"Choose Joy" and Other Bullshit

I hear it over and over again. “I don’t want to feel this way. How can I make my ___________ go away.” Fill in the blank with whatever unpleasant state the person is experiencing at the time: depression, loneliness, boredom, anxiety, stress, etc.

We believe that we have agency over our thoughts and feelings. We think that if we count to 10, go for a walk, or a call a friend, we will feel better. We are told by our friends, family, society, and thousands of Pinterest boards that we must “choose joy” and “just be happy.” If only choosing joy were as easy as pouring myself a cup of coffee.

The desire to always feel good comes from the ego. The ego believes it has agency or control. The ego itself does things it doesn’t want to do. We bump into this over and over again. I hear it in my therapy sessions: 

I am so tired of feeling this way. I need this anxiety to go away.

This thought is so triggering! How do I get rid of it? 

The ego thinks that running, hiding, and fighting with thoughts and feelings will make them go away.

And when we feel good, we try to change that too. Let’s say you get a big promotion. Rather than just savoring your achievement, you take your friends out for drinks to celebrate. You already felt good, but you wanted to feel even better.

We also try to change our thoughts. We say things like, “I just don’t think about it” when describing how we cope with a distressing event. When a friend is buying into critical thoughts, we say “stop comparing yourself to others” as if the thoughts will stop if we tell them to. You’ve probably even learned from a therapist that you should challenge “bad” thoughts, replace uncomfortable thoughts with more positive ones, or even distract yourself from thoughts.

The trouble is, you don’t have that kind of control. If you did, you’d say, “I don’t want to think that,” and then the thought would go away. You’d say, “I don’t want to feel bad,” and the bad feeling would disappear.

As long as the ego is in charge, you have no freedom. The ego is based only on desire and aversion. It keeps you frustrated continuously by lying to itself. It believes it has control when it doesn’t. It’s like a prison; you spend your entire existence chasing after pleasant feelings and running away from unpleasant ones. You binge on alcohol, escape into marathon TV watching, or try to fix yourself with self-help books. Meanwhile, you get further and further from fulfillment as you get buried in running, hiding, and fighting.

Emotionally intelligent, enlightened people don’t have agency either. If they did, they’d choose bliss, joy, and happiness all the time. Instead, they figured out that they have no agency at all. They know they cannot control their thoughts and feelings, and so they stop trying to. There’s enormous freedom in that.

You are not your ego. You are not the thoughts and feelings. You are not desire or aversion. You are you, separate from it all. Shift your approach from “I must get rid of this feeling,” to “whatever is happening is what I want to be happening.”