In Defence of Sadness | Advokat Dyavola

Of melancholy is a fearful gift;?
What is it but the telescope of truth??
Which strips the distance of its fantasies,?
And brings life near in utter nakedness,?
Making the cold reality too real!?

Lord Byron, The Dream

?A people who conceive life to be the pursuit of happiness must be chronically unhappy.?

Marshall Sahlins, anthropologist

That we are all capable of sustained happiness is a lie. Moreover, it is a lie that makes those whose personalities have never been described as ?bubbling? feel guilty for not belonging to Club Happiness.

Who in our society are more hated than the unhappy? After all, in a culture obsessed with happiness, the unhappy are ultimately considered failures. No one wants to be perceived as, or associated with, les mis?rables. They are such a drag, and who knows, they may be contagious. After all, melancholy, known by its vapid clinical synonym ?depression,? (William Styron said the word has??a bland tonality and lacking any magisterial presence, used indifferently to describe an economic decline or a rut in the ground, a true wimp of a word for such a major illness [...] for over seventy-five years the word has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its very insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control.?)?is classified as a mental disorder, and now they even want to pathologize grief.

When did our obsession with happiness and its evil step-sister, ?positivity,? begin?

Once upon a time, our collective ideal was to be ?good,? not happy. Throughout most of humanity?s existence, we were so focused upon questions of survival that we simply didn?t have time to think of such luxuries as happiness. The Ancient Greeks used to say,??Call no man happy until he is dead.?

Were the horrors of the twentieth century simply too much to bear? After humanity experienced the nightmares of world war, genocide, totalitarianism, famine, and plague, perhaps its capacity for misery was simply exhausted, and we collectively proclaimed, ?Enough is enough. Now, happiness.?

This is understandable.?However, this collective determination to be happy mated with our escapist?entertainment-based culture?to?create a Cult of Positivity.

The Cult of Positivity

Unemployed? Single? Poor? Failing in some other way? ?Positive thinking???is the solution, say the happyists.?Motivational speakers talk about the ?evil? of negative thoughts, and encourage their peons to expunge ?negative people? from their lives, because they are ?committed to lose.??Companies force their employees to watch ridiculous?self-help?DVDs, peddled by snake-oil salesmen, teaching them that positive thinking can bring them health, wealth, and happiness.?FedEx, Adobe and IBM are among the many companies that have hired ?happiness coaches? to work with employees, and even the U.S. army is incorporating ?positive psychology??(which one psychologist?calls??saccharine terrorism?)?into its training program.

Cancer victims are told they can beat the disease with positive thinking (they can?t), leading?patients to blame themselves when their self-treatment of positivity fails.

Creepy happiness movements?insist that ?happiness is a decision? (those 121 million people with depression are clearly not ?deciding? hard enough).

In the UK, a Happiness Czar was created (perhaps someone noticed that depressed people are less economically productive), and??happiness centres? administering courses of cognitive behavioural therapy have been established. Sounds a little like something out of Brave New World.

President Obama is castigated?for being a ?pessimist,? while former president Reagan is worshipped as an optimist. Optimistic presidential candidates are more likely to win presidential elections (though the presidents who gave more pessimistic inaugural speeches are more likely to go down in history as being great).

Critical thinkers and writers are derided as being ?negative? or ?pessimistic,? to the delight of those whose questionable actions they criticize. In being labelled negative, they are equated with being unhappy, and thus as failures. People demand that journalists write happier stories about fluffy kittens to cheer them up. God forbid the news of famine, war, and disease upset the poor first worlders.

As author Barbara Ehrenreich, who wrote a book about our cult-like obsession with positivity,?writes,??what is truly sinister about the positivity cult is that it seems to reduce our tolerance of other people?s suffering [...]?creating an empathy deficit that pushes ever more people into a harsh insistence on positivity in others.?

Psychologist Barbara Held, agrees.??The tyranny of the positive attitude lies in its adding insult to injury: If people feel bad about life?s many difficulties and they cannot manage to transcend their pain no matter how hard they try (to learn optimism), they could end up feeling even worse; they could feel guilty or defective for not having the right (positive) attitude, in addition to whatever was ailing them in the first place.? She says that??I believe that we would be better off if we let everyone be themselves ? positive, negative, or even somewhere in-between.?

Psychiatrist Andrew Thomson believes that, ?as a society, we?ve come to see depression as something that must always be avoided or medicated away. We?ve been so eager to remove the stigma from depression that we?ve ended up stigmatizing sadness.?

Psychotherapist and writer Adam Phillips says that ?There is a presumption that there is a weakness in the people who are depressed,? and points out that ?The reason that there are so many depressed people is that life is so depressing for many people.??He?thinks?that happiness is ?a cruel demand,? because ?happiness and the right to pursue it are sometimes wildly unrealistic as ideals.? He calls this form of thinking ?a version of fundamentalism,? and says that??anyone who could maintain a state of happiness, given the state of the world, is living in a delusion.?

Ehrenreich talks about how people in the corporate world are brainwashed into believing that all they have to do to be successful in their career is be positive. This kind of thinking, among other things, helps prevent negative reactions towards mass lay-offs.??What could be cleverer as a way of quelling dissent, than to tell people who are in some kind of trouble ? poverty, unemployment, etc. ? that it?s all their attitude,? Ehrenreich says. ?It?s a brilliant form of social control.?

Ehrenreich talks about the Cult of Positivity

This delusional positive thinking also?contributed to the Financial Crisis, when negative voices in finance or real estate were quieted or fired.

Perhaps this unhealthy infatuation with all things positive and happy is a product of our present age, or perhaps they are peculiar to our own culture.

