridge, because later adulthood, if you’re going to live till 90 or 100 later, it might start around 75. It’s when at that point probably retired. Although a lot of people are still working in their late 70s still. So it’s possible that the bridge of midlife lasts 40 years, from 35 to 75, with three stages in it early midlife, 35 to 50, the core of midlife 50 to 60, and then later midlife 60 to 75. And each of those three stages has a different flavor to it.

Chip Conley 00:10:39  But we didn’t have this worry in the year 1900 because the life expectancy in 1900 was 47. So midlife really didn’t exist.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:48  That’s amazing when we think about that. Let’s first talk about what our perspective on aging is and why it’s important. You know, you referenced just a second ago, 1900 age of 47, right. And I think many of us of my age, I’ve noticed recently we’re looking at pictures of our parents at our age or even more, our grandparents at our age. And we’re like, goodness gracious, I seem very different than that. And I think some of that is we’ve begun to have a different perspective on what it is to age. But talk to me about why our beliefs about aging are so important.

Chip Conley 00:11:31  Well, our beliefs about aging are in the US. Culture’s just pretty toxic. Let’s just be honest. If there was a bumper sticker that defined our belief of aging, it would be just don’t do it. And yet, if you don’t age, you’re probably dying or dead.

Chip Conley 00:11:45  So long story short, is because US culture has defined aging, often by the physical side of aging, which does over the course of your life, you show physical deterioration. People are scared of it. And yet our emotional aging process, we actually get better at emotional intelligence as we age. We get better at social relationships as we age. So the social side of aging can be better culturally. Not everybody, but a lot of people actually get more interested in culture as they age. They get more interested in spirituality in certain pursuits. Intellectually, they are more adept as they age because of crystallized intelligence as opposed to fluid intelligence. So, long story short, is the society perspective on aging is pretty negative. And yet the U curve of happiness research shows that, you know, after age 50, people get happier with time. And Becca Levys work from Yale has shown that when you shift your mindset on aging from a negative to a positive. Around midlife, you you add seven and a half years of extended longevity.

Chip Conley 00:12:49  So part of my role, part and part of MEAs mission is to help people own their age, feel good about the upside of aging and what gets better with age. And then look at how you can not just be youthful, but useful as you get older.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:06  Well, being useful is one of my favorite ideas and core values. Have you ever read The Cider House Rules by John? Oh yeah. Of course. Yeah. Doctor Wilbur Larch and, you know, always be useful. Very influential on me when I was a teenager. So as we look at people aging, I think many of us will see people who have become what you’re describing as wiser, kinder, better people as they’ve gotten old. And then there’s the stereotype of the grumpy old man who doesn’t want a kid on his lawn. And hardens and ossifies in some way. What to you shapes the trajectory from one of those outcomes to the other?

Chip Conley 00:13:51  It’s really the difference between a fixed and a growth mindset. So Carol Dweck at Stanford popularized this idea of mindset.

Chip Conley 00:13:59  So mindset is the way you see yourself and the world. And if you have a fixed mindset, you tend to think you have a fixed amount of luck or money or time, and you optimize that and you define success as winning and you’re trying to prove yourself. But if you have a growth mindset, you’re open to something growing with time. But that’s time or money or luck or knowledge or skill. And so your job is to actually not win and optimize, but it’s to actually learn and get better at something. And therefore it’s not about proving yourself, it’s about improving yourself. Often when someone only wants to play games that they can win, their sandbox gets smaller and smaller and they get more bored. And when you get bored, you can get cranky. And the reason you get cranky is because the world is passing you by and you don’t understand things anymore because you haven’t really been open to learning something new. There are a lot of people who fit this profile. I mean, let’s be just honest.

Chip Conley 00:14:58  It’s a profile that defines a lot of people who are older. So the growth mindset is really important because it helps you to realize you’re open to learning something new. When I joined Airbnb at 52 years old, average age in the company was 26. I had never been in a tech company before, and I was supposed to be the modern elder. I was supposed to be the one who’s, like, helping the founders figure out what to do with this business, this little growing tech startup. And yet at times, it felt like I was the dumbest person in the room. So I had to be open to not just being the oldest, but being the most clueless. And that wasn’t easy. But that required me to have a growth mindset, say, you know what? I’m going to get better. I’m going to learn about tech. I’m going to learn about, you know, DSCC, digital intelligence. I had a lot of EQ to offer, but I had to learn some DCPS. So long story short, is the people who tend to get ossified and calcified and get cranky are often people who have gotten very fixed in their perspective of the world and themselves.

Eric Zimmer 00:15:55  Yeah, it’s so interesting because I observe this in myself, the desire to become more certain that I know the way things are, you know, a certain skepticism of the way things are being done today versus when they were done before, a certain amount of less openness to new experiences. Like, I feel some of that happen and I’m very committed to actively countering those things. Yeah. You know, actively making myself take on new things, new challenges. I found myself really trying to anytime my brain is like, well, it was better back when. Is to really take that as like a chance to stop and pause and go hang on a second. Like that’s a reactionary way of thinking. Yeah. Not that it may not be true in certain cases, but it’s also true that some other things are better. Like you said, it’s this openness.

Chip Conley 00:16:55  Well, I think there’s a couple things. Number one is in our 40s in particular, we are so busy that it’s really hard sometimes to have the time and space to be curious. Curiosity is the opposite side of judgment. And so in many ways, learning how to judge things quickly. It’s a super skill because when you’re really busy, being able to make a quick judgment on something allows you to sort of say no to something or to edit your life accordingly. You know, that’s a coping skill during a busy time. So let’s know that there’s an upside to that. The other thing is you could say, well, gosh, you know, as I get older, I’m more discerning, I have more wisdom. And that’s probably true as well. Yeah, but wisdom is not about just what you can say no to. It’s also what you can say yes to. It’s also what you can learn. Wisdom is not about knowing everything. It’s about learning everything. Back to Socrates times. He laughed when people said, you know everything. It’s like, no, I’m still learning. And it’s that learning perspective that really makes the most difference. Being willing to become a beginner at something in your life at every time of your life.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:08  Yeah. Like you, I have taken up surfing later in life. Unlike you, I don’t live anywhere near where that’s a reasonable hobby. It’s a stupid hobby for me.

Chip Conley 00:18:18  Where do you live, Eric?

Eric Zimmer 00:18:19  Ohio.

Chip Conley 00:18:20  Oh.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:21  It’s a dumb place to take up surfing. I mean, it just doesn’t make sense, but, you know, I do it as often as I’m able. But I’ve also taken up, like, rock climbing and just different things that keep me a little bit more limber. You say in the book, you’ve got a line that I really like. You say time can be a dictator, but it can also be a liberator. Say more about that.

Chip Conley 00:18:41  How we look at our calendar has a lot to do with how we live our life. I mean, it makes sense. How we spend our days is how we spend our life. That’s a wonderful quote. And so for me, it’s a really interesting part of my life. I am very focused on my calendar.

Chip Conley 00:18:59  And so in some ways it dictates my life. It dictates, you know, how I’m spending my time with you today. You know, I got ten minutes extra time at the start of what was supposed to be our meeting, which was nice because I needed it. And I appreciated the fact that you needed to start ten minutes later. And that was. But when I say that, it’s like, oh my God, time defines and dictates my life. Similarly, during Covid, when my life got really spacious because, you know, I spent most of my time running MBA, teaching classes, etc. and all of a sudden we were closed for a period of time because of the pandemic. I put on my calendar three hours a day on Monday and Wednesday and Friday afternoons spying on the divine, and that was my opportunity to go into nature with my dog, Jamie, and to just be offline, not listening to a podcast, which is what I usually do when I hike, and just noticing things, being curious.

Chip Conley 00:19:54  I was doing what’s called an hour walk or what sometimes people call forest bathing and it was just really beautiful. So in that way, my calendar could be a liberation. Yesterday I thought I was going to go spend three hours with somebody who’s who’s a healer here in Santa Fe just for fun, not necessarily even healing session, but it didn’t turn out that I did, but I blocked four hours of my afternoon yesterday for that. And the reality was I wasn’t feeling very well yesterday. So that was fine ultimately. And I got to spend that time just relaxing, taking a bath and taking a nap and that’s what I needed. So we have more control and volition over our calendar than we think we do. But the language we use around time and counter is like, it’s almost as if we’re in prison.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:59  I think it’s some version of what you just said, which is like, I’m just so busy. I’m overwhelmed. I have no free time. I, you know, there’s there’s different ways of talking about it.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:09  I think it’s an interesting concept of time being potentially a liberator. You mentioned like being really busy in your 40s and then maybe in your 50s, a little bit less busy. And as time goes on, and I think time can be a liberator if we learn to use little bits of it better. I can say I don’t have time to do x, Y, or Z, but if I examine my life, then I’m like, but I spent an hour doing that and 35 minutes doing that, and there are little chunks there. Even in a very busy, dynamic life for me, there are places that without making radical changes, I can begin to claim some more autonomy.

Chip Conley 00:21:52  No doubt about it. Just being able to sit for a moment, maybe even five minutes and close your eyes and meditate and lose track of time is really valuable. I mean, there’s lots of social science research that shows that. I think, you know, one of the things that I find interesting is when you can get into a flow state.

Chip Conley 00:22:10  I was lucky enough to spend some good quality time with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who popularized the idea of flow. And what’s interesting about being in a flow state when you’re doing something that has timeless awareness, meaning you’re so engaged in it that you lose track of time. There’s starting to be some research that shows that when you lose track of time in a state of flow, it is possible that you’re not aging during that time. So finding time in your life where you can lose track of time is not just joyful and make you feel nourished, but it also may extend your longevity.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:48  I want to change directions here for a second, and talk about one of the things that we all know about aging is that your body changes in often ways that are less than desirable. And you say men are not spared the bodily indignities of aging and that women talk a lot more about it. We talk about menopause, we talk about perimenopause, and we could argue whether we talk about it enough, I don’t know. I’m not I’m not a woman. I’m not going to weigh in on that. But I certainly hear people talk about that way. More than I ever hear people talking about men and aging. Outside the context of, you know, an ED commercial, right? Like outside of that, it never gets mentioned.

Chip Conley 00:23:33  Bob Dole selling Viagra.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:36  Talk to me about this. And how might we as men better support each other in this?

Chip Conley 00:23:42  Yes. You know, it’s beauty or brawn when it comes to women. It’s beauty and the fear that you lose your beauty with time. Just as you get comfortable in your own skin, it starts to sag with men can be brawn. You know, the physical virality, the feeling virile. There’s a word to describe the men’s version of menopause, and it’s called andropause. What’s different versus menopause is menopause obviously has a huge fertility element to it. In terms of you no longer having menstruation and therefore no longer able to have children. and it’s huge. I mean, it’s a very important part of a woman’s life.

