A brief monologue by Dr. Arthur Brooks arguing that attempting to eliminate unhappiness is counterproductive to true happiness. He frames suffering as a sacred, instructive part of life and recommends learning to manage negative emotions through practices such as prayer, fasting, therapy, and vipassana/insight meditation.
If you try to eliminate your unhappiness, you will eliminate your happiness. You never want to eliminate your suffering. That's the worst possible technique for mental health, happiness and wellness. Suffering is a sacred part of life. It's your teacher. I talk about unhappiness as I talk about happiness. And I believe in unhappiness. I'm a big fan of unhappiness because you're not going to live life. And the biggest problem for young people today is they go to the campus counseling center and say, I still feel sad and anxious. They say, we got to fix that. Yeah, that's bad. Because if you try to eliminate your unhappiness, you will eliminate your happiness. You will be not experiencing a full range of emotion. You'll feel bad about your emotions and you will not learn and grow from your negative experiences. So you need to understand how to manage that and there's lots of ways to do it. For me it's prayer and fasting. Some people it's therapy. For some people it's actually really valuable. For some people it's vipassana, you know, insight meditation for self management of emotion. But you have to get good at it.
