Of the array of emotions that we feel, happiness seems to be the most treasured, and that I find quite interesting.
Let's explore traditional sentiments. Happiness is a pleasant emotion, it is a pretty colour to paint your mind with. Smiles and laughter are contagious, and everyone would rather be happy than sad. Don't worry, be happy. Don't bring everybody down. Let's put a smile on that there face.
Sadness, the counterpart of happiness, however, is bad. Sadness is an ugly colour. It mars the mood of those around you, and it makes the skies look a bit greyer than they actually are. And the future, a bit bleaker.
This is actually true. It is preferable to be happier than it is to be sad. Then why does sadness exist? Is it some sort of flaw? A mistake of some kind?
What if I told you that your emotional system wasn't designed for happiness at all? What if—like your immune system exists not for comfort but for survival—your emotions evolved not to make you feel good, but to make you whole?
Consider this: happiness and sadness aren't opposites, any more than your inhale opposes your exhale. They're complementary phases of a single process—the rhythm of a fully engaged life. Our cultural worship of happiness isn't just incomplete; it might be as misguided as trying to inhale perpetually without ever breathing out.
The cult of happiness reminds me of those strange fish tank ecosystems—sealed glass globes containing shrimp, algae, and water that supposedly maintain perfect balance indefinitely. They look serene on your desk, but they're fundamentally unstable, prone to sudden collapse when their artificial parameters inevitably fail. Our emotional lives cannot be hermetically sealed against discomfort without creating something equally fragile.
It's curious how we've medicalised sadness, pathologised anxiety, and demonised anger while simultaneously manufacturing industries dedicated to the pursuit of happiness. Yet, what chef would remove all bitter and sour ingredients from their kitchen? What musician would remove the minor keys from their piano? The result wouldn't be improvement—it would be impoverishment.
Perhaps our emotions function like a complex ecological system rather than a linear spectrum from bad to good. In a forest, death and decay aren't failures of the system—they're essential components that make new growth possible. The fallen tree, slowly decomposing, becomes the nurse log from which saplings emerge. Similarly, our “negative” emotions aren't bugs in our psychological software, but features that create the very conditions for genuine fulfilment.
Think about your own growth. Did your most significant evolutions emerge from your moments of comfort and ease? Or weren't they forged precisely in the crucibles of discomfort, uncertainty, and loss? The diamond's clarity comes not from being treated gently, but from surviving extraordinary pressure. The pearl forms not despite the irritant but because of it.
Our ancestors understood this intuitively. In Ancient Greece, the theatre didn't present only comedies—tragedy was equally valued, not as entertainment but as catharsis, a necessary purification of emotions for psychological health. Indigenous wisdom traditions worldwide incorporate practices not just of celebration but of communal grief, recognising that tears unexpressed become poison in the system.
Modern neuroscience confirms what these traditions intuited: emotional fluidity—not positivity—correlates with psychological health. Those who can move skilfully through their full emotional range, rather than getting stuck in avoidance or expression, show greater resilience and fulfilment. The healthy mind isn't perpetually happy; it's perpetually adaptive.
Consider our strange relationship with physical discomfort versus emotional discomfort. If you're physically hungry, you don't berate yourself—you recognise it as information directing you toward nourishment. Yet when emotional hunger arises—sadness, loneliness, uncertainty—we often treat these as failures rather than as equally important navigational data.
What if sadness isn't a departure from the proper emotional path but a necessary milestone along it? What if that heaviness in your chest isn't something to overcome, but something to listen to—a messenger carrying information no happiness could convey?
Perhaps equanimity offers us not an absence of emotion, but a more mature emotional intelligence—the ability to welcome each feeling as data rather than defining it as good or bad. Not emotional flatness, but emotional literacy. Not detachment from life's rhythms, but deeper attunement to them.
I'm reminded of those quantum particles that exist in superposition—neither here nor there, but in multiple states simultaneously until observed. Perhaps our obsession with labelling emotions as either positive or negative creates the very suffering we seek to avoid. What if, instead of collapsing our complex inner experience into simplistic categories, we remained open to its fundamentally paradoxical nature?
There's a freedom in this approach that happiness-worship can never provide—freedom from the exhausting labour of constantly managing your internal weather. Freedom from the shame of feeling what you actually feel. Freedom to discover that you are not your emotions at all, but the awareness in which they arise and dissolve, like clouds passing through an unchanging sky.
Maybe that's what the ancients meant by equanimity—not an absence of waves on the surface of the ocean, but identification with the depths that remain undisturbed regardless of surface conditions. Not emotional bypass, but emotional inclusion. Not perpetual sunshine, but the capacity to find meaning in both light and shadow.
Oh! What good news! That perhaps the path to genuine fulfilment doesn't lie in maximising pleasure and minimising pain, but in developing the courage to embrace the full spectrum of human experience with an open heart. That maybe, just maybe, our longing for constant happiness is actually a longing for something far deeper—the ability to be fully alive, whatever weather might arise in our inner skies.
April 29, 2025, 7:38 p.m.
Written bY CYril 