Chip Conley 00:24:23  For men that you don’t have that kind of sort of functional change, but you have a lot of things that are happening. One of them is the gut. You are actually gaining a fat in your gut. That can be actually very dangerous and remarkably stubborn. It is. It’s really hard to do. It’s very hard to get rid of. I gained a bunch of pounds when I was doing some cancer treatments the last two years, and, cannot get rid of that gut. You know, my gut is not huge, but it’s it’s something. So there’s that there’s the reduction in testosterone that really starts in your 30s, and it actually declines over time. And it can really accelerate for many men in their 50s and be more noticeable in terms of the lack of both appetite for being sexual or even capacity. So that’s happening. Obviously, you’re losing your hair, maybe losing your energy. There’s a lot of elements to this. Many of them sort of relate to men feeling a little bit less masculine.

Chip Conley 00:25:25  And that can be interesting. That’s a some of the crankiness that some men get into in their 50s and beyond is just trying to mask the lack of masculinity that they’re feeling internally. My father’s an interesting example of this. My father is 87 years old. Both my parents are 87, and my dad was a marine captain and a real hardcore, you know, masculine dude. And when he got into his 50s, 60s and 70s, he all of a sudden started to soften a little bit. And I don’t know how much of it was really the physical or hormonal side, but emotionally he started to, you know, read poetry occasionally or just be open to having an emotional conversation. And so I do think, you know, there’s a real beauty in seeing men start to become a little bit more soft, seeing women become a little bit more vocal and strong willed in their opinions, as opposed to just a people pleaser. This is one of the reasons why I say that as we’re growing old, we’re also growing whole.

Chip Conley 00:26:25  And what that means is we’re learning the alchemy, the polarities inside of ourselves, you know, whether it’s wisdom and curiosity. Introvert. Extrovert. Masculine. Feminine. Gravitas. Depth and levity. Humor. I think that one of the things that I really admire about an 85 year old person is when I spend time with them. They are so present. They’re not compartmentalized in any way. They have alchemised their polarities into this sort of integrated whole. And I think that’s really what we maybe should aspire to.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:59  I’m going to take a moment and ask a more personal type question here of my own interest, which is you mention energy dropping in people as they age. And one of the things I’ve talked to a number of men in their 40s and 50s about this, and it is a drop in energy and trying to figure out what is it? Is it, you know, lack of engagement with something that you’re doing? Is it diet or is it this? And one of the questions I sort of ask myself is like, what is a reasonable amount of energy for a 55 year old person? How have you thought about that question? You know, have you noticed an energy decrease and how have you thought about it and contextualized it?

Chip Conley 00:27:43  Well, I mean, just on a personal level, for two years I had to take hormone depletion therapy because I was dealing with prostate cancer.

Chip Conley 00:27:52  Okay. That went from stage one to stage two to stage three. And so to actually, in essence, inhibit my testosterone so that it was running around 8 or 10 instead of 500 meant that I was struggling with not a lot of energy at a time. When I had a book tour and I was launching our second MBA campus and all kinds of stuff. So dark chocolate. I was feeding on that. I think that you can feel the lack of energy inside you, and you need to respect that. And look at what are some of the root causes. Are you getting enough sleep? Are you eating well? Are you drinking too much alcohol? for a lot of people. A lot of men, they’re drinking more in their 50s and 60s than they did when they were younger. And the truth is that, you know, alcohol is problematic. And actually, it’s even more problematic for older women in terms of how you metabolize it. It can mess with your sleep as well. So some of the reason that there’s a lack of energy could be just physical issues, but sometimes it’s also not feeling the sense of purpose.

Chip Conley 00:28:56  And when you have a sense of purpose, it’s like a North Star that you are aspiring to get to. And, you know, you keep walking in the desert to see that North Star. You’re never going to catch the North Star because it’s just like a rainbow. You’re never going to catch the rainbow. But it is what drives you forward. So I think for some men there’s that. I actually think the physical side also of when you start getting some weight and you’re not exercising as much, there’s that going on as well. You’re carrying around a little bit more of a load. You don’t have the cardiovascular program that you used to have. I mean, I think it’s multifaceted. I will also say that as someone who is running on a treadmill in my career, that actually getting off the treadmill allowed me to slow down a little bit and realize how completely fatigued I was. And sometimes you just need that, that space to get some sleep and to just and slow down a little bit. And that’s okay.

Chip Conley 00:29:55  As long as in the long run you feel like you’re regenerating yourself. There’ll be a renewal as a result of that. Yesterday I was not feeling well. Last night I went to bed early. I had no alcohol, and the night before I had had small alcohol. I fasted last night, I didn’t have dinner, and I took a bath last night and I just felt so good when I got up this morning. I felt very different than I did yesterday and I have a lot more energy. So I just on a personal level, I can say like that is just two days for me of very different feelings.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:30  Yeah. Let’s talk for a moment about gratitude or being grateful for our lives. And you have a line in the book that I think is really interesting, and I don’t remember who you were talking to or who said this to you, but here’s the line that you wrote. It was the particular ness of his gratitude that shielded him from either envy or pride. Talk to me about gratitude and particular ness of it.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:55  What does that mean?

Chip Conley 00:30:56  I mean, there’s a lot of social science evidence showing that gratitude and happiness have a lot. They’re like kissing cousins. If you’re struggling, the best thing you can do is to find gratitude. If you want to feel happy, go write a gratitude list. But what’s been found is that just a generic gratitude list is not necessarily as helpful as being quite specific about what you’re feeling gratitude toward. And so the specificity, if someone wants to do a gratitude journal or a daily gratitude list. The specificity is what’s important, you know. And because what it does is from a neurological perspective, it’s like there’s a precision that you’re sort of saying, honing in on. That’s what I want to feed, you know, is back to, you know, the one you feed. I want to feed that. If you said, you know, like, I’m feeling gratitude because I feel, you know, love for my family. Well that’s great. Okay. what’s specific about that today? Yeah.

Chip Conley 00:31:51  Could you say I feel love for my family? Because my daughter today just told me how much she loved me, and I could see a twinkle in her eye. That’s much better than just saying I feel love for my family. Because the love for your family could be generic across any day, But actually when you say, because my daughter said she loved me and I could see that twinkle in her eye, it’s almost you can visualize it and your brain is sort of saying like, oh, more of that, please. And when something’s generic, it has less visceral impact on you. And I think when it comes to gratitude, feeling the gratitude and visualizing it is really important.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:31  That makes a lot of sense. I know for me, if you’re just listing the things that you intellectually know, you should be grateful for my family, my health. Those things tend to. If you’re doing gratitude as a regular practice becomes the the gratitude version of the hedonic treadmill, right? It no longer does anything but the specificity that you’re talking about does.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:58  I also think it tunes us into the granularity of our experience more, which is a really positive thing. For a while I used to do a gratitude list and have a couple pictures with it, and my dogs were always on it. Like when I looked back, I was like, well, I appear to be ten times more grateful for my dogs than any other person in the world, which seems funny in retrospect, but taking a picture of what they were doing that I found so adorable was a way of getting that specificity.

Chip Conley 00:33:30  Yeah, I think that makes a ton of sense. And you don’t want to get bored with a gratitude list. Yeah, let’s just be really blunt. Yeah, it will be boring if it’s generic.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:39  So a lot of people talk about here are the things I’m not going to do and is a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. I think that there have been some very clear things for me that it’s like, I’m not doing that, I’m not doing that. But you talk about creating something you called the Ten Commitments, which is a play on the Ten Commandments.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:57  Tell me about that.

Chip Conley 00:33:58  Yeah. You know, I grew up learning the Ten Commandments. And I remember saying to my parents, you know, like, it’s all about do not, do not, do not. I think eight of the ten are do nots. And so for me in my life today, and while I do have a spiritual practice and belief system, it’s not so much the Ten Commandments, which I do feel are helpful, but it’s really more about what are my proactive, positive commitments I can make in my life. And those are not going to be hard and fast and say like, okay, those are the only ten I’ll ever have. But you know, having ten that makes sense to me and are working for me, you know, today are important. And they become sort of the guardrails of my life. And so that’s, that’s a that’s a good thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:44  What are a couple of them. Can you share a couple of your commitments?

Speaker 4 00:34:47  I, I.

Chip Conley 00:34:48  I don’t have them in front of me right now.

Chip Conley 00:34:52  They changed. So I like in the book I had my ten. And I think one would be just being less focused on my resume and more focused on my eulogy. And how do I show up and create the conditions in my life such that I am, after age 50, more focused on my eulogy than on my resume? And I think that’s one that has lots of catalytic effect in terms of what? What does that mean? It means less egocentric. It means I’m less focused on my accomplishments. It means I’m more focused on the small things I do in life that are impacting other people. That’s an example of a commitment as opposed to a commandment.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:50  That’s back to the the ROI, the ripples of impact, which I absolutely love. I think that is such a a great phrase in a way of thinking of it. And I love the idea of ripple. Right. Because I think that’s the way our impact generally is. Sometimes we get to see it directly, but most of the time I don’t think we actually see the good that we put into the world.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:15  It ripples out in this very gentle way, and it takes a certain amount of faith and belief that indeed, that is happening.

Chip Conley 00:36:24  Yeah, there’s Kip Tindall, who I always thought of as a role model for me. He started the Container Store Company a long, long time ago, and he talked about your wake, you know, in the context of your life, sometimes you don’t know what the wake is that you’re like in a boat. There’s there’s a wake behind you as you’re focusing forward on the boat, especially if you’re driving it. You don’t necessarily know your wake behind you. Yeah. And the truth is, the bigger you are in an organization, the higher you are an organization. The more power you have, the larger your wake. And as a water skier who knows what it’s like to ski across the lake, I know that, you know, having a huge wake can be hard. It can be very disruptive. So the ripples are sort of a form of wake. There’s a wake also.

Chip Conley 00:37:12  What you really want to do in life is to have a really positive wake and recognize that the more senior you are, the more contagious your emotions, the more contagious your character, in essence, the bigger your wake. I think metaphors are often very helpful for people to sort of visualize how the world works.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:31  You have a question in the book that you say to ask, am I frustrated or disappointed? What’s the difference and why does it matter?

