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

by Oliver Burkeman

‘Things do not touch the soul,’ is how Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic philosopher–emperor, expresses the notion, adding: ‘Our perturbations come only from the opinion which is within.’

‘The truth that many people never understand’, he wrote, ‘is that the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt.’

‘calling a desire bad names’, he writes, ‘doesn’t get rid of it.’

There is a Japanese term, mono no aware, that translates very roughly as ‘the pathos of things’. It captures a kind of poignant melancholy at life’s impermanence – that additional beauty imparted to cherry blossoms, or cloud formations, or human features, as a result of their inevitably fleeting time on earth.

‘Vulnerant omnes, ultima necat’ as a reminder of the effect of the passing minutes: ‘Every [hour] wounds, and the last one kills.’

I’ll deploy what I have come to think of as the ‘Stoic pause’ – which is all that it takes to remember that it’s my judgment about the infuriating colleague, or the heavy traffic, or the burned food, that is the cause of my distress, not the situation itself.