I strive to take Integral approaches to issues in ordinary life, culture, politics, sexuality, and spirituality. A graduate of Harvard University and The Divinity School at the University of Chicago, I have worked as a writer for more than 15 years. 
Does happiness breed blandness?
August 23rd, 2008 by Joe PerezThere’s a problem with associating the impulse towards integration primarily with progress, growth, transcendence, and enlightenment. Those spiritual impulses may enable our potential, but they don’t embrace what’s actual. A more grounded spirituality marries spirit and soul–the impulses towards both evolution and involution. Happiness may be a sign of spiritual contentment, but not if it’s divorced from the natural need to express the full range of human emotions, including sadness.
A poignant article on the subject of America’s obsession with happiness and its harmful consequences has been written by Eric G. Wilson, a professor of English at Wake Forest University. Here are a few short passages concerning the virtues of melancholia:
Sphere: Related ContentI 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.
I’m not questioning joy in general. For instance, I’m not challenging that unbearable exuberance that suddenly emerges from long suffering. I’m not troubled by that hard-earned tranquillity that comes from long meditation on the world’s sorrows. I’m not criticizing that slow-burning bliss that issues from a life spent helping those who hurt. And I’m not romanticizing clinical depression. I realize that there are many lost souls out there who require medication to keep from killing themselves or harming their friends and families. I’m not questioning pharmaceutical therapies for the seriously depressed or simply to make existence bearable for so many with biochemical disorders.
Tags: emotions, psychology, soul, spirituality
August 27th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
Have you heard David Byrne’s song “Sad Song”?
“Well there are those who are happy
And there are those who are wise
But it’s the truly sad people
Who get the most out of life”
I find it a strangely happy, playful song.
Of course I agree with you. Only when we embrace ALL are we truly full-filled. That includes all the suffering, pain in the world, my own and others. Who wouldn’t feel sad by that!?
I am a little bothered by Eric Wilson’s article for one reason, though. It seems to be a bit of a reaction, as opposed to a response, to our culture’s inherent shallowness and people’s resistance to their own suffering. In his final paragraph he writes: “To be against happiness is to embrace ecstasy.” What Eric is longing for is a deeper happiness. Something like True Happiness. In the sense that: Ecstasy is Happiness. He wants to grow, to evolve, and he correctly intuits that in order to do that he has to include and embrace more of Life - more than what is generally required by the culture around him. But to be “against” happiness, even the shallow version society is addicted to - well, doesn’t that seem to be throwing the baby out with the bath water?
October 14th, 2008 at 9:22 am
Good blog, thank you for posting this article…