Chip Conley 00:37:40  So when you’re frustrated, there’s still the opportunity to change something. And so frustration can relate to anger. It can relate to a lot of sort of combustible emotions that can propel you forward, to take action, to make it different. Disappointment, which some people could say they’re the same, but they’re not. Disappointment is an energy that actually is a shrinking. Frustration is a growing. Disappointment is a shrinking. Partly because you’re beyond frustration. Disappointment is when you come to realize that there’s not much you can do to change something. Yeah, now. And regret is one step further, which is a sense of responsibility about that disappointment.

Chip Conley 00:38:23  So, you know, a regret is actually more painful than disappointment because you actually feel like you had some fault in leading to the disappointment. But disappointment could happen in all kinds of ways, and often it’s outside of your control. Therefore, there can be a sense of like, okay, oh, well, I’m gonna have to live with that. When someone has too much frustration in their life, it can lead to anxiety and high blood pressure and a deep sense of urgency and stress. When someone has a lot of disappointment in their life. It can lead to learned helplessness and depression and a sense that, you know, oh, woe is me, or there’s nothing I can do. So they’re very, very different in terms of emotional affect. And yet sometimes people talk about saying I’m frustrated and disappointed. It’s like, well, which one is it? 

Eric Zimmer 00:39:14  Yeah. Well, it’s another version of the Serenity Prayer, right? The things I can change, the things I can’t change, and the wisdom to know the difference and wisdom is a big word with you.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:27  And I think that’s a really important thing to know. Right. Because the response is very different. You talk about expectation in the book. So you say, you know, when you’re faced with disappointment, you can either improve your reality or lower your expectations. So improving my reality would sort of throw me back over on the maybe not frustrated side of the court, but that energy, right? The energy of change. If, on the other hand, I’m on the disappointment sighed. Then lowering my expectations. Talk about how we do that in a wise way.

Chip Conley 00:40:00  So one of the reasons that people often feel not great about age 45 to 50 is because of disappointment equals expectations minus reality. In your teens, your 20s or 30s, you build these expectations. They sort of propel you forward. And then by the time you’re getting starting to flirt with 50, you’re at an age where like, yeah, I don’t know if that’s ever going to happen. Yep. You could believe it’s going to happen in your 30s still.

Chip Conley 00:40:25  But by the time you get closer to 50, maybe not. And that’s really hard. And, Brené Brown calls it the midlife unraveling. And the midlife unraveling is unraveling your expectations in such a way that you are no longer feeling so wrapped up in something that there’s no space for anything else. So the key, the wise way to deal with that is to rejigger your expectations and get clear on what’s important to you. For a lot of people around 45 to 50, they are in a stage in their life where they they are running on a treadmill that was defined by their parents or their spouse or their community, but not themselves. And so it’s around that era of life that sometimes people wake up and say, like, I want to be a firefighter. I don’t I don’t want to be an accountant. We see those people come to me or, you know, a woman recently who was like, I don’t want to be a litigator. I want to be a pastry chef. It’s like, okay, you can do that.

Chip Conley 00:41:25  You know, at 20, it was hard for you to do that because your parents were sort of saying, you got to go to college, you got to make money, and then you end up getting on the treadmill and you say like, oh, I’m getting married. And now I have kids. It’s like, oh, and for some people, they wake up around 45 to 50 and say, like that David Byrne song Is This My Wonderful Life? And it’s not their wonderful life, it’s the life that you know. Somebody else wrote the script for. So finding the agency, and then the autonomy and the clarity of vision is part of what we help people with. At me.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:57  People coming to me, is there a guiding idea of what’s bringing them? There are people coming there largely because they are feeling unmoored in middle age, and they’re not quite sure what to do.

Chip Conley 00:42:12  For some people it’s something abstract like that. It’s like, okay, I feel sort of a little lost in middle age, and I’m feeling not good about aging and I want to improve on that.

Chip Conley 00:42:22  And sometimes it’s like, I feel like I’ve got to get clear on what my purpose is or what my wisdom is I’ve built, and that’s also important. But the number one reason people come to me is because they’re going through some kind of transition in their life. Maybe they’re in the sandwich generation, but they’re about to lose a parent, or they’re becoming an empty nester. The kids are leaving or they’re getting divorced. They’re selling their business. They’re changing their career. They have a cancer diagnosis. They’ve stopped drinking. They have decided that they’re going to move to a new place. They have a new spiritual curiosity that’s leading them back to Catholicism. There’s lots of things that are happening for people in midlife, and there’s menopause. There’s so much going on and so little in the way of social infrastructure to help support people during this time. So that’s the number one reason people come.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:14  That makes a lot of sense. I mean, we we tend to seek out extra support and help when we are facing something that feels acute.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:22  You mentioned in the book, Bruce Feiler, who’s been a guest for us, you know, a couple times and wonderful guy who talks all about that sort of life quake idea.

Chip Conley 00:43:31  Bruce has taught in our online programs, and I have a lot of respect for his work and his writing. In his book, life Is in the transitions, he talks about when you’re having multiple transitions at once. Yeah. He calls that a life quake. And I think the thing that’s really helpful to know about transitions is you can go through multiple of them at once, but each transition sort of has this anatomy or a framework, and it’s usually the ending of something is the first stage. The second stage is the messy middle, and then the third stage is the beginning of something new. And there’s coping mechanisms for each. And once you understand that three steps ending, messy, middle, beginning, you can realize that in one part of your life you’re having a transition, but you’re at the ending of something and another one. You’re in a transition where you’re at the beginning of something and another one, you’re at the messy middle. And so there’s a different coping mechanism for each. And once you have that sense, it really helps.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:24  Wonderful. Well, I think that is a great place for us to wrap up. Chip, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. You and I are going to continue for a little bit longer in the post-show conversation, because I want to talk about something that you write about, which is this idea of basically wanting what we have, you know, how do we get to that because that’s a you know, what I have is all I need. So, listeners, if you’d like access to the post-show conversation to hear Chip and I continue, as well as ad free episodes, a special episode I do for you each week called Teaching Song and a poem and Other Benefits. We’d love to have you as part of the community. And that’s at one you feed. Join Chip. Thank you so much.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:07  Oh thank you Eric, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom. One episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.

In this inspiring and deeply human conversation, Eric sits down with bestselling author and Modern Elder Academy founder Chip Conley to explore the wisdom, challenges, and surprising gifts of midlife. From redefining success and navigating transitions to embracing aging with purpose and curiosity, Chip shares raw personal stories—including a near-death experience—that reshaped his entire approach to life.

They dive into the “U Curve of Happiness,” the liberating power of a well-used calendar, and why “ripples of impact” might matter more than ROI. Whether you’re in the midst of a midlife reset or simply wondering what’s next, this episode offers profound insights and practical tools to help you feel more hopeful, useful, and whole.

Midlife has a way of sneaking up on you. I know because I’m in it, and it’s not without its challenges. But talking with Chip Conley shifted something in me. In this conversation, he shares how the hardest stretch of his life. Burnout, personal loss, and near-death experience ended up being the start of something completely new. We talk about the pull of ego, the search for identity, and how letting go of traditional success opened the door to something more meaningful. His idea of moving from return on investment to ripples of impact especially struck me.

In this episode, Chip Conley defines a midlife makeover to redefine success and happiness after 40.  He shares how the most difficult stretches of his life ended up being the start of something completely new.  Chip also explains the pull of the ego, the search for identity and how letting go of traditional success can open the door for something more meaningful.  If you’re in a season of life where things feel uncertain, or if you’re wondering what this phase of life is really for, this episode will help you feel a little more hopeful. 

In this episode, Corey Keyes explores the concept of languishing vs. flourishing and how to feel alive again He delves into the often-overlooked emotional state that exists between mental illness and thriving and discusses how many of us can feel worn down by life and stuck in a gray zone of stagnation. Corey shares his insights on the importance of mindset and how changing the way we think about our daily tasks can lead us to a more fulfilling life. The discussion touches on the critical aspects of purpose, connection, and vitality, offering listeners strategies to move from languishing to flourishing.

Key Takeaways:

• 00:05:29 – The Role of Positive Psychology and Mental Health
• 00:06:46 – Corey’s Background and the Successful Aging Research Network
• 00:08:08 – The Purpose of Positive Psychology and Addressing Languishing
• 00:09:25 – Flourishing Despite Mental Health Conditions
• 00:10:08 – The Relationship Between Flourishing and Mental Illness
• 00:12:49 – The Challenge of Defining Recovery in Addiction and Mental Health
• 00:14:02 – The Lack of Peer Support Groups for Depression
• 00:15:05 – The Role of Experts in Mental Health
• 00:16:15 – The Difference Between Sharing with Experts and Peer Support
• 00:17:07 – The Importance of Having a Clear Program in Support Groups
• 00:18:04 – The Need for a New Approach to Mental Health Support Programs
• 00:19:01 – Defining Languishing and Its Distinction from Depression
• 00:20:36 – The Overlap Between Languishing and Depression
• 00:22:29 – The Impact of Languishing on Mental Health
• 00:23:39 – Personal Reflections on Eliminating Suffering and Seeking Joy
• 00:25:04 – The Challenge of Recalibrating After Addiction
• 00:25:58 – The Importance of Functioning Well
• 00:28:05 – The Nuances of Feeling Good vs. Functioning Well
• 00:30:09 – The Difference Between Satisfaction and Momentary Feelings
• 00:31:04 – The Role of Storytelling in Perceived Well-Being
• 00:32:49 – The Importance of Meaning and Values Over Mood
• 00:33:59 – Allowing Self-Assessment in Measuring Well-Being
• 00:35:53 – The Criteria for Flourishing and Languishing
• 00:37:08 – Encouraging Reflection and Integration for Listeners
• 00:38:18 – The Importance of Functioning Well in Achieving Flourishing
• 00:40:28 – The Difficulty of Achieving Social Well-Being
• 00:41:10 – The Five Vitamins of Flourishing
• 00:42:01 – Integrating Flourishing Activities into Daily Life
• 00:45:05 – The Importance of Mindset in Achieving Flourishing
• 00:47:09 – Research on Mindsets and Practical Applications

Connect with Corey Keyes: Website

Corey Keyes is Professor emeritus of Sociology at Emory University where he held the
Winship Distinguished Research Professorship. He was a member of the prestigious
international MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Successful Midlife
Development and Aging. He participated the National Academies of Science initiatives
about “The Future of Human Healthspan” and improving national statistics to measure
recovery from mental illness. He organized and co-hosted the first Summit of Positive
Psychology held in 1999 at the Gallup Organization. His research introduced the
concepts of social well-being, the mental health continuum from languishing to
flourishing, and the two continua model of mental health and illness. He has consulted
with governmental agencies and nonprofits around the world, including Canada, Ireland,
Northern Ireland, and Australia.

