The downside of being happy: creativity kindled by sadness(washingtonpost.com) |
The downside of being happy: creativity kindled by sadness(washingtonpost.com) |
What you want to avoid is misery. I banished misery from my life sometime in my early twenties. I am unhappy somewhat often, but never miserable. Misery means not seeing a way out of the circumstances making you unhappy.
I believe emotional health revolves as much in how you see your emotions as which emotions you're experiencing. Reframing the emotions you feel can be a quite powerful experience for those not too jaded on the woo-woo aspect of it. "I didn't lose my girlfriend, we just weren't right for each other." If all you do is reframe, and never do any real learning, then sure, you'll end up miserable. But in general finding a way to reframe setbacks is a great way to find the energy to keep moving rather than wallow.
For some people, creativity is tied intimately to misery; I believe that people for whom their creative output relies on drug use are ultimately deriving it from misery. Minds need to be in a loose, free state to mix seemingly-unrelated concepts together. When one is truly miserable, they cannot see a way out of their predicament and so mind naturally finds a way towards that state. If they could see a way, then they'd focus on that way, and having a single point of focus is pretty much the opposite of creativity.
The most prolific creators make a workflow out of managing their minds. They'll tune out in order to become unfocused enough to get an idea, then they'll focus on putting that idea to paper, or electronic media or whatever. Good coders are well-attuned to such a workflow, but often don't think of themselves as creative, perhaps because their output isn't immediately pleasing to the senses. Artistic, maybe not. But creative? Absolutely.
Here's my reasoning: if you're doing philosophy and you saw "a way out of the circumstances" making you unhappy (philosophical circumstances) you would be able to become a political theorist or a religious figure.
The misery is mandatory if you plan on being truly (i.e. purely) introspective and avoid being compromised by the hope of external circumstances being favorable, it seems.
Possibly relevant: there are languages [1] where you have two verbs to express states of being, a long-term being (e.g., traits of character) and a short-term being (e.g., when describing a behavior or a situation).
Is this aspect relevant for your distinction between sadness vs misery or joy vs happiness?
Finally, are native speakers of languages with 2 states of being happier because they learned to distinguish better those emotional states?
[1] e.g., google for "ser vs estar <language>" where <language> in {Portuguese, Spanish}
Happiness: For me is calm, equanimity. Happiness can be sustained without negative effects. Happiness is not an emotion.
Joy: Is an emotion which means it is more more intense but also shorter in duration. If someone was always stuck in a state of joy we might start to worry about them (mania?). Experiencing joy is pleasurable but clouds the mind, and is tiring if sustained for too long.
Generally, all emotions put a cognitive filter on the mind: anger focuses the mind on a perceived threat and is known to exclude other information for example.
True happiness unclouds the mind and makes it see more clearly.
I banished misery from my life sometime in my early twenties.
I'm considered to be "creative" by my peers as I enjoy the arts and applying them for practical use. Contrary to the article, I found that I was significantly less creative when I was depressed. What was extremely frustrating was that it all felt 'stuck' - you can imagine a composer letting out his black-hole reservoir of pain and sadness in a stream of intense, out-of-world music, a cry for the greater ... but sadly for me it was less romantic. I just got stuck. Unable to speak properly, unable to write or draw or express anything for that matter. And yet it felt like I was ready to explode.
Now that I've recovered and drawn a line to separate those demons, I can get intellectual. One consequence of depression is too much noise; of bad chattering and self cruelty and emptiness. Emptiness can also be crushing. That could explain why I couldn't be 'creative' at all.
On the other hand, the author of the article mentioned a very good point:
>>Negative emotions appeared when they fell on hard times financially, when their health became poor or especially when a close relative died.
But I interpret this slightly differently. Poverty gives pain but I don't think this is the part that gives rise to creativity. I grew up in a very rural area where there was nothing interesting to do like video games and cinemas. That was when I was at my most creative and proactive, like using poor materials to make something really awesome and crazy. I prefer to call this "resourcefulness" but thinking about it now, maybe that is what creativity is all about: the ability to transform something deemed to be poor or average into another thing that is so much more than the sum of its parts. It's a weird irony that when my family moved to a "richer" environment, I found myself hopelessly stuck. Here are the things all laid out for me to draw and model. Here are the information to do this and that. Here's an infinite supply of paper. What a joykiller.
