I've never been (Un)happier

by Shaheen Bhatt

‘Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I’m not living.’

was envious of everyone around me because they seemed blissfully unaware of this fact that ultimately we’re all alone and that we’re all going to die.

Every happy spell in my life is contaminated with the knowledge of how fleeting it is, and so most of my life is spent trying to disentangle this contingency from the moment at hand.

Negative emotions draw deeply from who you are and your unrepeatable set of experiences and insecurities, which is why they’re so different for everyone.

Every cut, every scrape, every hurtful word, every heartbreak, every good or bad thing you have ever done, every mistake you have ever made and so much more come together to make you the beautiful, complex, perfectly messy creature you currently are, and it is precisely this self-definition that makes sadness such a solitary and isolating emotion.

With the absence of concrete answers we simply choose to move on with our lives rather than painfully ponder the questions, and we make peace with not knowing or fully understanding the circumstances of our existence.

‘It is this acute awareness of transience and impermanence that constitutes depression,’

Think, to be bogged down by a fear of impermanence in a world that isn’t a permanent place to begin with. Then how does my place in the world matter? Why agonize over my purpose in life when both life and purpose are fleeting?

But as humans we’re full of unconscious motivations and historical explanations for our current patterns of behaviour.

of serotonin, a neurotransmitter considered one of the primary contributors to feelings of well-being and happiness.

Everyone in my family belonged to a single industry; my parents, my older siblings, my cousins, my aunts and uncles, and now my younger sister, all made movies. I was surrounded by deeply ambitious, driven, successful, famous people. And here I was—no more ambition than to leave my bedroom.

‘We’re the middle children of history. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war

… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.’

You can’t spend your life feeling bad about feeling bad.’