Abstract Languishing has been theorised principally at the level of the person. This paper asks whether it can also be specified meaningfully at the level of cognition. Such a proposal carries a substantial burden of distinctiveness because psychology already possesses mature accounts of depressive cognition, learned helplessness, pessimistic explanatory style, hopelessness, hope, self-efficacy, and repetitive negative thinking. A cognition-level construct of languishing is therefore warranted only if it identifies an architecture not exhausted by these neighbouring constructs. Building from Keyes’s distinction between languishing, flourishing, and mental illness, and from recent work conceptualising languishing as structured rather than merely low flourishing, the present account examines cognition in relation to viable human possibility. Flourishing is defined as the sustained widening of viable human possibility within and across psychological, relational, institutional, cultural, material, and historical ecologies of participation. Languishing cognition is defined as a configuration of thoughts in which viable human possibility is compromised. The nature of this compromise is theorised along three separable dimensions: Yield, the change in viable human possibility represented as resulting from cognition, ranging from depletive to augmentative; Viability, the represented capacity of possibility to support meaningful participation, ranging from futile to viable; and Trajectory, the cognitive orientation of viable human possibility toward subsequent narrowing or widening. Languishing is hypothesised to occupy a configurational region within this dimensional space rather than a single pole. The architecture is explicitly falsifiable: if its dimensions cannot be distinguished, collapse into a more parsimonious structure, or add no explanatory value beyond established constructs, languishing cognition should be revised or rejected. Keywords: languishing, cognition, flourishing, viable human possibility, yield, viability, trajectory, construct validity