Navigating out of heartbreak
So much happiness depends on the story we choose to tell ourselves
Have you ever flip-flopped between caring about who wins a sports game and finding it stressful to care at all?
This past weekend, my mentee took me to an Australian Football League game as a late birthday present. She did it because her project involves studying the impact of concussions in AFL players and she figured we should at least attend one game.
Going to the stadium was fun — we got their very early, had beer, fries and hot dogs, watched a semi-professional game conclude, cheered while the players were introduced and learned the rules of Australian Football on the fly.
That said, once the game began, we uh…left after about 20 minutes. My mentee falling asleep might have been the point at which we realized the game wasn’t holding our attention. Sydney was winning anyway.
On the way back, we discussed why we found it difficult to care. My mentee said she couldn’t care about sporting games because she felt she had no control over the outcome. For me, it was a little different.
I remembered a match from the 1999 Cricket World Cup. I was 8 years old and very into cricket because my grandfather (whom I would stay with most evenings after school while my parents finished work), was very into cricket. India got eliminated from the tournament in a nail bitingly close match against Zimbabwe; the final score was 249–252. I remember watching the game on the TV in my grandparents’ living room, feeling heartbroken as India’s last three batsmen were dismissed in rapid succession. When the final bastman was dismissed, the camera focused on a Zimbabwean couple in the stands that leapt to their feet, elated by the win. The couple turned to each other, kissed, then went back to cheering. It was actually beautiful. I realized that if India won, that scene would have looked very different.
Something about that realization broke my attachment to the outcome of a sports match forever. I find it difficult to care about the outcome of the game because it feels hostile to the opposing team. I thought about that Zimbabwean couple in the stands; I liked that they could celebrate the special euphoria of the underdog win. Watching them celebrate, I had no desire to take that away from them.
The constraints we place on happiness
It is common to believe that certain conditions must be met in order for us to feel happy. Often, the belief causes no problems. You earn what you decided you need to earn to feel good about yourself. You are admired by your peers. You love someone who loves you too.
In many ways this is not unlike being in a city with a good sports team and deciding you can feel happy when that sports team wins; you get a hit of dopamine every time those wins come about, and the wins may be just frequent enough that relying on that dopamine to keep you going becomes a sustainable strategy. The main difference, if you were to draw one, would be in how much control you have over the outcome — but even with sports teams, it is possible that our thinking can impact the outcomes of “chance” events, as these experiments suggest:
And as with caring about a sports team, it can backfire. You could come upon financial hardship due to recession. You could have an accident and can no longer be the same person who was admired by your peers. You may love someone who does not see your potential. What then?
A lot of people think there is no solution; that there are just “winners” and “losers” and that is how life works. Men in particular are very prone to buying into this narrative, which I think is part of why suicide rates are so high among men. The “losers” typically feel a lot of anger towards things they designate as the reason those conditions aren’t fulfilled, akin to sports fans angry at players who “let them down”. Or people who are forever angry at “the government”.
Perhaps you could invent new conditions to try to take the place of the old ones, like developing a crush on someone new to get over your ex. But ultimately, any condition you place on your happiness entails a scenario where that condition is not fulfilled, and thus can always “go wrong”. Plus, you cannot trick your brain into giving you rewards for meeting trivial conditions (except by using drugs); that reward center evolved to give us rewards according to the significance of what was achieved. There’s no simple answer.
Or is there?
The default state of human consciousness is bliss
I recently went through another come-close-pull-away cycle with someone I have loved for close to 8 years now. I wonder if she pulled away because she feared she could not possibly fulfill the role I had designated for her in my mind. Faced with the possibility of this being the end of the road for us, I was looming over a cliff of depression. I told my mentee (who is also a good friend and my housemate) that I would stick around till the end of her PhD if she chose to do one, since I had promised as much, but I wasn’t promising much beyond that.
Naturally, my mentee took this poorly, and tried to convince me that this person I was so chewed up over had never been worth it in the first place. That made me feel worse, because if she had never been worth it, why had I been stupid enough to love her? Later that night, staring at the ceiling in my bedroom, I wondered why it was coming to this.
And then I realized…this belief that I had, that said I “should” be unhappy because of how things were…it was something I had made up. It was the consequence of caring about an outcome and feeling devastated that the outcome didn’t manifest. It was not fundamentally different from my 8 year old self whose heart was breaking from watching India’s batsmen get eliminated in that 1999 World Cup match against Zimbabwe.
What if I just…decided not to care?
Amazingly, I found that I could. I just let it all go and drifted into a place before thought; a place of feeling. I felt how life was temporary, and how near-death experiences tell us that our brain is like a “virtual reality” headset that our consciousness temporarily chooses to wear, and when the time comes our consciousness gets released from the “headset” and enters a state in which it feels connected with all of existence. A core state of consciousness that in yogic tradition is referred to as ananda, or the “bliss body”.
When I “came back” from this meditative state, I realized I had, essentially, invented reasons for why I was unhappy and had believed them. It was not “wrong” to do so. The whole purpose of physical reality is to have an opportunity to tell beautiful stories, or so I have gathered from my time spent making sense of all the data on what happens after physical death. We can pick a narrative in which we hit “dead ends” like the one I was hitting (literally a dead end!). Or we can pick one in which there are no dead ends, where a beautiful story filled with meaning and purpose can be told no matter what unfolds.
The dead end narrative was not one that I preferred. So I let it go, along with the narrative that I needed romantic love in order to find fulfillment at all — a dangerously prevalent story, rooted in the assumption that happiness is limited by the reproductive impulses of a physical body (it’s even the basis of the “red-pill” incel movement, and it collapses when you remember that the default state of consciousness is bliss). Instead, I will begin the process of rewiring my mind to tell a different, more beautiful story.
I know it won’t be easy. Being immersed in modern society means being faced with constant reminders of your old patterns of thinking and of how other people think. Today, I woke up and just felt…very empty, like I had to start from scratch on finding things to give me motivation. If I ran away and decided to join an ashram it might be easier to derive joy from meditative bliss and give up on romantic love, but I have chosen to be immersed in modern life because that’s where I feel I can make the most difference. I guess I need to recognize that what I have taken on is not easy, and today feels a bit lighter than yesterday. One day at a time, I guess.