Mark Ames, an American who lived and worked as a journalist in Russia for a long time, writes about his first visit to St. Petersburg in 1991, and how liberating it was to not have to be happy all the time:

?They didn?t oppress you with their pod-people smiles and affected self-confidence the way they did in California. In fact, they looked every bit as miserable as I?d felt inside for, oh, as long as I could remember. And yet, oddly, they were so much more alive than, say, the neighbours in our cul-de-sac on Sand Hill Court.?

One can?t help but occasionally feel that, in the West (minus the passionate peoples of the Mediterranean), any display of unbridled passion in a social setting immediately results in shock, terror, and indignation. At the very least it is a substantial faux pas. As author Jonathan Franzen puts it, ?anything that betrays real passion is by definition uncool.?

The Value of Sadness

No one would ever call happiness a bad thing, but perhaps it is not the only thing. Don?t the emotions at the other side of the spectrum have some value too? Why don?t we value the so-called ?negative? emotions? Isn?t our vast spectrum of complex emotions, awarded to us by our uniquely oversized?cerebellums, and our capacity for sadness, one of the things which make us human? Many famous thinkers have pointed out how human an emotion sadness is.

John Stuart Mill said that??It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.??Friedrich Nietzsche postulated in The Will to Power that ?Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.? Franz Kafka once wrote in his diary, ?I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.? F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that ?the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness,? and that happiness is the exception.

Jonathan Franzen writes?that pain should be embraced because it is ?the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived.? He believes that??the fundamental fact about all of us is that we?re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it.?

?Misery Loves Company? by Open, N.Y. ?

Before the Cult took over, sadness was given its due respect. Melancholia has traditionally been associated with genius and creativity.?Aristotle stated well over 2,000 years ago that ?all men who have attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art and in politics, even Socrates and Plato had a melancholic?habitus; indeed some suffered even from melancholic disease.?

This association of gloom and genius was revived during the Renaissance, leading John Milton to exclaim, in his poem?Il Penseroso: ?Hail, divinest melancholy/whose saintly visage is too bright/to hit the sense of human sight.? The romantic poets praised suffering as a process which adds insight and depth to a person?s character. As Keats wrote, ?Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul??

Indeed, various studies have shown that writers and artists have a much higher rate of depression. Just look at all of the artists and writers who have taken their own lives:?Vincent Van Gogh,?Jack London,?Sergei Esenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky,?Hart Crane, Virginia Woolf, Arshile Gorky, Cesare Pavese,?Tadeusz Borowski,?Ernest Hemingway,?Sylvia Plath,?Mark Rothko,?Paul Celan,?Yukio Mishima,?Diane Arbus,?John Berryman,?Anne Sexton,Romain Gary, and Primo Levi to name but a few.

Researchers have?shown that sadness can actually increase artistic creativity. Other studies?have shown that?sadness can improve memory, mathematical skills, and observational skills, and that sad people are less likely to stereotype strangers and are better at judging the accuracy of rumours. Psychologists?Lyn Abramson and Lauren Alloy have concluded that ?when they are not depressed, people are highly vulnerable to illusions, including unrealistic optimism, overestimation of themselves, and an exaggerated sense of their capacity to control events. The same research indicates that depressed people?s perceptions and judgments are often less biased.??Depressed people experience increased activity in their left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain which is responsible for intense focus, and delivers extremely analytical thinking.

Abraham Lincoln, whose ?melancholy dripped from him as he walked,? often wept in public, fell into deep depressions for months at a time, constantly thought of suicide, and described himself as ?the most miserable man living.? Yet Lincoln?s chronic sadness??spurred him, painfully, to examine the core of his soul? and forged ?a spirit of humble determination.??His ?hard?work to stay alive helped him develop crucial skills and capacities,? and his ?inimitable character took great strength from the piercing insights of depression.? As Lincoln expert Joshua Wolf Shenk opines, ?Lincoln didn?t do great work because he solved the problem of his melancholy; the problem of his melancholy was all the more fuel for the fire of his great work.?

Adam Phillips?talks?about the value of unhappiness, as?counter-intuitive?as it may initially sound.??We don?t talk of the right to be unhappy, when we should. Unhappiness can, after all, among many other things, be the registration of injustice or loss.? Fyodor Dostoevksy wrote in The Possessed,??Do you understand that along with?happiness, in the exact same way and in perfectly equal proportion, man also needs unhappiness?? Jonathan Franzen writes that depression is a ?successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship,? and that ?There is after all a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it?s the right unhappiness.?

Happiness is not a choice. Many psychologists contend that the most important determinant of happiness is a ?set point,? a genetic baseline happiness level. The behavioral geneticist David Lykken, after conducting extensive research on twins, concluded that ?trying to be happier is like trying to be taller.? Psychology professor and author Jonathan Haidt?says that??in the long run, it doesn?t much matter what happens to you,? in regards to how happy you will be.

Evolutionary psychologists say that we?re actually ?hardwired to emphasize the negative,? for survival purposes.?For the last million years or so, ?it has made good adaptive sense to be fearful, cautious, [and] timid? because such things as ?a?sniffle, a graze, or a bad piece of meat,? could have been fatal. Therefore it?s also made more sense to prudently assume the worst.

Conclusion

The celebrated American writer and sufferer of severe depression William Styron once wrote that the ?veritable howling tempest in the brain? that is depression??is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it,? and that??calling ?Chin up!? from the safety of the shore to a drowning person is tantamount to insult.?

If it?s true that the severely sad suffer in a way unimaginable to others, and cannot simply ?choose? to be happy, then perhaps we should be a little easier on them. If it?s true that sadness is one of the things that makes us human, adds depth to the soul, and helps us appreciate happiness, then perhaps we shouldn?t pejoratively label it as a ?negative? emotion.

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Source: http://advokatdyavola.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/in-defence-of-sadness/

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