An old schoolmate came to stay for four days last year. It had been fifteen years since we\u2019d shared a dormitory in rural Australia, and I\u2019d built the reunion up in my head.<\/p>\n
He was lovely. Polite. Completely absent.<\/p>\n
On the third day we took a boat up the river, and I asked how he was actually doing.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m fine,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
That answer nagged at me for months, and not because I thought he was lying. He wasn\u2019t. He\u2019d checked his internal weather, read the instruments honestly and reported back. Nothing hurt. Nothing was broken.<\/p>\n
He also hadn\u2019t laughed once in three days.<\/p>\n
An honest \u201cfine\u201d is worse than a lie<\/p>\n
When a man lies about being fine, some part of him still knows the truth. He\u2019s guarding something. There\u2019s a gap between the report and the reality, and that gap means he can still see both sides of it.<\/p>\n
The dangerous version is when that gap closes. When \u201cfine\u201d stops being a shield and becomes an accurate reading. He isn\u2019t hiding his emptiness from you. He\u2019s stopped being able to tell it apart from contentment.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve filed that report myself. A few years ago I watched an entire football match for a team I\u2019ve followed since I was nine, and realised at the final whistle that I didn\u2019t care who won. Not sad. Not annoyed. Just blank. And my first thought wasn\u2019t \u201csomething\u2019s wrong here.\u201d It was \u201cwell, that was a boring game.\u201d<\/p>\n
Emptiness explains itself away using whatever\u2019s lying around.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a name for it, and it isn\u2019t depression<\/p>\n
The sociologist Corey Keyes spent his career on the part of mental health nobody looks at: the middle. Not ill, not thriving. He called it languishing<\/a>, a flatness where you function perfectly well but the vitality has drained out, and one of its symptoms is not minding that it\u2019s happening.<\/p>\n Keyes is clear that this isn\u2019t depression. Depression is clinical, with sadness you can feel and signs you can point at. Languishing is quieter. You get up, you work, you answer texts, you get the car serviced. The psychologist Adam Grant wrote about it during the pandemic, and the piece became the most-read story of the year<\/a> at the New York Times. That alone tells you how many people found themselves in a word they\u2019d never heard before.<\/p>\n Men run out of words before they run out of feelings<\/p>\n The psychologist Ronald Levant coined a phrase for something he kept noticing in male clients: normative male alexithymia<\/a>. \u201cAlexithymia\u201d literally means having no words for feelings. \u201cNormative\u201d is the depressing part. It means this isn\u2019t a disorder. It\u2019s the standard output of how a lot of boys get raised.<\/p>\n The feelings don\u2019t go missing. The labels do. So a man ends up running three settings: fine, tired and annoyed. Everything gets filed into one of them. Grief becomes tired. Loneliness becomes annoyed. Hollowness becomes fine.<\/p>\n And labels are not decoration. Researchers at UCLA found that simply naming an emotion<\/a> quiets down the brain\u2019s alarm centre. Putting the word on the thing does real work. A man with no words for it isn\u2019t stoic. He\u2019s driving with no dashboard.<\/p>\n Run the friend audit<\/p>\n If you can\u2019t read your own instruments, borrow an external one. Count your friends.<\/p>\n