If we have the courage and clarity to look our worst feelings straight in the face, we can see them for what they are and feel a bit better about the fact that life is not, cannot, and will never be a project to banish bad feelings. Bad feelings are common. That’s not a tragedy. It’s life. Derek Thompson (www.derekthompson.org) with George Loewenstein, author of The Opposite of Happiness
At the core of behavioral economist George Loewenstein’s new The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us is misery. While plenty have studied happiness, it is noted, few have delved so deeply into the so-called negative emotions that comprise the miseries of life.
Indeed, one of the key researchers of happiness, Sonja Lyubomirsky, states this about The Opposite of Happiness: “I had trouble putting this book down…Blending beautiful writing, surprising humor, gripping stories, and cutting-edge science, The Opposite of Happiness reveals why negative emotions are not a flaw in the system, but the system itself. This is a rare book that will both unsettle and enlighten you—and change forever how you understand your own inner life.”
Per the publisher, Loewenstein “reveals the downside of supposedly uplifting feelings like hope, and untangles misery’s intertwined forms: guilt and shame, jealousy and envy, loneliness and depression, impatience, boredom and regret. Drawing from a first-of-its-kind Misery Survey, Loewenstein shares participants’ stories about, and insights into, the diversity of negative emotions that collectively weigh us down.”
You can take that Misery Survey yourself at this link.
Selected quotes from an author interview with Jason Bittell, Carnegie Mellon University:
Bookstore shelves are packed with happiness books — most of them self-help books with tips for achieving happiness. Some of that advice probably works — if people actually follow it. But it misses something important: unhappiness is the more constant feature of human life. Happiness comes in fleeting bursts; misery lingers. And there’s no symmetry between the two — the depths of misery a person can sink into dwarf the modest highs of happiness anyone can reach.
That asymmetry shows up even in language: we have more words, and richer, more differentiated ones, for the varieties of unhappiness than for happiness. And there is far more psychological research on misery than happiness. Psychologists have done extensive research on each of the 12 miseries I discuss in my book, such as regret, loneliness, envy, jealousy, anxiety and depression; they have done far less research on happiness.
Negative emotions are inevitable. That’s not a reason to stop trying to minimize them — motivating exactly that kind of corrective action is the whole reason they evolved. But it is a reason not to feel guilty or inadequate for feeling bad. That guilt doesn’t protect you from anything; it just piles self-blame on top of whatever misery you were dealing with in the first place.
