The Gift of Melancholy

By: Erik Rittenberry

Aertgen Van Leyden – St. Jerome in his Study by Candlelight (1520)

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.

— Emerson

To exude any whiff of “gloominess” in this obligatory optimistic era of fake-smiling influencers and “love yourself” gurus is to be inevitably greeted with superficial advice to “Cheer up,” “Snap out of it,” and “Can’t you just be happy?”

And my little secret, eternal response to these peppy evangelists is usually something like this:

No, friend, I will not “snap out of it.” I will let this wave of darkness wash over me. I will listen to its decrees and give in to the shadowy unknown. I will try to learn and let myself be transformed by its lessons. I will face this bleakness, this blackness, with all my emotional intelligence. This melancholy is a gift, and if one dares to endure its trials and tribulations, one might emerge with a new vision and deeper sense of being. Now, please, leave me alone to ponder my darkness.

I’m not alone in this sentiment. American physician and psychotherapist Alexander Lowen understood that “if we can face our inner emptiness, we will find fulfillment.”
The poet Charles Bukowski, who was no stranger to wallowing in the dark, once said:

"Don't fight your demons. Your demons are here to teach you lessons. Sit down with your demons and have a drink and a chat and learn their names and talk about the burns on their fingers and scratches on their ankles. Some of them are very nice."

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“Can’t you just be happy?”

I can’t help but be reminded of a scene in the recent film — Kodachrome. Ed Harris plays Ben, an old legendary photographer who is bitter to the core and dying of cancer. After one of his scathing rants, Ben’s resentful son, whom he hasn’t seen in over a decade, asks him: “Are you ever happy, Ben?

Ben replies: “Let me tell you something. Happiness is bullshit. It's the great myth of the late 20th century. You think Picasso was happy? You think Hemingway was? Hendrix? They were miserable shits. No art worth a damn was ever created out of happiness. I can tell you that. Ambition, narcissism, sex, rage. Those are the engines that drive every great artist, every great man. A hole that can't be filled. That's why we're all such miserable assholes.”

Of course, that position might not sit well in this therapeutic era of sanguine sermonizers, but it’s a long-held truism. Ben is referring to what might be called “divine discontent”— that relentless ache telling us something isn’t right. It’s that eternal whisper reminding us that we may not be living in alignment with our soul’s true calling.

And it’s often the case that profound creative achievements are born from the womb of our nagging discontentment. As Eric Hoffer reminds us, “Creativity is discontent translated into arts.”

Many of the great artists, thinkers, writers, and poets have created serious works from their emotional darkness. Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Keats, Van Gogh, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Plath, Sexton, Baudelaire, and I could go on.

The Norwegian painter Edvard Munch captured the rapture of creativity through despair when he wrote: “My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness. Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder. My art is grounded in reflections over being different from others. My sufferings are part of myself and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings.”

“But I’m not an artist,” you might be thinking to yourself. Perhaps not.

But you are the artist of your own life. You create your own story, and you’re capable of expressing it in your own unique way. In that sense, we are all artists, and our melancholy—that dejection of the spirit— could be the nudge that provokes us to change course and live in a more creative and invigorating state.

“The most fulfilling human projects appeared inseparable from a degree of torment, the sources of our greatest joys lying awkwardly close to those of our greatest pains.”

—Alain de Botton

The modern world is obsessed with the pursuit of happiness—or at least the illusion of it—yet we remain persistently unhappy. Why is that?

Some psychologists suggest that the widespread epidemic of “unhappiness” in modern society partially stems from our "happiness at all costs" approach to life. This relentless pursuit of happiness not only distracts us from deeper fulfillment but also drives us into the very despair we aim to avoid.

Life is complex and will always consist of a commingling of dark and light, pain and pleasure, ugliness and beauty. To be alive is to experience a vast range of fleeting emotions.

Focusing exclusively on positive emotions can lead to the suppression of negative ones, such as sadness, anger, or anxiety. However, these emotions are natural and necessary for personal growth and resilience. As Nietzsche once said, “Only great pain, the long, slow pain that takes its time... compels us to descend to our ultimate depths.”

Suppressing negative emotions often backfires, amplifying them and resulting in greater emotional distress. The reliance on happiness alone to sustain us is not only a losing game but also a great contributor to many of the addictive behaviors that lead us to our undoing.

We see this today in our relentless pursuit of instant "dopamine hits" to quickly escape boredom and momentarily satisfy our desire for pleasure. But it’s invariably followed by pain or a "come-down," prompting us to seek relief once again. This creates a harmful cycle that prevents us from living fully and authentically.

Our true aim should be to learn to integrate the complexity of our emotions into our lives. It was the great writer Hermann Hesse who acknowledged the necessity of saying yes to it all, even the experience of nausea and “the depths of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to learn to love the world, and no longer compare it with some kind of desired imaginary vision of perfection, but to leave it as it is, to love it and be glad to belong to it.”

In modern society, the notion of happiness has been warped and diminished to a fleeting thrill tied to money, power, and success—the hollow tokens of our sick, materialistic culture. This relentless obsession with a shallow, superficial idea of "happiness" deprives us of the profound spiritual insights that only embracing the darkness within can provide.

Eric G. Wilson, in his excellent book — Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy, noted:

“The predominant form of American happiness breeds blandness… American seekers of happiness are in danger of deluding themselves into believing that only one part of the world exists, the part that gladdens their egos.”

