Happiness: Enough Already

http://www.newswI have to make up a case here. While happiness must not be a ending in itself, likely money, it is highly desirable and even vital to human being. A certain level of happiness, must be said. If you, sadness defendant, give yourself the work to review the books out there you'll find that you are generalizing. I've lost my father four year ago, since there I met hell. I was wondering if I was condemned to spend the rest of my life as a dull boy, without any joy or meaning, that is what I felt. With that I lost relationships (because people don't wanna live with sad others), money (in binge action), jobs (I felt so discontent that I was extremely non-productive) and gain lots of fat (I would go binge eating to try to feel some relief). So I discovered the studies behind Positive Psychology and it literally give me the tools to build strength and a holly new perception of the world and of the problems, including the wrong way I was dealing with grief. My father died from severe major depression. I had it following his death. From this point of view I can assure: to understand depression you MUST firs have the experience to live near to someone who has and after you must experience it yourself. This way you can understand what depression really is. I used to think my father was weak and things like that, and I thank that way until he died. So, just now, I know what to be really depressive feel like. I've read: Authentic Happiness, Learned Optimism (both from M. Seligman), Women who Think So Much (from Nolen-Hoeksema) and Flow (from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi). Further I read lots of master and doctorate thesis I found on the internet, things regarding learned helplessness, flow, rumination (specially a piece from Nolen-Hoeksema with Barbara Fredrickson called "Rethinking Rumination"). Neither of this literature suggested me to be a 90 or 100% happy person. I found so much suggestions to use pessimism, or realism, wherever necessary. Even there are suggestions on how to evaluate each situation so oneself can decide. I also suggest the reading of Daniel Gilbert's as a counter-balance and food for tough. I'm 30, from Brazil, almost lost my life to sadness and I'm here to assure: Happiness, with moderation and responsibility, have the power to change one's life!

Hey, Slacker Gen XYZ, get off yourself, you aint such a much. In fact, you are the sole responsible reason for todays malady's. You're a whiney, little-minded jerk. Oh, woe,,,,alas and alack. You don't need therapy, you need to get a spine.

I have found that focusing too much on happiness can actually cause us to be less happy, because we spend less time in self-evaluation and more time actually living. Here is an article that sums this up:
http://spiritualinquiry.com/articles/the-dangers-of-a-happiness-obsession/

As one part of our moods, grieving cannot be deserted by us. The last words in this article describe sadness as the pain to body. Excellent! It is possible for us to accept more frustrations in our life, and know how to get the success. The reason is simple.

hi, want to say thanks to all who have shared since i first commented on 2/12/08. i worte a response to Laura with thanks to all of you who offered encouragement and shared your thoughts and experiences, but it disappeared before being properly submitted. tried everything to retrieve it...
i don't want to waste my life. if you know of any helpful organizations for temp. housing and for employment in Atlanta, Cobb County, please share with me. i will appreciate all help because i think/feel like i am struggling alone. i wish i could get on my feet and support myself again. just don't know how i will ever be able to be happy without at least one of my children in my life. i feel like no one loves, cares about, needs or wants me. now, however, i feel like there are people out there who care just like i care about all hurting people. i thought i would be able to help others if i could ever get my life together. thanks again.

I apologise for all the question marks in my post. When I pasted this in, they were apostrophes but for some reason it posted it with question marks.

If wanting to cut part of your ear off when you???re upset is the price to pay for a great muse, I think I???ll pass. But for the most part, I agree with this article. I embrace pessimistic and cynical attitudes. How else would we enjoy dark humour and satire?
I???m not sure if I???m an optimist or a pessimist overall. I have many days when I get up in the morning and find something in my day to look forward to and I tell myself, ???Today will be a good day.??? But I can also be quite negative sometimes. I don???t play the ???woe is me??? card and try to get people who have bigger problems than I do to feel sorry for me -- but if I have a negative attitude about something, I don???t bother hiding it. If I hide how I feel about something, isn???t that just phoniness?
And here???s another thing: We humans ENJOY complaining. And to a certain extent, we should. If it???s not done excessively, complaining can be a way to vent feelings and avoid building up frustration. There???s no need for positive thoughts to be omnipresent. A few years ago, when I was in junior high, we went to the gymnasium for a foolish session on a then recently published self-help book. One of the teachers doing the presentation mentioned that if someone breaks up with you, you shouldn???t allow it to ruin your day! What kind of emotionless freak would not have a bad day as a result of a break-up? Why is it that having a bad day now and then is considered so unacceptable and unnecessary now? Besides, might not all this effort to completely alter one???s way of thinking, as promoted by the cult-like touters of The Secret, be much more time-consuming and frustrating than it is actually worth? Let???s face it - some people are just naturally more positive than others, and life would just be boring if we all demonstrated the same positive attitudes.
I agree with what it says in the article, that people who are perpetually happy are a bit stupid or ???not experiencing the fullness of the human condition???. I???m not saying that to be mean or elitist, but it???s true. People I have encountered who laugh the easiest and seem to be the happiest are also people who contribute little or nothing to intellectual discussions.
Well, that???s my opinion. This was an interesting article which evoked interesting discussion.

