Kairosclerosis
Kairosclerosis is the moment when you realise you are experiencing joy, but consciously try to hold on to it, prompting you to identify with it, break it down trying to understand it, and pick it apart until the delicate experience becomes the dust of an afterthought. Essentially, you can’t just be happy, you need to figure out why, but in the process of thinking about it, you kill it.
Those of us who are Kairosclerotic are victims of our own imaginations. It is not that we do not want to be happy, it is that such a feeling feels so alien, so absurdly out of place, that we have to analyse it, to find out what is going on in the hope that we can develop a formula, a procedure, a method, to conjure this feeling once more.
The Kairosclerotic feels joy and sadness like the rest of us, but they feel (perhaps because their minds are more attuned to interpreting things negatively) that life is essentially miserable, so therefore, when they do experience joy, there arises a feeling of indecency and guilt. They believe (perhaps not entirely incorrectly) that life is essentially suffering and they therefore feel indecent or wrong to enjoy happiness when it arrives. It is essentially a melancholic attitude.
The joy a Kairosclerotic individual feels is soon overwhelmed by another thought; one of all the times they did not feel joy. They cannot help but contrast this brief slither of light against the enormous yawning void of misery and pain that had come before and that will surely come after. They cannot en-joy because their mind immediately sets this moment of happiness against all the moments that came before, emptying the present moment of any liberating and pleasurable potential.
We all know a Kairosclerotic person in our midst, perhaps we are one ourselves. A symptom of melancholy, we do not allow ourselves to be happy because we do not allow ourselves to feel. And if we feel, the greater danger is in feeling something we have not before and in realising that this brief moment of happiness is actually that: brief. We do not want to be happy for just the moment, we want more than a momentary spark in a dark chasm; we want to smile and live a life where when we are happy, we don’t need to question what the hell is going on.
Proper Candor 