You Aren’t Happy, But That Doesn’t Mean You’re Sad

In times of simplicity, one has to wonder why chaos is sought. We constantly search for pain, even when it keeps us from the very thing we desire: happiness. Is joy not an intense enough emotion to satisfy our hungry hearts? Do our souls crave more than smiles? Must they relish only in streams of tears, satisfied only when puddles form beneath our feet? Even when everything is going right—every light green, every day filled with sun, every breath an exhale—an emptiness still remains.

Some refer to this familiar cycle as self-sabotage. Philosophers may call it moral masochism. Both ideas attempt to answer the question: Is there pleasure in pain? Perhaps the comfort lies in the familiar. Humans know pain; the human experience is submerged in suffering, after all. We are born into this world with tears staining our freshly formed skin. Crying comes before smiling; pain comes before pleasure; despair comes before joy.

There is nothing wrong in my life at the moment (nothing major, anyhow). I have a job, a car, a roof over my head. I am aware of my privileges and grateful for what I possess. Yet still, knowing I should be happy is not enough to make me so. It’s like giving a turtle the ability to run, yet it still loses the race. Maybe possessions are not enough to elicit a character change. People are not art: a single brushstroke or a shift in color palette cannot transform the entire painting. And with nothing “wrong” in my life, the logical conclusion would be that I am happy. But I am beginning to realize we are more complex than that.

Human emotion is not a simple equation where the absence of a negative input produces a positive outcome. You can have all the positives in the world and still, in some unexplainable way, feel a negative emotion. There is no strict logic, no hack, no concrete answer. Of course, neuroscience can explain things like neurotransmitters and which parts of the brain activate with which emotion. But can it explain why I can feel happier eating a bowl of cereal at 2 a.m. than attending a concert by one of my favorite artists? I’m sure science will attempt an explanation, but it goes against what the obvious equation would predict. Why would a mundane, lonely task elicit more joy than an exciting, thrilling one? We could dive into theories of personality and psychoanalysis, picking apart a million ways to justify the emotion. I’m sure an answer, or at least a theory, could be found somewhere in that search. Yet still, it seems illogical that a positive experience can produce a negative effect.

All of this is to say: we are complex. And in those complexities lie intrigue, riddles, mysteries, and wonders.

This doesn’t mean it’s all hopeless and that no matter how hard we try to be happy, we will always seek pain because it is inherent (though that’s has been my main line of argument thus far). What I am suggesting instead is that maybe some parts of us are not meant to be understood. Maybe the real beauty of being human lies in the unanswered questions and the unsolvable equations. Perhaps it is the attempt to solve the equation that drives us back into pain. Dead ends on the road to happiness are bound to leave anyone hopeless.

“Good things are happening, so I should feel happy.” Should—an expectation. Expectation—a setup for disappointment. Not every experience calls for the same broad emotion. In language, emotions are placed in opposition, so when we don’t feel the “correct” one, we assume it must be the opposite. Like a pendulum, we swing from extreme to extreme.

It’s limiting, the words we have for emotions. We feel so many, yet we have so few words to describe them. That is where art enters the human experience. Artists paint to convey beauty because words like “pretty” and “beautiful” fail to capture essence. Writers fill novels with thousands of words to explain love because “happiness” simply doesn’t swing far enough on the pendulum to express its intensity.

So maybe you aren’t happy. But that doesn’t mean you are sad. It may simply mean that language has no word vast enough to describe your limitless soul.