Companions in Misery

 Stay tuned: this philosopher may be coming to deliver an MTSU Lyceum lecture in the near future...

BY MARIANA ALESSANDRI

I had just arrived home from my summer vacation — a week in a Minnesota cabin whose brochure warned “no crabbiness allowed” — when I came upon a study that declared New York the “unhappiest city in America.” I doubt many people were surprised by the results — New Yorkers, both in lore and reality, can be hard to please, and famously outspoken about their grievances — but as a born-and-raised New Yorker, and as a philosopher, I was suspicious of how the study defined happiness.

The survey in question, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, asked how “satisfied” Americans were with their lives — very satisfied, satisfied, dissatisfied or very dissatisfied. But the National Bureau of Economic Research used the data to conclude things about their “happiness.” Some might not have minded that the terms satisfaction and happiness were used interchangeably, but I did. The study was titled “Unhappy Cities,” and the headlines that followed it came out swinging against New Yorkers.

I was certain that a person (even a New Yorker) could be both dissatisfied and happy at once, and that the act of complaining was not in fact evidence of unhappiness, but something that could in its own way lead to greater happiness.

At times like this I appreciate philosophers’ respect for words, and a number of them have argued to keep happiness separate from satisfaction. In his 1861 essay “Utilitarianism,” John Stuart Mill carefully distinguished between the two, saying that a person can be satisfied by giving the body what it craves, but that human happiness also involves motivating the intellect. This means that happiness and satisfaction will sometimes conflict, and that those of us who seek happiness, and even attain it, may still be dissatisfied. Mill considered this a good thing: “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied, better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.”

The 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, one of history’s best-known pessimists, also believed there was more to life than satisfaction. Better to honestly describe a negative world, he believed, than to conceal it with beautiful lies. That sounds very New York.

There’s plenty to complain about when living in a big city: overcrowding, potholes, high prices, train delays, cyclists, bees. When I was growing up in Rockaway and schlepping to school in Brooklyn, it was perfectly normal to complain, and almost everyone I knew did. Our complaining was not an indicator of our level of happiness. In my experience outside the city, however, people routinely misinterpret my casual expressions of dissatisfaction as unhappiness. They consider complaining to be a sign of negativity, which they think should be replaced with positivity in order to be happy. “If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all” is an example of this ubiquitous, if banal, attitude.

When I relocated to Texas, I quickly learned that kvetching about rain was no longer socially acceptable. “We need it!” became my new small-talk response to rain to avoid being dubbed a Debbie Downer. In a world where cheerfulness is applauded and grumpiness frowned upon, those who express dissatisfaction are often politely bullied to “look on the bright side” of rotten things.

In a less insufferable way, the ancient Stoics also proposed that we stop complaining, that we minimize negative emotions like sadness and anger in order to maximize joy, tranquillity and peace of mind. The former set will lead to a miserable life while the latter will lead to a good life “in accordance with nature.” They believed that misery is rooted in trying to control things that are out of our hands (wealth, honors and reputation) instead of working on those things that we do have control over (desires, aversions and opinions).

In his “Enchiridion,” Epictetus, the Greek Stoic and former slave, presents complaining, too, as pointless because it’s based on a mistaken belief that we can control the uncontrollable. Many people today agree that complaining is useless and “won’t get you anywhere.” This predominant attitude assumes that something is only useful if it can change the hard facts. My husband, for instance, recently told my toddler that crying in the car was useless because it wouldn’t get us home any faster. And people similarly tell me that it’s pointless to worry and complain about things that are out of my hands. They must think, like the Stoics, that when I finally understand and accept this, I will agree that worrying and complaining are useless.

But what if my worrying and complaining aren’t an attempt to change the laws of nature? Can it be that my negativity is still useful, that it can get me somewhere?

The 20th-century Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno didn’t recommend banishing the negative emotions or “keeping on the sunny side of life.” In “The Tragic Sense of Life” he described his anxiety over the prospect that there might be no afterlife, adding that he failed to understand people who had not once been similarly tormented by this or by the certainty of their own death.

Unamuno believed that a life worth living consists in communing with others, and that this happens most genuinely through negativity. In “My Religion,” Unamuno wrote: “Whenever I have felt a pain I have shouted and I have done it publicly” in order to “start the grieving chords of others’ hearts playing.” For Unamuno, authentic love is found in suffering with others, and negativity is necessary for compassion and understanding. If we try to deny, hide or eradicate the negative from our lives, we will be ill-equipped to deal with people who are suffering.

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COMPLAINING is useful, but we must first shatter and rebuild what “useful” means. My son is not crying in the car to get home faster; he is crying because he is trapped. When I get trapped in crummy situations I too cry, whine, complain. I get it out. I vent. I do these things because they are useful, but not the kind of useful that people usually have in mind. Usefulness doesn’t exclusively mean undoing what we don’t like about our situation; it can also mean dealing with our situation creatively. I use negativity both to change myself — to release disappointment, anger and frustration — and more important, to connect with others.

Complaining is part of our daily expression, one way that New Yorkers bond with one another. In addition to, and perhaps even more often than exchanging pleasantries, we also exchange dissatisfactions. In all of these spontaneous interactions, we acknowledge one another’s existence. Two strangers complaining on a subway platform can end up cracking a smile or laughing, and though it would hardly be considered the beginning of a lifelong friendship, it is still neighborly. Just because the topic of conversation is negative rather than positive doesn’t mean we are unhappy, and oftentimes the opposite is the case. A funny complaint from the person next to me can quickly lighten my mood, and hers. But the possibility of someone’s being a happy complainer gets lost when we equate dissatisfaction with unhappiness.

From the outside, the image of dissatisfied and complaining New Yorkers might seem to exemplify Schopenhauer’s portrait of humans as prisoners “paying the penalty of existence.” Penal imagery is neither rare nor new in philosophy. Plato called us prisoners to our bodies. The Stoics and Camus condemned us to our fate; Sartre to our freedom. But Schopenhauer’s portrait of us as broken beings sentenced to life together leads him to ethics instead of individualism. Instead of twisting free from our fellow inmates, Schopenhauer suggests that we stay put and serve our sentence collectively.

His account of others as “fellow-sufferers” in “On the Sufferings of the World” encourages us to nurture a soft spot for even the most flawed individuals. That we are all condemned to the same Sisyphean fate ought to make us compassionate instead of competitive, work together instead of in isolation, and rely on one another instead of just ourselves. While Camus, in his well-known essay on the myth, has Sisyphus suffer his punishment alone, Schopenhauer’s account of redemption through shared misery might give Sisyphus, and us, neighbors to love. Still, Camus concludes, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” And if Camus can imagine happiness for a man sentenced to an eternity of meaningless toil, perhaps we can do the same for dissatisfied New Yorkers. Whether we are grieving the death of a friend or complaining about alternate-side-of-the-street parking, I think Schopenhauer was right to call us “companions in misery,” with the emphasis on companions.

Mariana Alessandri is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Texas-Pan American.