The sadness that came to tea
A lack of desire to comply with Covid protective behaviour and increasing desire to leave the country. What's going on?
I've been thinking more about leading psychologically richer lives after an exchange with journalist Keith Lynch earlier this week. He quoted a piece from by Substack that I published earlier this week:
"What’s more, psychologist Dr Sarb Johal explained in a recent blog post, people wanted to live what’s called a “psychologically-rich life” – essentially a rich existence full of intense feelings and “varied, novel and extraordinary experiences” – some pleasant, some not.
This, he wrote, may “explain the all-hands-off-with-guns-blazing attitude of ignoring precautionary warnings about masks and vaccines now.
“People associate it with the monotony they may have experienced for the past two years. And although they may have been safe and content for all this time, they want more. Even chaos is preferable.”"
I've also been wondering about how this is also linked to the MYOB survey reported today that 1 million New Zealanders are thinking about or actively planning to leave the country.
"When asked why they were considering a move abroad, half said they could get a better salary, 44 percent said it's for a better quality of life or the cost of living is better overseas while 34 percent wanted to experience living and working in another country."
Money is important, but that's also many people looking for a novel experience of life, perhaps one that they feelt like they may have missed out on and is unavailable to them in New Zealand.
I'll be honest, returning to New Zealand after returning back to London in April / May was hard. And I've spent some time trying to figure out why. Yes, there are opportunities overseas, and I am possibly exhausted by supporting the pandemic response in New Zealand. However, as my involvement has eased off since March this year, those feelings of exhaustion have thankfully receded. I am certainly attracted to the idea of a possibly more stimulating life and re-connecting with friends and family who I have missed terribly. But I also have commitments, my precious family, and a loved and cherished life in New Zealand too. I haven't felt so divided in years. This is just a reality to live with. There is no simple answer. It is just life right now.
But there is something deeper to these feelings of sadness.
An ache, a grief, a longing.
What is this melancholy that springs up from time to time in my life?
in the 17th and 18th centuries, melancholy was considered a perversion of the soul - a corruption of the "passions" - which is how emotions were thought of. One of the most important early writers on this topic was René Descartes, who wrote about it in his book The Treatise on the Passion of the Soul (1649). Descartes held that “passions” were sensitive movements that the soul experienced due to its union with the body. According to his theory, the soul was located inside the pineal gland, which oversaw the functions of the "human machine" and keeping its dysfunctions under check by circulating animal spirits. Descartes described sadness as one of “six primitive passions of the soul,” which leads to melancholy if left untreated.
But this sadness, this unresolved dysfunction of one of my primitive passions, feels different to our more commonly experienced situational sadness caused by a break-up, anguish over your sick child, or missing out on a valuable opportunity. You can wrap this kind of sadness up in a bow and explain it. But 'soul sadness', as Descartes may well have called it, emerges suddenly, with no such neat explanation, dragging you under in a riptide of disorienting viciousness.
Soul sadness is an emptiness that cannot be filled
Soul sadness eats all you feed it, never satisfied.
It shows up at the door uninvited, knocks it down and barges in, pushing you aside.
Then, it leaves just as suddenly and unexpectedly, leaving you bewildered, trying to function in your daily life, wondering when it will strike next.
Like a hungry and violent tiger came to tea, trashed your house, and left you a menacing note saying, 'see you some time'.
Tara Brach has called soul sadness:
" ... the sadness that arises when we’re able to sense our temporary, precious existence, and directly face the suffering that’s come from losing life. "
I wonder if we even need to experience losing a friend, colleague or loved one directly to experience soul sadness.
Perhaps a desire for psychological richness comes not only from a desire for novel experience after what may have felt like a monotonous past two years (even though mostly safe and relatively content in New Zealand as far as covid is concerned).
Perhaps it's also driven by a sense that life is tough, precious and short.
And that we should get on with it.
Because we may not know what else might come up on the horizon unexpectedly.
Or batter down our door and eat all our food and trash the place.
Perhaps the only way to come to terms with this sadness is to embrace the effect it is having on us, and where it may come from. Fully accepting that our lives are sometimes full of suffering and divided desires and loyalties can at least release us from the dread when the tiger comes calling again.
Perhaps we can understand the hunger that needs to be fed.
Because perhaps it isn't the tiger's hunger after all.
Perhaps it is our own.
And perhaps that's why a significant number of Kiwis are on the move again, in their own lives, and taking flight.
Kiwis recognising that they are in fact tigers. Who’d have thought it?