Unknown

Millions of people find comfort in feeling sad. This special feeling is what's known as melancholy. It's the kind of sadness that feels good.

So good you begin to desire it. But the disturbing thing about melancholy that sets it apart from regular sadness is how we don't know where it comes from. We simply feel empty.

And for some reason, we like it. As we'll see, the desire to be sad is a longing to understand what we're missing. It manifests as an engagement with sad media, the romanticization of suffering, and a yearning for meaning.

But before we look at the function of the desire to be sad, it's best if we understand where it comes from. Melancholy is everywhere in Silent Hill 2, as much as the fog that fills the town streets. In the game's opening, 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. But what if I told you Silent Hill's incredibly famous premise is also the premise of Sigman Freud's paper, Morning and Melancholia? Freud makes the radical claim that mourning and melancholia are both approaches to loss, but he specifically sees melancholia as a failure to mourn.

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

Freud wrote that for morning 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 or something 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. This is the most important thing I've said so far. Maybe something like looking at your baby photos hits you harder than you expected.

You know what's changed. Obviously, you've grown up, but you're not sure why it hurts so much. You feel melancholy.

Loss doesn't only involve people. Animals, objects, periods of your life, and purpose can all be loved and lost. Because there's something more to these things than just the person or thing we've left behind.

I'll help you understand what that is throughout this video. Of course, when you want to be sad, you consciously or subconsciously search it out, but little attention has been paid to how that's accomplished. Sad media is one outlet.

Tragedy becomes so attractive because fictional losses act as a mirror. And if you're anything like me, melancholy also means romanticizing the world around you. Your emotions.

Things seem prettier when you're sad. Both of these are ways of coping with loss. They both also fit neatly into psychoanalyst Jacqu Lacon's idea of the symbolic register.

The symbolic is the realm of representation. While it mostly concerns language, it also encompasses the laws and social conventions one is born into. It's one of three domains of psychic life.

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. All three have something to tell us about the desire to be sad. Drwing on the linguist Fman de Sasua, Lon taught that the spoken and written word are just two means of representation.

Words are what Sassu and Lon called signifiers, a material way of representing a concept. 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. Movies, melodies, and art help us grasp what we can't put into words. What I want to emphasize is the role representation has in melancholy.

Keeping in mind that Melancholy centers around an unrepresentable loss in Martin Scorsesei Taxi Drver, a Vietnam veteran takes on the night shift for a taxi service while suffering from insomnia, but he becomes increasingly disgusted with the people he sees on the streets that night. Disdain colors his view of the whole world. He writes about his ensuing loneliness with great detail in a journal, but there's something about it all he can't articulate.

His entries are seemingly unable to get directly to the heart of what he's lost. In one scene, Travis asks a friend for advice, but when he tries to explain his problem, he's entirely unable to. His friend's advice is consequently useless, and Travis is left alone with his melancholy.

On his TV appearance in 1974, Lacon claimed that depression arises from a failure to articulate oneself. The same is true of melancholy. 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. Lo understood that the fundamental psychological conflict is between language and the body.

If one complains about a lack of meaning in one's life, it's because the structures that sustain meaning have collapsed. The melancholic feels sad because they lack the symbolic resources 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 it invades the body through emotions like melancholy.

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 express. We might react to the emotional uncertainty by looking for others to tell us what we feel.

Fiction can represent things for us that we're unable to. So, we probe for answers on art, movies, music, and so on. We make ourselves sad, hoping we'll uncover the truth.

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. But it doesn't work.

There's more to this problem, but first we need to thank Headspace for sponsoring this video. There was a moment writing this video that I could have died. I had become so distracted with my research that I stopped doing some of the things you're supposed to when you're type 1 diabetic.

And so, in a staggering 3 days, the sugar content in my blood was so high it became acidic. I drove myself to the ER after an entire night spent throwing up. But if I had hesitated, my death wasn't off the table.

