You’re sad! and you’re alive!

Photo by Paola Chaaya on Unsplash

Have you ever thought that why you’re the only person sad around? or why do you come out as the only depressed person? The interesting and intriguing point is that everyone is sad and I’m writing this article for people who already admit they are sad or are in denial. Yeah, basically everyone!

If you think that the COVID pandemic has put many into depression then you’re only half correct. The correct half is only limited to the fact that we have been watching a sudden rise in patients of mental illness during the pandemic. Pandemic/lockdown is far below on the cause-list of psychological related illnesses. In fact, the pandemic has only acted as a trigger to the slowly ticking time bomb of making people realize that they are indeed sad/depressed/unhappy/dispirited. And it does make sense because people suddenly had more time than ever, enough to realize a bigger picture, where the objective of their life was far different from what they are currently pursuing.

The story of us being sad might have begun even before we were born, or even before our parents were born, or maybe even earlier when humans first realized they were conscious. We’ll come to that later.

Well, by now, either I’ve caught your attention because you can relate to my assertions, or you’re in denial and will read until the end only to prove me wrong. That you are happy. I’ll try to enlist as many reasons as I can for why you might(or should) be sad. But, if it doesn’t make you contemplate about your life, congrats kid! you still have time left in your bomb.

1. You lost your family. Or your loved one broke-up with you. Or you never felt loved. Or you’re just alone. Simply put, you don’t have a person you can fall back to. Someone you could reach out with any problem without worrying they’d hurt you ever.
2. It was your dream to become a pilot or an executive or a doctor or a programmer in a software giant or maybe someone else. You spent endless hours working towards that goal. You made so many plans on how to become one. Now that you’ve become one, it doesn’t make you happy and you think you’ve wasted so much effort on something that doesn’t even make you happy. So you’ve wasted your life. Similar thoughts can dominate your mind when you couldn’t become what you wanted to.
3. You’re so over satisfied with your life that you’ve stopped working hard towards anything. You want to live your life the way it is and don’t want anything to change. You stop collecting life experiences and finally fall into an existential crisis.
4. You binge-watch Netflix or youtube or television all weekend just to spend the time away because you don’t know what else to do (or because you don’t want to do). You don’t even know what you’re doing right now and why you are doing it. You are too scared to submit yourself to your thoughts so you try keeping yourself busy (anyhow).
5. You work for an extra hour, daily, just to get a little more bonus at the end of the year; to impress your boss a little bit more; to prove you’re better than the average among your co-workers. Not that working an hour more is sad but the fact that you take that hour from the bucket of time you could actually live your life; have the actual experiences; spend the money you earned(on your family, on your self!!), is just more than sadness. It’s your submission, your enslavement to your job. Now don’t boo me with a statement about your “passion”, just move on to the next point.
6. (This is an extension to the 2nd and 5th point) You are so passionate about your job, you work endlessly to reach your short/long term goal, only to end up at a special position in your life. A position which is the definition of success for others, and a failure for you. At that special position, when asked — “What’s one thing you would advise your younger self?”, your reply would be some variant of — “give more time to your family and friends, look around more, enjoy your life a little more because if you’re passionate and disciplined enough, you’ll anyways reach your goal but experiencing and appreciating the journey is the real treasure which will give you happiness!”. If you’re relentlessly chasing for success right now, the harsh truth is that your success is just a mirage. Each time you feel you’re closer, it gets further away. It’s sad, isn’t it?
7. You question everything you face in your life with “why?” and you don’t know how to get rid of those thoughts. For example: “Why do I want to earn?”, “Why am I responsible for feeding my family?” or the biggest unanswered question — “Why am I alive?”. People claim to have answers hidden in mythologies, some claim to have understood the answers. If you’ve heard their perspectives and tried inculcating their suggestions in your daily life (meditation, mindfulness, etc.), you’ve only tightened your noose of sadness, a bit more. Because now you have an infinite set of unanswered questions as opposed to what you started with. It’s like quicksand, the more you try to get out of it, the quicker you get into it. Happy realization? Life always goes downhill.

Now that I have(hopefully) made you reconsider your meaning of success, current lifestyle, ambitions, goals, and achievements, I’d like to welcome you to the other part of the world. You’re sad! and you’re alive! Why are we always taught, advised, and guided to be happy and positive? Is being sad really a bad emotion? Your struggle stories, that made you transform and bloom into what you’re today, those stories where you were sad. Do they really make you sad today? They make you happy and you think you were fortunate to have gone down that road, right? Your acceptance raises another question. Would you be happy today, if you weren’t sad back then?

It’d be fair to make an argument that happiness and sadness are very closely related by the string of emotions. Emotions are what makes you feel alive. Emotions are the reason you feel conscious!! Remember when I said, “the story of our sadness might have started when humans first realized they were conscious”? You know the reason now :)

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

My overall objective for writing this article wasn’t to make you feel bad about you being sad but to embrace the emotions as different colors of life. There are so many emotions to experience and each one has its own importance. Experiencing each emotion gives room for a different emotion to grow. Each one molds itself into a different yet unique emotion like colors in a rainbow. I hope to see you on the other side of the rainbow where we’ll gossip about those petty things we thought were the end of life. Until then, all the best.