our current cultural expectation...that constant happiness is possible is not only false but fundamentally damaging, because it makes people feel alone and broken when they meet with life’s inevitable sadnesses, when really what they are going through is as inevitable as the winter in temperate climes.
This is not really what gets to me, I think - I find happiness in the small sense pretty easy - a cat, a cup of tea, a nice plant. And that kind of happiness can coexist with periods of sadness and illness and frustration and even depression.
It's the constant pressure to be "productive" to justify my existence that makes me feel like a broken failure when I inevitably do need to slow down and rest (it looks like she addresses "workaholic culture" in the book as well?). (And the actual biological effects of SAD definitely play a role in winter - is it "normal" to want to sleep all day and stay up all night? I dunno, but it's not something society allows me to embrace even as a freelancer, and I'm not sure embracing it would actually be good for me - certainly not for my vitamin D levels.)
I'm always a bit hesitant about anything that sounds like "the reason you're miserable is because you want to be happy too much, and if you just accepted your unhappiness you wouldn't be depressed (still unhappy, but that's fine, because unhappiness is normal)" - like, I've never really felt like I was reaching for an unrealistic idea of ~constant happiness~, just that it would be nice to not be miserable and stressed and precarious and I want to be able to function as an adult in society and hold down a job and feed myself regularly and actually go to the doctor, and some of that is brain chemistry and some of that is absolutely a function of the capitalist workaholic society we live in, but hygge is a personal coping mechanism (one that I embrace!), not an actual fix for the broken system that's making so many of us miserable. It's like "have you tried meditating your way into mindful acceptance of your role as a cog in the capitalist machine?" personal approaches to coping with systemic problems sold as fixes when they're not.
I think often the takeaway I get from this kind of thesis is often "you're broken because you medicate your depression in order to function instead of just accepting that you'll always be miserable and nonfunctional." Which may not be what they mean, but there is already so much stigma around depression and especially around medication for it that I'm probably a bit hypersensitive (if I had a dollar for everyone who's told me I "don't need meds" because they thought I seemed "fine" before, when I was hanging on by my fingernails and nearly crashing and burning out of a master's program...) - but it does make me wonder if people realize that chronic/seasonal depression and event-induced grief/depression that passes in time are very different things that require different approaches.
(Also, sometimes the lifestyle/hygge approach to coping feels a bit like repackaged productivity narrative to me, only instead of work output it's like, homemade bread output. And I'm just so tired all the time, and tired of being tired, and this is me at probably the most functional I've been since I was a kid.)
...sorry about semi-related essay sparked by a book I've never read.
no subject
This is not really what gets to me, I think - I find happiness in the small sense pretty easy - a cat, a cup of tea, a nice plant. And that kind of happiness can coexist with periods of sadness and illness and frustration and even depression.
It's the constant pressure to be "productive" to justify my existence that makes me feel like a broken failure when I inevitably do need to slow down and rest (it looks like she addresses "workaholic culture" in the book as well?). (And the actual biological effects of SAD definitely play a role in winter - is it "normal" to want to sleep all day and stay up all night? I dunno, but it's not something society allows me to embrace even as a freelancer, and I'm not sure embracing it would actually be good for me - certainly not for my vitamin D levels.)
I'm always a bit hesitant about anything that sounds like "the reason you're miserable is because you want to be happy too much, and if you just accepted your unhappiness you wouldn't be depressed (still unhappy, but that's fine, because unhappiness is normal)" - like, I've never really felt like I was reaching for an unrealistic idea of ~constant happiness~, just that it would be nice to not be miserable and stressed and precarious and I want to be able to function as an adult in society and hold down a job and feed myself regularly and actually go to the doctor, and some of that is brain chemistry and some of that is absolutely a function of the capitalist workaholic society we live in, but hygge is a personal coping mechanism (one that I embrace!), not an actual fix for the broken system that's making so many of us miserable. It's like "have you tried meditating your way into mindful acceptance of your role as a cog in the capitalist machine?" personal approaches to coping with systemic problems sold as fixes when they're not.
I think often the takeaway I get from this kind of thesis is often "you're broken because you medicate your depression in order to function instead of just accepting that you'll always be miserable and nonfunctional." Which may not be what they mean, but there is already so much stigma around depression and especially around medication for it that I'm probably a bit hypersensitive (if I had a dollar for everyone who's told me I "don't need meds" because they thought I seemed "fine" before, when I was hanging on by my fingernails and nearly crashing and burning out of a master's program...) - but it does make me wonder if people realize that chronic/seasonal depression and event-induced grief/depression that passes in time are very different things that require different approaches.
(Also, sometimes the lifestyle/hygge approach to coping feels a bit like repackaged productivity narrative to me, only instead of work output it's like, homemade bread output. And I'm just so tired all the time, and tired of being tired, and this is me at probably the most functional I've been since I was a kid.)
...sorry about semi-related essay sparked by a book I've never read.