You Don't Need to be Happy All the Time

Leaving the comfort to search for meaning

There is increasing pressure nowadays to be happy and positive all the time. There is a myriad of hacks and tricks online to banish all negative emotions. Whatever doubts or fears you have are deemed toxic and need to be eliminated.

This creates a lot of tension in many people because that’s simply not possible. Reality is filled with suffering, and what you do through forcing positivity is simply banishing necessary feelings.

There won’t be long until those feelings blast out, leading to a crisis, mental breakdown, or worse.

Your feelings are your life’s compass

The fundamental reason you shouldn’t deny what you feel and listen to it is that it represents something about your current situation. Whether that is of the domain or mind or the reality outside, it depends, but your feelings carry valuable information that can help you.

You might feel angry and depressed because you hate your job, your relationship might not be working, and you’ve gained weight.

Simply lying to yourself that everything is alright and ignoring what screams inside you will only lead to disaster.

You might also lose who you are. We don’t understand where all our desires, feelings, and thoughts come from, but it is clear that they have roots deep inside us.

Trying to brainwash yourself with positivity might change your choices, creating a gap between who you really want to be and who you are.

According to a psychological existential-humanistic perspective, that is the conflict that leaves the door open for developing a mental disorder.

You have to get in touch with your feelings, understand them, and learn from them.

Your life’s meaning might be just around the gates of suffering

Always pursuing happiness and pleasure can lead to a hedonic lifestyle. Where you embrace comfort and try to run from anything that can bring you down.

I don’t think this strategy works in the long run. Your life’s meaning can easily get buried under the pursuit of things that don’t matter.

“That kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest.”

-Viktor Frankl, ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’.

Furthermore, no life is sheltered by the tragedy of life, and sooner or later, almost everyone encounters it, no matter how rich or poor.

Being on the path towards what is meaningful to you, with all its negative and positive emotions, is the thing that will keep your life filled with purpose and make you resilient in the face of what could happen.

I believe that forcing positivity upon yourself is just feeding an illusory reality. A reality where there is nothing wrong happening. A reality where everything is alright.

That reality doesn’t exist. The central teaching of Buddhism and many other religions is that life is suffering.

Even though it is a harsh truth, it doesn’t make it less real.

Nevertheless, I think there is a lot of happiness to be found in aligning yourself with a path of meaning. Accepting your feelings and learning from them will bring your inner self into the light, guiding you towards what truly matters in your life

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