Your suffering is a composite of the effects of the choices of others and your own. While there is only so much you can do to change other people, you have full control over the component of your feelings that is due to your own choices in life.
Our society tells people suffering from miserable feelings that they can’t help it, they are victims, and they are just as valuable as if they were not experiencing these feelings. These false beliefs cause many to miss the cue for improvement that misery provides. As long as you think that you can’t help how you feel, you are a victim, and there is nothing you can do to change your situation. If you believe this, you will prove it true by failing to make any of the changes that would prove it false.
Most suffering comes from resisting newly revealed misalignment of your thoughts, feelings, and actions from reality. For example, unwanted feelings can come in response to the revelation of lower selfvalue than you previously thought, or a greater cost or benefit than you assumed for something or someone you desire. The alleviation of all such suffering is fully within your power through changing what you expect, what you want, and what you do to realign yourself with your updated view of reality.
Modern culture teaches that your feelings are something that happens to you. The truth is that how you feel in any moment is primarily the net result of your choices up to that point. Your feelings don’t happen to you—you generate them through your choices. If you experience depression, it’s because you are making choices that generate depression. If you experience anxiety, it’s because you are making choices that generate anxiety. If you lack meaning, it’s because you choices generate meaningless activities.
Seeking to resolve miserable feelings without making changes to the choices you make is an impossible endeavor. If you can’t address the cause of the problem, the best you will accomplish is masking the symptoms through distracting drugs or experience—all of which will cause their own problems, most of which are much worse than the symptoms they mask.
Changing your feelings is always a question of changing your choices. Seek choices that generate the feelings you desire. You will almost always find that the future feelings you seek to experience are generated through a willingness to endure feelings you don’t want in the present. For example, to increase meaning long-term requires you to complete many seemingly meaningless tasks on a daily basis, as great accomplishments always require discipline over time.
Society tells you that you are no less of a person for struggling with these unwanted feelings and, increasingly, that miserable feelings are actually virtues. As long as you believe this, you will not do what it takes to resolve them, and you will not accept the solutions to these problems even if they were offered to you. Even if you are not willingly making these decisions, they are still primarily a result of your choices. Until you exercise your full ability to track down which decisions are causing them—including seeking and accepting the help of those who might seem them more clearly than you—their persistence does make you a worse person than you would otherwise be, both in terms of your quality of life and your quality of character.