Learner Dad: A lot of the chit-chat is about Pokémon trading cards - it’s hardly new 

"The upshot now is that after school the old bandstand in the park is like the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, with kids talking up their Pokémon collection and trading surplus cards."

Picture: iStock 

We’re all languishing these days, according to The New York Times. An article last week revealed that loads of us are experiencing a mental state in that grey area between depression and flourishing and that scientists have decided to call it languishing. This, according to the article, is because a lot of us are struggling with “the emotional long haul of the pandemic”. 

Now that the initial terror of Covid has subsided, we have gone from anguish to languish. Within hours, it was hard to open an article online without coming across our new friend ‘languishing’ – after all, it was in The New York Times, so it must be true.

Really? I understand the urge to suffer something that comes from New York because it’s such a cool and trend-setting city. But even pre-Covid, I spent 99% of my time in that grey area between depression and languishing. It’s called everyday life.

OK, there is a bit more of a cloud over most of us these days. My sourdough passion has turned into a chore because, in fairness, it’s just a loaf of bread. But I keep making it anyway because it turns out we need our daily bread.

I think this languishing thing is classic late April in Ireland. The daffodils have come and gone, the little birds are growing up, the lambs are in the field – so, where is our good weather? Well, it’s coming as I write and there are still two months of long nights on the way – the only languishing we’ll be doing by early June is out the back with a glass of wine.

In the meantime, I’m going to take mental health lessons from my kids. Look, maybe it’s just my two, but I think a lot of children are flourishing despite the pandemic. Or maybe because of it – they’re certainly getting more Nintendo time in the evenings because their parents have their noses stuck in an article about languishing.

It also helps that they have a much better social life than their parents. When I drop our kids up to school they usually bump into someone from their class at the gate and fall into the kind of chit-chat that’s missing from my life.

A lot of this chit-chat is now about Pokémon trading cards. It’s a thing now in their school, don’t ask me when it started. It’s hardly new – I was collecting soccer cards in the mid-70s. But it’s brilliant the way kids use them. In the playground the other day, a kid from my daughter’s class gave my son a few of his surplus cards. No one told him to do this, he just did it. This brought my guy into the Pokemon gang – I could see how much it meant to him. We all wanted to belong at seven years of age.

The upshot now is that after school the old bandstand in the park is like the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, with kids talking up their Pokemon collection and trading surplus cards. Thanks to the mom network in the park, we learned about a good Pokémon board game to buy so our two can battle each other with their cards. This triggers imagination, competition, laughter, tears, fights, making up again, making up their own rules. It’s a whole new world, away from a screen. It’s the opposite of languishing.

You can learn from your kids. On the way into school this morning, my son met a girl from his senior infants class and they started chinwagging about some news they heard on the radio. This was like the universe telling me I need to get out more and talk to people.

 A lot of languishing is just inertia and tiredness – every time I force myself out to meet a friend or colleague for coffee, I come home feeling much better about the world. Life is fairly dull most of the time, with or without Covid. That’s OK too. But if you do need some variety, get out and meet your people, swap some news and maybe a Pokémon card. It certainly beats languishing.