The Desire to Be Sad

Most people will tell you they want to be happy. But for the select few, there's something incredibly comforting about being sad. I say few, but millions of people have undoubtedly felt the desire to be sad.

I'm one of them. Yet, we rarely talk about it. The desire to be sad is something more than the way it feels good to occasionally listen to a sad playlist or the enjoyment of rainy days.

It's like an itch you can't scratch. And if left unchecked, its more extreme variations can make you miserable. So I decided to look into this obsession with being sad to learn from philosophers and neuroscientists why it feels so comforting and what to do when it threatens to disrupt my life.

This video is sponsored by Headspace. More on them later. There's already a word that I think describes a desire to be sad.

melancholy, introspective sadness. It's that loss of interest in the things that excite us, that all too familiar yearning for something we can't quite put our finger on. It surprises us when we least expect it.

We might feel melancholic at a party or a club, on our birthday, after finding a lost children's toy in the street, or after having sex. Its comfort is bittersweet, and when it strikes, we don't seem to want the feeling to go away. Melancholy feels good.

It also never seems to be about anything the way we usually feel sad about something. We would be forgiven for thinking it's sadness for its own sake or the result of something fundamentally wrong with us. But before deciding whether the desire is a bad or maybe even a good thing, we need to understand it.

We'll explore three characteristics of the desire to be sad. my analysis for each building off the philosophical principles of the one behind it. First, why do we feel sad?

The desire to be sad starts with already feeling sad. But the first thing that sets melancholy and the desire to be sad apart from regular old sadness is that you feel clueless about why. In Silent Hill 2, James Sunderland receives a letter from his deceased wife 2 years after her death telling him to meet her in their special place somewhere in the town of Silent Hill.

And although he tells himself she's dead and can't possibly be there, he goes looking for her anyway, as if he doesn't believe what he already knows. Melancholy is everywhere in Silent Hill, as much as the fog that fills the town's streets. But what if I told you Silent Hill's incredibly famous premise is also the premise of Sigman Freud's paper, Mourning and Melancholia?

There's a lot of disdain for Freud these days. Yet, while today most have tried to cleanse their hands of him once and for all, neuroscience has been validating his ideas one after the other. A simple example, it's been shown trauma is stored in the nervous system and can lead to bodily discomfort long before we consciously link our present symptoms with our past experiences.

We accept so many of Freud's ideas as common sensical that we often only hear his name credited in negative contexts. So before we let our preconceptions turn us off of him forever, let's judge his ideas on melancholy off their merit alone. I promise it has nothing to do with penises.

When Freud published his essay in 1917, the world was nearing the end of the most horrifying war it had ever seen. Rational animals fought like brutes across Europe. Vienna, his home, was ravaged by famine.

The future of psychoanalysis looked uncertain, and he struggled to make ends meet with his work. Also, close friends had become enemies. Freud was no stranger to depressive thoughts, and in this gloomy atmosphere, he turned his thoughts toward his lingering sadness.

Freud makes the radical claim that mourning and melancholy are both approaches to loss. That was unthought of before him. He then conceptualizes melancholia as a failure to mourn.

The mourning process means coming to accept that the person we love is gone forever. Everything in the world reminds us of them. We might even feel their presence.

Freud wrote that for mourning to be successful, we must retract our attachment to the deceased each time a memory surfaces until our grief no longer consumes us. Images rush in to fill the gap left by their absence. It's an unbearably painful process that lasts for years.

We used to think you could die from it. Nobody questions why you feel sad after losing someone you love. By contrast, even we can't quite pinpoint why we feel sad and melancholy.

One may know they've lost someone, but Freud writes only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost, but not what he has lost in him. As we'll see later, this line inspires our solution. Of course, a loved one does not need to die to be lost.

A sense of loss can emerge even when the person you love sleeps in the same bed as you. One talked about mourning the end of a relationship before breaking up. It feels like you've already lost them.

Loss doesn't only involve people either. Animals, objects, periods of your life, and purpose can all be loved and lost. Building off Freud's legacy, the psychoanalyst Jacqu Lon argued that the fundamental psychological conflict is between language and the body.

Our language affects how we feel, and how we feel affects the language we use. If we aren't conscious of what we lost, that equates to saying we cannot articulate it. The loss is still felt, however.

It expresses itself through the body. When we feel melancholy, we don't just want to be sad. We actively immerse ourselves in less than happy media.

If you're anything like me, this also leads to romanticizing the world around you, your emotions. Things seem prettier when you're sad. It's a comforting process.

Ask someone about their desire to be sad, and comfort is the word that comes up time and time again. There are two components here that demand our attention. The first is the attraction towards representations of sadness and despair.

Why is it comforting? The second is the tendency to romanticize things in melancholy. Both of these fit neatly into Lan's theories about what he calls the symbolic register.

