Why You Can’t Find Joy In Anything

Photo by British Library on Unsplash

Sorrow, I filled the tub with rusty wine and drowned our children in it.
There are so many gods —

Fortune, Doorways, Useful Arts —
to disappoint them all is fatal.
I held a world between my teeth once.

Blue marble, fine china.
But nothing makes me happy.
A million lambent oysters, orgiastic

pearls of caviar,
do not make me happy.
I have lost my appetite for spring.

- Margaret Kaplan

When I was in Lisbon I learned about a pretty unique word: Saudade. Roughly translated, it means a melancholic longing or yearning, a sense of incompleteness. But it’s something more than that. Something that we don’t really have a word for in English. A longing oriented towards longing itself. A desire for desire. I felt this for some time. A restless sense of boredom and dullness. It felt inescapable. Is this anhedonia?

What is anhedonia? In the DSM, it’s one of the cardinal symptoms for major depression, a lack of enjoyment in activities that one usually finds enjoyable for at least two weeks. Tracing the word…