sadness Archives | Neel Burton

Aim Higher, and Happiness May Follow

Alexandre Rey Colaço playing the piano, by Giovanni Boldini.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Happiness exists—but as a fleeting feeling, not a permanent state.

No one can remain cheerful all the time. Nor should they want to. A life without sadness would be shallow and dishonest, scarcely a human life at all. Our sadness is often the measure of what we value: we grieve because we have loved, worry because we care, and struggle because something matters.

Part of the problem with happiness is contained in the word itself. In English, happy is related to happen, which derives from the Old Norse happ, meaning fortune or luck. Like luck, happiness is something that happens to us. It comes and goes, often without asking our permission.

That is why happiness is such a poor goal. If we make a passing feeling our chief aim, we condemn ourselves to chasing it. Worse, we begin to monitor ourselves continually: Am I happy yet? Am I as happy as yesterday? Am I as happy as my friends appear to be?

The more we scrutinise our happiness, the more dissatisfied and self-absorbed we become. Happiness is turned into a performance indicator—and almost invariably found wanting.

From Happiness to Flourishing

The Spanish word for happiness points in a different direction. Feliz derives from the Latin felix, which originally meant fruitful, fertile, or productive. Whereas the English word points to fortune, the Spanish word points to fertility: not merely to how we feel, but to what we bring forth.

The Ancient Greeks aimed higher still. They called their ideal eudaimonia, which is often translated as “happiness” but is better understood as flourishing. Literally, eudaimonia means something like being possessed of a good spirit or divinity. It is not simply about feeling good, but about living well—leading a life that is worthwhile, fulfilling, and elevating.

Unlike happiness, flourishing can contain a great deal of unhappiness. Indeed, grief, struggle, and sacrifice may belong to our finest achievements and relationships. Raising a child, writing a book, caring for a dying parent, or standing up for a principle may bring anxiety, exhaustion, or pain. Yet we would not therefore wish these things out of our lives.

A pleasant life is not necessarily a good life, and a good life is not always pleasant. If we lived badly, what could it mean to be happy except to feel good about the wrong things?

What Cannot Be Taken Away

Socrates supplied the extreme test. The Athenians condemned him and made him drink the hemlock. But although they could put him to death, they could not take away who he was or how he had lived. They could take his life, but they could not make it a bad one.

Indeed, by killing him, they made him greater. His death became the final proof of his philosophy and transformed his life into an example for all humanity.

Aristotle, the intellectual grandson of Socrates, made flourishing an activity rather than a mood. Eudaimonia, he argued, consists in developing and exercising what is best in us—reason, judgement, and character—across the whole course of a life. It cannot be reduced to manufacturing a pleasant but insubstantial state of mind.

That’s why happiness often arrives when we are not looking for it: while absorbed in a friendship, a landscape, a piece of music, or some difficult and worthwhile work. At such moments, we are not standing apart from life to assess it. We are living it.

So, yes, happiness exists—but chiefly as a by-product, not an aim in itself.

Instead of asking, “Am I happy?” we should ask, “Am I living well?” and “What am I becoming?”

Happiness is the light cast by a life well lived.

Continue Exploring

If this essay spoke to you, you might look into The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle.

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What Our Tears Are Trying to Tell Us

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Who never ate his bread with tears doesn’t know what life tastes like.
—after Goethe

In many cultures, especially for men, crying is considered to be undignified and infantile behaviour, except in certain specific circumstances such as mourning the loss of a relative. After childhood, men shed tears much less frequently than women. The reasons for this are partly biological, but mainly sociocultural.

‘Crying’, or ‘tearing up’, is not just one thing. There are in fact three types of tear, two of which are rather uninteresting: basal tears that lubricate and protect the eye, and reflex tears that flush out irritants such as smoke particles or onion vapours. The third type of tear is, of course, shed in response to emotion.

