Yesterday, I wondered why we chase happiness, but don’t want to catch it. Perhaps we are clutching a big bundle of unhappiness and don’t want to put it down.
We are comfortable with unhappiness. Often, we think we deserve it. “Deserve” is one of those words I see a lot of on Facebook and wonder how people know who “deserves” and who doesn’t. Deserving is a way of giving people permission to feel an emotion they are going to feel anyway.
Back to why we clutch unhappiness. It fills up the empty space in our heart that happiness has avoided. It fills up time. We watch others have what we want, do what we would like to do, get the promotion we drooled after. Unhappiness is familiar. We confuse ‘familiar’ with ‘comfortable.’ And we live comfortably with unhappiness.
There’s one more reason why we hold unhappiness instead of letting it go. It gets more results. Share some joy on Facebook, and you get a few kind “likes.” Put up a tear-stained, painful post and people stand in line to comfort, advise, share their story or top your tale. Unhappiness gets results.
We’re an interesting folk. Chasing what we can’t catch and clutching what makes us miserable.
–Quinn McDonald wonders why people know that you can tell a joke just once and get people to laugh–the second time, it’s no longer funny. But an unhappy story makes us cry time and time again, without changing the situation.
QuinnCreative 
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Oh so right! We hang on to all sorts of miseries because they’re like a comfortable old shoe . . . and then one day we buy a new pair and find it affects our whole posture, the way we walk, the way we set out into the world! Small changes can challenge fiends disguised as old friends.
Very wise. Really well said, too.
Thank you Quinn, a real compliment from such an accomplished writer.
I can recognize good writing when I see it.
Shakespeare’s most produced plays are the tragedies: Hamlet is #1, Romeo and Juliette #2 and MacBeth and King Lear are tied for #3. Often we embrace other’s tales of woe so that we can feel better about our own state, or our escape from a similar situation. Even adventure stories contain large elements of, ‘Whew, I am sure glad that is NOT happening to me!” A lot of humor is based on things happening to other people, sometimes bad things. Look how many times people get hurt doing something on America’s Funniest Videos. Humans are odd.
I agree. It’s also the basis of a lot of “reality” shows–relief we have a better job or aren’t crazy or catty.
When I first saw the car that had been stolen and crashed I said “Poor woman, that car is IDENTICAL to mine” until I realized that it was actually my car. My brain couldn´t register it had happened to me.
That’s a common reaction–when we’ve been pickpocketed, we keep looking for the wallet because we can’t imagine it was stolen. It’s a good thing, actually, that we don’t immediately believe the bad thing that happened is about us and true. It shows optimism.
Also shows sanity; we don’t immediately believe the *less likely* thing that happened. Most of the time the wallet was just mislaid.
Good point.
I showed sanity? Cool. 😀
“Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”
-William Munny (Unforgiven)
And, “Luck’s got nothing to do with it, I worked damned hard!”
– Wendy
One of my favorite ideas.
“Talent’s got nothing to do with it. Persistence prevails.”
– don’t remember where I first heard this
Heh, heh. Good one.
I tried that one a few times when people commented about my kids but got negative reactions.
When people comment on my kids I say that it’s a combination of their work and mine . . . we did it together. 🙂
Totally agreed, we all put a lot of hours. Those hours were dismissed. They were well behaved because I was “lucky” and had great grades because they were “gifted”. The effort had got nothing to do with it.
Can you hear me rolling my eyes from here? I got that too, when FirstBorn was younger. I’m still rolling my eyes.
yup.
thank you so much for this post….have sister living with me who is so stuck in this place….has been a challenge…
Bless you for letting her stay.
with mom, dad and sister dolores all gone..and 13 years between us- [i left for college when she was 5], the challenge is to grow a healthy relationship.. i printed out your words, left them for her, also shared them with friends who do not get your posts. sister lives with the mentality that the glass is half empty and god will knock it over….
Happiness is a big threat to some people. They are afraid of it, afraid that if they are happy, they will become different. And it is true, they will. We all have a Story that we live. The story often makes other people in our lives wrong: “Mom never loved me enough.” And we prove how hurtful that was to us by choosing the life that continues to make us miserable. By constantly punishing the people who hurt us, we feel better. “See what you did that made my life awful?” We do this after the parents are gone, because it becomes our motivator, our fuel. Finding a different fuel is hard. It changes how we see life. It’s too much for some people. And it’s very, very sad.
I think negative draws a crowd because helping makes others feel good.
I think negative draws a crowd for the same reason a car wreck does–a combination of gore and relief that it wasn’t us. But that’s me in a more cynical mood.
Human brains make patterns; can’t help it. I think “deserving” is just a pattern to apply to create the appearance of making sense.
I find it prissy.
OK, spill, just how many words DO you know, anyway? 🙂
Four. But I love nuance.
Oddly enough I have a good friend who works at Nuance!
Wait, wait, there has to be a joke I can make here somehow.
A C, an E-flat, and a G walk into a bar….