When I was a hospital porter I often felt sad. There were
many reasons for this, and I've written about these plenty of times, but being
immersed in the sad experience often made it hard to understand it. A friend
has sent me a video that has given me a lot of clarity. It asks the question:
Is sadness always a bad thing? There are different kinds of sadness. The
reactive emotional pain when something bad happens, like when you hear somebody
you love has died, for example. There is depression which is a mental disorder
in which you cannot function; but there is a third kind, known as melancholy. Melancholy is different to
the other two. It is a quiet and internal feeling generated from ones own
thoughts rather than circumstances. It doesn't have a single cause or a specific
resolution. It is an acute awareness of life and the universe, and its
inevitable temporary nature, its transience, its apparent pointlessness. For
example, I might feel reactive sadness and anger because of my treatment at the
hands of the characters I have described previously; Jack Shaw, Sharon, Stacey
etc. Melancholy is a more long-term feeling about them; it comes from the
understanding that their presence in my world is inevitable, that it is written
into the ground rules of my lived experience. I felt reactively sad when I
heard that my friend Barry had died, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2022/11/finding-barrys-grave.html.
Melancholy is the knowledge that, seeing as he was a lot older then me, that it
was always most likely I would one day lose him to the Grim Reaper. I still
feel melancholy in my post-HPing life, most notably in the form of what I call
"Boudica moments", see: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2025/02/boudica-portal.html.
The problem is the modern NHS regards melancholy in the same way it does
depression; in fact I doubt it even notices the difference between the two. As
it says in the video's title, modernity forbids it. This is because melancholy
is not productive. People who feel it are not best suited to a 21st century hospital
which is organized no differently to a Victorian factory. It is a production
line where sick people come in and healthy people or corpses go out. It's as
simple as that. It is the product of industrial psychologists like Hugo
Münsterberg, who is described in the film, who said things like: "How we
can produce most completely the influences on human minds which are desired in
the interest of business." (I was not surprised to find out that this
individual was part of the Freudian set, like another person I had the
misfortune to encounter personally, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2023/10/am-i-gate-child.html.)
One could easily substitute "business" with "healthcare".
Healthcare providers are essentially robots. Any humanity has to be beaten out
of us. This process is described well by a character in the film Patch Adams, see: at 18:00 https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9tvv7m.
Anybody who won't submit to that and
refuses to be turned into that robot is a system error, a broken component...
Maybe that's why they got rid of me, see: https://hpanwo-radio.blogspot.com/2026/01/the-gas-spanner-programme-145_18.html.
The problem is that a hospital is full of situations that inspire melancholy;
death, pain, injury, gore, grief, fear. Sometimes I used to stop and look out
of a window for a while when something really terrible had happened. An
EP&DBP I once knew sometimes used to stop work on the late shift to watch
the sunset. We regarded that as a subtle but deep act of subversion. But the
authorities regard such people as problems that need to be solved; with
training, "attitude readjustment" sessions, SSRI doses and, if
necessary, dismissal.
So basically we are not allowed to be sad, certainly not in
the melancholic way. That is a pity because melancholy is a part of what makes
us truly human. It comes naturally out of reflective thought. Many great
thinkers dating back to Aristotle say that it is essential for our
consciousness. The Florentine priest and philosopher Marsilio Ficino said back in
the 15th century that melancholy was not something to be avoided; on the
contrary, we should seek it out, embrace it, dive into its deepest abyss. It is
only when we feel melancholy that we are truly alive, awake and aware. It is
the correct response of a conscious entity to life. If we learn to accept and
integrate it, it can even give us a kind of bittersweet joy. It is the source
of genius, the only way to reach wisdom. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmUNJcq02pg.
All great thinkers, especially in the arts and humanities, suffer long and
overwhelming attacks of melancholy. This not only contradicts the
aforementioned mechanical reductionism of human nature theory, but a lot of
modern self-help, New Age and pop spiritual culture. These ideas permeate such
places as Glastonbury
See here for more information: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/01/bhutan-happiest-country-in-world.html.
See here for more information: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2008/01/bhutan-happiest-country-in-world.html.
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