If you enjoyed this episode with Corey Keyes, check out these other episodes:

Why We Need to Rethink Mental Illness with Sarah Fay

Insights on Mental Health and Resilience with Andrew Solomon

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Episode Transcript:

Hi Corey, welcome to the show.

Corey (00:15.15)

Greetings, Eric.

Eric (00:17.043)

When I heard the title of your book, immediately was like, all right, I need to talk to this guy. Sometimes I see a book or we have a guest idea and I send it to my producer, Nicole, and we talk about it and we debate. But every once in a I’m like, just book this one. So you were in the just book this one category based on the title, which is languishing how to feel alive again in a world that wears us down. And as we get into the conversation, I think we will talk about my own thoughts and challenges around feeling alive. And so it’s a topic that means a lot to me. But we’ll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild and they say, life, there’s two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear.

And the grandchild stops, think about it for a second, they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Corey (01:29.912)

Well, it means the world to me. I used it in my book and I have used it in almost every talk, believe it or not, I have given. And I usually use it right at the end. Because I use that parable and I talk about the wolf being motivated by fear or love and that we’re feeding the wolf of fear when it comes to illness, disease and death. And that’s where public health

and even medicine has been focused. And we’re not feeding the wolf that comes from love, health, wellbeing, and what I would call the health span. And I usually end by saying, I’m very hungry to start focusing on health and feeding the wolf of love. Because I think we’ve been focused too much, believe it or not, on illness and increasing life expectancy and putting death at bay and yet we’re struggling to add healthy longevity to our lives. And that’s what my book is really about when it comes to mental health, adding good mental health rather than focusing only on mental illness.

Eric (02:42.657)

Wonderful. I’m glad you use that parable and I’m glad you set us up in that way. I think it gives us a lot of fruitful directions we can go. I want to start off by just asking a question to see if I can orient what you’re doing in the context of psychology on a broader sense. Certainly for most of psychology’s history, it was focused on mental illness, right? It was solving neuroses and the various different things we called it and all of that. And then there was a period of time where there became a movement called positive psychology that was really about like, what does it look like for humans that are thriving? Where is what you’re doing oriented in that? It sounds like it’s on the positive psychology side, and yet I don’t see that as a term that you’re using. So help me place you. This is just more for my nerdiness probably than any actually useful useful conversation but I can’t resist asking.

Corey (03:45.215)

I straddle both worlds actually. Because I want to take mental illness very seriously, and I believe we can prevent it by going in the direction that I’m trying to chart, which is focusing on mental health is more than the absence. I was there at the beginning of positive psychology, but long before positive psychology came along, there was the successful aging research networks that came into existence easily a decade or more before. And it was funded very generously and graciously by the MacArthur Foundation. And I was one of the members of a very select group of people from around the world that were brought in as young scholars to work with also very senior scholars around the world who were focusing on successful aging, knowing that we were living in an aging world, right? And that we needed to be prepared and we needed to learn from people who were aging what we were calling successfully. Now that’s a bit of a loaded word and people have tried to deconstruct it. I don’t even want to go there. I know what they were talking about. They wanted to look at how people maintain health and wellbeing despite the challenges and the losses that come with aging. How do we adapt, compensate, optimize, call it what you want? And if it was not for the MacArthur Foundation that supported this research, which created a longitudinal studies that are still going today, Eric, in 2025, we will have our third wave of data that we will collect on respondents. And this data set is available to people around the world and they have been mining it for beautiful things that actually fed positive psychology. And I was there at the beginning, but I really, I don’t identify much with positive psychology because I didn’t know what their why was, what their purpose was. I wanted to focus on the positive so we could address suffering in the world that wasn’t being addressed very effectively.

and also a problem, if there were, that we weren’t even paying attention to. And that’s why languishing came into being, because that was a problem that wasn’t on anybody’s radar. And so to me, it wasn’t enough to say, I want people to be happy. Why? Why? What are you going to fix in the world? And to me, languishing was an unidentified problem.

And I also believe that if we promoted what I call flourishing, we could prevent a lot of mental illness. Not all, but a lot of it because we can’t cure mental illness and we’re not even doing a very good job at managing it, to tell you the truth.

Eric (06:48.461)

Yeah, one of the things that’s really interesting in your book is this idea of flourishing, and we’re going to define flourishing and languishing here in a second, but was this idea that you can be flourishing, and we’ll talk about what that means, and have a mental health condition, and that flourishing doesn’t necessarily eliminate the mental health condition, but makes it better or more livable. and can have a certain amount of prevention.  But being mentally well doesn’t mean the absence of all mental illness. It means it also can mean the addition of these positive things. So say what you’d like about that, and then let’s maybe define languishing and flourishing before we get too far in here.

Corey (07:40.814)

I love that you brought that up right away because it is central. Now I could go on about all the studies that verify and back up what I’m about to say. It’s there in the book. But for people who have been in who have mental disorders, depression, anxiety, even schizophrenia, when they experience full recovery, I call full recovery, when they’re moving towards flourishing, they’re much less likely to relapse or have a recurrence of that mental disorder. And the way I think of it is they stay in recovery, full recovery, far longer. For me personally, because I have two mental disorders, actually three. When I am flourishing, my mental illness recedes into the background. Indeed, even goes, I put it away in the closet, so to speak. It’s there. Every time I wake up and I go into my closet, I know it’s there. It’s hanging on the rack, but today I’m not wearing it.

Because my life has purpose, I have a sense of contribution, I’m growing, I have all those things that we’ll talk about shortly that go into the ingredients of flourishing. So in order to really recover from mental illness, as we say in the addiction world, you’re never fully recovering. You’re recovered, but your disease is always there but it recedes into the background and what’s foreground is your mental health or what I call flourishing.

Eric (09:30.033)

Yeah, I mean, that’s certainly I think a lot of people will debate what, you know, and they do debate what recovery in addiction looks like. Right. What does that mean? I’m a recovering drug addict and alcoholic. And this time around, I’m 16 coming up maybe on 17 years sober. And so I like the way you said it. It’s kind of in the closet. In my case, it’s way back in the closet. It hasn’t been pulled out in years. But I’ve had experiences in the past when I say this go around means I had sobriety before and then didn’t. I tend to believe that it, like you said, it’s there. But I think what’s so interesting also is in how we define ourselves according to those things. It’s easy for me to sort of think of addiction as I’ve recovered and it’s kind of in the background, it’s still there. Something like depression is a whole different sort of animal to kind of wrap my head around what’s my relationship to it because it’s not sobriety is easy to measure just not there right you use you don’t use but but things like depression start to look like things that you call languishing and and you know they’re these are more subtle distinctions. I almost wish that the clarity of addiction was I was able to bring it to other areas.

Corey (10:47.938)

Yes, and I think, for me at least, because I also have depression and alcoholism as well as  PTSD, I agree wholeheartedly with you. I mean, the issue of, for me, alcoholism is that…

In one sense, we all think about, I’m just not picking up, right? Well, it’s so much more than that. I mean, it is about regaining a whole different new way of living in a world, right? And that, think, is true of depression as much as it is of alcoholism, except that I don’t love it or hate it for some people. I love my AA program because we do it with each other and for each other because nobody else can do it for us. And yet when it comes to depression, we’ve kind of given it over to experts as if I can’t really take care of myself. And so sometimes we create a mindset that we catastrophize. When I start to feel sad, I’m thinking,no, here comes the beast. When in fact it’s like I should just say, wow, isn’t that interesting? Just like my Buddhist friend. I’m feeling sad. Now let’s explore that and let’s get, let’s start talking with some people about this. I have no one to talk about when it comes to depression.

Eric (12:22.707)

Yeah. So let me ask a question there, because I’ve often wondered about this, and as somebody who’s been on the inside of the mental health world, Something like addiction has these support groups. I I think it’s wonderful today that the 12-step groups are one of the support group options that are available. There’s more of them, but there’s a host of them. And people do tend to turn to them for this thing. And I’ve often wondered why does that sort of thing not exist for something like depression or anxiety or mental health more broadly? And I’m curious if you have any theories on why. Why doesn’t it exist? We see peer support groups pop up in lots of areas, but we just have never seen peer support group gain much traction in this area. And I don’t fully understand why.

Corey (13:19.648)

It’s perplexing to me because doctors admitted early on to Bill and Bob that there’s nothing I can do for you. I can, can, can, you know, that’s not the case when it comes to depression. We’re given this false sense of hope and people won’t like when I say it because I’m on those damn medications myself, but they don’t cure me anywhere close to it. And yet we have these experts who keep telling me and everyone else, well, I can help you. I can make you better. That wasn’t the case for most addictions and it certainly wasn’t the story that I know when Bill and Bob were starting, right? So they had to figure it out for themselves. And yet we go into therapies with clinical psychologists and we do all this talking. So it’s not unlike sharing that we do in the rooms, in N.A. or A.A. And yet, I think because we have this expert out there that we share with, we don’t believe that we have much to learn from each other, the other patients. And I think that’s such a wrong-headed thing because I think we’ve handed over our own ability to help each other to these experts, these clinical psychologists and psychiatrists. They’re necessary, but I don’t think they’re sufficient.

Eric (15:07.456)

Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts and theories myself also of why we don’t have more of that. I agree talking to an expert is sharing, but it’s a different kind of sharing. It’s a very different kind of sharing because generally the your your psychologist or your your therapist or whatever isn’t then turning around and going me too. Me too, right? I’ve been there. Yeah, I mean, God, just last week I was. I also think that what 12-step programs have and what a lot of other support groups that I’ve seen have is they have a clear defined program. I mean talking and sharing and identifying is a big part of it, but there’s also here are the things that we do. Right and and I think most attempts at peer groups around depression or mental illness lack that there’s not Yes, I understand you. I recognize what you’re doing. You feel heard by me. You feel seen by me. And now you can do the things that I did. think that has been, I think that’s an element of, you if you look at what makes some of these programs work, there’s the people, the connection, but there’s also a program. And you can argue how useful a particular program is. Is the 12 Steps the best way? Probably not. But you know what? It’s a way, right? It’s a path. It’s a way of allowing you to take very specific actions in a direction that points, at least for a lot of people, towards health.

