Explaining Unhappiness

August 7, 2020

Unhappiness - The Final Explanation

<p>Although explanations for unhappiness vary from culture to culture, the core experience of negative emotional states does not. A psychological problem is synonymous with being unhappy. It would be a perversion of language and experience to deny that unhappiness is an awareness of feeling bad, which means that anyone who says that they are unhappy is feeling in a way that they don’t want and would like not to –– if such were possible. This parsimonious account of human discontent allows us to focus on this single all important issue and leads to the irresistible question: How do these seemingly inscrutable feelings come about? The answer to this question throws us headlong into the centuries old mind-body problem. Do bad feelings originate in our bodies or do they show up there after we did something in our head?</p> <p>The answer to this question is: bad feelings always start in our heads.&nbsp;&nbsp;In order to show that this is true, let’s begin at the beginning. Any explanation&nbsp;&nbsp;including that of unhappiness, is only as sound as its starting assumption.&nbsp; It is impossible to find a theory of human nature that does not assume that human beings are flawed–– that we are imperfect. This is a serious mischaracterization of the human condition because it conflates limitation with imperfection.&nbsp; More important, “imperfection” is neither a scientific fact, an eternal verity nor an innocuous concession to modesty.&nbsp; It is, as it turns out, an inadvertent code word for self-deprecation. Not only does this starting assumption prefigure our entire emotional life–– our unhappiness–– close analysis reveals that this negative self-referential premise is literally a paradox.&nbsp; If the problem of unhappiness has remained illusive and unsolvable, that is because no solution was ever possible. Paradoxes cannot be solved; they can only be dissolved. Happiness is not attained by doing but by not doing. With due respect to our founding fathers our quest for happiness would not be best served by its pursuit but by the dissolution of unhappiness.</p>