As ever, our fear has a history that begins in childhood, where one of the following is likely to have occurred. Someone we deeply loved, and perhaps admired too, was unhappy. Their sorrow moved us profoundly and led us to identify with them so that our caution around contentment continues to function as a secret tribute to them. To be happy would, in a way that would pain us profoundly, mean being disloyal. However much they might on the surface have encouraged us to venture out and seize opportunities for joy, an important part of us wishes to stay with them under the canopy of grief. So without knowing we’re doing this, we ensure that we will always have a modest career because they never had educational possibilities or we turn down sexual opportunities because they were sexually neglected. Alternatively, someone we were close to might have been jealous of us and led us to want to downplay our achievements and hide our contentment – in order to feel safe from their envy and rage. We learnt to associate gloom with safety and joy with risk.
To return to a more balanced state, we’re liable systematically to sabotage the conditions of contentment. We start working on holiday and soon uncover a cause for concern at the office; within hours, we may be protesting that we need to return home. Or else we do our utmost to convince a new lover that we’re not worth it, by seldom calling them or (if they really don’t get the message) having an affair. It feels so much more normal to be abandoned.
In order to acclimatise ourselves to joy, we need to return to the past and unpick how we learnt to use anxiety as a defensive strategy to protect us against other threats we were too young and too easily overwhelmed to answer.
We manic worriers need not sarcasm but supportive and intelligent company to give us the love we need to dare to look back at the past – and the insight with which to try to do so. Our dread is a symptom of an ancient sorrow, a sign that we keep not finding anything in the outer world that answers to the horror of the inner one.
There is nothing greedy or stupid about happiness. The ability to take appropriate satisfaction from the good times is a profound psychological achievement: it is a mark of deep seriousness to be able to giggle, have a pillow fight with a child, delight in a fig, sunbathe, sometimes knock off work early to have an ice cream and appreciate a daffodil.
Unable to sense any resources within itself to honour the hopes of those it loves and depends on, the child grows up with a latent sense of fraudulence – and a consistent fear that it will be unmasked. It winds up at once grandly expecting that others will recognise its sensational destiny – and entirely unsure as to why or how they might in fact do so.
Its underlying longing is not to revolutionise nations and be honoured across the ages; it is to be accepted and loved for who it is, in all its often unimpressive and faltering realities.
It wishes, as we all do, to be seen and accepted for itself; to have its faults and frailties forgiven and acknowledged, rather than denied or glossed over. It is in the end as much of an insult to one’s authentic reality – and as psychologically painful – to be praised for great things one hasn’t done and could never do, as to be attacked and blamed for sins one is innocent of.
The phenomenon suggests that true love should involve an agnosticism around a child’s eventual level of worldly success. It should ideally not matter to the parent where a child ends up – or rather, it should matter only in so far as, and no further than, it matters to the child.
The Golden Child is, over time, destined for a moment of breakdown when the hopes invested in it fail to be realised. The Golden Future will, it starts to be clear, never materialise, but a bigger prize awaits: a feeling of liberation from expectations that were always disconnected from reality. The Golden Child is freed to enjoy a momentous truth: that a life does not need to be golden in order to be valuable; that we can live in baser metal forms, in pewter or iron, and still be worthy of love and adequate self-esteem. And, even though this has nothing to do with the original expectations one was asked to shoulder, that realisation will be the truly exceptional achievement.
Yet in reality, what makes someone feel lonely isn’t usually that they have no one they can be with, but that they don’t know a sufficient number of people who could understand the more sincere and quirk-filled parts of themselves.
We stop feeling lonely when, at last, someone is there to acknowledge with frankness how perplexing sex remains, how frightening death is, how much envy one feels, how many supposedly small things spark anxiety, how much one sometimes hates oneself, how weepy one can be, how much regret one has, how self-conscious one feels, how complex one’s relationship to one’s parents is, how much misery one harbours, how much unexplored potential one has, how odd one is about different parts of one’s body and how emotionally immature one remains. It’s the capacity to be honest about these potentially embarrassing and little-spoken of sides of human nature that connects us to others and finally brings our isolation to an end.
It’s often said that we have built a lonely modern world. If this is so, it has nothing to do with our busy working schedules or gargantuan cities. It has to do with the fiction we tell ourselves about what we’re like. We trade in brutally simplified caricatures, which leave out so much of our real natures – so much of the pain, confusion, wildness and extremity. We’re lonely because we can’t easily admit to other people what we know is true in ourselves – and see no evidence for our peculiarities in public discourse. We tell stories about what we’ve been up to lately or how we feel at the moment that capture almost nothing of the truth of who we are, not because we are liars, but because we are ashamed of the gap between what we sense in ourselves and what is generally spoken of. We’re encouraged to present a cheerful, one-dimensional facade in which everything awkward but essential has been planed off. Without a hold on our true selves and energy to divulge our core, we have no chance of ever genuinely ‘meeting’ anyone else – however many so-called friends we might lay claim to.