Speaking of mental illness, I'm pretty surprised bi-polar disorder is not mentioned at all in the article. I think its been fairly well researched that bi-polar individuals (both today and before bi-polar was an understood mental illness) can have highly productive periods (manias) that have lead to great works of music, art, and science and oscillate with periods of depression.
I have known multiple people to fit this description (some diagnosed, some not) and it would be easy to miss or not understand these cycles and think that their depressive nature contributed to their creativity when its really their mania cycles that produce the most.
Personally, my creativity takes a nosedive when I am sad or depressed, which likely changes from person to person. Things that reduce depression also increase creativity for me (exercise, sports, good food etc).
_Clinical_ depression is when that depression has reached the point where it needs treatment, is caused by brain chemistry issues, etc.
- Sample size of three.
- Linguistic analysis. Perhaps they're not actually sad. Perhaps they just happen to be writing about sad things.
- Unrepresentative sample (they're all successful musical composers).
Last year I met someone more dear to my heart than I had ever imagined. Nearly every day since then has been of joyful bliss. However, I was enjoying myself so much that I stopped bothering to record my journals for months at a time. How ironic is it that in this time with so much meaning and so much happiness and shared experience to record, I felt that there was no need to record it, because I was having such a great time. Now I regret not having a reference for us to look back upon.
The article may not apply to everyone, but to me, it certainly does.
I also kept a small journal (which I was very ashamed of!) when I was depressed, and like you I found that it was helpful as it was at least a small but very free outlet to express what would definitely be difficult to talk about.
And I've also recovered :) And like you too, I don't keep a journal so much now, in fact very rarely I'd write in it and come to think of it, it was usually when I was very grumpy that I turned to it.
So I can't help but be glad that I don't have much of a journal now. I also feel your conundrum with happy memories, but one thing depression has taught me is to count every "now" moment as a blessing. I've a goldfish memory but I'm very precious about remembering the good emotions, like happiness, peace etc, and that for me is enough. And enough to carry me forward and whack the occasional blues. And anyway, I always find that we inadvertently store memories, be it random phone captures, spontaneous scribbling, reminders of cringey moments by friends and family ... as corny as it sounds, we're all made of our past and we all love to share things. So no need for fomo!
I'm probably more happy when I'm creative and am around creative people. I'm sad when I can't be creative and don't have those outlets.
If you are having trouble with things, there are ways to get a bit better. Talk to someone, look into mindfulness about accepting current things more and worrying less about the future (this is pretty great really), etc. And in some cases you can take actions to make sure you're in a better situation.
I get a lot of good ideas from being around other people. Yes, you do need time to implement them, but having a good feedback loop if you are externally motivated is also a useful thing.
I think it's ok to want to fix the "being unhappy" part, and you can also be creative along the way. We definitely don't want to perpetuate the idea that we have to stay unhappy to be productive. Though this isn't always easy and a lot of people are dealt really hard hands.
There are some good examples of some incredibly unhappy people that were absolute geniuses (Van Gogh!) and also a lot of people that great creative geniuses that aren't as tortured. These things are orthogonal. But there are signs there's a lot of good things going on even when there are a lot of bad things also going on.
Not to say you can't find some good things about being sad about something. Developing empathy and caring about things is a pretty powerful asset. This can cause people to want to do more positive things for the world, knowing what it can feel like for them.
"Negative emotions appeared when they fell on hard times financially, when their health became poor or especially when a close relative died."
If the goal was to give anecdotal hope or inspiration to the average "sad" person today, then this is interesting. :-)
the nail that stands out is hammered down
people HATE those who are creative (don't bother with your counter-example to my blanket statement; it isn't relevant) and make a mess out of them from an early age. it also doesn't help that creative types tend to be eccentric; once again, the nail that stands out is hammered down. being hammered down results in depression/sadness that coexists with other difficulties like losing loved ones etc.
stepping out of line is just as dangerous in SV as ever when people are trying to mentally draw invisible lines between what is tepidly "disruptive" and what is genuinely subversive or abnormal. the same could be said of the wider american culture, in which certain segments value signalling of faux "edginess" while still living in terror of actual contradiction of the status quo.
what do these things have to do with creativity, you may ask? making new stuff is perceived on some level as an attack on the old stuff-- and that old stuff is held onto with a deathgrip.
Why did Dostoevsky become a great writer? 10 years of hard labor.
What conclusion do I draw? We must incarcerate.
