What is the point of sadness?
We watch sad movies. We read sad books. We listen to sad songs. We write sad poems. But why? What is the point?
This is a question that has boggled me for a while. I am one of those people that tends to just be naturally sad. Maybe “sad” is the wrong word: sober, solemn, somber—there are a lot of terms you could use—but either way, I tend to have a more serious, a more heavy-laden disposition. And so I always ask myself:
What is the point of being sad?
Why is this such a ubiquitous and defining feeling for human beings?
Everybody experiences sadness to some degree. Everybody has gone through tragedy, loss, betrayal, heartbreak, confusion.
For a while, when I was just out of high school, I grappled with depression, which is a layer of sadness SO deep that there is no feeling at all. You’ve gone beyond the threshold of understanding into a depth of absolute nothingness.
My intimate relationship with sadness has taught me a lot about the purpose of it all: sadness brings meaning. I’ll say that again.
Sadness brings meaning.
If you’ve seen the movie Inside Out, you’ll understand that’s the entire theme of the film. The movie is set inside the mind of Riley, a young girl who has just moved from her hometown and stars two personified emotions: Joy and Sadness. Joy spends the first half of the movie trying to get rid of Sadness but learns in the end that without it, Riley will end up feeling nothing. That without sadness you cannot have happiness, without sadness you cannot get help, without sadness you cannot learn, without sadness you cannot connect.
Sadness brings meaning to life.
Let me use a visual metaphor.
Above are two comic book covers, the left by Jim Lee and the right by Salvador Laroca. Jim Lee’s cover is done with very heavy inking. For those of you who don’t know, “inking” is the stage between the pencil sketch of a comic book panel and the technicolor finished product you see before you, where an inker goes in and adds the blackness. They add the defining lines and the shadows which gives the whole image its contrast, making the colors pop and the different characters stand out.
There was a time in the early 2000s when some experimental artists tried to skip this step, going straight from pencil to color. The result (on the right) is a harder to distinguish, weirdly grayed-over mess that made the panels and characters harder to understand.
The shadow is what gave the color its color.
For a long time, scientists have studied the relationship between happiness and sadness and have found something very interesting. The more sadness you have experienced in your life—the deeper the troughs are—the more potential for happiness you have— the higher the peaks. The more struggle you endure, the more serotonin (or “happiness hormone”) your body creates. Without experiencing any true harship or heartache, your version of victory and love is shallower than others. In the wise words of Passenger:
“You only need the light when it's burning low
Only miss the sun when it starts to snow
Only know you love her when you let her go
Only know you've been high when you're feeling low
Only hate the road when you're missing home
Only know you love her when you let her go.”
So, the point of sadness is to bring meaning into your life, to draw distinctions between emotions, to make happiness grander. Don’t run away from sadness. Don’t be afraid to cry, to mourn, to lament. Don’t go running towards it either, necessarily—trust me, the world has enough sadness already, it’ll find you without you needing to go find it. Just don’t be afraid of it.
Sadness reminds us we are alive. Reminds us that we have loved, that we have celebrated. Tells us that we have excelled, that we have won.
Sadness is not the absence of joy, but the recognition of it.
