Licking the Razor's Edge (2015)

Addiction #34 – Freedom from SADNESS
“I am intrigued by the smile upon your face,
and the sadness within your eyes” ~ Jeremy Aldana
“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not;
and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”
~ Henry Wordsworth Longfellow
We all feel sadness sometimes, and we have been told that our occasional melancholy is
“just the way life is” – that feeling saddened every now and then by life’s tragedies and
crises and disappointments is “normal” en “healthy”. And this might very well be the
case – each of you must decide for yourselves how you will deal with the periods of
sadness that wash over you during your lifetime.
And while I am not here to tell any of you how to do so – while I am not here to claim to
know anything objective about the way you encounter sadness, I am here to offer an
alternative view. I am here to make the somewhat bold claim that most of the sadness
that most of us experience is completely unnecessary. In fact, I will offer the proposition
that sadness for most people is far more than an occasional emotional experience … I
offer that sadness is an actual addiction.
Indeed, if we have the humility to take a calm look around us, it becomes apparent that it
is not enough for many of us to merely feel sad on occasion; that in actuality we seem to
have created an entire culture that revolves around sadness; that relies upon more than a
few subtle-yet-potent forms of repetitive mourning.
For starters, we do almost anything to feel “happy” – a completely misunderstood
emotion that we have somehow come to confuse with fleeting excitement, hollow
pleasure and material accumulation. In fact, I would submit that most of the addictive
behaviors mentioned in this series of articles are at least partially the result of us striving
to obscure our gravest addiction of all – our addiction to melancholy.
When we are bored or even mildly amused with life – when things are going “well” (or at
worst neutrally), we humans constantly search for the next “kick”; that next spike in
interest; that next thrill – the newest controversy, the freshest fad, the latest media
distraction … anything that will keep us from feeling “down” or “low”; anything that will
keep us as far as possible from the constant threat of sadness.
And yet, oddly enough, in those times when we are sad, it is not enough for us to simply
deal honestly with that emotion and then “get on with life”. Instead, we call our friends
and tell them all about our newest crisis; indirectly encouraging them to actually prolong
our sadness with their well-intended expressions of sympathy, pity, worry and
commiseration.
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