Name: Why it’s okay to not be okay | The Gray Area
Uploaded: 2025-12-23T16:55:48.000Z
Duration: 53 min 22 s
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For the show this week, I'm talking to the philosopher Mariana Alessandri.

She wrote a book a few years ago called Night Visions.

It's really about sadness and grief and what it means to live with dark moods, dark emotions.

And really that book and this conversation is a reminder that, that these things are part of life, that they are not symptoms of failure or reasons to feel shame.

And this is an episode we like to run every year around the holidays, because this is a time when everybody is supposed to feel good and happy and thankful.

But if you don't feel those things and you are struggling with any of these dark emotions, that's okay.

And Mariana has a lot of wisdom to share about all those things.

That's an old question, one of the oldest, in fact, since the beginning of philosophy at least, people have been wondering what makes us happy and, and

Happiness is great and very much worth pursuing.

But if you're a real person living in the real world, you know already that it's not possible to be happy all the time.

And the problem with a culture obsessed with the pursuit of happiness is that it creates a lot of pressure to not be unhappy.

It also reinforces the idea that anyone who's unhappy is in some important sense, a failure.

Even if you believe that happiness is the ultimate good, is it a mistake to assume that unhappiness is something to be avoided at all costs?

I'm Sean Elling, and this is the Gray Area.

She's a philosophy professor at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley, and

the author of a new book called Night Vision, Seeing Ourselves Through Dark Moods.

The book is not just a rebuke of what people sometimes call toxic positivity.

It's really an attempt to honor those darker emotions that all of us feel sometimes.

It's a very clear eyed and intimate look at the reality of our inner lives.

But importantly, it isn't a celebration of sadness either.

It's a meditation on painful emotions and the important truths they can reveal about the world and our place in it.

And this is something I wanted to explore with Mariana.

So I invited her onto the show to do just that.

There is a standard way of viewing darkness that you're pushing back against in this book.

You're talking about dark emotions like anger, anxiety, depression, and

grief, but also darkness in the sense of obscurity and the unknown.

So I just want to begin with you telling me about this standard view and really why you think it's wrong or unhelpful or both.

So to talk about the dark, it's, like, essential to figure out the light first.

It's almost hard to see how we think of the dark without it being in comparison with how we see the light.

And so in the book, I talk about Plato's cave and how in the story, there are all these prisoners who are looking at the cave wall, and

And behind the fire are these puppeteers who hold up these puppets, and

they walk around with these puppets of, like, people and trees and dogs.

And those puppets project shadows onto the wall.

And then the people believe what they see on the wall.

They think that those things on the wall are actually the actual things, and

they have contests and they see who's the smartest, but it's all based on shadows.

And one day, one of these prisoners gets freed against his will, because, first of all, they don't really know that they're prisoners until someone drags this person out into the light.

And in the light, first the person's blinded and doesn't want to be there.

So he first wants to look at the ground and the shadows on the ground, because those things look like real untruth.

And then he can look at the water that has reflections.

And then by night, he can see things clearer.

And little by little, Plato tells us that this person acclimates to the light and then can finally see truth, so can finally see the real tree, whereas before, he was seeing, like, a copy of a copy of a tree.

And so a lot of people, I would say most people, interpret this story as saying that the light is what allows us to see truth, that the light is what saves.

I mean, if you take it into the religious realm, a lot of religions talk about how the light is the savior.

So then we have light, like, way up high in the sky as this thing that is everything.

We say, you're radiant, you're beautiful, you're glowing, you're brilliant.

It's just this big way that we invoke brightness as good and beautiful and holy and pure.

So then, in the light of that darkness, think about all the words that it means.

Like, if something's dark, we don't want to go to a dark place.

We want to shed the dark and step out of the dark and into the light.

And so we have created in our society this very difficult dichotomy between light and dark.

And we spend a lot of us spend a lot of our time trying to get brighter and lighter and shed our darkness.

And from my point of view, that's not possible.

And so then we're left feeling like failed bright creatures because we're also creatures of the dark.

And so I'm trying to hold a space open for the darkness that values it and that honors it as part of who we are, rather than just as something that's trying to overcome or dismiss or get rid of it.

It's probably the most pervasive metaphor in our culture.

I'm not sure there's even a close competitor, right?

And it's so hard to doubt because it seems natural that light is better than dark.

Well, I mean, you mentioned the allegory of the cave.

And as you were just saying, the moral of that story typically is taken to be, hey, look, get your ass out of the cave and into the sunlight so that you can see the real truth of things.

And you have a sort of alternate take, which is that.

And now I'm quoting you, everyone is a potential puppeteer.

That, for you, is the sort of upshot of that.

I live where it's, like, sunny 25 hours a day.

And I would not want to just be in the sun my whole life.

Like, just out there in the desert, you know, in the sun.

The cave provides us this, like, shelter.

If we see the metaphor or the allegory of the cave, as the cave was bad because it was dark, and

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Why it’s okay to not be okay | The Gray Area

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