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Botnst · #1 08-21-2008, 09:34 PM

In Praise of Melancholy

American culture's overemphasis on happiness misses an essential part of a full life

By ERIC G. WILSON

Ours are ominous times. We are on the verge of eroding away our ozone layer. Within decades we could face major oceanic flooding. We are close to annihilating hundreds of exquisite animal species. Soon our forests will be as bland as pavement. Moreover, we now find ourselves on the verge of a new cold war.

But there is another threat, perhaps as dangerous: We are eradicating a major cultural force, the muse behind much art and poetry and music. We are annihilating melancholia.

A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that almost 85 percent of Americans believe that they are very happy or at least pretty happy. The psychological world is now abuzz with a new field, positive psychology, devoted to finding ways to enhance happiness through pleasure, engagement, and meaning. Psychologists practicing this brand of therapy are leaders in a novel science, the science of happiness. Mainstream publishers are learning from the self-help industry and printing thousands of books on how to be happy. Doctors offer a wide array of drugs that might eradicate depression forever. It seems truly an age of almost perfect contentment, a brave new world of persistent good fortune, joy without trouble, felicity with no penalty.

Why are most Americans so utterly willing to have an essential part of their hearts sliced away and discarded like so much waste? What are we to make of this American obsession with happiness, an obsession that could well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation? What drives this rage for complacency, this desperate contentment?

Surely all this happiness can't be for real. How can so many people be happy in the midst of all the problems that beset our globe — not only the collective and apocalyptic ills but also those particular irritations that bedevil our everyday existences, those money issues and marital spats, those stifling vocations and lonely dawns? Are we to believe that four out of every five Americans can be content amid the general woe? Are some people lying, or are they simply afraid to be honest in a culture in which the status quo is nothing short of manic bliss? Aren't we suspicious of this statistic? Aren't we further troubled by our culture's overemphasis on happiness? Don't we fear that this rabid focus on exuberance leads to half-lives, to bland existences, to wastelands of mechanistic behavior?

I for one am afraid that American culture's overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I further am concerned that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations. I am finally fearful of our society's efforts to expunge melancholia. Without the agitations of the soul, would all of our magnificently yearning towers topple? Would our heart-torn symphonies cease?

My fears grow out of my suspicion that the predominant form of American happiness breeds blandness. This kind of happiness appears to disregard the value of sadness. This brand of supposed joy, moreover, seems to foster an ignorance of life's enduring and vital polarity between agony and ecstasy, dejection and ebullience. Trying to forget sadness and its integral place in the great rhythm of the cosmos, this sort of happiness insinuates that the blues are an aberrant state that should be cursed as weakness of will or removed with the help of a little pink pill.

more at: http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=tk1twsk466pmt0m7fj6py116kyc71fhv

tonkovich · #2 08-21-2008, 10:32 PM

to everything there is a season,.....

Dee8go · #3 08-22-2008, 09:19 AM

You can't really have any ups if you haven't had any downs . . . At least you probably wouldn't be able to recognize the ups unless you had something with which to contrast them.

Mistress · #4 08-22-2008, 09:52 AM

The author needs an IV drip of Thorazine.

dynalow · #5 08-22-2008, 10:22 AM

Must be a democrat.

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/301/are-we-happy-yet

and or he chooses to be unhappy.....

http://www.livescience.com/health/060227_happiness_keys.html
It requires some effort to achieve a happy outlook on life, and most people don't make it."
—Author and researcher Gregg Easterbrook

Psychologists have recently handed the keys to happiness to the public, but many people cling to gloomy ways out of habit, experts say.

Polls show Americans are no happier today than they were 50 years ago despite significant increases in prosperity, decreases in crime, cleaner air, larger living quarters and a better overall quality of life.

So what gives?

Happiness is 50 percent genetic, says University of Minnesota researcher David Lykken. What you do with the other half of the challenge depends largely on determination, psychologists agree. As Abraham Lincoln once said, "Most people are as happy as they make up their minds to be."

What works, and what doesn't

Happiness does not come via prescription drugs, although 10 percent of women 18 and older and 4 percent of men take antidepressants, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Anti-depressants benefit those with mental illness but are no happiness guarantee, researchers say.

