How “Feel Good’sim” is Ruining Your Life and Making You Miserable

And also... How escapism will always keep happiness outside of your grasp

I recently heard someone describe or name the phenomenon that I’ve been observing in people more and more in the last few years as “feel good’ism.” I’d like to give credit where credit is due but I just frankly don’t remember who it was or where I heard it. I wish it was my concept and idea, it’s not but I’ll be able to provide some insight on it.

“I have to feel good all the time”

As a mental health professional that works with a lot of young adults and teens, there has been a steady rise in this idea of feeling good and so I see so many young people fall into this trap that they are supposed to feel good all of the time without ever really considering if it’s even possible in the first place. Can you feel good all of the time? Here’s a better question. What’s wrong with feeling bad?

I’m not even sure where this idea even came from or how in God’s wide universe this even came to be so widely and universally adopted in the first place. It’s bizarre, I don’t know where it came from so I’ll just blame my old standby. Sociopath media. But I’ve started asking some of these young people a few questions.

“What bad emotions are you avoiding?”

“What’s wrong with those emotions?”

“What are you doing to feel good?”

And most importantly… “Is it working? Are your efforts to feel good all of the time and avoid bad emotions working? Are you happy? Do you feel good all of the time?”

Here’s what they’re telling me. They don’t want to feel sad, they avoid sadness, most of all. They’re not sure why this emotion is wrong or bad, they just feel like it is so they avoid it.

They tell me that no, it’s definitely is not working. Despite their efforts to feel good all of the time they definitely feel like crap. All of the time. Life feels empty, pointless and meaningless. Their life feels completely empty and lost. They have no direction or sense of purpose or belonging. Even worse. They have no sense of identity or self. They don’t even know who they are or what it means to have connected experiences in life.

So if you’re following along at home, this is what we have so far…

Young people want to feel good all of the time so they avoid what they see as negative emotions like sadness. It’s not working, they’re not feeling good all of the time in fact what they say they’re experiencing is closer to the definition of hell. Without a doubt, their effort to avoid feeling bad isn’t just not working, it has created exactly what they’re trying to avoid.

Escapism is keeping you in a perpetual limbo of misery

When I ask them what they do to “feel good” the answer is usually the same… most of them are falling back on some sort of escapism. Basically using some kind of external means for producing that precious dopamine.

Things like smoking pot every day, drinking a lot and often, video games, porn, sex, masturbation, spending money on new things, scrolling through sociopath media, the list goes on and on. While it seems to many of them that escapism is saving them, it’s actually keeping them stuck in a pattern of emptiness. It’s keeping them from breaking out of this destructive pattern. Escapism just keeps them stuck on the same hamster wheel. They never get anywhere and then wonder why they're so depressed.

This is how I think of it. We all have a misery threshold and once we pass it, we’ll defiantly stand up and demand something better for ourselves and escapism is keeping that threshold perpetually in check. You’re just not going to stand up and demand better for yourself as long as there’s a cloud of smoke constantly clouding your visions, preventing you from facing the sometimes painful truths about life.

I asked one young adult recently, he’s twenty-something years old if the escapism was working. Was it helping him feel good? “No,” he admitted in a moment of personal honesty. “It just makes me feel slightly less crappy.” The troubling thing is that I know it’s not just him. It’s across the board with young adults and teens. Escapism is supposed to be making us feel good and it’s not. “I want to feel good,” they tell me. “But you don’t feel good,” I remind them, “you’re miserable. Your method for avoiding feeling crappy isn’t working.”

“Crazy is the new sane and sane is the new crazy”

Let’s dig a little bit deeper though because there’s something else driving this problem. It’s running away on a deeper level. And it’s the lack of personal awareness and the lack of personal exploration. People are feeling heinously lost in life because they only think of themselves in the context of why they hate themselves before they turn to some form of escapism for relief. They don’t want to self-examine, this is the pain that they’re running from and by running from the pain of true introspection and self-examination they are creating an intense and pervasive misery for themselves.

Self-examination is dead, we need it back, desperately

Self-examination has been replaced by an obsessive fixation on other people and how they should be living. Judging others harshly and with finality after just a few glances of tiny snapshots of that person on the internet, furiously demanding they change their ways. If you stop to watch it unfold, you may have realized that the people who are most furiously insisting that you live in certain ways, make certain decisions and so on are living lives that are in total shambles. They can’t tell you how to be happy or lead a happy or meaningful life but goddammit you better do what they say anyway and they hate you, really hate you, for having the audacity for having a completely different life than they have. It’s total madness and insanity when you really think about it but as I find myself saying these days, nearly on a daily basis, “crazy is the new sane and sane is the new crazy.”

“Happy people embrace the necessity and process of change.”

My point is this… If you feel lost in life, then figure out how to get back on the path for your personal path for living your best life. You haven’t lived a single second in another person’s life, another person’s mind or another person’s emotions and perhaps, maybe just maybe, one of the reasons why you’re lost in life is that you’re spending entirely too much time concerned about what others are doing, thinking, feeling and living and not enough about yourself. But perhaps this obsessive tendency to control others is just another form of escapism?

Young people seem to be obsessed with this idea of feel good’ism but it’s not working. At all. Here’s one of the basic laws of finding happiness. Are you ready? Maybe you should write it down. *Eh hem* If what you’re doing isn’t working, if what you’re doing isn’t giving you the results that you want then you have to change what you’re doing. If you want different results in life, you have to do something different.

And hey since we’re talking about laws and methods of happiness, I’ll give you another one. I’ll give you a peek under the happiness hood. Happy people realize and embrace the process of change. They realize that change is within their power and they exercise that power to work in their favor for their best life. Miserable people see circumstances as totally static, immovable or permanent. That’s just part of the misery equation. If you want to be miserable then you can easily fall into the type of thinking that basically goes like this…

“My life feels totally empty… oh well… what a damn shame. What are you gonna do?” Miserable people cling to what’s making them miserable. I don’t know what came first, the misery or the clinging.

This culture of feel good’sim isn’t just not working, it’s destructive. It’s your enemy. There are just way too many things these days that are seen as friends but are enemies. Escapism isn’t your friend. It’s your enemy. So let’s talk about your enemies and then we’ll talk about your friends, the ones that are in disguise.

There are some emotions and emotions that are always destructive. Here’s the shortlist.

Fear

Anxiety

Shame

Depression

Rage

Other emotions are healthy. They’re good for you. They will force you to change and they will give you an enhanced positive connection to your experience in life. Most notably… sadness. Sadness and depression are completely different. A lot of people see them as the same thing, they’re totally different. Sadness is actually a powerful portal to love and increased happiness. If you don’t believe me then you probably avoid sadness. Like the plague. If you tell me that you hate feeling sad and avoid it all costs then I’d bet that you’ve got some serious escapism going on.

People are so abhorrently phobic about sadness that they bring mountains of misery to their lives just to avoid feeling sadness. Trust me, I’m a professional. Sadness won’t hurt you. Sadness won’t permanently scar you but frantic efforts to avoid it really honestly might.

Another friend in disguise is anger. There are different types of anger and some anger is positive and powerful. It banishes fear and motivates changes. Good anger can be your best friend, believe me.

In conclusion. If you’re feeling lost and empty and you find yourself attached to this idea of feeling good and using escapism then you need to know that you are perpetuating your own misery and the good news is that the solution is staring back at you in the mirror. Abandoning the notion of needing to feel good all of the time is an act of self-respect and self-love. You deserve to live your best life. When you run away from feeling sad you are running away from happiness.

Happy journeys.