Between Thoughts -Intellectual Musings

What Lewis Nkosi’s Black Psychiatrist knew about the wish we keep making wrong

Lewis Nkosi is one of my favourite South African writers. Mating Birds I could not put down; I read it the way you eat Umphokoqo (Phuthu – crumbled maize porridge or crumbly pap with  Amasi, Sour Milk).  When you’re actually hungry, not politely. He never got to write the memoir he’d apparently already titled in his head,  Memoirs of a Motherless Child, a title that borrows the ache of the old African American spiritual, Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child. But I finally got my hands on the collection that holds The Black Psychiatrist, his one-act play, and one exchange in it has been sitting with me for days.

A woman, Mrs Gresham, says the thing almost all of us have said, and I confess I once dared to say it myself, though I no longer make the wish this way:
“I want to be happy. Why don’t I deserve to be happy?”
Mrs Gresham

Kerry, the Black psychiatrist, doesn’t reach for the soft answer:
“It is not given to most of us to be happy. Merely to be able to cope with our unhappiness.”
Dr Kerry, The Black Psychiatrist

Mrs Gresham calls it crap. Fair. It sounds like crap the first time you hear it,  cold, defeatist, the kind of line a tired professional says to get you out of the office. But I’ve turned it over enough times now to think Kerry wasn’t being cynical. He was being honest in a way that only lands once you stop needing it to be comforting. That one exchange sent me down a rabbit hole: what is happiness, should we even be chasing it, and if not that, then what?

Two Kinds of Happy
Psychology has long split the word in two. There’s hedonic happiness,  pleasure, comfort, the good meal, the promotion, the day that goes right. And there’s eudaimonic happiness,  the steadier sense of a life lived on meaning and purpose, in line with your values, contributing to something past yourself. Most of what we chase, and most of what disappoints us, is hedonic. It’s built to fade.

Why Chasing It Backfires
Here’s the paradox behavioural science keeps confirming: the harder you monitor your own happiness, the less of it you tend to have. Dr Iris Mauss’s research found that people who prize happiness most intensely often end up lonelier and more disappointed, precisely because they’re auditing their own mood instead of living. Add to that the hedonic treadmill,  a term from psychologists Brickman and Campbell describing how quickly we adapt to any win, lottery or promotion or new car, until our baseline mood resets and we’re back to hunting the next high.

Underneath that is basic wiring. Our brains were not built to make us content; they were built to keep us alive, which means they lean toward threat over pleasure,  what’s called negativity bias. And dopamine, the chemical we associate with reward, is really the chemical of anticipation. It spikes on the chase, not the catch. Once you have the thing, the dopamine drops, and you’re already scanning for the next one.

If Not Happiness, Then What
So if “I want to be happy” is the wrong wish, or at least an incomplete one, what’s the better version? I’d put it like this: I want the resilience to hold my own seasons, and the depth to find something worth keeping in each of them. Psychologist Shigehiro Oishi calls this psychological richness, a life measured not by how good it felt but by how varied, novel, and perspective-shifting it was, the hard chapters included. Add to that eudaimonia, living in line with what you actually value, and equanimity, the composure to meet both the good years and the brutal ones without being flattened by either.

The reframe:  not “I want to be happy,” but “I want the capacity to carry what comes.”

What the World Already Knew
Strip away the Western obsession with feeling good, and most global wisdom traditions were never chasing happiness the way we do now. Japan offers Ikigai, your reason for getting up, and Wabi-Sabi, the beauty found in the imperfect and impermanent. India offers Santosha, contentment independent of circumstance, from Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, and Ananda, a joy that sits beneath the noise of daily emotion. China’s Taoism gives us Wu Wei, effortless alignment with the natural order, where happiness is a by-product of harmony, not a target and the Yin-Yang understanding that sorrow and joy are cyclical, not enemies. South Korea holds Jeong, the deep relational bond that ties people together over time, alongside the pairing of Han and Heung,  collected historical sorrow balanced by an equally collective, danced-out joy. It’s almost exactly what Kerry is describing: carrying grief and still finding the energy to move. Brazil gives us Alegria, joy generated communally through music and movement, and Saudade, a longing so tender that culture has made peace with it as proof of having loved something. And home, South Africa gives us Ubuntu,  umntu ngumntu ngabantu, a person is a person through other people. In that frame, chasing individual happiness in isolation was never really the point. Your well-being was always tied to the dignity and health of those around you.

Reading Kerry Again
Nkosi wrote this against the backdrop of apartheid, where telling a Black patient, or any patient living under that weight, to simply “be happy” would have been its own quiet cruelty. Kerry refuses the easy prescription. He’s not saying give up on joy. He’s saying the real work, the actual measure of a life well lived, is building the emotional infrastructure to metabolise pain rather than pretend it isn’t there. That’s not far from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Dr Steven Hayes’s modern behavioural framework, which treats suffering as part of the basic architecture of being human. The moment you stop fighting your unhappiness and instead learn to carry it while still walking toward what you value, you tend to find something that looks a lot like the peace you were originally chasing. Not despite the difficulty. Through it.

Mrs Gresham wanted the easy fix and got a harder truth instead. I understand her irritation. But I no longer wish to be happy. I wish to be the kind of man who can hold his unhappiness without it holding him, who has people around him thick enough to carry some of the weight, and who can still find, in the middle of a hard season, something worth calling meaning, ikigai. That’s the better wish. It just takes longer to say.

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Dr. Mzamo Masito

Between Thoughts – Intellectual Musings

Where the uncomfortable questions get a seat at the table.