The heightened loneliness of some melancholy souls can be explained because they are unusually closely in touch with the less public, more candid parts of themselves. They are dissatisfied with their relationships with people around them because they have made friends with so many of the lesser known rooms in their own minds. They haven’t shied away from uncomfortable and surprising ideas and feelings – and hunger to discuss these in unsuperficial dialogue with equally forthright others.
Around twenty percent of us will be in the uncomfortable cohort; alternately refusing to believe that anything could ever be enough, or cursing ourselves as ‘failures’ (by which we in essence mean that we have not managed to beat insane statistical odds). At school, we probably worked very hard, not because we were drawn to the topics, but because we felt compelled for reasons that were – at the time – not entirely clear; we just knew we had to come close at the top of the class and revise every evening. We may not be exceptional right now, but we are seldom without an acute sense of pressure to be so.
It seems odd to look at achievement through this lens, not as the thing the newspapers tell us it is, but – very often – as a species of mental illness. Those who put up the skyscrapers, write the bestselling books, perform on stage, or make partner may, in fact, be the unwell ones. Whereas the characters who – without agony – can bear an ordinary life, the so-called contented ‘mediocrities’, may in fact be the emotional superstars, the aristocrats of the spirit, the captains of the heart. The world divides into the privileged who can be ordinary and the damned compelled to be remarkable.
Our societies – that are often unwell at a collective and not just an individual level – are predictably lacking in inspiring images of good enough ordinary lives. They tend to associate these with being a loser. We imagine that a quiet life is something that only a failed person without options would ever seek. We relentlessly identify goodness with being at the centre, in the metropolis, on the stage. We don’t like autumn mellowness or the peace that comes once we are past the meridian of our hopes. But there is, of course, no center, or rather the centre is oneself.
The dating game becomes the royal occasion when we can confirm our deepest suspicion: that we are unworthy of love. We may, for example, fixate on a candidate who is – to more attuned eyes – obviously not interested; their coldness and indifference, their married-status or incompatible background or age, far from putting us off, will be precisely what feels familiar, necessary and sexually thrilling. This is what is meant to happen when we love: it should hurt atrociously and go nowhere.
Or, in the presence of a potentially kind-hearted and available candidate, we may become so demanding and uncontained, so unreasonable and urgent in our requests, that no sane soul would remain in contention.
for sadness is so much easier to bear than hope
They’re not peculiar, it’s just unfair and overwhelming to ask someone you’ve known for twelve hours to make up for a lifetime of loneliness.
Our limbs are tight, our words are measured, our interactions prescribed. Everything is under close surveillance, but not for that matter especially satisfying. We haven’t danced in a long while.
The opposite of spontaneity is rigidity, an inability to allow too many of our own emotions into consciousness, and a corresponding reliance on hard work, manners and precise timetabling to prevent intimacy with the raw, confusing, intense and unpredictable raw material of life itself. We are rigid, first and foremost, because we are afraid. We stay rooted to our familiar spot because any movement is experienced as intensely dangerous. We ruminate excessively as a way of trying to exert control over a chaotic environment through our own thoughts. We seldom act, out of dread of making a terrible mistake.
Traditionally, the thought that someone somewhere had some great asset you lacked (a business, a prestigious job etc.) would have felt like an impersonal fact, with no bearing on your inner life, because there was no possible route from where most people were to the possession of such a thing – anymore than a peasant could hope to become a knight.
But the spirit of modern society is one of intense equality, which is a torture in terms of envy, for when egalitarian ambitions circulate in societies that tell themselves that anyone can do anything, the experience of envy goes into over-drive. We don’t envy everyone, we do so only when we think their advantages are within our reach. So when almost everything feels like it could be ours (but a lot never can be), the opportunities for envy grow dangerously large.
Unfortunately, our society both generates untold quantities of envy and also (in a strange hang-over from the Judeo-Christian past) seems to condemn anyone who might admit to experiencing the emotion too intensely.
It is a call to action that should be heeded, for it contains garbled messages sent by confused but important parts of our personalities about what we should be doing with the rest of our lives.
Unfortunately, we are extremely bad students of envy. We start to envy certain individuals in their entirety, when in fact, if we took a moment to analyse their lives calmly, we would realise that it was only a small part of what they had done that really resonates with, and should guide, our own next steps.
When we have sucked all the goodness from envy, we also have to acknowledge that there will be limits to its benefits. We need to know both how to use it and at other points, how to quieten its pangs. Too many random reminders of other people’s success too soon may simply terrify us into inactivity and unwittingly prevent us from putting any single plan into practice. We leap from target to target without knowing how to focus. In order to achieve anything on our own, we need to be free for extended stretches from the psychological pressures exerted by news of others’ feats. We require periods of inner seclusion and calm if we are ever going to finish off something worthwhile, that is, something that we may ourselves one day be envied for.
We need to be able to postpone competition, to the moment when it can properly challenge us, rather than simply crush us. The student at a creative writing class who envies Hemingway or Nabokov is not going to be helped by the full intensity of the comparison between their writings and those of these masters. We need stretches of constructive inferiority – time to assess the scale of the mountain and to begin climbing with steady concentration. Envious rivalry, if it breaks in too soon, produces only despair and distraction.