Practicing Unhappiness

As part of my research for a book project, I’ve been reading about positive psychology.

One of the big problems with the majority of psychology and medicine alike is that they are both predominantly sickness-oriented. If you go to a normal doctor, he has no idea how to work with a man over 25 who is athletic. He’s trained to handle sick people, and wary of malpractice lawsuits, so he’s going to give conservative advice and try to minimize risk instead of maximizing performance.

I went to an ophthalmologist a few months ago. I had what turned out to be a “vitreous floater” in my eye because I’d taken a shin to the face at high speed during a round of jiu-jitsu. The doctor and I were the same age, and he asked, “what would possess someone your age to do jiu-jitsu?! I like to…walk my dog.”

He was actually a pretty cool doctor, and had some experience dealing with boxers and football players, so he told me it was no big deal and pretty common. (I chose him carefully and drove an hour to his office for a reason.)

But any adult man who trains hard has probably heard something like this. “You should stop deadlifting,” is pretty common advice.

The same is true, perhaps even more so, when it comes to psychology. Therapists are trained to treat people with mental problems, and help them get to normal. Few are focused on helping normal people excel at life.

And, because they interpret softer data than chemical testing, there is a real danger of them projecting “sickness” or “trauma” onto someone. Their business models aren’t designed to help healthy people.

Martin Seligman attempted to address this when he became President of the American Psychology Association (APA) in 1998. He initiated a push for a “positive psychology” designed to help people make their lives more fulfilling and productive. After a decade of research with his colleagues, he published his second book on the topic, titled Flourishing. In it, he describes his PERMA model for assessing and promoting psychological well-being, and explains some of the experiments and projects that he gives to students and professionals that seem to increase positive emotions and an overall sense of flourishing. Among them are gratefulness exercises and journaling good things that happened during your day.

Of course, there are many other practices that you can do that are widely believed to produce a more positive and productive state of mind. Meditation and prayer are both recognized as contributing to an overall sense of well-being. Seligman worked with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who has studied and written about “flow states” that make life feel engaging and fulfilling.

If there are practices you can do to increase an overall sense of happiness and well-being, it makes sense that there would also be ways to “practice unhappiness.”

I’ve written about this from many different angles, but it’s something I encounter constantly online, and it is a persistent problem exacerbated by social media.

To be sure, some people have always “practiced unhappiness.”

Your Boomercon relative who settles down to yell at Fox News every night is practicing unhappiness. And so is his gray-haired-hippie counterpart with Trump Derangement Syndrome who is obsessing over CNN or whatever.

But social media makes it easy and almost guarantees that at least someone else will know that you’re screaming at the TV.

Maybe it makes guys feel “seen.”

I encounter this in my feed all the time when someone new follows me or likes a post or makes a comment. I check their profile—hoping maybe they’re cool—and scroll through a catalog of daily shit-posting going back months or years.

If most of what you have to share with the world has to do with what makes you angry, what does that say about who you are?

Most of these guys are just reposting political memes and new articles and angry things other men wrote. They’re not pundits and no one is paying them to do it.

They’re doing it for, and I think to themselves.

If that’s something you’re doing daily, you’re practicing unhappiness. Over time, I believe that in most cases that’s going to have a negative impact on your sense of well-being and just make you a miserable bastard.

You’re just turning yourself into your own generation’s version of the jerk on the couch or the deranged old man screaming at the sky.

When I see a feed or a profile like that these days, it reads as mental illness to me. I don’t want to interact with that person. I don’t want that in my life.

It may just be a daily release valve for an otherwise cheerful and reasonable guy.

But my guess is…probably not.

I’m not saying that you have to pretend that everything is going perfectly or live in a world of rainbows and sunshine. But it’s one thing to point out problems and make social commentary, and another to set aside time every day to ruminate on problems beyond your control.

Are you trying to make the world a better place, or is this just a bad habit?

I was also reading through Abraham Maslow’s Motivation and Personality. In describing traits he associated with a self-actualized person, he noted that they seemed better able to see the world as it is, without projecting their own mental state outward onto it in a way that colors everything in a particular way.

It was found that self-actualizing people distinguished far more easily than most the fresh, concrete, and idiographic from the generic, abstract, and rubricized. The consequence is that they live more in the real world of nature than in the man-made mas of concepts, abstractions, expectations, beliefs, and stereotypes that most people confuse with the world, They are therefore far more apt to perceive what is there rather than their own wishes, hopes, fears, anxieties, their own theories and beliefs, or those of their cultural group. "The innocent eye," Herbert Read has very effectively called it.

[…]

One does not complain about water because it is wet, or about rocks because they are hard, or about trees because they are green. As the child looks out upon the world with wide, uncritical, undemanding, innocent eyes, simply noting and observing what is the case, without either arguing the mater or demanding that it be otherwise, so does the self-actualizing person tend to look upon human nature in himself and in others.

Now, Maslow’s “study” was about as far from being properly scientific as you could imagine, but there is some truth to this that you can recognize in happy, successful men when compared to miserable men.

Both can recognize that something is not as they would prefer it to be or think it “should” be.

But the first recognizes this in a matter-of-fact way, and the second will often become consumed by or obsessed with the same issue. The negative man consumes news about problems every day and ruminates on them, and that practice colors his perception about not only that issue, but other things as well.

He conditions himself to see problems, and distorts reality to find problems and connect good or neutral things to problems.

“I see a red door and I want to paint it black…”

This practice makes him less able to enjoy life.

I think practicing happiness vs. practicing unhappiness is an interesting topic and highly relevant to the idea of “staying solar.” So CB Robertson and I are going to make that our topic for this week’s live DIALOG show at 7:30PM PST on Sunday night.

If you have some thoughts to share on the practice of happiness or unhappiness, join us in the live chat.

Stay Solar