In Defence of Sadness
Often I’ve found the most beautiful art to be the saddest pieces—bathed in melancholy and emotional weight. Tears streaming down the face of a broken-hearted woman. The flocking of birds against an overcast sky that’s signalling heavy rain. Or anything Franz Kafka has ever written. What is it about this sadness that makes us feel so deeply? Perhaps it’s the universality of sadness. We’ve all felt it. We came out of the womb crying our eyes out. Almost every human on earth has or will experience their first heartbreak, the loss of a loved one or the disappointment found in failure. It’s an emotion that we feel deep in our core. It affects us not just mentally, but physically too. That feeling when your heart sinks so deep you doubt it’ll ever come back up.
So for something so inevitable, a feeling so ubiquitous, why do we run from it? It seems like a lot of the modern rhetoric is to avoid this emotion and only focus on its opposite, happiness. How to gain happiness, how to sustain it, and how to never, ever feel sad again. But the avoidance of any negative emotion will only prolong its presence. This is where many depressive episodes originate, and where anxious thoughts begin to swell. The Jungian Shadow thrives in this environment. Avoidance is its fuel.
“Jung believed that true freedom and inner peace arrive with self-realisation. If we don't confront our subconscious fears and suppressed feelings, we remain reactive to the world around us.” Mentalzon, (n.d). Carl Jung on navigating emotions and life’s challenges.
Our emotions are a natural part of the human condition, and it would be best to accept that fact sooner rather than later. To be a whole human being, we must accept all parts of ourselves. Our avoidance tactics never help us confront our pain—they only postpone it. We binge watch TV shows, drink copious amounts of alcohol, scroll endlessly on social media apps, all to avoid the possibility of having to sit with our own thoughts for even a second. Perhaps if we learnt how to process our emotions we wouldn’t feel such a strong pull towards these habits that disconnect us from ourselves.
It’s not all our fault, however. Our society has become a constant torrent of entertainment that feeds into our desire for avoidance and escapism. When we feel down, it triggers our mind to seek out distraction which relieves the pain temporarily, only for it to come back even stronger the next time. And so the cycle repeats. It’s a ruthless cycle that most of us don’t even know we’re in. And those of us that do, feel the societal dread and despair that’s being masked by these distractions. A societal shadow is being formed, one that we all seem to avoid talking about. The normalisation of constant entertainment blinds us from critical thinking and keeps us away from our deepest thoughts and feelings.
I believe every problem has a solution, or at least, an action worth taking. In this case, I think it would be wise to develop our collective emotional intelligence, beginning at the individual level. Lasting societal change begins with the self; in my Stoic way of thinking, this means being indifferent to both positive and negative emotions. Sadness is an emotion like any other. It will pass. Let us sit with it while it is here. Let us leave the door open for it to come and go. Instead of striving for happiness, we must seek to understand and accept our blues.
Sadness is not merely something to endure—it can also be a catalyst for pivotal shifts in our lives. Moments of deep sorrow thrust us towards our hidden wounds and calluses. When we come face to face with the thoughts we’ve been running from, we’re left with only two options: break or evolve. So we change, we grow, we transform—lest we allow the world to break us. Without these moments, we would stay stagnant, never coming close to our full potential.
I’m not advocating for us to seek out sadness but to accept it when it comes. To give it space to exist. Those of us with the courage to sit with sadness will reap the rewards of feeling the full range of emotions. When we truly accept our emotions, we can see that even our deepest sorrows contain beauty.