Millennial's Monologue: Secret Dramas in Our Hearts & Souls

Question #5: Why am I unhappy?

Question #5: Why am I unhappy? 

Several weeks of obsessively reading dozens of books on the psychology of happiness and unhappiness have finally paid off.   I no longer feel suicidal, which sounds depressing, but to me this is a triumphant moment worth celebrating with another cup of coffee and a slice of triple fudge cake.  Until today, I’ve been feeling totally overwhelmed and debilitated by too many confusing problems scattered all over my life.  But, as paradoxical as this sounds, my biggest problem was that I didn’t know what exactly was wrong .  Indeed, if there ever was any defining characteristic to my quarter-life depression, it was this vague, hazy, blurry, indeterminate, unclear, and indefinite nature of my discontented state.  But today, I’m hopeful because I’m beginning to understand the real root causes of my existential crisis.  

My first hypothesis is that I’ve trained my brain to be unhappy and I need to rewire it fundamentally.  According to psychologist Rick Hanson, whatever we repeatedly feel and think “slowly but surely” makes lasting changes in our neutral structure.  Every time we dwell on a negative experience, he explains, it is “like running laps in Hell: You dig the track a little deeper in your brain each time you go around it.”  I am unhappy now because I’ve been basically doing everything he warned his patients not to do: “If you keep resting your mind on self-criticism, worries, grumbling about others, hurts, and stress, then your brain will be shaped into greater reactivity, vulnerability to anxiety and depressed mood, a narrow focus on threats and losses, and inclinations toward anger, sadness, and guilt.”  The only way out of this dungeon I dug myself into is by injecting fresh, new, happy ideas into my brain and conditioning it to notice and appreciate all the good things in life.

My second hypothesis is that my life has thus far been “directed by other people’s expectations, external criteria, and definition of success that don’t actually fit” me, as the The New York Times columnist David Brooks pointed out in “The Agency Moment.”  All my life, I’ve been extremely busy trying to meet one deadline after another, win one gold medal after another.  That intense focus created a problem—I actually had very little understanding of what I enjoyed doing.  When I started looking for things I genuinely love doing, what I realized was that the person I want to be isn’t considered “cool enough” by the rest of the society.  

Like Peter Buffet said in Life is What You Make It, “People are shaped by the times and the societies they live in, and there’s no denying the power of social fashion. . . Signing on with a dominant version of success is relatively easy. . . aiming for the species of success that’s in style at a given moment is pretty simple. It requires no great originality or soul-searching. It’s mainly a matter of going with the momentary flow, subscribing to the same set of criteria and priorities that most people have agreed to honor. By contrast, adopting a personal version of success that’s at variance with the fashionable kind takes a fair amount of thought and strength of character.”  In other words, I reached a point in my life where I needed to make a decision—whether to be guided by what psychologists call “external motivation” or “internal motivation.”  Given my lifelong track record as a prestige monster, this was a very difficult decision to make. 

Finally, my third hypothesis is that I feel confused and burdened by my persistent need to find meaning in life.  Why do humans have this irrational need to feel valued and seek cosmic significance?  Like Rick Warren said, “When life has meaning, you can bear almost anything; without it, nothing is bearable.”  Even my hero George Orwell admitted that he became a writer because of his “desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.”  Despite my desperation, however, the idea of wanting to find my "true" calling ticks me off a little.  It sounds too grandiose and it makes me feel like I'm too full of myself .  So yea, I’m very confused, but for now I'm finding a lot of comfort and guidance in the words of Pastor Warren: “It is impossible to do everything people want you to do. You have just enough time to do God’s will.”

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Suggestions For Further Reading

Pink, Daniel H. (2011-04-05). Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Penguin Group US. 

Buffett, Peter (2010-04-12). Life Is What You Make It: Find Your Own Path to Fulfillment. Crown Publishing Group.