After being in jail for three, four or five years, a Dostoevsky will appear...
[sic]
The history of art and culture is developed by jail or by sexual minorities.
We utilize neither today, therefore we don't have any great cultural creators.
A straight person living in a luxurious Moscow apartment will not create.
For creativity you need a trouble maker. A freak will create.
He said something that stuck with me too (paraphrasing):
"I was driving with my daughter the other day and listening to her music and I was constantly thinking about how it was just like what I was listening to in the 80s and 90s. That's perverse and wrong. Her music should be strange and alien and vaguely alarming to me. I find this really terrifying. I am afraid for her future."
I am not totally convinced of the suffering angle but I very much agree with the second part. I find the lack of cultural creativity alarming as well, and maybe as the leading indicator of a coming dark age or something.
The driving forces behind popular music, Hollywood, TV, video games even, have never been larger. It's easier to just say their shadow encompasses everything than it is to walk over to the edge and look out.
And I realised that even the most darker blues, or the greatest tragedy is driven by some kind of light, by what they call redemption.
You fall down, you hit rock bottom, you see some light, you feel relieved, maybe just a bit, but you do.
I felt like I just cannot see any light.
It's all about counterpoint, after all.
The best example I can draw is James Hetfield. In the early Metallica days, his writing was amazing. Dark, depressing, powerful. Then he decided to get sober and nearly overnight he's creativity dried up and we got "St. Anger". The albums since his sobriety have been mediocre at best and lampooned by critics.
I have other examples, but this is probably the one that really jumps out at me.
2. Is creativity linked to motivation? Motivation and resulting action is U-shaped. While being not motivated at all will result in (nearly) no action, both negative ("sadness", anger, hunger, etc) and positive motivation provide a good basis for getting active. That may explain why being sad 'is better' than feeling overall satisfied. However, positive motivation has a much stronger impact. So instead of forcing yourself to be sad and miserable in order to be creative (and god knows alot of actors exactly do that...), get interested, 'catch fire' like we say in Germany. Results wil be the same or better. And your overall quality of life, too. Just my 2 cent.
"[...] and it would be hard to argue that angst can't help you make some really good art. People who have something to work out through their creativity also tend to put a lot of effort into making it good, if it's concerning something important or special to them."
Heh.
The article is talking about deep creativity. Things that changed the world forever, that are still loved hundreds of years later.
No one will remember your two creative lines of code within a couple of months. Stop comparing yourself with real creative geniuses.
For me, observing the world, it's the: "aha!" moment. Simply realizing that this made some pieces fall together. When I discovered GAs in 1989, I had a jaw-dropping to the floor, hit-the-library-right-now for 120 sleepless-hours kind of moment. When I understood Moby Dick to be the American Bhagavad Gita, I had a similar moment.
But, for when I, myself, create - it's been very rare. Probably because I am not a creative genius. At best, I am a poly-something-or-other synthesist. Applying Claude Shannon to evolution was about my peak.
I could say that my moment of creativity came when I was borderline losing it - certainly unstable - maybe insane - probably not recognizably sad.
What is it like for you?
It's not about solving problems or finding more elegant solutions... It's about creating something almost from nowhere, as if it were magic.
And it has to be unrepeatable. Beethoven himself wouldn't be able to create the same piece twice. It's just that one-time miracle in a moment of inspiration that you'll always look back in awe...
Seeing things as they are, ideally without differentiating for "good" and "bad", and calling things by its proper names is beginning of intelligence.
Joy, contrary to happiness, is a natural state (that's what makes children so different), which has nothing to do with social and environmental conditioning.
Personally I tend to think of depression as draining; it takes out your energy, your willingness to live your life and push through. Like you said, emptiness.
Sadness feels... sad, it brings you down, but it doesn't necessarily affect you in the same 'draining' way.