I spend every day mindfully considering existential topics such as death and the horror of having a body. Because of that mindfulness, I was able to handle this emergency well emotionally. Headspace is an app that can help you cultivate a similar mindfulness.

It has solutions for stress, poor sleep, and lack of focus in the form of breathing exercises and guided meditation. I've been using Headspace for the past month and I was surprised how much their breath work exercises just 5 minutes of comfortable deep breathing made every day. The app provides a daily set of meditations and exercises for you, but you can also select your own.

If you've ever wanted to try meditating like I did, Headspace makes it easy. And you can try it out completely for free for 60 days. This is a limited time offer that's way longer than their oneweek trial.

All you have to do is sign up using the link in my description or scan the QR code currently on screen. Loss doesn't just strike at the symbolic. It poses problems for the imaginary, too.

There's a scene in Shakespeare's comedy 12th Night in which Jester is threatened with his dismissal unless he can make the countest Olivia laugh. Her brother is dead and the countess is in mourning. He tells her he thinks her brother is in hell, to which she insists he's in heaven.

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

Grief isn't always for the dead. We grieve ourselves. When you lose someone you love, you also 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.

But the melancholic isn't aware they've lost this part of their self. When there's a malfunction in the symbolic, there's also usually 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 Lacon's diagram of the three registers, he attributes meaning to both the symbolic and the imaginary.

In this sense, seeing your feelings represented by other people is comforting. But it does more than offer comfort. It tells you who you are.

Sometimes we need to learn what mourning 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. Similarly, in Fight Club's first act, we watch as the narrator can only process his emptiness in support groups for people with life-threatening conditions despite not sharing their problems.

When a woman very obviously not suffering 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 on April 8th, 1990, 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 rocky 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.

But 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, too, actually doesn't bring us any closer to escaping these feelings. " The only signifier that often seems available to someone with 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 associated with the desire to be sad is 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 for 5 months. Usually, a mission lasts 2 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, proitizing, 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 worsening 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 on writing 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 the rotting corpse of a house with nothing to do until I was sent home early.

I slept through most of those couple of 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 believed 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 Lacon ironically calls, a pun combining and 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. Certain forms of media, slow, haunting music, tragic films, melancholic literature can all serve as a way of externalizing sadness in a beautiful form. The beauty of tragedy advances the plot.

It's a symbolic byproduct of structure imposed on the chaos. Such 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. Melancholy is largely inhibitory, a silence that insists upon itself, a what's the point in even trying.

This is the third and final characteristic of the desire to be sad. I'll discuss with you before we hear Lanton's solution. Do you ever?

I yearn. You yearn. Oh yes.

Often I I sit and yearn. I craved. Constant craving.

I haven't yearned. Lacon'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. When Freud says the melancholic might know who they've lost but not what they've lost in him, Lacon 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. Lacon stance is even more extreme. Not only do we attach ourselves to what we've lost, melancholy is an identification with loss itself.

This is why melancholia feels endless. You become your own nothingness. In his sixth seminar, Lon says that we must reconstitute our lack in order to find meaning again.

That's his solution. 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 one you've lost, but you were never whole to begin with. Lol's remarks imply that we never get over a loss.

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

This devastated him and his wife. He 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 nevertheless 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.

Warning requires the acknowledgement that all desire is for something we'll never have. For life to have meaning again, you must live as if you're missing something. And we do that first by naming our loss.

Lacon tells us that we have to be well spoken about loss to give it a place in the symbolic to make room for lack. In Silent Hill 2, James sees Mary everywhere in the fog. Travis and Taxi Drver makes loss his whole identity.

And in Twin Peaks, everyone obsesses over Laura, not necessarily to solve her murder, but to make sense of what her death reveals in them. The point isn't to fill that hole. It's to name it.

Every desire is a dissatisfaction. Let yourself be broken. 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 pained soul speak.

and thereby begin to mourn the losses that motivate your desire to be sad.