#selfie-sh and (un)happy
There are the good days and bad days. There are days when you wake up with an overwhelming awareness of being alive, and there are days when you just close your eyes and wish it all to pass. The #100happydays challenge asked to document the happiest of your moments. For 100 days. Quoting from their website, there are so many reasons to get started: ‘The ability to appreciate the moment, the environment and yourself in it, is the base for the bridge towards long term happiness of any human being…How? Plain simple! Every day submit a picture of what made you happy! ’
When I read these words, they seemed to make a lot of sense. So I researched a bit and fetched some comforting statistics on how people who completed this challenge found themselves happier, healthier and livelier. I seized the opportunity. I started an Instagram account and began uploading pictures with the #100happydays tag. Who doesn’t want to be happy, right?
The challenge had interesting effects. Initially, it all seemed achievable to my warped mind. Happy things happen more easily in the holidays, and it’s easy to notice them. But then, those grey days arrive. I truly understood the worth of the challenge then. This challenge is unreasonable, and here’s why:
1. There are happy moments you cannot represent in a picture
Some of my happiest memories from the last 100 days were how a piece of guitar music sounded to my ears, how my heart filled with warmth and wonder when I received a sudden international call from a concerned friend, a vague dream that was full of magical colors, the creative insight that I experienced at 4 a.m. in the morning. These were experiences that were real and they delighted me. But I simply couldn’t represent them as a picture. Sure, I could try and model them—an empty coffee cup to testify that I downed all that coffee. But drinking the coffee didn’t make me happy, the fact that it satisfied a craving did. How will I represent that? The dream. How will I ever be able to explain that in a 5 MB picture with my limited capacities?
2. A picture might not tell the whole story
It’s hard for me to take a picture that is comprehensive. I take a #selfie with my cooling glasses and caption it ‘Playing dress up because I can. #100happydays’. But this doesn’t tell you the whole story. It doesn’t tell you that I spent hours and hours scourging my cupboard for an outfit, that I tried to visualize different dresses and color combinations in my head. It doesn’t tell you that this is precisely what made me happy. The #selfie just shows a face that looks arrogant and self-involved, and I already know that’s not the story of my happiness. That’s not even half the story. That’s only a preface to the vastness of human emotion.
The #100happydays pictures, specifically, don’t give you the true history of your emotional experience. It would be wrong to expect them to.
Because you know that all your 100 days were not entirely happy. There were sad moments too. There were neutral moments. There were pathetic moments. There was anger, grief, pride, loathing, jealousy and disappointment. But these are specifically filtered out. You chose to ignore these happenings when you click these pictures—you bias yourself into viewing your days only in terms of counted joys. When you look back, maybe 2 years from now, you will see happy pictures. This is good in the sense that it can be soothing and therapeutic, even. But it’s bad in the sense that it doesn’t quite feel whole. You know there are parts of the story that are missing in these pictures. Something doesn’t fit, it’s not the aggregate canvas of experience. Maybe it’s not meant to be, but wouldn’t you have liked for it to be any other way?
3. Then there are those days
Then there are those days. You know the ones I am talking about. The days when everything goes wrong, when things are heavy on your heart. On such days, you don’t feel happy for anything at all, or you lack the ability to recognize your happiness. It would be wrong to push yourself into feeling happy either, because that is unnatural. You should let grief run its course. If you force yourself to smile, you know that hollowness only grows in you because you are aware you are pretending.
On some days, it is appropriate to be sad. The emphasis on happiness makes sadness almost feel like a sin. Sadness is a natural emotion that deserves expression. The day I attended my friend’s funeral was a sad day. I remember it vividly. Seeing him lifeless—a corpse. It was unbelievable and it was sad. I posted nothing on my Instagram that day. Nothing made me happy. I was genuinely in mourning. It’s important to allow grief when it arrives naturally; it’s okay to permit those days when nothing feels happy. We all have them, and it’s something to recognize.
4. Why only one happy moment a day?
Truth is, sometimes there are fantastic days. They’re perfect, and every moment is a fairytale. And on such days, you could satisfy a hundred #100happydays challenges. There are so many beautiful moments, it become hard to choose. So what would you do? Why would you force yourself to pick just one?