Corey (16:38.19)

It is. And I balk sometimes when I hear people say, well, let’s take the a 12 step kind of approach and apply it to mental illness. I think that itself, Eric, would be a little wrong headed because I love the steps because they’re so closely allied with the fact that we’ve reached a level of demoralization and humiliation and a loss of a sense of life that we have to rebuild that are baked into those steps. So we have to redeem ourselves, reclaim ourselves. Mental illness has enough of the morality issues hanging over to stigmatize it. So we need to really think anew when it comes to a program that would be step-like for depression and anxiety.

But I think we could if we really put ourselves to the task.

Eric (17:44.812)

Yeah, I think it’s I think that you’re right. I mean, the 12 steps I would argue even for a lot of people who have addiction issues may not even be the right path. Right. But certainly people who are wrestling with severe depression don’t need to be focusing on their character defects. Right. Like they’ve got they’ve got that pretty well pretty well sorted. All right. So this is a rabbit hole. We could spend the whole conversation on. And I’d love to just sit here and brainstorm what this program looks like. But we’re going to move on so that we get sort of reanchored here a little bit. And I want to talk about languishing. So what is languishing? Give us the history of sort of how it came, how it evolved for you as a way of thinking and what it is and how is it different from other things that it sort of looks like.

Corey (18:39.054)

Yeah. Well, let’s start with that last part of your question. For most people, it seems a lot like depression. Even, shall we say, minor depression. Let’s first distinguish it and then then I want to jump back into how they blend together. The first thing is depression is the presence of negative symptoms. If we were to look at the psychiatric manual, we would see the presence of negative emotions and loss of interest in life and then several forms of malfunctioning, really problematic functioning. Languishing is the absence of very positive things, very positive symptoms. So what you’re missing are the feelings that come around what we might call joy, happiness, interest in life. And interest in life is the only overlapping symptom. And then the rest are what I call these signs of functioning well. I measure purpose, does your life have direction and meaning? I measure a sense of contribution, are you contributing things of worth and value to your family, community, workplace, sense of growth and so forth. So you can be free of negative things, right? That go into depression and not have any of the positive things either. And that’s an interesting category because that’s why I’ve used a phrase and Adam picked up on what I’ve used in my talks that why languishing is the middle child in between things like depression and flourishing. It’s stuck there right in the middle. There’s a lot of people who are free of negative symptoms like anxiety and depression. They might have a few, but they don’t meet the criteria for a diagnosable disorder.  And yet they don’t meet the criteria for flourishing either. They’re stuck in the middle. But by the same token, here’s where things get really confusing. Because clinicians want to tell me languishing is part of depression. And I say, yes, it is. For most people with a mental disorder, they’re languishing to some degree. Mildly, moderately, or sometimes severely. Just because you have gotten you’ve gone into the realm of a mental disorder, doesn’t mean you’ve left languishing at the door. It comes along with you. And often it’s the gatekeeper. It’s often why people end up with mental illness. And so here’s the thing. You could be depressed and languishing at the same time most people are. And yet here’s the mystery to me. We attribute all the problems that people with a mental illness have.

to their mental disorder, when languishing is there causing easily half, if not more, of the problems. It’s not just depression causing the problem. It’s the languishing that comes along that’s also causing the problem. And so you can have both.

Eric (22:08.913)

You talked about depression being a lot of negative symptoms and poor functioning. Right? And I love the idea you made this fact that you can, with certain people, you can remove a lot of… And I would say this is the case for me, right? the real gross levels of suffering are gone. I mean, used to be a homeless heroin addict. I’m so much better. I used to suffer with depression that made it hard to get out of bed. I never have that problem. That’s not what I’m talking about at all. And in my more honest moment, if I were to chart my journey, I would say something very similar to what you said, which is I’ve gotten rid of the real suffering. And I think if you put the 23-year-old me in my brain, he would think he was enlightened, right? The difference is so stark. But the 53-year-old me doesn’t know as much about joy and peak moments of happiness and all these different things that he would like. You know, I figured out how to eliminate a lot of suffering, but I haven’t figured out how to strongly amplify good feelings. Now here’s where things get tricky. I’m a former heroin addict, right?  To me, feeling good is way up here. Right? Like I have this idea in my mind, you should feel like that. People don’t feel like they feel like when they’re on heroin. Like that’s not normal day-to-day functioning. So where I get caught up a lot is going, okay, does, when we talk about having more joy, more positive emotions, what are we talking about? What’s the reasonable level of someone? And that’s where I kind of get hung up and I don’t know what to say, do I, am I languishing? If you look at functioning, and a lot of your book is about functioning.  A lot of your book is about functioning. If you look at functioning, I’m in no way, shape, form languishing. My life is filled with purpose. I play, I learn. I mean, all your vitamins, connection. Like, I function, I think, at a pretty high level on all those things. But my mood is not, like, way up there, right? It’s in this sort of grayer area. So, is that languishing? Is that flourishing?

And like I said to you before, sometimes I’m like, well, maybe that’s just my temperament. Maybe I need to stop monkeying with it all, worrying about it and just go, you know what, that’s just kind of who you are. That’s, know. So I love this topic. I love the nuance of it, but I also dislike the ambiguity of it when it comes to trying to sort things out in my own head.

Corey (25:28.972)

Yeah, yeah, the feeling functioning thing. That’s a real challenge for us who are trying to come off of this artificial almost explosive dopamine rush that you can’t get anywhere else. Right? You just can’t. And it takes a long time to recalibrate that. And for many of us, don’t think we take it. It takes a lifetime.

Eric (25:43.667)

Right, yep

Corey (25:54.956)

because I don’t think you’d quite want to trust it because there is this sneaking suspicion that even if you’re just feeling it and you’re not using it, you’re like, boy, I shouldn’t go down there. having said that.

Even though I would call what you’re experiencing some degree of languishing, there’s interesting combinations that are worth mentioning here. Now, when I split apart the criteria for feeling good versus functioning well in my research,

Let’s just go, let’s nerd out just a little bit so I can get to your point. There was 12 to 13 % of US college students who would be flourishing according to my criteria when it came to functioning well. That meant that every day or almost every day they experienced at least six out of the 11 signs of functioning well. But they did not meet the criteria for feeling good because…

Eric (26:53.3)

Mm-hmm.

Corey (26:57.824)

They didn’t report either interest in life, happiness or satisfaction with life every day or almost every day in the past two weeks or past month.

That group, I have some, the data right here, 13 % of them had one of three mental disorders in the past two weeks compared to less than 4 % of those students who were flourishing, who put the feeling good with the functioning well. every study I’ve ever done, Eric, when you’re flourishing, when you meet the criteria for feeling good, you just have to have one out of the three interested in life.

Eric (27:26.676)

Mm-hmm.

Corey (27:37.034)

satisfied or happy every day or almost every day. Just one combined with at least six out of the 11 signs of functioning well. They’re always doing better than the group, even the group that’s functioning well. They’re flourishing when it comes to functioning well. But here’s the interesting thing. There’s a even larger group of young people who would meet the criteria for flourishing only when it came to feeling good, but they don’t mean they’re not flourishing when when it comes to functioning well.

Now that group too is that’s almost 25 % of the US college student population. They feel good about a life where they’re not functioning well. Their life doesn’t have purpose, belonging, contribution, growth, and all that. 21 % of them met the criteria in the past two weeks for depression, anxiety, or a panic attack compared to less than 4%. But it gets worse.

the more severe your languishing. It’s better to be flourishing in at least one out of the two than it is to have moderate to severe languishing. But it’s always better, Eric, to be flourishing. For some reason, that combination is just magical. So you’re doing well, and I know those moments you’re describing where I’m functioning well, I’m growing, I’m learning, but…

You know?

There’s a lot of times when you’re functioning well that you’ve had to go through a lot of effort to get there and it doesn’t feel good. Growth is not necessarily everything it’s cracked up to be. It doesn’t create happiness. So those people, it makes sense. They’re not, when it comes to mental illness, they’re not doing as well as those people who are flourishing. But it’s always better than having severe languishing, trust me.

Eric (29:14.602)

Yeah.

Eric (29:35.41)

Right, and I think where this gets even more tricky, I guess there’s two things I wanna push on here. The first is when we say things like interest in life, well, how interested? You know what I mean? This is really, to me, very subtle. I would say I’m interested in life.

Corey (29:53.132)

Yeah, yes, right.

Eric (30:02.444)

But I’m not, am I interested in the way that like, moments of, and that’s where I get, where I sort of get hung up is like, well, what is, it’s this question of what is enough, right, with anything. And then I think the second thing that’s really interesting, and I’ve thought a lot about this since I had the conversation, I had the conversation with the psychologist, Paul Bloom, and he talked about two sort of ways that people measure well-beings,

Corey (30:23.96)

Mm-hmm.

Eric (30:32.459)

And the one is you ask people how satisfied they are at intervals. You say, satisfied are you with your life in these various areas? And people report things. The other is you ask people, how are you feeling right now? Right? How are you feeling right now? And so what I think is interesting is that you can have a gap between those things. You can have people who say,

Corey (30:49.006)

Hmm.

Eric (31:00.449)

I’m satisfied with my life. My life is good, right? I would fall into this category. I’m satisfied. mean, my life is great, right? Like, mean, in so many ways, my life is outstanding. But if you ask me at certain moments, how do you feel? I might say, eh, you know, I mean, that would be my reaction. you know, eh, And this gets to also thinking about like, what is our…

Corey (31:06.616)

Mm-hmm.

Corey (31:22.19)

Hmm.

Eric (31:29.175)

What is our mood system wired up to look like? Does everybody have the same capacity? Or I’ve heard about happiness set points. Where do these things land? And so, again, it gets to this question of, because I also think that when we start to take on labels, that gets interesting. It’s a different perspective. It’s a different way of viewing myself in the world if I say,

Corey (31:33.122)

Yeah.

Corey (31:41.271)

Yeah.

Eric (31:57.73)

I’m very satisfied with my life. Things are going really well. The things that matter to me are all in place. And you know what? I have sort of a lower than average mood system to say versus to say I’m languishing. Right? Like that difference there matters in how I see and view myself. I’m just, I don’t mean to turn this into a conversation about me, but I’m like you’re languishing, you know, I’m sort of very…

Corey (32:06.445)

Mm-hmm.

Corey (32:10.956)

Yeah.

Eric (32:26.042)

I’m close to the target audience. Now there’s a lot of people who are languishing much more severely, right? And I think I want to turn my attention to that in a second. But I think what we’re talking about are these sort of edge states. And I’m just curious how you think about those things for yourself, because I suspect you’re similar.

Corey (32:30.968)

Yeah.

