At Lawyers Mutual this month, we’ve been exploring themes of recharging. It feels like a fitting time to look back at where we actually are in this post-COVID era. While most of us rarely talk about the pandemic anymore, I can only speak for myself when I say that things still don’t feel entirely normal. The underlying flatness has never completely resolved. Whether it’s the long tail of the pandemic, the weight of aging, or the chaotic cadence of our current cultural moment, that familiar zest for life remains somewhat muted. If you’ve felt that same quiet drag in your own practice or personal life, it might help to know that history and psychology tell us this isn’t a personal failing. It’s a collective phenomenon.

When we look back at the 1918 Spanish Flu, history reveals a striking parallel in how societies process widespread crisis. In the aftermath of that pandemic, the physical and economic world rebuilt relatively quickly, but the social and emotional landscape remained fractured for years. The trauma of sudden loss, combined with public health measures that isolated communities, left an indelible mark on daily life. People didn’t simply rebound into exuberance. Whole populations experienced a prolonged period of quiet exhaustion, heightened anxiety, and a subtle pull away from civic life. It serve as a historical reminder that society’s emotional clock resets much slower than its economic one.

This long emotional tail points to a crucial reality about disaster recovery: psychological and trust recovery can take decades to fully heal. Research examining the 1918 pandemic revealed that individuals who lived through the peak outbreak suffered long-lasting dips in “interpersonal trust,” leaving them permanently more cautious toward institutions and strangers, a psychological footprint that was even passed down culturally to their children. Ultimately, societies rarely “recover” by returning to the exact baseline of the past. They recover by settling into a restructured baseline. While economic indicators might stabilize within a few years, the psychological, cultural, and political aftershocks typically ripple through society for 15 to 20 years.

This persistent sense of grayness was famously given a name by organizational psychologist Adam Grant: languishing. Sitting squarely between the peak of depression and the flourishing of peak health, languishing is the neglected middle child of mental health. It is a state characterized by stagnation, emotional dullness, and a quiet lack of focus. It’s the feeling of looking at your days through a foggy windshield, where you aren’t necessarily in acute pain, but the joy and drive in your work have been turned down to a low hum. Recognizing that we might be collective languishers allows us to stop forcing an artificial sense of high-energy output and instead reframe what it actually means to recharge.

To move beyond generic self-care advice, here are some suggestions on what true recovery and rest can look like today:

Stop waiting to feel like your old self. One of the traps of recovery is assuming that success means getting back to exactly where we were before. But five or six years have passed since the pandemic disrupted our lives. We are older. Our workplaces have changed. Our relationships with work, technology, other people, and even time itself have changed. Perhaps the goal is not to recover the person we were in 2019. Maybe it is to figure out what energizes the person we are today.

Choose engagement over escape. When we feel depleted, our instinct is often to collapse on the couch and consume television, social media, news, or whatever requires the least from us. Sometimes that is exactly what we need. But passive rest and restoration are not always the same thing. Activities that absorb us like gardening, cooking, woodworking, exercising, playing music, fishing, painting, volunteering, or learning something new can restore energy precisely because they require us to participate rather than merely observe.

Rebuild connection deliberately. The pandemic trained us to withdraw. We learned to work from home, order groceries without entering a store, attend meetings without leaving our desks, and replace countless small human interactions with screens. Many of those conveniences are here to stay, and some are genuine improvements. But convenience can quietly become isolation. Lunch with a colleague, coffee with an old friend, participation in a bar association, volunteering, or simply spending time with people whose company we enjoy may do more to recharge us than another evening alone recovering from the day.

Make room for novelty. Languishing thrives on sameness. When every week looks like the week before it, time begins to blur. Novel experiences interrupt that pattern. They do not have to be dramatic. Take a different route home. Try a restaurant you have never visited. Explore a nearby town. Learn something completely unrelated to the law. Novelty gives the brain something new to notice, and noticing is one of the ways we begin to feel present again.

Perhaps that is the larger lesson of the post-pandemic years. Recovery does not necessarily arrive as a dramatic return of enthusiasm. Sometimes it happens quietly. We reconnect with someone. We become absorbed in something. We laugh harder than we have in a while. We find ourselves looking forward to Saturday. And one day we realize that the world seems a little less gray than it did before.