5. The missing appeal
Don’t tell me you don’t know. There is a strange irony in some photographic statements. There are moments that lose their appeal as soon as you articulate them, as soon as you vest them with meaning, as soon as you make them pictures. There are so many of us who would argue that this is not true, but afford yourself this insight. These are some rare and beautiful expressions of the human spirit that lose their flavor the moment you decide to freeze them in time.
Maybe such moments exist to be expressed in the fluid flow of time; maybe they were created to be lost.
Additionally, there are private people who want to keep their joys in their personal havens—perhaps in their minds. Clever pictures have the capacity to reveal secrets as naked truths. They emerge and stand there as unmistakable revealings. This can seem alarming and strange to such people who’d rather keep these things inside their heads as unpronounced, savored secrets. And that’s perfectly valid and understandable.
6. Anxiety
I never foresaw this when I started the challenge. But having to take a picture every day and keep track of it made me anxious. It’s like I’m on the lookout for events, I am consciously trying to engage—to be happy. And believe it or not, it stresses me out. I can’t zone out and ignore a happy moment. I need to have my battery charged and camera ready. I need to jump at the happy moment—freeze it, share it, name it, tag it. It’s stressful. Eventually, it becomes a mechanical activity, not something that feels as easy as breathing. And deep down, I know that happiness is not about anxiety and it feels like I’m cheating myself.
7. The Decision: Would you choose to experience the moment or capture it?
We are all given a finite amount of time to live. Life is full of precious moments. But then there is this question.
When there are incredible and exhilarating moments, would you choose to experience them or commit that time to capturing them?
This bothered me. Often, I chose to let these moments go, to sweetly forget them in the small nostalgias of fleeting seconds. I wanted to know them, not remember them.
And on such a day, as I sat introspecting this question, I wrote this philosophical memo to myself:
In life, you often have a choice. A choice to consume and a choice to present. A choice to experience and a choice to understand. A choice to trust, and a choice to insist. The nature of truth is that it is constant, but the nature of response—now that is changing isn’t it? It’s a function of emotion, maturity, passion, desire and bravery. And as these merge over time, you unravel yourself like an unwinding clock, uncoil to slowly peel off memories, hopes, ambitions, nostalgias, pasts and pains and longings. Being human can feel like such a small, negotiable burden to your heart.
But when given a choice to forget yourself in the sway of madness or linger softly like in a sweet sadness, what do you choose? Do you want to be a memory that you dust and anchor—preserve in layers and layers of distorted truths…or float away in amnesia, unaware, fluid? Decay or instability? I sometimes live in lies instead, like a swift dab of watercolor over a wanting canvas. Painting myself into stories I am not.
Suppose a moment arrives and creates you—a moment of magic—a leap, a jolt, an epiphany. Would you take a picture of it, to scavenge and remember? Would you strive to find it again—in a different form, in a different medium, to feel its grammar affect you? Would you want to assign it to something—attribute? Or would you let go of that moment…let it experience you and leave you, like an unwanted visitor or a noncommittal lover? What would you do? This is a question that comes to me every time I do something as simple as take a picture.
Here is a moment—a moment worth knowing. But when you are taking a picture, you are not consciously admitting that image into your subjective experience; you are filtering it through a contraption, redirecting the frankness of experience to visit you differently. You are constructing an image while simultaneously trying to feel it. You are complicating the knowledge of happening. You wish to both experience and capture at the same time, but you know its hard to be two things at the same time. This, to me—is the greatest unfairness there is.
So to answer the big question, no, the #100happydays challenge didn’t make me happier. It only made me realize the deep loneliness of my happy moments. It made me understand that the space I inhabit is full of a sort of silent, breathtaking loneliness— my happiness stems from creative pursuits and very rarely from social situations. And that makes me feel strange and sad, and the realization asks to change me. I live in an isolated pool of thought, and I feel separate—I don’t feel mysteriously and easily connected with everyone else who is celebrating their happiness. I don’t have social moments of shared exhiliaration—none of my pictures reflect that spirit.
I am just as happy or sad as I have always been—just as grateful, just as spirited. But somewhere, I know that I have little to cherish. Perhaps I am not fulfilled, but satisfied.
At the end of this journey, a realization strikes me though. You are not just a delightful picture, you are a person. You don’t need to proclaim your happiness, you need to celebrate your personhood. This is the simplest of all plenary knowledges.