Corey (32:43.298)

Yeah. Well, I go around and around with psychologists about this. There’s, you know, some people like Daniel Kahneman wanted to say there’s experienced happiness, which is valid. And then there’s remembered happiness, which is I can’t trust it. Right. Right. Well, my take on that always is we’re storytellers. don’t we don’t for you. Sometimes 10 moments in one day will not of happiness will not equal.

Eric (33:00.006)

Exactly, yes.

Corey (33:11.96)

this, the summary that this was a good day. Because you could have been dedicating yourself to moments of happiness that had very little meaning to you. Yet they felt right at the moment if I recorded your experience, it felt good because I was working on something interesting. But

Eric (33:30.81)

Or conversely, I could have slept bad last night and be working on really meaningful things and just sort of been like, you know, I didn’t feel great, but I was there, right? I did what mattered to me.

Corey (33:34.316)

Yeah!

If

Corey (33:41.632)

And you were there. Yeah, you did it and you did it to the best of your ability and you could end up saying, well, that was a day well spent. That was a really good day, even though, you know, it didn’t feel great. So to me, human beings, you know, life is not made up of moments, even though it is in reality. And whether we have peak moments or valleys, you know, I think the way stories and matter.

And I had this argument with Kahneman because I do think endings matter. So if an ending is really triumphant and everything up to that was miserable, you’re telling me it’s invalid for me to say this. story is, to me, a really good one. I feel really good about it, even though I suffered most of it. I prevailed. And I argued with it. I was like, no, moments.

Where we start, our peaks and our lows and where it ends matters greatly to human beings.

Eric (34:44.996)

are what we, yeah, it seems to be based on all studies, that’s what we affix. And then I think there’s also the whole idea of, you know, what meaning do we give to certain things? Is what’s most important how I’m feeling? Or which is transient and affected by a thousand things. It’s affected by the weather outside, it’s affected by how I slept, it’s affected by how many carbs, I mean, whatever your thing is, right?

Corey (34:52.546)

Yeah.

Corey (35:05.92)

And you bet.

Eric (35:14.832)

thousand factors and yet the things I do in the world that matter that have meaning Those are those are different right there. They’re not they’re not based on mood and I’m always at least for me personally I’ve tried to orient myself away from mood Being the driving factor in my life because if you have a mood system like me that could be rocky territory Whereas values and what matters

Corey (35:41.87)

Yeah.

Eric (35:45.209)

That’s a place I can affix my attention to that really steadies things and allows me to, to your point, to have a story that feels like it’s important.

Corey (35:50.466)

Yeah.

Corey (35:56.428)

Yeah. And to get to your other point about trying to get granular about sort of the questions I ask, I decided early on I would use these terms but not get in the business of trying to create an objective metric or even think I could get inside somebody else’s head. If you say that almost every day in the last two weeks, I felt interested in life.

Eric (36:15.075)

Mm-hmm.

Corey (36:25.016)

Who am I to get in the business of saying, okay, now I’m gonna get real grand on you. Now, your interest might be at a different sort of objective level than mine, but when I can come to that conclusion, I’m probably the best judge in many respects than anyone else. And so…

Eric (36:26.127)

You

Eric (36:46.449)

Yep. Yep.

Corey (36:49.542)

All I can say, and some people would say I’m punting, I know, I’m going to allow you to make that assessment. And all I can say is in the scientific world, when people actually meet these criteria, it is remarkable to see how much better or how much worse they are doing.

Eric (36:53.821)

You

Corey (37:17.094)

I’m telling you, is over 30 years now of research. Nobody’s come up with a diagnostic set of criteria for good mental health, flourishing or languishing, that could replace where I just started. It was a starting point. And by the way, what I did was take depression and literally turn it on its head when I looked at all the signs and symptoms of well-being.

Eric (37:41.821)

Mm-hmm.

Corey (37:44.682)

So you had to have 1 out of 2 anhedonia combined with 4 out of the 7 malfunctioning to meet the criteria for depression. Every day or almost every day.

When I looked at all the well-being measures and reduced them down to the 14 questions in my questionnaire, you have to have one out of the three feeling good almost every day combined with at least six out of the 11 functioning well, seven out of 14. Any combination, the beauty of my diagnosis, don’t, there’s multiple ways people can flourish. There’s multiple ways that people can languish.

And there’s no, that’s the thing. When I sit down with people and try to help them, I get the questions out and I put them in front of them and I say, you don’t have to be doing well in all of these things. Just seven out of the 14 and they have to be at least one out of the feeling good and six or more out of the functioning well. And by the way, the only thing I will recommend, focus on functioning well because you will feel good when you reach that.

level of functioning well and it will be based on something sustainable, not external to you. You will know that your effort is what and your accomplishments are creating that feeling good. Because normally, and I studied this in young people, they put feeling good before functioning well. They value feeling good way over functioning well.

Eric (39:12.126)

Sure.

Eric (39:15.592)

Mm-hmm.

Corey (39:16.506)

And if you can find a way to feel good without functioning well, trust me, most people aren’t going to stick with that course.

Eric (39:23.668)

Well, sure. And, and generally, it’s a it’s a road that that has an end to it, right? Meaning, you there are ways to feel good without functioning well. I mean, you and I have explored, know, we’ve explored, we’ve explored them, you know, I mean, I took that I took, I took that seeking about as far as you can take it, right. And it didn’t end well. So let’s talk about what do we mean by functioning well? What are we talking about when we say someone is functioning well?

Corey (39:26.231)

Yeah

Corey (39:30.507)

Yeah.

Corey (39:36.108)

We’ve experienced some of the worst parts of it. Yes.

Corey (39:43.15)

Yeah.

Corey (39:53.858)

Well, there were six criteria called psychological well-being because they focused primarily on the pronouns, excuse me, not protons, the pronouns, me and I. So there’s self-acceptance. Do you like most parts of your personality? There’s positive relations, which is do you have warm, trusting relationships with other people?

There’s a sense of personal growth. Are you being challenged to grow and become a better person? There’s something called a mastery, which is, you able to manage the daily responsibilities of your life? There’s autonomy, which is, do you feel confident to think and express your own ideas and opinions? And last but certainly not least, purpose in life. Does your life have meaning or direction to it? And then there’s five qualities or

right, Terry, called social well-being that privileged the pronouns we and us. So there’s self-acceptance on this self-side. There’s acceptance of other people. Are you trusting? Do you view other people with some sense of trust? Do you believe that other people are basically good by nature? There’s this thing called coherence. Are you able to make sense of what’s going on in the world around you?

your society, your community, the world called coherence. know that. Trust me.

Eric (41:18.432)

What’s that old saying? It’s not a sign of wellness to see a sick society as healthy, whatever that is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Corey (41:28.542)

As help, yes. To be well adjusted to a sick society, yes. There’s a sense of integration. Do you have a sense of belonging? Do you have a community? There’s a dimension called social contribution. Do the things you do on a daily basis matter to the world around you, to other people? And last is the sense of social growth. We’re members of teams, literally and figuratively.

Are we being challenged? Do I feel like I, as a member of something, am I being challenged to grow as a better member of something? And so those are 11 signs of functioning well. And you can have six from any of the either group. But you just need six or more, at minimum of six, almost every day.

And I toyed early on in my research, you had to have a few from social well-being, some from psychological well-being. It doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter. Having said that, and this is an interesting thing, almost everywhere we’ve looked in the world, social well-being is the hardest thing for people to achieve. Almost every day. Yeah, it’s really the hardest thing for our social animals, believe it or not.

Eric (42:44.363)

Yeah, I believe that. mean…

Eric (42:50.783)

Yeah, yeah, I can see that. I mean, there are days that my social life is very fulfilling and rich. And there are other days that I sit here and, you know, I’m working on I’m working on a book. So I spend most of my day writing. And then, you know, I see my partner and we’re doing fine. And we have dinner, but there’s nothing really that you know, you know, like, there’s just not a lot of social interaction that day is not necessarily a bad day. But but it’s just not the, you know,

That’s the way I think a lot of our lives are. All right, let’s now let’s turn our attention to I’d like to talk about what are the vitamins of flourishing? What are the five sort of things that people can look at doing or investing in that add up to flourishing? And I assume what you’re saying is

Corey (43:32.43)

Thank

Eric (43:45.341)

if you do these, if you you integrate these things into your life to some degree, then you’re going to answer yes to more of those measures of well being that we just talked about. Is that the essence of it?

Corey (43:56.192)

You will. Yes, this comes from a longitudinal study that followed these folks who were either depressed, not depressed but languishing, or they were flourishing. And what they found was that, regardless of your category, if you were doing more of these five things, now you don’t have to do them all in one day, but if you picked one of them,

which was either play, learn something new, some form of spiritual or religious activity, helping others and connecting or socializing. If you did more of one of those things the day prior to the interview, you recorded and had a much better day.

And even if you were depressed or languishing, if you continued over time to do more of those five vitamins on a daily or weekly basis, you began to move out of those places. Now, you didn’t jump all the way to flourishing. It takes time. Maybe, you know, we don’t know the exact amount of time, but the good news was you began to move up the continuum closer and closer to flourishing.

But here is the thing, if you are flourishing and you stop doing those things, it didn’t take long and you began to drift away into languishing.

I call that the couch potato effect. Doesn’t matter if you’re flourishing. can’t just say, I’m flourishing and I’m going to put that in the bank. Now I’m going to ignore all those things that got me there because I got something more important. Like I got work. I got careers. I got success to tackle. And I’m going to leave all those things behind because they’re a waste of my time. People at my workplace don’t really care about those things.

Corey (45:54.306)

Well, guess what? Well, if you don’t care about them, of course they don’t. And before you know it, you’re languishing. So those five things were very clearly addressing a deficiency in flourishing, whether you were depressed or languishing. And I think of languishing kind of like the physiological equivalent of anemia.

Eric (46:22.404)

Mm-hmm.

Corey (46:22.606)

It feels like that too because trust me, the way I found out that I had celiac disease is I became very anemic. I didn’t know it. One day I was out there hiking with my wife and I could not make it back to our car. She put me on the side of the road, went back, got the car, picked me up. I said something’s wrong and I went to the doctor and I was very low in iron.

And she said, there’s only one of two reasons. You’re bleeding internally or you’re not taking up iron because you’ve got celiacs. Your little intestines has been destroyed. Boom. Yes. And so when I thought about my celiacs and what I had done to my, and how it felt, languishing is essentially a deficiency of those five vitamins.

Eric (47:00.707)

Yeah.

Eric (47:16.131)

Yep. Okay, so let’s dive into those five vitamins a little bit. And I think I want to go to something you said kind of at the end there, which is like, okay, I’m doing these things, I decide I’m going to put them in the bank, and I’m just going to focus on other things like work or success. Or I think the thing of it, though, is that the wise approach seems to me that

Corey (47:19.566)

Mmm.

