It’s because the best things in life are never easy.
Christine Brae, author
But my question is why?
Have you ever wondered why we turn to poetry or art or dance or something in the creative realm while sad?
Well apparently I wasn’t the first one to ask this question. Joe Forgas, a social psychologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia, has spent the last decade investigating the surprising benefits of negative moods.
For thousands of years, people, and now scientists, have speculated that there’s some correlation between sadness and creativity, so that people who are a little bit miserable (think Van Gogh, or Dylan in 1965, or Virginia Woolf, Albert Einstein, Alan Turing, sadly the list goes on) are also the most innovative.
Aristotle was there first, stating in the 4th-century B.C.E:
that all men who have attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art, and in politics, even Socrates and Plato, had a melancholic habitus; indeed some suffered even from melancholic disease.
This belief was revived during the Renaissance, leading Milton to exclaim, in his poem Il Penseroso:
“Hail, most divine melancholy/whose saintly visage is too bright/to hit the sense of human sight.”
The romantic poets took the veneration of sadness to its logical extreme and described suffering as a prerequisite for the literary life. As Keats wrote, “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”
Now coming to the current timescale, it might not come to a surprise that depression is a rising trend. Biologists have also started to question if depression is an evolutionary trait.
But in some sense, it does make sense, doesn’t it?
My childhood questions often included “why can’t veggies be tasty? or why can’t pizza be healthy?”
As I grew up this question morphed into, why are the good things harder to get? Why can’t good be easy? Why can’t good and easy go hand in hand?
Why is it so hard to be legendary?
Now here I am in my teens pondering over the same question in yet another frame of reference.
Why does a person need to be torn apart to turn into something beautiful?
There are two important lessons in Forgas’ research. The first is that our fleeting feelings can change the way we think. While sadness makes us more focused and diligent — the spotlight of attention is sharpened — happiness seems to have the opposite effect, so that good moods make us 20 per cent more likely to have a moment of insight. The second takeaway is that many of our creative challenges involve tasks that require diligence, persistence, and focus. It’s not easy making a collage or writing a poem or solving a hard technical problem, which is why sometimes being a little miserable can improve our creative performance. And hence our overall performance.
According to Forgas, angst and sadness promote “information-processing strategies best suited to dealing with more demanding situations.” This helps explain why melancholic people are better at judging the accuracy of rumours and recalling past events; they’re also much less likely to stereotype strangers and make fewer arithmetic mistakes.
Aren’t these traits, we all as humane people must possess naturally?
So are we all getting depressed, for good?
Is depression a part of evolution?
Yes it’s strange, (but just as strange as how birds developed hollow bones?)
But the more pressing question is, WHY?
Which leads us back to my initial questions.
When a child comes into being, comes into this beautiful world, it comes with a blank canvas.
Slowly but surely, the canvas starts filling, painted by its parents, siblings, friends, and the SOCIETY. It is moulded into something which “fits”. Now when the child really wants to be someone amazing, it needs to break the mould. Most of the eminent legends might have an anxious depressing past, I challenge you to look it up.
All of our heroes fading, whilst we fade with them?
I think the flaw is pretty evident. Isn’t it?
The only way to test it is to nurture a child without limiting it into the societal, ethical moulds, to let the human race be who they really are, to let them be more humane, and not a human error instead.
But this does ignite a ray of hope. Good might be easy, brilliance and comfort might go hand in hand, just maybe veggies can be tasty! (ok that may not happen ).
BUT only if we let it.
