…you’re sad/unhappy/miserable.

Two disclaimers at the beginning here: first and foremost, I am not talking about mourning, that is to say the natural and often long-term emotional reactions to bereavement or massive and life-altering tragedies; I am instead speaking to the cult of personal misery over minor, everyday events. And second, even in the case of the latter, this does not mean you are not special or that your sadness doesn’t matter; but rather that the fact that you are sad, on its own, does not make you unique.

Shiny Happy People?

That having been said, of all the things to seek to distinguish yourself through, misery may well be the most destructive. Not that you don’t have reason to be sad, or dissatisfied, or just simply unhappy, but people have been doing this semi-professionally for years, and more thoroughly than you: the truly romantically sad (usually artists) have a history of living brooding, tragic, and artificially shortened lives.

Sadness may be a badge, but not of honor or emotional depth – it’s more like a merit badge that most people get at or around puberty. Which, again, is not at all to trivialize your pain and sadness, but rather to say: your pain may be unique in its flavor, but having it and dwelling on it does not distinguish you.

As with all of life, it is not what you are given so much as what you do with what you have that counts. There isn’t really a proof of this to be had, but it’s pretty effing pointless to do or try anything if it’s not true – the game has to be more than the hand you’re dealt. And so, while stating that it is perfectly legitimate to be sad for a whole slew of reasons, there is real and crippling danger in embracing your sadness wholesale, or to make a profession of entertaining your misery.

‘Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?’ Hamlet may be considering suicide here, but between death and suffering there is also a third option: resistance. It is not an interpretation borne out by the context of Hamlet’s words, but that doesn’t make it untrue more generally: how much worse is sadness when one accepts it and dwells in it? How much more alienating and disaffecting is conceding victory to unfriendly circumstances? A good percentage of misery certainly comes via the feeling of absolute helplessness that accompanies it, and so, hard though it may seem, resistance itself can at least allay a portion of that sadness.

Nor is this a pie in the sky concept: yes, there is always tomorrow, in those times in our lives when we all have pain and sorrow, but when that seems too far away, there is something else, more immediate and tangible, to set you apart. Resist the impulse to wear your misery as distinction: it is as much the uniform of Western post-modernism as any emotion. Resist the sadness, and more than that, the temptation to make it part of you, and you will already be closer to ending it than any degree of commiseration could bring you.