I have been hearing a lot of buzz recently about the science of happiness. There have been several studies done in the past 2-3 years which have sought a scientific explanation for human happiness so it can be reproduced to make everyone happy. In January 2007, for example, there was a three-day Positive Psychology Summit which was an academic summit attended by 425 people (mostly scientists) trying to get to the bottom of happiness. This summit was part of an organization called the Gallup Institute for Well-Being. In 2005, Time Magazine did a full-spread article on the topic. This isn't only an American phenomenon, either. The BBC ran a 6-part miniseries on the science of happiness in April-May 2006. It seems as if the secular world is trying to find happiness just as much as we are in the Christian world. God has been replaced by neurons and synapses to try to find a way to make us happy.
I heard an interesting report on KPCC today, though. Eric Wilson, the author of "Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy", took a new approach. He argues that depression and sadness is where the human race experiences most of its creativity. If some of the most important artists in history - van Gogh, Picasso, Alexander Hamilton, Virginia Wolf, Sylvia Plath, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Thomas Jefferson, Michelangelo, Marilyn Monroe (this list could go on for a very long time) - were alive today, they would be diagnosed with clinical depression and might be heavily medicated. And (follow Wilson's argument here) if they were heavily medicated, they probably would not have produced the works/art that they did and the world would be a much different and gloomier place. Wilson argues that if we pursued a scientific method to discover the source of happiness so we would always be happy, then the human race would not have the artisitc output that it does. In modern society, heavily medicating sadness, we are stifling the artistic potential of the human race.
What do you think? Are we supposed to be happy and should we try to not be sad if we can find a way to be happy? Is sadness a bad feeling?
2 comments:
As much as I want to quote Legally Blond right now, I won't...
I definitely think that it is okay to be sad sometimes. I think that it is necessary to be sad every once in a while. If we're never sad, how would we know how good happiness feels??
I'm generally a happy person, so it's sometimes hard to understand chronically sad people. How can I be sad when life is so good???
When I am sad, though, Ladder 49 and a good cry does the trick! =)
And... I just realized that I turned a post about happiness into a response all about sadness =)
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