“There’s a name for the blah you’re feeling: it’s called languishing,” says Adam Grant in The New York Times. Languishing is the “neglected middle child of mental health”, the void between depression and flourishing. It is a sense of stagnation and aimlessness, as if you’re “looking at your life through a foggy windshield”. It may well be the “dominant emotion of 2021”.
Languishing dulls your motivation, disrupts your focus and shortens the odds that you’ll cut back on work. What’s more, those who are languishing today are most likely to experience depression and anxiety in the next 10 years. The danger is that “when you can’t see your own suffering, you don’t seek help”. Now for the good news: “One of the best strategies for managing emotions is to name them.” Acknowledging the feeling of languishing is the first step toward treating it.
No more hair dye, I’m mouse proud
Mousy brown hair “gets an incredibly bad rap”, says Lisa Armstrong in The Daily Telegraph. For years I fought against my natural mouse tones with endless hair-colouring experiments. “I’ve been everything from red to blonde to auburn, plus an unfortunate flirtation with green.” But recently a combination of grey hair and no salon appointments has taken me back to my rodent roots. It is “a stonking success”.
It turns out mousy brown hair is the perfect shade for women over 50. “It’s even, natural-looking and – bonus! – my hair’s more or less the same colour as the fabulous Andréa in Call My Agent, who may be a mouse, but is anything but mousy.” Dye jobs may look fabulous, but they dry out your hair beyond recognition. “If it’s a choice between being blonder or having hair that doesn’t break off once it gets halfway to my shoulders, I’ll take the latter.”
💇🏻 The raven-haired singer Nick Cave is not a fan of greys. In his question and answer newsletter, The Red Hand Files, a woman named Floella wrote in with a haircare query. “I’ve decided to embrace the glimpses of grey that have appeared in my hair in lockdown and stop getting it coloured,” she said. “Have you been tempted to let your crowning glory grow silver?” Cave replied:
“Dear Floella,
No.
Love, Nick.”