A Different Life And Different Outlook

A Different Life And Different Outlook

A Different Life and Different Outlook                                    
“In Praise of Melancholy” by Eric G. Wilson discusses the psychological obsession of happiness in America.   Happiness is seen as complacency and a lack of feeling or blandness in life. In this article melancholy is the desire for more in life searching for meaning through all the chaos and realizing that not everything is perfect.   The first step to change is to realize that you are in the wrong or everything in your life isn’t right.   So melancholy is positive in the sense that we are able to realize what is really going on in the world around us.   We as people want to take the easy road out of life and stay in euphoria at all times so we drown our sorrows with pills and vapid superficial behavior.   America tends to look at melancholy behavior in a negative sense, as a depression of sorts.   Eric stresses that the American dream is to achieve riches and material wealth but once a satisfactory area is reached in life we unconsciously allow complacency in.   John Keats suffered from tuberculosis, which also killed his mother and his brother.   He saw suffering and suffered himself all through his life, serving in the hospital and he expressed his feelings through his poetry.   Although through his tumultuous times he realized that suffering and death is part of life.   That’s what makes life itself so wonderful and beautiful.   Keats dealt with that pain by rising above it, he was melancholy but at the same time he realized that there was more to life.   There is such a fine line between depression and melancholy but we do need to realize the fearful power of the earth all around us then we can fully understand life.   That quest for understanding inspires deeper thinking and creative energy to flow.   The reason for fearing understanding or melancholy is because we have anxiety over death and pain.   We can’t keep living the façade of happiness when there is so much more to understand...