Recently, I listened to an interview of Cory Keyes on languishing. He was discussing his new book, Languishing: How to Feel Alive Again in a World That Wears Us Down. He mentioned his unsupportive upbringing and his resulting conclusion that the world was not going to help him. He says he learned the lesson that he had to help himself. OMG. It brought tears to my eyes. What a lonely existence to feel that Nature and the relational networks of humans and nonhumans don’t care, won’t help.
Most of us in westernized, capitalized societies grew up this way. It is species-abnormal.
Recall that our species has been around for 300,000 years or so, the human genus homo for two million, hierarchical inegalitarian civilization for 10,000 years or so among only a small number of communities—now, of course, forced on most everyone with species-abnormal practices and outcomes. Most of our existence was spent in nomadic foraging groups which, like other animal groups, foster wellbeing in one another.
Keyes’ commentary represents the extreme westernized worldview and species-abnormal life experience so common today—forced and enforced disconnection. In his life and the lives of many others, there was so much early toxic stress and misguided teachings that it thwarted the growth of receptive intelligence, the perceptual sensibilities to the sentient world of kin companions all around—the trees, the animals, plants. Many lack the sense that everything is alive and in relationship to them. The westernized discourse of intellectuals, science and even religion pooh-pooh this sensibility as primitive animism, shaking it out of most children before they get too old.
Today’s species-abnormal ways promote individualism, the view that a human is a separate object in a world of objects. Actually, this is a common view among schizophrenics, who feel a veil between themselves and reality (McGilchrist, 2021). It’s a signal of right hemisphere malfunctioning (or underdevelopment—it’s supposed to grow rapidly in babyhood from nurturing care, Schore, 2019).
We can see all around us how the individualism assumption is planted early on. Babies do not experience the evolved nest. They are separated from mothers after birth, even though they are like fetuses of other animals until nearly age 2 years. In the worst case, they are taken home to their own rooms and beds, scheduled and sleep trained, not held in arms much, not responded to much, expected to ‘behave’. This is all toxic stress for a baby who, for healthy development, must follow the inner compass of immediate need fulfillment via 24/7 presence of nurturers. The child learns, if they survive this set of treatments, not to expect too much from life—not much happiness, not much fulfillment, not much relationship. Hardly knowing or learning who they are, they have to ‘pull themselves up by their bootstraps,’ or act out for attention or because of under-developed self-regulation (they did not get co-regulated by nurturers), or find some comforting practice (busy achievement, raging control of others, oral addictions, video addictions, etc.). As depressed, angry, or languishing adults, as advocated by Keyes, they will need to take up intentionally chosen wellness activities.
But adulthood is not where things start. Human health, sociality and prosocial morality are grounded in early supportive experience, in evolved nestedness, where one always feels connected to others—first to mother, then other nurturers, then the beings in Nature. The world is full of companions. One never feels disconnected.
Those who live in preconquest nested communities do not languish. Remarkable to western visitors, they are happy and delighted with life, not languishing in neurotic despair.
To assume that everyone languishes, that it is part of being a human, is erroneous and a mistaken baseline assumption common in the USA these days. Unfortunately everyone adjusts to languishing and loneliness as a normal part of the human condition. Instead of realizing its abnormality and seeking its cause and solution, its symptoms are treated.
Within this abnormal culture and lifeway that most of us live in without awareness of alternatives, Keyes proposes five vitamins against languishing:
• close social connections,
• playing,
• helping others,
• learning new things, and
• engaging in spiritual or religious practices.
These actually reflect daily experiences of the Indigenous or kinship lifeway, though incomplete, especially since early development and the importance of lifelong nestedness are overlooked.
My suggestions for self-healing are more extensive. Indeed, the longest chapter in my book, Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture, and Wisdom, was about how to heal yourself from early toxic stress, the unnested undercare so pervasive these days. Based in a transdisciplinary view, I suggested following DEEP: Developmental Ethical Ecological Practice. Developmental because things were missed in childhood that need to be cultivated for flourishing. I wrote:
• “A DEEP approach is developmental because it focuses on the development of skills, awareness, perception, and desires, and it starts where the individual is.
• It is ethical because it advocates virtue development, as represented in our moral heritages of engagement and communal imagination ethics, as a goal for the good life.
• It is ecological because it moves beyond what obviously affects an individual to include the broader community of humans but also other entities, as well as a sense of being in the flow of life.
• It is a practice both because it is a lifelong endeavor, and it can be an individual or group mission or be part of mentored therapy. With the additions of the ethical and the ecological to traditional therapy, we may be better able to create societies and a planet that thrive.” (p. 262)
Ideally, one establishes relations with mentors (which can include books or online guidance); finds a supportive growth group; learns through apprenticeship (novice to expert learning); self-authors with assistance; and helps restore the web of life in all aspects. I suggested ways to first self-mend, then move to self-development, and finally take up Commonself wisdom. It’s a long chapter. In future posts, I’ll say more, but you can read the introduction and first chapter of my book here.
Read Introduction
Read Chapter 1
Based on some belief system, many think that instead of presence to the aliveness of a baby, that it is appropriate to detach from baby and teach baby not to expect nurturing 24/7. They cut off baby’s connection and natural growth. Not only do they traumatize babies, but too often these folks grow up to wreak havoc on others, human and non-human, in rageful, fearful distrust of Nature, relationships, and deep ancestral wisdom. It breaks my heart every day to see how broken a large part of humanity is and how our lifeways are destroying many of our non-human kin.
But some of us are here to help restore humanity to its fullness. We must help one another relearn the way of beauty, the way of loving presence to others. Galway Kinnell’s poem inspires this view:
Saint Francis and the Sow by Galway Kinnell
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
You can read the whole poem here.
NOTE: Our ancestral wisdom is not only about enhancing the beauty in one another but also about taking joint action to keep bullies from dominating our egalitarian group. Since that is relevant to what is happening in the world today, that will be a topic I cover in the future.
REFERENCES
McGilchrist, I. (2021). The matter with things: Our brains, our delusions, and the unmaking of the world (vol. I and II). London: Perspectiva Press.
Narvaez, D. (2014). Neurobiology and the development of human morality: Evolution, culture and wisdom. New York: Norton.
Schore, A.N. (2019). The development of the unconscious mind. New York: W.W. Norton.