I'll be the first to tell you that much of Lan's work can feel like it tries too hard to be clever. He used countless puns and homophones, and his understanding of his most normal terms radically evolved throughout his 28 years of teaching. I own a literal dictionary based entirely on the con.

And after 3 years of studying him, I still find myself looking through it constantly, and I love it. These terms have saved me from depression numerous times. Learning to speak about loss is like learning a new language.

Lon provides us with the words. The symbolic is one of three domains of psychic life. It's essentially the language, laws, and social conventions one is born into.

These things exist only because of everyone's collective participation. There's also the imaginary which has to do with our self-image and perception of others and the real that which cannot be represented or understood. The symbolic allows for us to communicate with each other and decides what's normal or allowed.

If we were to risk defining it in one word, that word would be discourse. Yet, drawing on the linguist Fundman de Sasua, Lon taught that the spoken and written word are just two means of representation. Words are what Ceua and Lon called signifiers, a material way of representing a concept.

The word cat is a signifier for the concept of a cat. Together, they, the word cat, and the concept of catnness form a sign or a symbol. But words aren't the only signifiers.

Sign language, for example, doesn't have words. The 1992 documentary Baraka has no voice over and still manages to make a point. What I want to emphasize is the role representation has in melancholy, keeping in mind that melancholy centers around an unrepresentable loss.

In 1974, the French government aired a 1-hour program on TV featuring Lon. During the program, he claimed, perhaps irresponsibly, that depression was the result of a moral weakness. That's already how people with depression feel.

So this seems pretty darn unhelpful. But the flaw in question, Lon explained, is a failure to articulate oneself. None of us choose the language we learn to speak.

The methods of navigating existence given to us by our parents and culture do not have our name signed at the bottom. The forms of representation available to us come from other people. And yet, in cases like the desire to be sad, we cannot fully express what we're going through.

There's an incompleteness in our language. An existing void is torn wider. If one complains about a lack of meaning in one's life, it's because the signifying structures that sustain meaning have collapsed.

The melancholic feel sad because they lack the symbolic resources they need to work through their feelings. I remember when someone close to me was suffering from depression. He would hardly speak a word.

At best, he would answer probably to any questions until he was left alone. This is what Laconians call an empty discourse. And inhibition is always a matter of the body.

Lon says psychoanalysts know that every emotion says something. It's yet another form of expression. Only our emotions can't use words.

I am sad because that is what emotions are dying to tell us. We always feel more than we can [Music] express. Freud's classic formula for repression applies here.

That which cannot be expressed one way will be expressed another. The desire to be sad is a search for something to represent our feelings to us, thereby allowing us to recognize them and ourselves through the sadness of others. We'll talk more about that in just a minute.

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All you have to do is sign up using the link in my description or scan the QR code currently on screen. Usually, when there's a malfunction in the symbolic, there's also a problem in the imaginary, a crisis of self. As I explained before, signifiers represent concepts.

These concepts exist in the imaginary. What we call a self-image is in fact the concept one has of oneself. On the con's diagram of the three registers, he attributes meaning to both the symbolic and imaginary.

Grief isn't always for the dead. We grieve ourselves. There's a scene in Shakespeare's comedy 12th Night in which a jester is threatened with his dismissal unless he can make the countest laugh.

Her brother is dead and the countest is in mourning. He tells her he thinks her brother is in hell. She insists he's in heaven.

the more full Madonna to mourn for your brother's soul being in heaven, he says, causing the countest to laugh. "Why bother grieving someone we know is at peace? " Lon dares to point out that there's something self-centered about mourning.

That's normal, by the way. It's to be expected. When you lose someone you love, you lose a part of yourself.

To lose a child is to likewise lose your role as that child's mother or father. This part of the morning process might look like keeping that child's room clean, setting a seat for them at the dinner table or keeping up other parental duties at first, but eventually we let ourselves lose the responsibilities we once had. Except the melancholic isn't aware of what they've lost.

Imagine feeling hopeless but not knowing what you're feeling or why. You begin to ask yourself questions. They may already be familiar to you.

What kind of person feels this way? Am I normal? What's wrong with me?

Here we encounter the first possible reason for our attraction towards sad media. Seeing your feelings represented by other people is comforting, but it does more than offer comfort. It tells you who you are.

If you've ever received a diagnosis for a mental illness, you know there's a sense of relief simply from having a name for what you're going through. And who hasn't heard of cases where someone begins to act more like their diagnosis, even if it later turns out to be incorrect? The comfort of the desire to be sad is enforced by the sense of self it gives us.

But the desire to be sad doesn't just give us an identity. Freud's paper showed us there's no guarantee mourning will ever happen on its own. You'll never accidentally get over a loss.

And sometimes we need to learn what morning looks like before we can begin. The psychoanalyst Darien Leer describes watching others mourn their losses as a way of enabling us to process our own. Perhaps this is one reason why people can feel devastated after a public figure they knew nothing about passes away.