Nor will money or prosperity buy happiness for many of us. Money that lifts people out of poverty increases happiness, but after that, the better paychecks stop paying off sense-of-well-being dividends, research shows.

One route to more happiness is called "flow," an engrossing state that comes during creative or playful activity, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has found. Athletes, musicians, writers, gamers, and religious adherents know the feeling. It comes less from what you're doing than from how you do it.

Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California at Riverside has discovered that the road toward a more satisfying and meaningful life involves a recipe repeated in schools, churches and synagogues. Make lists of things for which you're grateful in your life, practice random acts of kindness, forgive your enemies, notice life's small pleasures, take care of your health, practice positive thinking, and invest time and energy into friendships and family.

The happiest people have strong friendships, says Ed Diener, a psychologist University of Illinois. Interestingly his research finds that most people are slightly to moderately happy, not unhappy.

On your own

Some Americans are reluctant to make these changes and remain unmotivated even though our freedom to pursue happiness is written into the preamble of the Declaration of Independence.
Don't count on the government, for now, Easterbrook says.

Our economy lacks the robustness to sustain policy changes that would bring about more happiness, like reorienting cities to minimize commute times.

The onus is on us.

"There are selfish reasons to behave in altruistic ways," says Gregg Easterbrook, author of "The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse" (Random House, 2004).

"Research shows that people who are grateful, optimistic and forgiving have better experiences with their lives, more happiness, fewer strokes, and higher incomes," according to Easterbrook. "If it makes world a better place at same time, this is a real bonus."

Diener has collected specific details on this. People who positively evaluate their well-being on average have stronger immune systems, are better citizens at work, earn more income, have better marriages, are more sociable, and cope better with difficulties.

Unhappy by default

Lethargy holds many people back from doing the things that lead to happiness.

Easterbrook, also a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institute, goes back to Freud, who theorized that unhappiness is a default condition because it takes less effort to be unhappy than to be happy.

"If you are looking for something to complain about, you are absolutely certain to find it," Easterbrook told LiveScience. "It requires some effort to achieve a happy outlook on life, and most people don't make it. Most people take the path of least resistance. Far too many people today don't make the steps to make their life more fulfilling one."

****
Sound advice this.

MY TURN
What Old Age Taught Me
Now in my golden years, I've learned that you can't know how to live until you know how to give.

By Kirk Douglas

........Depression is caused by thinking too much about yourself. Try to think of others, try to help them. You will be amazed how that lessens your depression. That satisfaction is priceless......

http://www.newsweek.com/id/150476

Dee8go · #6 08-22-2008, 10:25 AM

I'm amazed at how readily family doctors hand out prescriptions for antidepressants. I thought only psychiatrists used to prescribe those types of drugs.

dynalow · #7 08-22-2008, 10:29 AM

Doctor please, some more of these....
....Outside the door, she took four more......
What a drag it is getting old......
Hey!

Mistress · #8 08-22-2008, 10:38 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dynalow

Doctor please, some more of these....
....Outside the door, she took four more......
What a drag it is getting old......
Hey!

Keith Richards is a medical marvel.....he is a very happy fellow.

aklim · #9 08-22-2008, 12:09 PM

I'll be happy when I see a bunch of mindfawks tied to my rear hitch in my rear view mirror as I am going down the road.

aklim · #10 08-22-2008, 12:12 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dee8go

I'm amazed at how readily family doctors hand out prescriptions for antidepressants. I thought only psychiatrists used to prescribe those types of drugs.

Why? What makes you think the mindfawks are any better than the family doctors? My wife as an NP can prescribe anything up to Schedule II Narcotics which includes the psych drugs if she chooses to. Same as those mindfawks. Only supposedly, and I don't believe it for a moment, those clowns are supposed to know more about the human mind than NPs or Family MDs.

Put 50 of them in a room with 1 patient and you will have no less than a dozen different diagnosis and probably a bunch of "cures".

Botnst · #11 08-22-2008, 05:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dee8go

You can't really have any ups if you haven't had any downs . . . At least you probably wouldn't be able to recognize the ups unless you had something with which to contrast them.

That's why I used to smoke. Life was so good.....I kept wanting to have a cigarette when I was finished.