Crocodile Tears

Whereas many animals have basal and reflex tears, emotional tears appear to be uniquely human. Although other animals, of course, vocalise and express distress, there is no convincing evidence that they shed tears for emotional reasons. So, presumably, if women cry more often than men, it is because they are more human? Elephants and chimpanzees are sometimes said to ‘weep’, but it has not been conclusively demonstrated that these are indeed emotional tears. On the other hand, we can be pretty sure that crocodiles don’t sob. The expression ‘to shed crocodile tears’ has its roots in an ancient legend, according to which crocodiles pretend to weep to either lure or mourn their prey.

What I Remember from Med School

Reflex and emotional tears are produced by the lacrimal gland and drained through the nasolacrimal duct into the nose, which is why we also sniff when we cry. Any excess fluid spills out of the eyelid and trickles along the side of the nose or surface of the cheek, forming teardrops. Damage to the ophthalmic branch of the trigeminal nerve desensitises the cornea, impairing the production of reflex tears. However, it is the parasympathetic division of the facial nerve that is responsible for making tears, and damage to the facial nerve, as in Bell’s palsy, can lead to a decrease in tear production.

Existential Tears

When we think of crying emotional tears, we think of sadness and grief. But we also shed emotional tears in response to a range of other, sometimes positive, emotions and feelings, including elation, laughter, love, frustration, pain, anger, and surprise. We may also cry in response to music, beauty, kindness, yearning, reunion, or anything that strikes us as poignant. What all these instances of crying have in common is not sadness, but significance.

Social Tears

Crying is not merely a private affair. Tears may serve a number of social functions. In particular, they may serve to convey our emotions while emphasising their depth and sincerity; draw attention, sympathy, and assistance at a time of danger, distress, or need; and serve as a signal of appeasement, dependency, or attachment. If someone cries in our presence, it is almost impossible not to be moved, even changed, by that. No surprise, then, that tears can also be used to manipulate and deceive. The younger you are, the better you know this.

Healthy Tears

In ancient and mediaeval times, physicians believed that crying purged excess humours from the body. This idea survives in the modern scientific notion that emotional tears serve to excrete stress-related substances such as ACTH. But the more important purgation is, of course, psychological.

Crying may help us to feel better, in particular, by enabling us to experience, express, and ‘process’ our emotions. In the Poetics, Aristotle argues that tragedy, by arousing emotions such as pity and fear, brings about a catharsis—a purgation or purification—of such emotions. After crying, we may feel not better exactly, but differently: calmer, clearer, more reconciled to life, or simply more certain of who we are and where we stand.

Crying as a Way of Knowing

Emotional tears signal moments that are of existential importance in our lives. They tell us that something matters deeply. Sometimes we know what that something is—the death of a parent, the birth of a child—but at other times our tears seem to know before we do, and to arrive bearing a message.

Imagine that a relationship or friendship has broken down. Three months later, or even three years later, you sit down on a park bench and unexpectedly begin to cry. Those tears tell you something that you may not have known, something that you may have been guarding against: that you still miss the relationship, and that it mattered more than you realised. The tragedy is when the other person also has their park bench moment, but neither of you acts upon it.

Thirty years, gone like that.

We do not always cry because we know what matters to us. Sometimes we know what matters to us because we cry. In this sense, crying can be a way of knowing, revealing deeper truths that reason, thought, and language cannot reach. It sometimes happens that we cry without quite knowing why. When that happens, we should ask ourselves: What does this mean? What is the more refined part of me trying to tell me?

What brings us to tears changes as we change. A child might cry because they are underwhelmed by their Christmas presents. The sadness is real because, at that age, the presents really do matter. As we mature, the objects of our tears change along with our hierarchy of values. We cry less at the frustration of our immediate desires, and more at an unexpected kindness, a beautiful landscape, a piece of music, an abstract value like dignity or freedom, or the human condition.

We cry for our ex not merely because we can’t have them, but because they can’t have us.

Because without us, how on earth will they cope?