Awhile back I preached a sermon and said the following:
When Proverbs 17:22 says that “A joyful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones” it’s not simply describing two states that people find themselves in. “Medicine” is an intervention you bring into someone’s life to end sickness and encourage health. Solomon is encouraging you to pursue a joyful heart and experience blessings from it rather than cultivate a crushed spirit and suffer the problems that it brings. A parallel text is Proverbs 14:30, “A tranquil heart gives life to the flesh, but envy makes the bones rot.” The point is to not nurture a crushed spirit, but to do something about it that demonstrates your faith in Jesus.
It seems to me that one way of stating the problem is that, because humans are unhappy about things, they can also become unhappy about being unhappy. And then they can do it again. And again. Unhappiness thus compounds.
This seems crazy but it also seems like a price we pay for being self-aware or self-conscious. We are capable of multiplying our misery by our thoughts.
But it could also work the other way. We could be grateful about feeling grateful, for example. We can be happy about being happy. God wants us to cultivate attitudes that help us thrive rather than entangle and paralyze us.
I quoted a lot of Cornelius Van Til in my book on wisdom Solomon Says (available at Athanasius Press and Amazon.com [Kindle]), but I’m not sure I included this gem:
Man was created God’s vicegerent and he must realize himself as God’s vicegerent. There is no contradiction between these two statements. Man was created a character and yet he had to make himself even more of a character. So we may say that man was created a king in order that he might become more of a king than he was.
That’s the kind of compounding we’re meant to do!