In the Iliad, after the warrior Patrick Liss dies, the people gather to mourn him openly, including those who never knew him. We read that the women cry, each one for their own sorrows, and the men, each one remembering what they had left at home. and In Fight Club's first act, we watch as the narrator can only process his emptiness and support groups for people with life-threatening conditions despite not sharing their problems.

When a woman very obviously not about to die from testicular cancer begins to attend the meetings, he loses the ability to grieve. The same extends to our relationship with fiction. When the first episode of Mark Frost and David Lynch's Twin Peaks aired on television, an estimated 24.

6 million people sat down to watch. The show's pilot would become one of the most famous episodes in the history of television. I genuinely think about this show almost every day.

She's dead. Wrapped in plastic. In a small Washington town, the homecoming queen, Laura Palmer, is found dead on a beach wrapped in plastic.

She's been murdered. The opening episode shows us the effect her unexpected loss has on the community. It feels so hauntingly human.

It's heartbreaking. But the reason I feel sad watching it isn't because I care about Laura Palmer. At this point, she's little more than a name to a body.

It's because the examples of these characters and this community give me a way to reflect on my own experiences with loss. Except the others mourning can act as an imaginary route for the subject, but not more than that. leader writes, "Associating with the melancholic experiences of others, effectively saying, I'm melancholic, or I'm depressed, too, actually doesn't bring us any closer to escaping these feelings.

" The only signifier that often seems available to someone with depression, melancholy, or some other chronic sadness is their condition. As someone who's been diagnosed with depression, I know that in our darkest hours, we might simply default to talking about our discomfort as being depressed instead of voicing intimate details about what we're going through. Such labels provide comfort and a valuable sense of identity.

But the desire to be sad is likely to persist. Another behavior relating to the desire to be sad is the romanticization of pain and loss. Throughout history, melancholy was associated with a manic creative state, an obsession with art and beauty.

That mania describes what happened to me during one of the hardest periods of my life. I'm actually sort of scared to tell you about it, but that's the point, isn't it? I grew up Mormon.

When I turned 18, I signed up to be a missionary. I was assigned to Northern California. I served there for 5 months.

Usually a mission lasts two years for a man, but the pandemic interrupted mine in March 2020 and I was sent home early. My mission was one of the most disappointing and melancholic periods of my life. For years, I had nightmares in which I was forced to go back.

Notice how everyone is grouped close together and then I'm way off here, almost out of frame. There's a reason for that. I felt like I didn't belong.

Being a missionary meant spending hours every day knocking on doors, proilitizing, and chasing leads. A lot of effort and routine with no results. I spent every night of those five winter months wandering the streets of 90 suburban neighborhoods in the fog.

I feel even now like it was a long dream. I looked into the endless lit windows and yearned to sit down inside. It never rained.

There was just a monthsl long dripping. That's how I remember it. You can see my mental health worsting in these pictures just from my face.

Through it all, I kept a journal. I wrote almost 1,000 pages during those 5 months, which was odd because there was almost nothing worth writing about. What's more, I insisted I write my journal like a novel.

I wanted to appreciate what I was doing like it was a work of art. When California was put into quarantine, I was locked in a rotting corpse of a house with no access to the internet until I was sent home early. I slept through most of those couple weeks, taking more and more melatonin and staring at the ceiling fan when my body screamed, "No more.

" I had stopped writing. I had been looking for a reason to be out there, searching for it through my writing. I still believed in God, so I believe there was an indisputable reason for being there, but there wasn't one.

The only meaning I found came from the act of writing itself. So although I was depressed, it's like I didn't know it. I hid it behind a thousand pages of fanciful pros.

Everything I wrote was lyrical to the point it became disgusting to read. This is what Lon ironically calls juissance, a pun combining jissance and son, bodily enjoyment from the masturbatory use of language. But if the experience wasn't as hauntingly mundane, I don't think I would have felt a need to force it to be interesting.

I didn't realize it until years later after I had already left the church. But that's why I wrote the way I did. Writing my journal like a novel was a way for me to distance myself from the sadness I felt.

Writing is what kept me stable. It sustained me. When I stopped, it debilitated me.

With nothing to hold it back, the emptiness consumed me. The point of my story isn't about knocking on doors or even about being Mormon. It's about how we use language to grapple with unbearable realities.

I was like a character tasked with writing their own story in order to continue to exist. Certain forms of media, slow haunting music, tragic films, melancholic literature can serve as a way of externalizing sadness in a beautiful form. The spirit of this is captured by Frederick Nichze in the birth of tragedy in which he writes that only as an aesthetic phenomenon are existence in the world justified.

The beauty of tragedy advances the plot. It's a symbolic byproduct of structure imposed on the chaos. Romantic beauty might be the only thing conferring any meaning at all to a forlorn and incomprehensible situation.

