The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

by Oliver Burkeman

the more that you remain aware of life’s finitude, the more you will cherish it, and the less likely you will be to fritter it away on distractions. ‘Look at it like going to a really nice restaurant,’ said Tillinghast. ‘You take it as a fact that the meal isn’t going to last forever.

many of us live with the dim fear that on our deathbeds we’ll come to regret how we spent our lives. Remembering our mortality moves us closer to the deathbed mindset from which such a judgment might be made – thus enabling us to spend our lives in ways that we’re much less likely to come to regret.

When you really face mortality, the ultimate and unavoidable worst-case scenario, everything changes. ‘All external expectations, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important,’

theirs. ‘Remembering that you are going to die is the best way that I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked.’

imagine you are eighty years old – assuming you’re not eighty already, that is; if you are, you’ll have to pick an older age – and then complete the sentences ‘I wish I’d spent more time on . . . ’, and ‘I wish I’d spent less time on . . . ’. This turns out to be a surprisingly effective way to achieve mortality awareness in short order.

The chief benefit of ‘openture’, Paul Pearsall claimed, is not certitude or even calm or comfort as we normally think of them, but rather the ‘strange, excited comfort [of] being presented with, and grappling with, the tremendous mysteries life offers’.

Eckhart Tolle’s deceptively simple-sounding question – ‘Do you have a problem right now?’ – is a marvellous antidote to low-level stress.

I came to understand more deeply that happiness and vulnerability are often the same thing.

‘What’s the worst that could happen?’, the answer is sometimes pretty bad. But it is finitely bad, rather than infinitely terrifying, so there is always a chance of coping with it. Or at least I think there is.

‘A good traveller has no fixed plans,’