Life's beauty is inseparable from its fragility. We are young until we are not. We walk down the streets sexy until one day we realize that we are unseen. We nag our children and one day realize that there is silence where that child once was, now making his or her way in the world. We are healthy until a diagnosis brings us to our knees. The only certainty is uncertainty, and yet we are not navigating this frailty successfully or sustainably. The World Health Organization tells us that depression is now the single leading cause of disability globally -- outstripping cancer, outstripping heart disease. And at a time of greater complexity, unprecedented technological, political and economic change, we are seeing how people's tendency is more and more to lock down into rigid responses to their emotions.
On the one hand we might obsessively brood on our feelings. Getting stuck inside our heads. Hooked on being right. Or victimized by our news feed. On the other, we might bottle our emotions, pushing them aside and permitting only those emotions deemed legitimate.
In a survey I recently conducted with over 70,000 people, I found that a third of us -- a third -- either judge ourselves for having so-called "bad emotions," like sadness, anger or even grief. Or actively try to push aside these feelings. We do this not only to ourselves, but also to people we love, like our children -- we may inadvertently shame them out of emotions seen as negative, jump to a solution, and fail to help them to see these emotions as inherently valuable.
Normal, natural emotions are now seen as good or bad. And being positive has become a new form of moral correctness. People with cancer are automatically told to just stay positive. Women, to stop being so angry. And the list goes on. It's a tyranny. It's a tyranny of positivity. And it's cruel. Unkind. And ineffective. And we do it to ourselves, and we do it to others.
If there's one common feature of brooding, bottling or false positivity, it's this: they are all rigid responses. And if there's a single lesson we can learn from the inevitable fall of apartheid it is that rigid denial doesn't work. It's unsustainable. For individuals, for families, for societies. And as we watch the ice caps melt, it is unsustainable for our planet.
Research on emotional suppression shows that when emotions are pushed aside or ignored, they get stronger. Psychologists call this amplification. Like that delicious chocolate cake in the refrigerator -- the more you try to ignore it ...
(Laughter)
the greater its hold on you. You might think you're in control of unwanted emotions when you ignore them, but in fact they control you. Internal pain always comes out. Always. And who pays the price? We do. Our children, our colleagues, our communities.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not anti-happiness. I like being happy. I'm a pretty happy person. But when we push aside normal emotions to embrace false positivity, we lose our capacity to develop skills to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. I've had hundreds of people tell me what they don't want to feel. They say things like, "I don't want to try because I don't want to feel disappointed." Or, "I just want this feeling to go away."
"I understand," I say to them. "But you have dead people's goals."
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Only dead people never get unwanted or inconvenienced by their feelings.
(Laughter)
Only dead people never get stressed, never get broken hearts, never experience the disappointment that comes with failure. Tough emotions are part of our contract with life. You don't get to have a meaningful career or raise a family or leave the world a better place without stress and discomfort. Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.
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