We walked to the bubble tea cafe on an oddly crowded evening in downtown Mountain View. “I think people have just been led to believe that being sad is a prerequisite to being an artist,” A said. “I’m not saying there isn’t a stereotype,” I answered, striding briskly beside him. “I’m just saying that to create art, you need some kind of inspiration, and sadness is a very easy emotion to come by.”

I don’t think all art comes from tragedy. But all art does come from emotion and more often than not, attempts to evoke emotion from others. I find that sadness, as an emotion, is less complex than happiness and the sustaining of prolonged joy. Sadness is basic and primal and more difficult to control. It seeps out into my everyday activities, sometimes overwhelming me and sometimes lingering in the background, temporarily suppressed by determined focus. When I channel it, I can use it for creative enterprises that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to accomplish in a state of emotionless apathy. The trouble with using sadness as an artistic springboard is that it can taint the results. While the gray pallor on the finished work may not have been my original intention when I was first inspired to start the project, I feel as if it was better to have created in a burst of tears and art than to have sat glumly in the darkness of my lonely, agonized thoughts.

I’m reading a book called Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age. In it, author Bill McKibben speculates on the effects of genetically engineering our children to be better people, or to grow up to be the kind of people we want them to be. He asks us to question the effects of infusing a child with the gene for happiness, and quotes Gregory Stock, researcher at UCLA: “If we had the power to protect our future child, we might be very reluctant to leave him or her with a predisposition for recurring bouts of dark depression. Not even the knowledge that our child might use these distressing periods to good purpose would make our decision to forgo germinal intervention any easier.” That cyclical sadness is wrong or destructive is the simplest perception. The emotional growth and even the enjoyment one can derive from using creative outlets to overcome this sadness is easily overlooked by peers and family who worry incessantly about surface appearances. In the same chapter, McKibben cites the research of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who studied the experience of human enjoyment. Csikszentmihalyi discovered that in the people who found intense joy in some activity, whether it be rock climbing or painting, individuals sought out a “clear set of challenges,” and a way to “go beyond the known.” Two ways of “going beyond the given” are to compete, as chess or basketball players do, or to “struggle against internal obstacles,” as composers or artists do. I find it intriguing that Csikszentmihalyi’s work reveals that the deepest enjoyment derives from struggle, whether physical or mental, as at first glance such a challenge would appear detrimental or contrary to the pursuit of happiness.

This returns us to A’s original observation about tragic artistry. Is sadness necessary to produce great art? Of course not. The perception that artists are often tortured, isolated figures is not altogether invented, but it is a misguided understanding. What people fail to see is that even in times of great distress, a person can find happiness in the struggle to share his feelings with a disconnected audience. When I write or draw or design, I think of two things — the emotion that drives me to create, and how I can enable others to perceive that emotion the way I do without it being their own. Is it impossible for someone who is sad to be inspired by it and to find enjoyment in the struggle to overcome it? I don’t believe so. The constant challenge that this reinvention of my feelings provides me with actually alleviates the original sadness, even if temporarily. Art, happy or sad or otherwise, extends and sometimes alters the current state of the soul.