Note: This is a 6-part series. See the introduction to the series for links to other posts in this series.
Related to "choose happiness" are perhaps more familiar calls to "turn off unhappiness" and the myriad calls to overcoming unhappiness with "positive thinking." But there is the very lived experience for many people that we simply can't turn unhappiness off. We can try to suppress it, overwhelm it with "positivity" and happiness, but either we fail or the effects are ephemeral and give way to an uneasiness with the fragility of such happiness (listen to the nervous energy coursing through the song "Turn it off” from the musical Book of Mormon).
Every time I watch the Fab 5 on Queer Eye, a part of me really wants to buy their message of self-care and positivity, but I can't. I wouldn't even know how to. The call to "choose happiness" is hard and does not feel within my control. My efforts (ok, coping strategies) often feel like trying to patch a shoddy, leaky log dam with twigs. This intuition that "choosing happiness" is hard, and maybe even problematic is exemplified by a whole cottage industry of people writing about "toxic positivity" and "positive thinking backfiring."1 It has even become an instagram meme page.
Beyond the mere fact that emotions and feelings themselves can be hard to control,2 I think there's a second subtle reason why it can be hard to choose happiness: the idea and feeling that happiness and its causes are external to us. When I was little, I learned reasons for my crying and reasons for my smiling. I had it explained to me that grief is that feeling that comes after loss, and I experienced happiness that came from an unexpected cantonese roast duck dinner. This frame of mind leads to a default (and oftentimes still effective) approach to life oriented around the view that feelings of sadness and happiness come from arranging for external causes to happen.
This is not to say that this isn't a valid approach to life. After all, if one is starving one probably should seek food, an external good, to temper the hunger. The external view of happiness can even be comforting to the point that sometimes we want happiness to be external! To the extent that we can control the world around us, so too does it offer a promise of security: that if we can maintain this external state of affairs then we can maintain our internal happiness. For the privileged, external sources of happiness can even morph into a feeling of justification of one's happiness. For whatever reason, happiness can feel more secure if rooted in eternal, external forces of the universe than moored to our fickle choices.
But the flip side of this view is that when we lose control over the world, so too do we lose that sense of control over our happiness. We may not even question the fact that we are unhappy: if happiness is external, then under certain circumstances even depression can seem natural, like a law of nature. (A dark manifestation of this phenomenon is the subtle shift from thinking “this is how nature works” to thinking that one "deserves" unhappiness or that others "should" be unhappy with their life circumstances.)
So we often have very grounded life intuitions to think that happiness is external, but it is worth investigating a little more: between outright externalization of happiness and extreme models of toxic positivity, where and how much room is there for agency?
Or Google it! E.g. I found this book by Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided that looks interesting (but I haven’t read it yet)
Depending on what one means to “control emotions,” it can even seem impossible. We’ll cover these nuances in the future.