You have to be careful meddling with something like that. But this romanticization is another trap. Beautiful sadness is still sadness.

We'll need more to escape our despair. Something I understood years after my experience as a Mormon missionary is that melancholy isn't only about what was lost in the past, but also what's lacking in the present. We might lose interest in the things we care about when we feel the desire to be sad.

You and I know it's not only a matter of lacking the words to articulate our feelings. Melancholy is largely inhibitory, a silence that insists upon itself. A what's the point in even trying?

Which brings us to the subject of desire. This is the third and final characteristic of the desire to be sad. I'll discuss with you before we hear Lon's solution.

Freud has a lot to say in his essay about the way we beat ourselves up when we feel melancholic or depressed. If you want to hear more, I discuss that on my Patreon. Here is where loss reintroduces itself in the desire to be sad.

Do you ever? Yearn? I yearn.

You yearn. Oh yes. Often I I sit and yearn.

I craved. Constant craving. I haven't yearned.

Lon's theories on desire are rather remarkable. By desire he means something other than our biological needs. You can think of it as yearning instead of craving.

Desire begins with lack. It begins with being told we can't have something. Even though we fantasize about being loved by a certain person, doing great things, or getting something we want, the desire behind all desires is the desire for a sense of completion.

The fulfillment we need to heal our inescapable lack. This kind of yearning is encouraged in Sufiism, a mystical branch of Islam. One Sufi mystic calls it the sweet pain of belonging to God.

When Freud says that the melancholic might know who they've lost, but not what they've lost in him, Lon answers that what we've lost is something we never had. My experience would seem to agree that the same process Freud outlines for mourning occurs in melancholy. We never escape the ghost of our loss.

Fonder memories are all we can think about. But the two aren't the same. As Darien Leader puts it, in mourning, we slowly detach ourselves from the dead.

In melancholia, we attach ourselves to them. Lon's stance is even more extreme. Not only do we attach ourselves to what we've lost, melancholy is an identification with loss itself.

Rather than describe the lack of purpose I felt in California, how I didn't fit in, how I was afraid of disappointing people by perhaps coming home early, I was wrapped up with this sense of missing something. In failing to articulate my hopes and fears, I felt empty. This is why melancholy feels endless.

You become your own nothingness. In his sixth seminar, Lan says that we must reconstitute our lack in order to find meaning again. That's his solution.

It's by no means instantaneous. Let's break that down. Escaping melancholy requires reestablishing what you've lost as something impossible.

You probably feel as though you'll never be whole again. That's because you've associated the sense of completion you yearn for with the thing you've lost, but you were never whole to begin with. The con's remarks imply that we never get over a loss.

And that's kind of the point. He shares this with the later Freud. 3 years after publishing Mourning and Melancholia, Freud lost his favorite daughter Sophie to the Spanish flu in 1920.

This devastated him and his wife. They really never got over her death. 9 years later, Freud wrote to a friend that we can never find a substitute after a loss.

No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nonetheless remains something else. And actually, this is how it should be. It is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish.

Morning requires the acknowledgement that all desire is for something we'll never have. Reconstituting lack means living as if you're missing something. It means sacrificing a part of yourself willingly, letting the pain express itself through the pursuit of something new.

Every desire is a dissatisfaction. It's letting yourself be hurt. If you've suffered a loss, you have a long and painful path ahead of you.

I can't say it gets better, but it might get easier. Lon understood that your relationship to language is a structure. He calls it a prison house.

So is your brain. A structure, I mean, although also maybe a prison. But structures can be changed.

What's so fascinating to me is that you can change parts of your brain with just your words. When you mold the neuronal structures of your brain, that's called neuroplasticity. Neurons that fire together wire together, as it goes.

Over 200 peer-reviewed studies show this is what happens when you repeatedly journal about the hardest thing you've ever experienced. That should sound to you like Freud's formulation of the morning process. The people who do this routine experience permanent changes to their prefrontal cortex.

The pain from that event lessens, but they become more resilient to future hardships, too. For years after my mission, my depression worsened. It got to the point where I wished I would cease to exist.

That's when I wrote my video on the desire to not exist. I was diagnosed by my doctor with depression and given anti-depressants, but something strange happened. I felt unbelievably happier long before they had a chance to kick in.

I didn't think much of it at the time, but now I think I know why. Writing that video allowed me to process the pain of my mission in California, to understand why it was painful. The nightmares stopped.

Is there a cure for depression? That much is unknown. But we must believe in a cure for the depression we feel today.

The depression of today is not the depression of tomorrow. The desire to be sad doesn't need to be a bad thing. Now you know that it signals something deeper.

Now you can use it to ask the right questions. Let your pain soul speak and thereby begin to mourn the losses that motivate your desire to be sad.