Is our desire to be happy at the root of our suffering?
Disappointment is a uniquely human condition, the flip side of our capacity
for creativity and invention. Only humans “dream things that
never were” and “say ‘Why not?’ “ as George Bernard Shaw famously put
it. This capacity gives us flying machines and pocket computers. It also
gives us rising suicide rates in countries around the globe, from the
United States to India to New Zealand.
To be unhappy enough to end it all, a person must first imagine a condition
of greater happiness, then lose hope that the greater happiness can
be achieved. Anyone this side of Dr. Pangloss in his best of all possible
worlds can start down this dismal path. Because there is no limit to human
imagination, there is never a shortage of greener pastures.
Though we’re shocked when the rich and famous kill themselves, the Kate
Spades and the Anthony Bourdains, we shouldn’t be. Neither wealth nor
celebrity nor any other endowment quiets the human impulse to wish
some things were different than they are.
John Keats, for instance, was a handsome and massively talented young
man of 23 when he pronounced himself “half in love with easeful death.”
Ruminating on the sweetness of an unthinking nightingale’s song, he catalogued
just few of the disappointments of human consciousness:
“The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs . . .”
A strong case can be made that modern society does a poor job of preparing
21st-century humans for the inevitable ebb and flow of discontent.
Indeed, British therapist and philosopher James Davies has
buttressed that case formidably in a scholarly tome titled “The Importance
of Suffering,” and follow-up bestseller, “Cracked: Why Psychiatry is
Doing More Harm Than Good.”
Davies argues that we have created a culture that assumes happiness to
be the normal, healthy human condition. Deviations from the blissful
path — sadness, anxiety, disappointment — are thus treated as illnesses in
search of a cure. This “harmful cultural belief that much of our everyday
suffering is a damaging encumbrance best swiftly removed” gets in the
way of a more robust response, he writes: namely, approaching unpleasant
emotions as “potentially productive experiences to be engaged with
and learnt from.”
I would not go quite as far as Davies does in his skepticism of psychiatric
medicines; clinical depression and anxiety are serious illnesses that have
become more manageable with the help of prescription drugs. But he is
unquestionably right that these chemical compounds alone will not
make the world appreciably happier. Despite widespread use of the prescription
pad, we’re seeing an epidemic of opioid abuse and rising suicide
rates.
Historically, cultures have celebrated the value of endurance in the face
of suffering and the understanding that comes from adversity. This was
the bedrock on which Robert F. Kennedy stood during his finest hour,
when he broke the awful news of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder
to a predominately black audience in Indianapolis 50 years ago:
“My favorite poet was Aeschylus,” Kennedy said. “He wrote: ‘In our sleep,
pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our
own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of
God.’ “
Few leaders speak now of pain as a positive good. There’s scant room in
today’s Prosperity Gospel for Paul’s notion of the kind of “comfort, which
you experience when you patiently endure the same sufferings that we
suffer.” It’s hard to imagine a president writing, as Abraham Lincoln did
to a despondent young West Point cadet: “Your good mother tells me you
are feeling very badly in your new situation. Allow me to assure you it is
a perfect certainty that you will, very soon, feel better — quite happy — if
you only stick to the resolution you have taken.. . .”
Lincoln could write that with conviction because he knew the depths
firsthand. His friend Joshua Fry Speed grew so alarmed at young Lincoln’s
despondency that he removed every sharp implement from the future
president’s room. Biographer Joshua Wolf Shenk writes persuasively
that living with deep sadness was a key to Lincoln’s success: “With Lincoln
we have a man whose depression spurred him, painfully, to examine
the core of his soul; whose hard work to stay alive helped him develop
crucial skills and capacities . . . and whose inimitable character took
great strength from the piercing insights of depression . . . forged over
decades of deep suffering and earnest longing.”
© 2018, The Washington Post
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If you or a loved one feels suicidal, please seek help. The 24-hour
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