Many assume that the pursuit of happiness, or the so-called “good life,” is a tedious quest for possessions and affluence. Of course, we all know that these pursuits, beyond our basic needs and providing for our families, do not lead to any enduring happiness. But the quest continues unchecked by any attempt to reevaluate what we truly want.

True happiness, an intrinsic joy, usually arises within us as a “byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict,” according to William Burroughs. “Those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.”

Happiness, understood in the pre-modern sense, wasn’t reduced to a feeling of mere satisfaction. It was always understood, in the words of Földényi, “to be an exceptional moment tangential to transcendence itself.”

Aristotle, who wrote in the fourth century B.C.E., was the first to seriously consider the idea of happiness.

In the philosopher’s view, happiness is not merely a fleeting emotion or a state of pleasure but a way of living—a fulfillment of one's potential through virtuous activity in accordance with reason.

For Aristotle, happiness is an activity of the soul in accordance with perfect virtue over a complete life. It is not a passive state but an active pursuit of excellence, fulfilling one's unique potential and living in harmony with one's true nature and reason.

In other words, happiness isn’t something one pursues but experiences with his or her entire being. Happiness comes as a byproduct of deliberate action, by belonging to and serving something beyond yourself.

Leonard Cohen captured this idea perfectly when he once said, “The less there was of me, the happier I got.”

“All real living hurts as well as fulfils. Happiness comes when we have lived and have a respite for sheer forgetting. Happiness, in the vulgar sense, is just a holiday experience. The life-long happiness lies in being used by life; hurt by life, driven and goaded by life, replenished and overjoyed with life, fighting for life’s sake. That is real happiness. In the undergoing, a large part of it is pain.”

— D.H. Lawrence

Melancholy as Teacher

Let’s talk about melancholy — that aching uncertainty and sadness fed by the arbitrary nature of our existence.

I’m refraining from using the clinical word “depression” because I’m not speaking of a psychological illness. I’m speaking of a spiritual one, a dark night of the soul, a heavy somberness that evokes us to question our very existence and the meaning of life. A condition that no self-conscious creature is immune from experiencing from time to time.

Feelings of sadness, world-weariness, and forlornness are an intrinsic part of the human experience. And they are, at times, our greatest teachers if we’re willing to listen. Many of us refuse.

We often avoid confronting the root causes of our melancholy and disregard the vital signals it sends us. Instead, we distract ourselves with trivial entertainment, numb our feelings with alcohol and antidepressants, overwork ourselves, and try to mask our despair with luxury and material possessions.

But life is a persistent beast, and it won’t let us get away with cosmetic solutions for very long.

If we can muster the courage to sit with our despair, it could lead to a much-needed transformative experience. As the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard came to realize: “My melancholy is the most faithful mistress I have known; what wonder, then, that I love her in return.”

The body is the knower of everything. It signals us when it feels like it’s being dragged down the wrong paths in life. Feelings and emotions of darkness and despair are coming to us from the underworld of our being. It should never be avoided or ignored. It’s trying to convey to us a precious message of what’s gone wrong. We need to listen.

As Peter Kingsley reminded us: “The more anyone tries to silence that call, the louder it gets. The more you fight to shake off the gravity of that heaviness, the heavier it becomes.”

But if you can stay with it and learn “its touch and feel,” it’ll steer you away from that all-too-common ego-oriented way of life and into a higher realm of being, a rebirth into a transcendental awareness of the true meaning of your life’s calling.

“Forget about pursuing happiness, and you may find it. You will not find happiness by chasing after it, since you do not know what will make you happy. Instead, do what you find most interesting and you will be happy knowing nothing of happiness. ”

— John Gray

Conclusion

We are all alive in one of the most unimaginable times in history.

The technological era has indeed provided us with many conveniences, comforts, and a new way of living. Yet, it has all come with the detrimental cost of severe psychological and spiritual problems. We see it all around us.

Rapid tech advances, AI, virtual reality, synthetic biology, and many others are leading us away from who we truly are as unique, self-conscious creatures. They are transforming the organic world into an artificial environment that ravishes our emotional well-being. We're cut off from nature, our communities, and even our deeper selves. We’ve relinquished our power to mass organizations that spy on us and tell us what to buy and how to think. We have surrendered our privacy and, in some ways, our dignity.

Our hearts and minds are no longer connected to the work we do or want to do.

We’re products of a vast system that requires us to behave in a manner far from the natural pattern of human behavior. Deep down, we know this isn’t a natural or gratifying way to spend our brief lives here on this planet.

Melancholy, my friends, is that inner voice that tells us something is wrong. A voice that invites us to change course and encourages us to begin thinking about the deeper meaning of our existence.

I want to conclude with a beautiful passage from Thomas Moore’s timeless book Dark Nights of the Soul that perfectly sums it all up.

“Nothing could be more precious…than a dark night of the soul, the very darkness of which allows your lunar light to shine. It may be painful, discouraging, and challenging, but it is nevertheless an important revelation of what your life is about.

In that darkness you see things you couldn’t see in the daylight. Skills and powers of the soul emerge from your frustration and ignorance. The seeds of spiritual faith, perhaps your only recourse but certainly a valuable power, are found in your darkness.

The other half of who you are comes into view, and through the dark night you are completed.

You become the wounded healer, someone who has made the descent and knows the territory. You take on the depth of color and range of feeling. Your intelligence is now more deeply rooted and not dependent only on facts and reason.

Your darkness has given you character and color and capacity. Now you are free to make a real contribution. It is a gift of your dark night of the soul!”

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