Do we need to feel misery to enable us to experience happiness in our lives?

Is Happiness And Sorrow Intertwined?

Happiness needs to coexist with suffering, right?

Happiness originates from overcoming the sense of indifference and suffering. They are the yin and yang of each other; you cannot be content until you encounter something contrasting or else being content may simply be as normal as you breathing. There is nothing special about it. It is just there.

Some may say that being content exits in harmony with sadness as it is utterly impossible to have only one or the other. One cannot be excessively content or excessively sad, one exists as both states just like a cosine wave, continually fluctuating forward and backwards. You could not put a human in a circumstance good enough or bad enough to keep it on either the positive or negative side indefinitely, yet we have a rollercoaster of feelings always fluctuating amongst merriment and sadness.

Happiness Prevails Through Sadness

Regardless of the fact that you may believe that you can have one without the other, I'll take look from another viewpoint. If we somehow managed to state we can be sad without feeling happy, at that point that may be because contentment is a natural reaction to what pleases us. We do not figure out how to be merry, and we do not figure out what happiness is, we only experience it.

To put it in another example, you need to know what cold feels like to experience heat and fearsome fires. I believe that the experience of misery makes one appreciate the moments of their joy all the more, however by no means do we automatically stop understanding what happiness is because sadness is gone. It acts as a way to enhance a moment of joy; we need sadness to be happy.

All in all, if we look at it from a different light, sadness can create deeper happiness. I believe that we see happiness as a straightforward emotion yet it is something that is far more complicated than we realise.