I don't like you, but I need you.

Can happiness exist without sadness?

Everyone always wants their lives to be perfect.  We always want to live in a world without pain, without sorrow, without hardships.  But if we lived in such a world, would we even be able to truly appreciate the good fortune we were blessed with?

The concept of a perfect world sounds...well, perfect.  However, we wouldn’t be able to even perceive how perfect everything was if we didn’t know the opposite.  In order to truly appreciate joy, you must experience sorrow.  You must have that basis of comparison.  If you’ve never experienced sorrow, then how can you know when something is positive?  You couldn’t.  It would just seem normal.

A world without misery would cause us all to take what we had for granted.

In order for humans to understand what happiness is, we must first understand that it is not the only thing out there.  If all we knew was happiness, then happiness would just seem normal, and in general, people are dissatisfied with normality.  Officially, a 75% is considered an average grade.  However, humans are, by nature, competitive.  By nature, we don’t like to be deemed “average”  or “ordinary,” so we feel compelled to go above and beyond that, because we know that there is something better.

So really, if everything in the world was perfect, then we would still be just as dissatisfied as we are now, because we’d be incapable of moving beyond and advancing from others.

If sadness didn’t exist, we still wouldn’t be happy.  We would just...be.

Our existence depends upon the interrelation of emotions in order to create satisfaction.  All we want is to be satisfied.