Eric (47:42.145)

you integrate those things into the work that you do, into the success that you seek, into, you know, they become, they become the way in which you approach things, right? I approach my work from a perspective of what can I learn today here, right? There’s opportunities to learn there. Who can I connect with here?

Corey (48:00.152)

Yes.

Eric (48:10.245)

today, right? Like, I think that we often think that we have to, we have to go do these other things and other places in other ways. And where so many people get hung up is there’s no time to do that. There’s no time if you’re going to work, which most people have to do. If you have, let’s say, children or the flip side of it, parents who need care or both, you know, where a lot of people find themselves. It’s it’s so hard to get time away.

do things. So we have to think, at least for me, strategically about how do I integrate these approaches to things into my day-to-day life.

Corey (48:49.976)

Yeah, I love that you bring that up because I remember I was just marveling at Epicurus, the great philosopher of hedonism. I read about him in the book and he said, what you really need in life are three things, friends, freedom, and by freedom he meant really autonomy, to do as much for yourself.

as you can and for each other rather than giving over your life to a boss. And then the last one is an examined life. When things go bad, you need time to reflect and learn. Now everyone was like Epicurus, this is so obvious. Why did you put that on the stoa? Right? wrote, he had, and he said, well, tell me if it’s so obvious, why don’t you do these things?

Eric (49:41.875)

Exactly. Yes.

Corey (49:42.454)

You need constant reminders. He said this again and again. Human beings need constant reminders because we are so easily led to believe something else is so much more important. So much more important. And people have said this about my five vitamins. And I think back and I’m like, my God, you think this is obvious? Then why don’t you do it? Why do you think you can only do five minutes of it and it’s done? No, you have to do exactly.

exactly what you said. Create a mindset. There’s such beautiful research on mindsets now about just change the way you think about the things you have to do so you get the things you need from the things you have to do.

Eric (50:29.993)

So, okay, I love that. But I have to ask, when you talk about some of this research on mindset, is there any places you could point me?

Corey (50:36.078)

Mm.

there’s several in, and that I talk about in the book. There’s this wonderful young scholar, but she’s, she’s out in Stanford in psychology, Aliyah Crumb. And it

Eric (50:51.418)

You’re you just freaked me out because the conversation I just I recorded an interview before this and the woman was a mentor of that woman and I’ve never heard her name till now and now I’ve heard it twice. No, it’s a she’s a younger I’m sorry. She’s a she’s a mentee of that woman. She’s a younger student that has worked with Aliyah, but I’ve never heard. What’s her name? Carrie Lebowitz? Yeah. well, hell.

Corey (51:00.558)

Carol, yeah Carol Dweck. Yeah, not Carol Dweck.

Corey (51:12.312)

Who was it? Was her name Carrie? Yeah, that’s my student. She was my student. Yeah. She’s in my book as well and I taught, yeah.

Eric (51:20.422)

Yeah, well, look, I’ve never heard…

Eric (51:25.862)

I’ve never heard of Aliyah Crum until like an hour ago. okay, but all right, let’s let yeah, that is fascinating. All right. Let’s let’s come back to what you were what you were just saying, which is, talk to me about this idea of taking what we quote unquote, think we have to do, which we actually don’t. In a lot of cases, right, there’s no law that requires we do certain things. Talk about

Corey (51:28.664)

Yep.

Yep. Interesting, isn’t it?

Eric (51:55.813)

reclaiming autonomy there and using that to give us some of the things that we need for flourishing because I think this is a really key point.

Corey (52:04.056)

Yeah, yeah, and there was this, I just love this study. When Leah was working with Ellen Langer, who was a psychologist at Harvard, looks at, right, they were looking for a group of people who do some very physically demanding work, yet probably don’t view their work as exercise. And they chose among a group of people who,

Eric (52:15.964)

Yep.

Corey (52:33.902)

who take care of the hotel rooms, right? They clean and all do all that work and did an intervention and they did an assessment of all the physical activities they did and then looked at the Surgeon General’s report and it was very clear that these mostly women, almost all women, were easily surpassing the Surgeon General’s recommended physical activity for every day, every day, all day.

Eric (52:36.938)

Mm-hmm.

Eric (52:59.902)

Yeah, they’re moving all day.

Corey (53:03.478)

And yet they do not view their work as exercise. so Langer and Crum decided to work with these women and create a mindset intervention with one group and said, look at and talk to them. Look at what you’re doing here. You’re lifting this and doing this. And they intervene to help them look at not just work, what the physical activity they were doing. And lo and behold, adding the mindset that their work isn’t just

Eric (53:07.614)

Mm-hmm.

Corey (53:33.356)

work, it’s also physical activity that’s very healthy.

Corey (53:42.05)

change their physical biomarkers and health. And it wasn’t because they started, they went and got a gym membership or started eating differently. It was, and there’s lots of research on this now, that if you change your mindset about what you’re doing or what you’re eating, it doesn’t mean ignoring the reality of what you’re doing.

Eric (53:47.336)

know, that’s crazy.

Corey (54:09.39)

and trying to romanticize it is simply adding layers of nuance to the reality that most of the time we’re doing one thing that has 10 or more different elements. And we only look at it one way.

Eric (54:25.164)

Yes, Carrie and I in our previous conversation talked about this very idea, right? And I think it’s a really important one, which is this idea that reality isn’t just what actually occurs or what the facts are, nor is reality all what we think about reality. It’s a co-creation of those things. And to your point, every situation you can look at from multiple angles.

And I talk about this a lot. Listeners of the show will have heard it. This idea of like when I realized at one point I was like, I found myself saying to myself all the time, I have to do X. And the example I often give is I have to take my son to soccer practice. I have to take him here. I have to take him there. And one day I went, wait a second, no I don’t.

There’s no law in the books that a father has to take his son to soccer practice. That’s preposterous. So I’m doing it. Why am I doing it? I’m doing it because I care about his well-being. I care about his happiness. I think playing team sports helps him develop, whatever the things are. All of a sudden, the exact same activity has gone from something I have to do to something I’m doing.

Corey (55:18.047)

No.

Eric (55:46.46)

out of a value that I have. And, you know, this is kind of what you’re saying. When we take the right mindset about what we’re doing, when we take the right mindset about what we do in our lives, our lives can look very, very different without anything changing. It’s not to say that sometimes things don’t need to change. They do, of course. And there’s a lot of change that can happen by looking at things differently.

Corey (56:02.808)

Yeah.

Corey (56:09.528)

Yeah.

Eric (56:16.374)

And I love your five vitamins because they give them a lens. They give us a lens, right? We can look at, can I take what I’m doing? Is there a way that it fits into a learning category or a connecting category or a transcending category or a helping category? Or is there a way to make this thing a little bit more playful? It gives us a, I mean, it gives us sort of almost, to use the words you were just using, five mindsets.

Corey (56:16.547)

Yeah.

Corey (56:30.37)

Yeah.

Corey (56:36.366)

Mm-hmm.

Corey (56:42.574)

Exactly.

Eric (56:42.849)

that I might slot things into that suddenly give them a value they didn’t have before.

Corey (56:51.402)

Love it. Love it. And this is when I talk to businesses and workplaces, think of managers as also sort of co-creators of this reality as well. An opportunity, right? You don’t have to change much, but maybe a little about the workplace to add these vitamins to people’s lives. And it is a win-win because I mean, the evidence was very clear that languishing was costing businesses

Eric (57:00.844)

Yeah.

Corey (57:20.766)

as much if not more than depression was. It was costing them a lot in mis-days of working presenteeism. They were there, but they weren’t really there.

Eric (57:23.563)

Yeah, I believe it. And… Yeah.

Eric (57:33.805)

And there’s a cynical view of all that that has taken place a little bit that I understand and I also don’t fully agree with. And that cynical view is that companies are investing in wellness only to serve their bottom line. And that may or may not be true. But the fact is, if you can bring wellness into where you spend most of your time as a worker,

That benefits you. doesn’t matter what the underlying reason is. We spend so much time at work, we have to find a way to embody it with meaning and purpose and, I mean, your five vitamins, right? Because most of us don’t have an option but to be there or something similar to it, right? We just don’t right now. And…

Corey (58:21.474)

Mm-hmm.

Eric (58:25.134)

So I think this viewing all of this workplace wellness with cynicism, I understand, you know, right? You don’t want to use workplace wellness as just a way to convince you to spend more and more of your life at work. That’s not it. But it can be used as to say the time that I spend there, how do I make it more meaningful? And that benefits the employer and it benefits everyone.

Corey (58:43.886)

Yeah.

Corey (58:48.94)

Yeah. Yeah, it…

I played that game politically and scientifically. I mean, it’s very clear. I could draw out all the statistics of how and scare everyone who’s listening to this that languishing is one of a pretty potent cause of all cause mortality for females and males. It’s very clear. It will…

Eric (59:13.87)

Yeah.

Corey (59:16.936)

And there’s good biological reasons for that that I talk about in the book. It’s a very strong risk factor for a variety of mental illnesses, depression, anxiety, even PTSD and frontline healthcare workers we found shortly during COVID. And I could go on and on. mean, and it’s deeply genetic.

You know, I mean, it’s all there. It’s like, okay, now the question is, you know, I would, I’m not gonna play this cynical game because I know in order to get places like the National Institute of Health interested in this, you have to show all those things.

If it shortens lives, it’s genetic, it has biological biomarkers, it has neuroscientific substrates, it’s all there. Now, it also addresses the bottom line of a very important one that nobody’s paying attention to. Nobody. And we need to raise awareness because there’s so many more people languishing than who have mental illness. And the sheer amount of people

Eric (01:00:28.305)

Yeah.

Corey (01:00:30.986)

eclipses and causes a lot more problems for the world economically, socially, educationally than mental illness. It eclipses it. And if we want to deal with

Eric (01:00:36.677)

Yep. Yep.

Corey (01:00:46.722)

The burden of mental health problems along with mental illness, we’re going to have to deal with this problem languishing. So it’s a bottom line issue for public health, for medicine, for workplaces. And it is for you, dear listener, you and your family and yourself. It’s a bottom line issue. And we ignore it to our peril because it’s a problem.

Eric (01:01:12.421)

Yep, Given the genetic nature of it, some of us, languishing is a big step up from the previous genetic generations. I’ll take it. No, I’m just kidding. I’m mocking my ancestors. It’s a joke.

Corey (01:01:26.613)

Hahaha!

