I recently came across something that seems completely ridiculous, if not impossible:
Some people angrily defend their right to be unhappy.
I mean, no one wants to be unhappy. At least I haven’t seen it on anyone’s wishlist lately 😂. So how do some people defend their right to be unhappy – angrily at that?
Part of this sentiment is a quote from Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” where a character states, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.” The underlying message is that a life worth living requires discomfort, challenges, and sometimes even suffering; otherwise, it would lack “everything noble and fine and heroic.”
In the course of life, unhappiness can be a necessary evil. Personally, I sometimes find that I need to experience what I don’t want in order to recognize what I do want. I’ve even heard from people who have unlimited access to whatever their heart desires that this lack of challenge eventually becomes the cause of unhappiness – if only through boredom.
Another thought occurs to me: Nowadays, being unhappy is almost taboo. Happiness seems to have become the new religion. With nearly unlimited resources such as how-to books, the internet, and talk shows offering advice on all aspects of life, unhappiness is often stigmatized as a sign of laziness, stupidity, or selfishness – a failure to improve one’s mindset or living conditions.
But what about the idea of “angrily defending my right to be unhappy?” Doesn’t that sabotage the acceptance and transformative power of unhappiness? I think it does, even if not always in an obvious way. Sometimes, the refusal to resolve the cause of unhappiness is disguised as reasoning.
For example, I once noticed several nails sticking out of the baseboard in our living room. The obvious solution would have been to grab a hammer and pound the nails back into the wall. Instead, I found myself thinking:
“Why is this happening? Every day I practice positive thinking, and yet I still face issues like this! Why am I always the one who notices these things? Why doesn’t my husband pay more attention to his surroundings? Why doesn’t he grab a hammer and take care of it?! Those nails wouldn’t even be sticking out if the contractors had done a better job! I should sue them!!”
Instead of celebrating that a hammer could easily solve the problem, I chose to argue with myself. In other words, I allowed a circumstance to foster unhappiness instead of using it to reveal a satisfactory solution – and with that a path to happiness.
Moreover, when I angrily defend my right to be unhappy, I end up wishing people and circumstances were different. I complain about my husband not hammering the nails back in and about the contractors not doing their job correctly. Meanwhile, I have no intention of changing my own attitude and approach. I could have politely asked my husband or the contractors to fix the nails, or I could have grabbed a hammer myself without making a fuss.
It seems, whenever I angrily defend my right to be unhappy, I am undermining my right to be happy. 🤪
In that spirit: Happy Holidays!! 😉
Brigitte K. Schneider
aka Ms. Sabo Teur
Copyright © 2023, Brigitte K. Schneider. If you wish to quote text from this article contact the author by leaving a comment.
Bravo Brigitte!🤸♀️