Are happy people boring?

[shiels]

It's an odd thing, Mental Health The Big Weird Noun - to get everyone to a base level of understanding of an omnipresent and complex thing, to shift it out of the darkness from shame and riducule and ignorance there’s been a reduction to its most basic components, clumsy connections happen, there's a conflation between clinical diagnoses of very complex and chronic conditions and mental wellbeing as a whole...and then it's been amplified, a big simple morose broadcast through the zeitgeist until we’re bored and get the crude explanation, and now hopefully we can collectively build from there, refine and add nuance and context and have a bit of a laugh about it again eh

 

[shiels]

Sorry! I'm all sensitive. Haven't done my exercise

 

[entertainment]

i don't get it, look outside and hear the birds sing, smell the flowers, take your vitamins, smile at your neighbour, depressed people just need to cheer up

for the record, I thought this was over the line

 

[droid]

I think it's ok to acknowledge the toll they take on us.

There's tens of thousands of people out there - maybe many more - who would do anything to pay that toll again, who ache every day to be dragged down by those they've lost to depression.

Worth considering.

 

[luka]

There's tens of thousands of people out there - maybe many more - who would do anything to pay that toll again, who ache every day to be dragged down by those they've lost to depression.

Worth considering.

I'd count myself among them.

 

[luka]

But fucking hell they're hard work.

 

[Corpsey]

Keen to say I'm not wanting to stigmatise depressed people, having known a few and been one— I wanted to caution against a tendency I've seen in some people (myself primarily) to romanticise unhappiness, which I actually think can help push people further into a hole.

Philip Larkin has been my model and cautionary tale in this regard. I relate so strongly to his sense of alienation from happiness, but I also recognise that he wallowed in it — possibly consciously, for the good of his poetry.

My MA dissertation was about how both Flaubert and Kafka saw unhappiness as both the precondition of and object of art.

 

[droid]

Do happy people make good art though? Or rather, do unhappy people make the best art?

 

[luka]

We have to read his MA dissertation to find out.

 

[Corpsey]

I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy.

 

[Leo]

nothing sexier than a tortured artist, right?

 

[Leo]

who cares about an artist who pays off his credit card balance each month and gets a good night's sleep?

 

[luka]

nothing sexier than a tortured artist, right?

I think it's possible to say on the one hand, that this is a worn out myth, but one which still retains the power to bind individuals in its threads and carry them, by the force of its narrative, to their inevitable mythic doom and as such should be carefully avoided, stepped around, jumped out of the way of, ran away from....

And on the other to say, there is a reason, perhaps, why people who are driven to create, might not be the most balanced

I think you can do that. Without bolstering the myth

 

[luka]

I think creation at any serious committed level, is bound up with quite violently destabilising forces and if you engage those forces sometimes they will suck you down for a spell, knock you off balance, try and drown you. That's the nature of the thing.

 

[luka]

The artist as responsible capitalist producer with his or her work tidily compartmentalised I think is an impossibility for most. There may be exceptions, there usually is.

 

[version]

Which 'great' artists were well adjusted, comfortable etc? I'm struggling to think of examples.

 

[luka]

The ones we know absolutely nothing about seem pretty chill. Shakespeare. Even your man Pynchon. But, we know nothing about them.

 

[version]

We know a bit about Pynchon and he doesn't seem particularly well adjusted. Apparently he didn't like his parents much, stole his mate's wife, exploded on a girlfriend for drinking in the day, claimed his mother had drunk in the day and stabbed his father in the eye with a needle, jumped out of a window in Mexico when a reporter tracked him down and a bunch of other stuff.

 

[version]

Borges might have been. As far as I know, he just hung out in libraries.

 

[woops]

What Corpsey is right about is that depressed,people are the most boring people out there. God protect me from depressed people. They're like a disease. Total poison.

it's a very cruel thing. you're in such a state and you know you're having this effect on people you like