Reply #49

You relieved some existential isolation for me this morning, as I made a similar choice a number of years ago and thought I was pretty much the only one out there who thought this way. I no longer resist feeling my emotions, whether they are negative or positive, and I no longer subscribe to the normative American belief that some vague notion of "happiness" is the meaning of life or that sadness, etc. is something abnormal. Mostly I just work on accepting reality as it is, and in cases where something must be done, I work on addressing what I feel is the situational cause of the emotion rather than the emotion itself.

My analogy is the pain caused by putting one's hand on a hot stove - the pain itself is not the problem; rather the problem is that I put my hand on the hot stove. The pain is a highly functional mechanism that lets me know when something in my environment or my own behavior is dysfunctional. If I remove the pain instead of removing my hand from the stove, I have both disrupted that functional mechanism and am continuing to harm myself. It is the same with emotional pain - it's there to tell me that something is wrong with my environment and/or behavior. It's not something bad, abnormal, or dysfunctional, and it should be accepted and attended to rather than ignored, medicated, or shoved away.

In any case, however, I do not chase so-called "happiness", or assume that if I am not happy 24-7 that something is wrong with me. It's been working out ok for me for about a decade now. I do not see mental health professionals, and I do not take medications. I just accept reality and do the best I can for other people and myself. I am not always "happy", and I am not in any sort of denial about the darkness of the world. Sometimes I am sad and angry, and that is ok too. I just fix what I can and accept the rest as the reality of life.

Have you read Barbara Ehrenreich's book "Brightsided"? It's about her belief that our insistence on "positivity" and "happiness" at the expense of facing and dealing with reality is actually very harmful to us as a society. If you haven't read it yet, I strongly recommend it. There is another book that recently came out about this topic - "The antidote: Happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking", by Oliver Burkeman. Someone gave it to me as a Christmas gift, but I haven't had the chance to read it yet.