Corey Keyes

In the winter of 2025, something shifted in the relationship between human beings and their tools, and every metric designed to capture the shift measured the wrong thing. Adoption curves, revenue rates, productivity multipliers: all of them measured output. None measured whether the people producing the output were flourishing or quietly emptying out. This is the gap that Corey Keyes spent thirty years making visible—not in the context of artificial intelligence, but in the broader context of human mental health, where the same structural blindness has persisted for over a century. The blindness is this: modern psychology operates on the assumption that health is the absence of illness. If the worker is not depressed, she is well. Keyes's epidemiological research demonstrated, across populations and decades, that this assumption is false. Between illness and health lies a vast, populated territory he named with clinical precision: languishing—a state of emptiness, stagnation, and quiet depletion that meets no diagnostic criteria, triggers no organizational alarm, and is therefore