What’s remarkable about that, Eric, is you know, the genes, and we’ve shown this, that we inherit for flourishing and languishing operate more or less independently from the genes we inherit for mental illness. And again, we’re back to the wolf you feed.

Eric (01:01:48.997)

Yeah.

Corey (01:01:50.978)

because it’s about epigenetics and environments. And we’re feeding that wolf of illness and we’re trying to lower genetic risk when we’re ignoring what resides over here in the parable, which is the genetic potential. And we’re not even there, but my point is we’ve shown this in our research that they operate independently. And the one that wins is the one that gets attention.

and gets fed. And we’re not paying an attempt at all to genetic potential for flourishing. And that’s my dream before I pass on to some other spiritual realm that I see somebody who actually sees this for what it is. It’s like, why aren’t you feeding that wolf?

Eric (01:02:27.227)

Yeah, yep.

Corey (01:02:41.006)

I don’t get it.

Eric (01:02:42.835)

So, let’s wrap up here because we’re about the hour mark and I want to end on what you just said, which is where you tied things back to the parable. And I’d love if you could just take us out with, you know, one, like, what is one very basic way that an individual listening to this show could feed the wolf of flourishing?

Let’s end there. And then in the post-show conversation, I want to explore a little bit of what you said about what we’re not paying attention to. I think that’s interesting, but I want to leave listeners with something that they can take away as a way of feeding the wolf of flourishing.

Corey (01:03:27.522)

Yeah.

I’ve, languishing is a normal response that can become problematic if we don’t listen to it because I call it the existential alarm clock.

When you start to feel that creeping in, that emptiness, that numbness, that feeling of starting to die inside, it’s telling you you’ve left behind something that’s very good for you, that you need, that was feeding your flourishing. Now sometimes we have to do that, but don’t ignore it for too long because it is an alarm clock, that if you keep hitting the existential snooze button,

You will languish in a way that’s pathological, that’s very dangerous. So listen to it because it’s telling you. You are leaving behind the very things that go into the vitamins and also go into the ingredients of flourishing that feed your spirit.

Eric (01:04:37.638)

Wonderful. Thank you so much, Corey. Like I said, you and I are going to talk in the post show conversation and listeners if you’d like access to that, where we’re probably going to nerd out on some things. If you like that part of what we do, become a member of our community at when you feed.net slash join and you can hear Corey and I nerd out on that stuff. And thanks, Corey. I appreciate it. It’s been a pleasure.

Corey (01:04:46.862)

Yeah

Corey (01:05:02.094)

Thanks for having me.

Eric (01:05:06.086)

Alright, do you need a moment, a break? Are you ready to keep going?

Corey (01:05:10.644)

I’m ready.

Eric (01:05:12.26)

All right. Here we go. Hi, Corey. Welcome to the post show conversation.

Corey (01:05:18.392)

Great to be with you still.

Eric (01:05:20.191)

You had to travel so far to get here. I appreciate you coming for the post-show conversation, which happened literally 35 seconds after the last conversation. Listeners, but for you, if you’re hearing this, you did have to journey to get here because you had to join our community. And for that, I am grateful that you did and welcome. All right. So near the end there, Corey, you were saying that you feel like people are not

Corey (01:05:22.542)

You

Eric (01:05:47.688)

focusing on feeding the genetic potential of flourishing and that that’s what you want to see happen. What do you mean by we’re not focusing on that? And by I guess we could say what what do you mean? And when you say we who do you mean?

Corey (01:06:04.514)

Yeah. The we in this is our national institutes of health and our public health system. We invest through taxpayer money, millions, millions annually in the national institutes that study very important diseases and illnesses like cardiovascular disease, cancer, right?

Eric (01:06:12.276)

Okay. Okay.

Eric (01:06:32.306)

Corey (01:06:32.834)

There’s even a National Institute of Mental Health, which is a misnomer because it’s the National Institute of Mental Illness. It doesn’t focus on mental health. And my work shows that very clearly, if we cured, found a cure tomorrow for all mental illness, it doesn’t mean we would all be flourishing. We could all end up, you know, just be free of mental illness and languishing. And there is no National Institute.

health that looks at health as more than the absence of illness. My work very clearly shows that the absence of illness does not mean the presence of health. And lowering the bad does not mean everyone is, know, treatments for depression for instance, anxiety like acceptance and commitment therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy.

are very effective, studies show, at lowering the symptoms and helping people get rid of that mental illness. But the studies show that barely 20 % of patients who get those therapies also benefit in having it elevate their positive mental health. Most patients are left free of a mental illness but languishing. And what good is that when languishing is a strong risk factor for relapse and recurrence?

So the things that lower the bad do not promote the good. And we need an institute that focuses on, OK, well, we can lower depression and anxiety. if it’s true, and it is true what I just told you, it doesn’t promote positive mental health. And we need that to stay in recovery. What does?

Eric (01:08:13.142)

So is this a an analogy or analogous to the basic idea of preventative health versus.

the type of health care we do today, right? 90 % or maybe it’s even higher of our health care dollars go to fixing problems that are there, right? And they need fixed. If you’ve got serious heart disease or you have cancer, you’ve got to try and fix it, right? But there’s a rather compelling argument to be made that if you focused on health earlier in the cycle, you’d…

you’d both have people who are healthier and you’d have way less of the stuff that you’re spending so much money trying to fix. Is this similar to what you’re saying that if we focused on flourishing, we would A, have people who were flourishing, which would be good, and B, we would have way less people that slide into the darker parts of mental illness that are much harder to actually fix. The basic idea, right, I think that I think about a lot is like a fire is pretty easy to put out when it’s a

Corey (01:09:04.802)

Thanks.

Corey (01:09:18.178)

Yeah.

Eric (01:09:23.646)

little sparks. You let it burn long enough, it’s a hell of a lot of work to put out a big fire. And so I think that what you’re saying is similar to the people who make that that a similar argument around our physical health. Close?

Corey (01:09:25.102)

Yeah.

Corey (01:09:30.573)

Yeah.

Corey (01:09:38.838)

Yeah. Yes, exactly. And why build homes without actually doing research how to create them better, healthier, and less likely to actually start, become a firing cauldron? So prevent fires in the first place. So here’s all that. So during the pandemic, you know, everyone was studying mental illness. And I just saw an article that just came out and said the following.

Eric (01:09:56.362)

Yes, yes, yep.

Corey (01:10:08.974)

53 million new cases of anxiety were caused by COVID, 70 plus million of new cases of depression. And I say, well, that’s not true because the evidence that you’re ignoring was all the studies that were coming out showing that flourishing, people who are flourishing going in and during the pandemic.

If you’re a healthcare worker, you are much less likely to develop PTSD. But if you’re languishing, you were. If you are flourishing, you are much less likely to develop anxiety or depression during COVID. But if you’re languishing, you were. I could go on and on. It wasn’t COVID. It was the fact that we were not mentally prepared for it. If people were more mentally healthy, they would have been protected and

buffered from that. Yeah, it was both.

Eric (01:11:04.92)

it was both, right? I mean, it was, right? It was, if we want to use our fire analogy, right? It’s that we had a bunch of houses that were built right up against the fire line, and nobody had spent any time thinking about what might happen to that house if a fire shows up, right? And when the fire showed up, I mean, it’s what you know, my son is a wildland firefighter. So this is an area I, you know, I know, I think some about right? And, you know,

Corey (01:11:33.73)

Yeah.

Eric (01:11:34.632)

you pay much attention to that world, you realize that the problem is we are building in places we shouldn’t be building. We are building in ways we shouldn’t be building. And that it’s inevitable that we’re going to have property destruction from fires, because fires are going to happen in the same way that pandemics or bad things are going to happen. And the problem is the the problem is the condition of the house before that arrives. And I think what you’re saying is the pandemic was made

Corey (01:11:48.046)

Mm-hmm.

Eric (01:12:04.4)

The mental illness was made so much worse because we had a bunch of people, i.e. houses, that were not in good shape to start with. And when a fire showed up, they caught on fire.

Corey (01:12:13.634)

Yes.

Yeah, we take it such for granted. But in fact, the evidence was, I mean, there’s more that I could go on. Health care workers in Italy were less likely to develop burnout. Frontline. Yeah, right. So it’s not that people can’t do hard, they can do hard, but they need to be have some of those ingredients of flourishing. So you can throw a pandemic at them, you can throw them a lot of stress and conflict, but they will crumble.

Eric (01:12:27.882)

if they

Eric (01:12:38.06)

Yeah.

Corey (01:12:45.25)

when they’re languishing. They will withstand it and maybe even grow as a result of when they’re flourishing. I can’t say this again and again. That’s the clarity with which we need to speak about this.

Eric (01:12:45.718)

Yeah, yeah.

Eric (01:12:54.543)

Yeah. It. Yeah, I mean, it makes a lot of sense just to me on a personal level, right? Like now I am a privileged person, so the pandemic affected me in less ways than many people, right? The actual circumstances of it. But I also think I was generally flourishing and that time was not a bad time for me. It was a time of meaning and purpose. And that’s because of where I was when it came. And again, I don’t want to completely take away the fact that privilege does prevent some of the worst. I was affected. I didn’t have three grandparents that died and a parent that died. The horror stories you hear about, like, my mom had dementia and I couldn’t visit her for six months. I mean, like, that’s…

Corey (01:13:48.824)

You

Eric (01:13:51.714)

That’s horrifying stuff, right? That’s gonna, that’s gonna be difficult for anybody to deal with. But I think your general point is that by being in a state of flourishing, we are much better able to withstand the really difficult things that life brings because that’s what life does. I mean, it’s kind of certain.

Corey (01:13:55.448)

Yeah.

Corey (01:14:11.374)

Yeah, and it certainly will. I don’t think anyone, I don’t care what walk of life and what path they’re walking. Life is a thief and it will take things from you whether you give it freely or not. And that’s the lesson of Siddhartha becoming the Buddha.

Eric (01:14:36.154)

Life is a thief, yeah.

Corey (01:14:36.814)

It is. It’s world… It is. It will tell you and open your eyes to everything that’s coming for you. Loss, aging, death, and everything you love. So, this is not a new story. Now, you’re right. More of it’s visited some than others. But it’s coming for all of us. And so are we mentally prepared.

Eric (01:14:45.945)

Indeed. Yep. Yep. All right. Well, I think that’s a great place for us to wrap up. Corey, I appreciate you joining us in the post-show conversation and for all of your work. Thank you.

Corey (01:15:09.678)

I appreciate being on the show. Thank you, Eric.