Do You Suffer From This Disorder?
The pursuit of unhappiness, especially your own. Please kindly don’t show up at my house. But wait, there’s more.
During some research for another article, I came across a bit of intriguing information about a rather little-known psychiatric disorder that might explain some of what I’m seeing on Medium and elsewhere.
The disorder is called Cherophobia, which is when a person has an irrational aversion to being happy.
From this website:
The term comes from the Greek word “chero,” which means “to rejoice.” When a person experiences cherophobia, they’re often afraid to participate in activities that many would characterize as fun, or of being happy.
Based on many of the titles I see, some of the articles I start and promptly dump, it seems that not only should this be formally classified but it also seems to be spreading fast.
While it’s true that misery loves company, the tendency is to want to drag others down with you. That probably deserves its own psychiatric definition.
I don’t wanna be happy and I sure as hell don’t want YOU to be happy either.
While that doesn’t fall into the definition, it sure can feel like it sometimes.
A friend once called me a “jubilant person.” I love that. Doesn’t mean I’m happy dappy all the time, nor does it mean that I am irrationally happy. Irrational at times, sure. But my default setting is joyful, if for no other reason than that so far, there have been plenty of close scrapes with imminent death, and far too many close calls with wanting to end it myself.
What time I have left, the hours and days and weeks and years left to me are pretty precious. I like doing things which deepen the crevasses of my smile lines.
We seem to believe in my birth country that we have a right to happiness, or at least the the pursuit of it, since some slave-owning wags put those words into our incorporating paperwork, if you will.
We did a damned good job of making others righteously miserable on the path to make ourselves happy at other’s expense. We cost them their land, livelihood, lives and futures in remarkably cavalier ways, only getting annoyed when said folks dared to complain, speak out or, gasp, fight back.
How dare they get in the way of our Divine Destiny to be righteously happy no matter the cost to the rest of the world?
Over time, we in this supposed happy place of such blessedly lucky and ever so special people- just ever so much more special and superior and unique than anyone else on the planet- ended up below some eighteen other countries whose happiness quotient is a good bit better than ours.
Call me nuts, but it seems we’re slipping. And farther and faster every year. Imagine that.
To that, this:
From the article:
“We’re always convinced we’re exceptional. And now it seems to me we’re exceptional in our stupidity more than anything else,” says Carol Graham. Graham is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings institute, a think tank specializing in social sciences; Graham’s expertise is in measuring American wellbeing.
…The happiest countries are the ones who do have the highest levels of a whole range of things,” says John Helliwell, an editor of The World Happiness Report and professor emeritus of the Vancouver School of Economics. “They include, especially, a willingness to trust each other to work for each other, and to come together in times of difficulty.” (author bolded).
They kinda nail it.
A country where a state, my state, has counties that are so red they can’t bear to sit inside the same boundaries as those Terrible Blue Folks over on the other side, well. That’s cyanophobia, in fact, the fear of the color blue.
And just to be fair, the folks on the western side of the state, at least some, are just as phobic about those Red folks, which makes them affected by erythrophobia, or fear of red. Can’t make this shit up.
Key word: irrational.
Stupid people, and that’s a virus spreading faster than the Delta variant (I’ve had my share and am still getting infected regularly) do stupid shit, get bad results and blame others for their issues. That doesn’t lead to happiness (Nor did it lead to MAGA, but I digress)unless, of course, you can find lots of folks who can’t fight back to blame for your lack of happiness. Or generosity, for that matter. Or common sense, or decency, or brains, but what do they have to do with anything?
There is a fear of being stupid or thought stupid (stultophobia, no really) and then there are just SO many folks running around proving it that you truly have nothing to fear. For my part I just need to keep my mouth shut or prove it. For others, Fox News does just fine.
But then there’s this:
Look. Usually it’s us girls who have phobias about swimsuits but stupid knows no bounds.
And, under normal circumstances, most normal men are quite happy to see women in bikinis, but this is America, where the pursuit of unhappiness is becoming a thing. To that, there is…
Or, sapiophobia, fear of smart people, which infects all the trolls who bark at all those writers on Medium who actually have something to say, which is very different from sapiosexual, which in my book means smart enough not to believe a man when he brags about the size of his penis.
But then those anti-vaxxer folks are likely using ivermectin,which is for worms in large animals, and as a result their penises fell off. Okay I made that up. But their evangelist friends are Googling how to replace and inflate said penises for them. They of course have PDD, or small penis syndrome:
I didn’t have to make that up.
Actually I suffer from dumasphobia which is a terrible fear of dumb people, which means I have an anxiety attack every time I look in the mirror.
Lotta new phobias out there with new ones popping up daily.
My guess, there will be brand new ones for those of us terrified of leaving the house and being too close to the unvaccinated.
Then there has to be a brand new one for anti-vaxxrs who are terrified of being too close to someone with a mask. Oh. Wait. That’s
And you thought I was making that up.
Then there has to be one for…..you get it.
We are so committed to being labeled as anxious with our special version of psychosis we’re anxious about not having a label, which needs its own phobia, the fear of not having labels to identify our anxiety disorder, to make us even more special.
We’re seem to be happiest being anxious about not being happy, which we are supposed to be if we’re truly good Americans.
I’m happy for you.
