Sometimes, I can't help but feel that our world is excessively obsessed with happiness.
I say that not as a criticism of happiness — because being happy is a nice thing! — but I say that because we often seem to live inside a reality where happiness becomes the only acceptable emotion.
I also say this because when I look back across my life, many of the defining moments that stand out in my memory have definitely not been happy and, if anything, they have been somewhat sad and even tragic.
But I don't think that has ever been a reason to avoid them. Why you would so actively avoid sadness is a bit of a mystery to me. Embrace the sadness. Experience it.
Whereas that might sound off-putting to some folks, my immediate reaction to that is "why not?" Why should we not be allowed to fully experience our sadness?
The mental health industry seems to have a bias towards labeling anything that resembles sadness as "depression," and if people are sad for more than a few moments, they are generally medicated into oblivion because we can't have people going around being sad.
Perhaps it's more of a western industrialized nations thing, but it often feels like there's an "unseen force" that promotes the idea that if we are allowed to experience our sadness we are somehow casting doubts and shadows over the Eternal Quest for Happiness that's always in front of us, and all the attendant commercialism that goes with it.
Maybe I'm just too cynical.
What I find myself thinking about is the changing landscape of what we might call "the normal spectrum of human experience." We are removing a lot of things that were once considered part of normal human life and instead labeling them as "disorders" and "syndromes."
Personally speaking, I was often perceived to be a "sad boy," when I was little and growing up. Even Mrs. Denmarkguy has occasionally remarked that I seem to have an "undercurrent of sadness" in my personality.
I have never disputed or denied it.
What I have disputed is that it's a bad thing. Maybe I'm "weird," but I have often found great beauty in the intensity of sadness.
And it's definitely not depressing. I know depression... and it's a whole different ball of wax!
I was not actually raised in a very "emotional" family... in fact, quite the opposite. Most of the people around me avoided their feelings, and lived life purely by logic and common sense.
I mention this only because a lot of them had "mental health issues," a couple to the point of suicide and/or needing to be institutionalized.
As a teenager, I remember keeping journals... and one time my mom read some of them and immediately "went to work" on me to try to "correct" my mindset because much of what I had written seemed "inappropriately depressing," in her estimation.
I suppose that what she was really doing was trying to "erase" any signs that we might be anything other than a happy shiny family.
It just seemed so odd, to me. And this was even before (1970s) the whole idea of "mandated" shiny happy people became the societal norm!
I guess I am just reluctant around the entire idea of limiting the range of human emotional experience, for whatever reasons. Maybe those reasons are sinister... after all, depressed people are less likely buy stuff. Yes, I'm cynical...
Odd as it may sound, I enjoy my feelings of sadness when they come up... and I don't deny that they are sad, even if that make some people a little uncomfortable.
I'm just a human being, having a human experience.
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your weekend!
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Created at 2024-01-27 23:10 PST
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