The three types of unhappiness (Part 2)

Continued from Part 1

In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson suggests that when we decide what to give a f*ck about in the brief time allotted to us on this earth, we shouldn’t focus on the (hedonic) pleasure we want. Instead we should ask ourselves, what pain am I willing to endure to get what I want? Manson writes, ‘what we get out of life is not determined by the good feelings we desire, but by what bad feelings we’re willing and able to sustain to get us to those good feelings’.

So, for example, if I am deciding whether or not to write and publish a blog post, instead of focussing on the desire for recognition, praise, and accomplishment, I need to ask myself, do I want the pain of criticism, frustration, and time taken away from other pleasurable activities? Or, to use Mary Oliver’s phrasing, am I willing to carry the bag of stones no matter how much the hour calls for dancing?

This is the first form of unhappiness, which I will call necessary pain. It’s the pain of vulnerability, the ‘willingness to show up and be seen with no guarantee of outcome’, which Brené Brown says is ‘the only path to more love, belonging, and joy.’ While it might feel like anguish or anxiety, framing this type of unhappiness as necessary pain, even desired pain, can help us take control of our feelings. We actually want this pain, we have brought it on ourselves, we have endured it before and we will endure it again.

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The second type of unhappiness we neither want nor choose, but it can still be useful to us. This is the suffering that comes from life events beyond our control: the illness of a loved one, harassment at work, being trolled on social media. In short, a calamity, often unpredictable, and not of our making. Of course, these things will make us unhappy. And they should. Grief, sadness and anger are necessary and healthy responses to such situations. I call this natural unhappiness. Natural in the sense that it happens to all of us.

During one of his guided loving-kindness (or metta) meditations on the Waking Up app, Sam Harris reminds us that all of us will one day lose someone close to us and each of us will surely die. We cannot avoid, nor should we try to avoid, such unhappiness. In fact, leaning in and opening ourselves to the pain is a core element of psychological and spiritual growth. According to William Irvine, the Stoics discovered that ‘by thinking of setbacks as tests of our character, we can dramatically alter our emotional response to them.’ Trying to make sense of suffering renders it less potent. The sting of death is not our sins, as the Bible would have it, but our tendency to deny its existence.

Continued in Part 3