This is veering off-topic so apologies. I tried to match my experience with the feelings described by the author in the article, but yes, you're right, depression can be much more than that. Now I say can because I visualise depression as a spiral, not necessarily consistent throughout, but definitely like a bottomless well. The feeling of being a "pressure cooker" is a level of depression, but I'm tempted to say that it's not the worst. The worst, and the most dangerous, I felt was self-transparency, where I lost all sense of what makes "me" and the world feels like a ghost and passes straight through. It was much more than numbness, it was emptiness that felt more white than black, yet I remember tears that won't stop welling, of shaking and shivering and lots of switching offs, usually to actual sleep. This was different to melancholy though, this was really the point when you don't consider but believe that you're absolutely and weightlessly nothing - and consequently there is no difference in physical life and death. There's no more anger nor confusion, just whispers of what's the point. I know that all this sounds poetic (and I haven't covered all that precedes this point such as guilt/imposter/self-ripping) but damn it wasn't beautiful. Suicide might be an idea my mind fiercely puts a gate around, but the desire for death creeps in anyway: there were a few incidents when my foot slowed down when crossing the road, when I walked alone at midnight ... no it wasn't nice.
I'm glad no harm came to me. It turned out that the worst was actually the beginning of my recovery; I managed to hold on for a little longer (thank you to my few friends and family) and gradually the world trickled in. I became fascinated by the sky though it hurt my eyes, but it had so many colours with clouds of different shapes, and a depth that showed that there is much much more beyond. Then the sounds came in. And looking at small children, I realised that I had become one too because we spoke the same language. It was very strange, but that was when I first felt happy! And proud and glad that I had hold on after all.
Falling into the spiral is like your world collapsing into a pile of cards. But let it collapse, and be patient: you will have the chance to rebuild, except with a cleaner slate and more thought for the now and the future. Just need to hold on for a little longer, and sleep, lots of sleep.
Anyway, it's nice to have a little better insight into this stuff even if I don't agree with the article, thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Here's a link to the single if anyone is curious about it:
I think people who are consistently creative can frequently either find an environment that constrains them (a writer taking a retreat to the woods, for instance), or tackles problems with existing constraints.
If everything in your life is going well and there's not boredom, there's not a whole lot of purpose to creativity - you are however free to create constrained environments. Burning man for instance creates a lot of opportunity for creativity because its out in the desert, temporary, and must be packed up or burned afterwards. Same with living out in the country with few social connections. Its easy however to just get dragged down by depression or just the dreariness of boredom when living out in the country for me at least - there's a reason a lot of people turn to drugs in rural areas (in the US at least).
That's another wild horse to get in control of I guess.
A couple of years later, I was much more fluent.
When I'm sad, I want to work with that feeling.
When I'm depressed, I can't interact.
Here's the repo for the abandoned project:
> Be civil.
Despite potentially being correct, I think the downvotes are merited, and not coming from pointing out an instance of groupthink, but coming because the comment was not civil. (This was my personal reason for downvoting him.) The comment is worded to attack and deprecate those people it targets — this was not necessary in order to make the point about groupthink.
Can you tell me what, exactly, was uncivil? I ask you, because you seem civil, and I'm hoping you won't criticize me for simply not seeing it. (fwiw - I'm a native speaker of the English language in the North American tradition, but I do get out of practice from time-to-time in my travels)
I knew it wasn't a very popular opinion, so I didn't want to invest a lot of time trying to make it sound nicer. I'm terribly uncivil by nature, unfortunately.
I'm really sorry, but I appreciate that at least one person was able to take something from it and share his empathy with me! (Thanks, reddytowns!)
Have you seen "Inside out"? In that movie, joy and sadness are depicted as two characters cooperating whereas depression sets in when these two are absent and the infrastructure starts to shut down and crumble...
But I think with depression, there is less 'logic'; it's much harder for you to follow what the hell is going on. Kinda like a big mess of yarn that's so knotted up you really wanna grab a pair of scissors and cut them up, and throw them in the fire for good measure. It's destructive, and that's why depression is awfully dangerous. Now you might think that the process itself will lead to that blank slate - I gave a pile of cards metaphor earlier - enabling a chance to build better and even turn the experience to some sort of character enrichment. But it's not that glamorous; not everyone can hold on for that long. I do count myself extremely lucky.
But one thing the film definitely got right was the concept of support. Riley eventually got through by allowing herself to break down and tell her parents everything, acknowledging the bits that she consciously feels to be weak, pathetic et cetra, like sadness. And that's really important for someone who's depressed; you will not be able to help yourself. Contrary to your belief, you need outside support to help you battle those demons and tell you that A is A and not a+b+c-d. It might be difficult to find good support, and initially I didn't either, but I knew my mom to be fundamentally caring about me and by approaching her, we slowly went down the road to detangle the mess. I'm not gonna kid, it was rocky as we didn't have a very good relationship, but we got there eventually. And learnt a bit more about humanity.