Making Space for Unhappiness
Image via Cristina Gottardi
Irvin Yalom tells a story about the writer Andre Malraux asking a parish priest what he had learned about mankind after taking confession for 50 years. “First of all,” the priest replied, “people are much more unhappy than one thinks…and then the fundamental fact is that there is no such thing as a grown up person.”
This brief little story is interesting for many reasons, not the least of which is that one wonders if this is really what the priest said, or if it is only what Malraux heard. Words have a tendency to take on distinct shapes and different meanings when filtered through the lens of experience. In the case of Malraux, experience was anchored by the early divorce of his parents and the subsequent suicide of his father following the stock market crash of 1929. After that came the multifaceted devastation of The Great Depression and the second world war. All of this happened during Malraux’s early years and provided the context in which his life would be situated.
Whether the priest said this or not, Malraux did not have to look far or wide for the evidence of unhappiness in the multitude of lives scarred by overwhelming amounts of adversity. Proof was all around. It is possible Malraux, capable of being boisterous and shy, reserved and full of action, understood the priest to be answering a question about himself, which essentially he was. Questions about mankind tend to conceal something personal about the person who asks. Some questions double as a type of confession.
Regardless of his intent, the answers given are interesting from a psychological standpoint. To say that people are more unhappy than we think is different than making the obvious observation that people are unhappy. The wording of the response gets at something else, namely our tendency to hide our unhappiness from others. We are primarily driven to do this by two emotions, fear and guilt.
FEAR & THE ENTERTAINER
The popular entertainer represents many things in society, some positive and some negative. Because of their public status they are easily signified upon by others. This process of signifying is a part of the ongoing exchange that takes place between the entertainer and society. The primary goal of the entertainer is to provide their own stylized version of fun to the masses, but they can also represent other things besides having a good time. They can be symbols of hope, and they can be cautionary tales, which is the part that is most relevant to this discussion. When we talk about the disastrous effects of hiding your feelings it is usually in reference to some tragic event involving an entertainer or some other public figure. Losses like Robin Williams come to mind, but others losses have also occurred more recently. The public’s reaction to these events tends to be a microcosm of grief, ranging from anger, confusion, shock, and abject denial.
It begs the question of why and how it can be so late, and sometimes too late, when we discover the fact of someone’s painful unhappiness? Fear comes into play because of the natural tendency to compare, which all animals must do on some level in order to survive, but none with the toxic efficiency of human beings. Hasty judgments used to keep us safe and in some cases they still do, but measuring our social status against others and feeling the need to hide certain feelings out of embarrassment does not move the pendulum of our safety in any direction. Or at least it shouldn’t, but the truth is that realities, whether real or imagined, do sometimes produce terrible effects. To think of yourself as unhappy is an essential ingredient, maybe the only ingredient, needed to be unhappy, regardless of the context.
Fear might not be so consequential if people could talk more openly about their struggles and find common ground, since unhappiness rests on a negative view of difference. Having someone join in your unhappiness with their own, or simply show a willingness to bear witness to it has the effect of shrinking the difference, of chipping away at it.
Without this support, one’s mind can become like a hardened shell without any cracks or crevices where light can get inside. The only sensation becomes the unpleasant echo of your own self-defeating thoughts. In this mental state the cost of revealing ourselves is judged to be too high because of what happened last time, every other time, becomes the symbol for what will happen every time. Rather than risk hurt and rejection, our thoughts push us towards a self-imposed exile.
Terrible as that sounds, I have no doubt it is the mind's way of trying to help us survive, and it is impressive that beings who are fundamentally social can and do indeed survive in isolation for significant lengths of time. But the overconsumption of fear as a motivating factor and the overreliance on isolation as a coping strategy force you to pay a heavy price.
GUILT
Apart from being afraid, we are also embarrassed to acknowledge the fact of our unhappiness. Even though our thoughts and ideas about happiness are not much better than second-hand sketches handed down to us by people who themselves are unskilled in the art of happiness, we take them very seriously. We believe that being anything less than happy as we have lazily imagined it is to be a failure. Instead of realizing that happiness and unhappiness are informed by chance and circumstance we view them as being solely the product of our own decisions. Therefore, if I’m unhappy, I’ve done something wrong.
This idea is so popular because it aligns with the way many of us naturally perceive events in childhood. As children we tend to exaggerate the amount of influence and control we have so that when things go well we have the confidence of “knowing” we made it happen. Unfortunately we use the same type of thinking when things don’t go well, assuming it is because we made it happen. As adults we usually make this judgment based on the same criteria we used as children–does it make me feel good or does it make me feel bad. Pair this type of infantile thinking with our other tendency to compare and it becomes easy to be personally convicted about one’s lack of happiness and choose to hide out of a sense that you are doing something wrong.
COMING TO TERMS
Maybe you have done something wrong. That is sometimes the case and in those instances guilt does serve an important function in helping us to correct our behavior. Guilt is not always an unearned emotion, but it is frequently a fabricated one. The benefit of being skeptical towards the feeling of guilt and occasionally bypassing it is that it allows you to be honest about what’s really going on, share it, and possibly experience relief for having done so.
It likely requires both personal and social changes to make being unhappy more acceptable and less of something deemed unacceptable and necessary to hide. Social pressure to perform, (especially online) seems to be at an all time high, so only the latter seems viable. A personal commitment to time spent in solitude and reflection balanced by the fostering of a few close relationships based on truth and honesty might be the best way not to get swept up in the tide.
Unpleasant as it may be, the reality is that human beings aren’t really designed to be happy. No more than we are designed to be angry or sad, brainiacs, or olympic athletes. We don’t come prepackaged. There are entire industries built on the singular hope that people will refuse to acknowledge that fact.
GROWING UP
The second half of the priest's answer is that there is no such thing as a grown-up person. A statement that essentially reduces comparison to a useless act. Compare yourself to what? To who? We are too biologically and psychologically complex to be stable in the full sense of the word. We are always moving. To compare is to judge yourself against something that isn’t there or won’t be in the next moment. Anyone who pretends otherwise, who pretends as if they have themselves all figured out, should be met with skepticism. The best that anyone can do is articulate their own experience through whatever method they like as long as it is arrived at through careful contemplation.
Going back to the title, this means that everyone at times is a patient in need of help from another, and everyone is also at times a guide helping point the way towards healing for someone else. Both labels are social constructs that should be held onto loosely. The fact that certain people are more likely to become patients than others is often because of reasons that have nothing to do with illness or wellness. The patient label is usually applied to whoever is most willing to speak up about their need for help at a given moment in time. The label can also be applied to the person for whom other people, for whatever reason, are willing to speak on behalf of. In either case the label is not necessarily for the person with the greatest need.
That priest really was speaking about all of us when he answered this question, himself included. Ultimately, there is no such thing as a grown up person because we are all still growing. Rather than being an excuse for perpetual immaturity, it is an opportunity for continuous self-exploration. The latter choice is how a person might one day find themselves outside of the unhappy rank and file the priest was talking about.