Why do I feel guilty for being happy?
Things are going well. Work is fine, the evenings are calm. And somewhere under it sits a small unease, as if the good week had been taken from someone else.
Anton Chekhov wrote a story about that unease in 1898. In "Gooseberries" a veterinary surgeon, Ivan Ivanovitch, tells two friends about visiting his brother. The brother spent his life saving for a small estate with a gooseberry bush. Now he has it, and he is happy.
The hammer
Watching his brother eat the sour berries with delight, Ivan Ivanovitch comes to a thought he cannot put down:
"There ought to be behind the door of every happy, contented man some one standing with a hammer continually reminding him with a tap that there are unhappy people"
— Anton Chekhov, "Gooseberries", tr. Constance Garnett, in The Wife, and Other Stories
The image is easy to misread. The man with the hammer does not take the happiness away. He only taps.
The tap
Read this way, guilt about being happy may not be a verdict. It may be the same tap, which keeps the good week from shutting out the rest of the world.
People often try to silence it by telling themselves happiness is not selfish, or by spoiling the good week a little so it feels deserved. Chekhov does neither. He leaves the tap sounding.
A different kind of guilt, the one that comes from unlived possibilities, is on the page about Rollo May and ontological guilt.
What the story leaves
Ivan Ivanovitch's friends are tired and go to bed without answering him. The question stays with the reader: who does this tap remind me of?
Epimelea is a psychotherapy app built around the existential school. The conversation carries over from one meeting to the next. The archive is encrypted on the device and belongs to the person who wrote it.
About the app: an AI therapist for long-term therapy
This page is about a school of psychotherapy. It is not medical advice and not emergency help. If you are in danger right now, contact your local emergency number, or find a helpline in your country at findahelpline.com.