Against Happiness: in Praise of Melancholy

Right now, if the statistics are correct, about 15 percent of Americans are not happy. Soon, perhaps, with the help of psychopharmaceuticals, melancholics will become unknown. That would be an unparalleled tragedy, equivalent in scope to the annihilation of the sperm whale or the golden eagle. With no more melancholics, we would live in a world in which everyone simply accepted the status quo, in which everyone would simply be content with the given. This would constitute a nightmare worthy of Philip K. Dick, a police state of Pollyannas, a flatland that offers nothing new under the sun. Why are we pushing toward such a hellish condition?

The answer is simple: fear. Most hide behind a smile because they are afraid of facing the world’s complexity, its vagueness, its terrible beauties. If we stay safely ensconced behind our painted grins, then we won’t have to encounter the insecurities attendant upon dwelling in possibility, those anxious moments when one doesn’t know this from that, when one could suddenly become almost anything at all. Even though this anxiety, usually over death, is in the end exhilarating, a call to be creative, it is in the beginning rather horrifying, a feeling of hovering in an unpredictable abyss. Most of us habitually flee from that state of mind, try to lose ourselves in distraction and good cheer. We don inauthenticity as a mask, a disguise to protect us from the abyss.

You don’t need to look very far or wide to see the endless American pursuit of happiness: look at Amazon’s best sellers, check out an episode of Dr. Phil or Oprah, grab nearly any self-help book off the shelf at your local Borders. I’ve witnessed many people painting on happy faces that seem discordant with their circumstance and the larger worldstate, and the notion of inauthenticity quickly bubbles up into the conscious.

That’s not to say that happiness isn’t good or desirable or even virtuous. What’s missing from today’s sweeping “positive psychology” trend is the value of sadness, its place in the human emotional continuum, its contribution towards wisdom and a life lived in full. We are increasingly treating melancholy and sadness as an affliction in need of eradication, and that’s an unbalanced and unnatural objective. Do we really want a dystopian world full of Yin, completely devoid of the Yang? Do we really want a sterile, perma-smile society, accepting all that we have and never pushing to understand our world our ourselves through the natural mechanisms of self-actualization?

I certainly don’t.

Link: In Praise of Melancholy