Thoughtful post and you even had the sense to mention serious depression and not mention God in this posting. I'm giving you the COOL PERSON OF THE MONTH award. Sorry no money comes with it. Sincerely,David

Gretchen Rubin
The Importance of Unhappiness for Happiness.
The importance of unhappiness, for happiness.
Posted Jun 10, 2009
Because I write every day about happiness, and how to be happier, many people assume that I’m on an anti-unhappiness crusade – that I think that life, lived right, would be a stream of non-stop blissful moments.
As a consequence, I frequently hear arguments in defense of unhappiness – that without unhappiness, you can’t have a rich, complete moral and aesthetic life; that it’s a necessary corollary to love and attachment; that it’s an important goad to working for meaningful changes; that it’s not possible to have an “up” without a “down”; etc. (Some people, I suspect, argue on behalf of unhappiness because they ascribe to Happiness Myth No. 1: Happy people are annoying and stupid.)
But I’m not on a wipe-out-every-sad-moment-from-your-life campaign; I don’t think that striving to have a happier life means that you should be striving to wipe out all unhappiness from your life or to ignore any cause for unhappiness to live in a cheery stupor.
I agree with all those arguments about the significance of unhappiness. In fact, because of my happiness project, I try to pay a lot more attention to unhappy feelings. It’s tempting to try to tune them out, because they’re unpleasant, but unhappiness is an important cue. (As always, I consider depression to be a grave condition, separate from the happiness/unhappiness distinction.)
An extremely minor example of this: how I gave up fake food. For a long time, I ate a lot of fake food – things like granola bars, fat-free cookies, single-servings packages of sugary cereals, etc. I’d get hungry when I was running around, and instead of getting some real food to eat, I’d get fake food. Fake food was easy, it was cheap, it was fast, and it felt like a treat. I did this for years. Because of my happiness project, however, I started looking for places in my life where I felt bad (that’s one prong of the First Splendid Truth), and I realized that eating fake food was a source of bad feeling for me. Eating so much junk food instead of healthy food made me feel guilty and out of control. So I gave it up – cold turkey, because I’m an abstainer not a moderator. And it makes me very happy to be free from that small, but relentless, shot of twice-daily guilt.
Feeling bad is a sign that it’s time for action. Change is often painful; unpleasant, disruptive; exhausting; scary. Unhappiness can act as the goad to get you to push through those barriers. It can push you to switch jobs, get out of a relationship, move, change your habits, change your behavior, change the world. You can start meditating, start running, start a non-profit, start a garden. Everyone’s happiness project is unique, and the approach that you take to address your unhappiness is unique.
I’m saying that unhappiness is a clue to a way to be happier; does that mean that I believe that the goal of life is to eliminate all unhappiness? No. But it is a goal to give up needless unhappiness, or foolish unhappiness, or lazy unhappiness? Yup.
Some people describe a pleasure, or a sense of purposefulness, in feeling sad. I guess I just don’t get that. What do you think? Have you experienced a situation where feeling unhappy was an important catalyst to help you change? And is there a redeeming quality for unhappiness that I’m not appreciating?
* Groups for people doing their own happiness projects are forming! I saw this link to the one in Gainesville, Florida, and I heard that the Greater L.A. group already has 31 members -- zoikes. I can't wait to hear more about these groups.
* If you'd like to start a group yourself, for people doing happiness projects, click here for a starter kit.