There is a simple truth: if we don't feel our grief, our sadness, we won't recognize real joy when it arises. Our society is predicated on a "feelgood" mentality which leads us farther and farther away from reality. We miss the experience of what life really is.

But many seem to feel that science and medicine will provide an answer for everything from feeling bad, to crime, even death itself. Some of the younger among us might even entertain the notion that someday they'll find a cure for every possible thing, including aging, and will be able to prolong both our lifespans and our quality of life indefinitely.

I'm a firm believer in the ability of science and medicine to do great things for us. But I'm also a realist.

I know I'll die someday, and I've learned recently that even the simple step of keeping the thought of my own death in my mind, is of great benefit to how I live my life each day.

I remember (at least in part) how on 9/11, I not only felt the shock and disbelief of those events, but it made me stop and think for a moment about what really mattered most to me. Nothing felt better than to hold my wife when she got home from work that day, and after becoming over saturated with all of the news coverage and airing and re-airing of the buildings coming down, we both decided to turn off the TV and took a moment to go outside, watch the sunset, and feel truly grateful just to be alive, with a warm place to sleep, and food on the table.

I realized later (after some serious reading on the subjects of anxiety, free will and death) that being confronted with that much death had shaken me (and so many of us) to our foundations, and in the end, though words can't express the tragedy of those events, the effect on our souls wasn't necessarily a bad thing.

Seeing those towers fall and realizing so many lives had just come to a sudden end before my eyes, put my own death right in front of me, though I didn't know it, and repressed it at the time. But with my own mortality plainly in sight, what mattered most became much clearer.

I'd go on but I'm just a bumbling fool, in my ability to express this compared to someone like Peter Koestenbaum, whose clarity on these topics has realy helped me to avoid allowing my own feelings of depression to lead me down a darker path then the one I tread today.

You can check out Peter's weekly leadership thought as well as other selected writings and resources at www.pib.net

I like how amystriz6 put it: "This is a matter of living an authentic life. Easy to say, difficult to live? I'm willing to give it a try."

"Anxiety freely accepted translates into strength difficult to dislodge. Anxiety, far from being a sickness, is the actual experience of being strong, of growing, of building character, of achieving pride. And those are the final values of life, not shallow pleasure, but solid personality."

"Managing anxiety requires reframing it from being an illness to being an essential step toward health. The breakthrough point to remember is that optimum pain -- the right amount of anxiety -- is exactly how growth feels. Too much anxiety leads to either escape or collapse, and not enough anxiety yields no growth."

The above is quoted from and article on anxiety by Peter Koestenbaum http://www.pib.net/articles/anxiety.htm

I think you could read this, replacing "anxiety" with "sadness" and it would still have the same ring of truth to it.

We certainly can not ignore the realities of actual clinical depression and the need for medication in some situations to help people who do not respond to other types of therapy. But I'm no professional on the topic so don't take my word for it.

But I have to agree with the general sentiment of the article that perhaps our culture has taken us off course on the ways in which we view and deal with sadness.

This is not to say that everyone is at the same place on this, because we're all unique in our experiences and what we've learned at whatever stage of life we are at.

I think this article makes a good point in saying that we (personally and culturally) should not ignore or discount our feelings of sadness. As humans, we have a wide range of emotions that serve specific purposes. However, I don't think we can label any emotion as good or bad. Each feeling we have is valid simply because we feel it.

Judging our emotions creates unnecessary discord within us. We experience additional feelings of guilt, insecurity, worry, etc. Trying to feel a certain way (blissful) when we feel another (depressed) also creates discord. Performing tasks or engaging in activities our culture deems positive, does not necessarily make us happy. We can't fake it. Our hearts know better.

A consistent state of well-being doesn't come from feeling happy 100% of the time. Perhaps it is derived from being honest with ourselves about how we are feeling, and allowing ourselves to actually feel the emotion instead of immediately trying to fight against it. Think of a child. When they are angry, they scream. When they are sad, they cry. When they are happy, they laugh. They feel their emotions, process them, then move on. They do not try to be or act a certain way. They are true to themselves.

As adults, we can live in accordance with who we truly are in each moment. We might just feel a greater sense of relief and well-being because of it. This is not a debate of happy or sad. This is a matter of living an authentic life.

Easy to say, difficult to live? I'm willing to give it a try.

Mabye its about time we give up the notion that happiness should be a constant in our lives. We have been led down a primrose path by those who tell us that the latest bauble will give us a sense of personal well being, only to find that we have financed our own misery at 22%. Perhaps we should look at the grey days as hidden lessons which remind us that we realy do have a lot to be thankfull for. Remember, it was after Christ's suffering in the garden, when all had deserted him and he was betrayed by one he trusted, that he gave us the gift of redemption on the cross.

This is how we get over a chapter and we enter another.