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

by Oliver Burkeman

That we yearn for neat, book-sized solutions to the problem of being human is understandable, but strip away the packaging, and you’ll find that the messages of such works are frequently banal.

The startling conclusion at which they had all arrived, in different ways, was this: that the effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is our constant efforts to eliminate the negative – insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness – that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.

It involved learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity, stopping trying to think positively, becoming familiar with failure, even learning to value death.

At the bottom of all this lies the principle that the countercultural philosopher of the 1950s and ’60s, Alan Watts, echoing Aldous Huxley, labelled ‘the law of reversed effort’, or the ‘backwards law’: the notion that in all sorts of contexts, from our personal lives to politics, all this trying to make everything right is a big part of what’s wrong.

“trying to make everything right” italicized here

The ‘negative path’ is about rejecting this dichotomy, and seeking instead the happiness that arises through negativity, rather than trying to drown negativity out with relentless good cheer. If a fixation on positivity is the disease, this approach is the antidote.

If ‘being positive’ doesn’t make you happy, is it right to call it ‘being positive’ at all?

We see a rut coming up in the road ahead, and proceed to steer our bike right into it.

Literally witnessed this at cyclocross worlds 2022

The imp of the perverse plagues social interactions, too, as anyone who has ever laughed in recognition at an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm will know all too well.

:fuck:

For the Stoics, the ideal state of mind was tranquility, not the excitable cheer that positive thinkers usually seem to mean when they use the word ‘happiness’. And tranquility was to be achieved not by strenuously chasing after enjoyable experiences, but by cultivating a kind of calm indifference towards one’s circumstances. One way to do this, the Stoics argued, was by turning towards negative emotions and experiences; not shunning them, but examining them closely instead.

So… mindfulness.

What actually causes suffering are the beliefs you hold about those things.

Ceaseless optimism about the future only makes for a greater shock when things go wrong; by fighting to maintain only positive beliefs about the future, the positive thinker ends up being less prepared, and more acutely distressed, when things eventually happen that he can’t persuade himself to believe are good.

Each time you kiss your child goodnight, he contends, you should specifically consider the possibility that she might die tomorrow. This is jarring advice that might strike any parent as horrifying, but Epictetus is adamant: the practice will make you love her all the more, while simultaneously reducing the shock should that awful eventuality ever come to pass.

ARRIVAL

All too often, the Stoics point out, things will not turn out for the best.

The only things we can truly control, the Stoics argue, are our judgments – what we believe – about our circumstances. But this isn’t bad news. From the Stoic perspective, as we’ve already seen, our judgments are what cause our distress – and so they’re all that we need to be able to control in order to substitute serenity for suffering.

For the Stoics, then, our judgments about the world are all that we can control, but also all that we need to control in order to be happy; tranquility results from replacing our irrational judgments with rational ones.

Because we think these things must occur, it follows that it would be an absolute catastrophe if they did not.

the strategy of focusing on the worst-case scenario – and distinguishing between very bad and completely terrible events – really comes into its own. It turns infinite fears into finite ones.

‘If you accept that the universe is uncontrollable,’ Ellis told me, ‘you’re going to be a lot less anxious.’

Non-attachment need not mean withdrawing from life, or suppressing natural impulses, or engaging in punishing self-denial. It simply means approaching the whole of life – inner thoughts and emotions, outer events and circumstances – without clinging or aversion.

The unconscious is the repository of everything that we’re avoiding.’

Experienced retreat-goers, it turns out, have a term for this phenomenon. They call it a ‘vipassana vendetta’. In the stillness, tiny irritations become magnified into full-blown hate campaigns; the mind is so conditioned to attaching to storylines that it seizes upon whatever’s available.

we tend to confuse acting with feeling like acting, and how most motivational techniques are really designed to change how you feel.

And in those situations, motivational advice risks making things worse, by surreptitiously strengthening your belief that you need to feel motivated before you can act.

The routines of almost all famous writers, from Charles Darwin to John Grisham, similarly emphasise specific starting times, or number of hours worked, or words written. Such rituals provide a structure to work in, whether or not the feeling of motivation or inspiration happens to be present. They let people work alongside negative or positive emotions, instead of getting distracted by the effort of cultivating only positive ones. ‘Inspiration is for amateurs,’ the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. ‘The rest of us just show up and get to work.’

‘People … think that they should always like what they do, and that their lives should be trouble-free,’ Morita wrote. ‘Consequently, their mental energy is wasted by their impossible attempts to avoid feelings of displeasure or boredom.’

In his book Destructive Goal Pursuit: The Mount Everest Disaster, Chris Kayes relates Lester’s basic finding about the typical Everest climber: he was someone who demonstrated ‘considerable restlessness, dislike for routine, desire for autonomy, tendency to be dominant in personal relations, and a lack of interest in social interaction for its own sake. Their felt need for achievement and independence was very high.’

!!!

We’re not only distressed by our thoughts; we imagine that we are those thoughts.

Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one.

Because (here it comes) the very notion of a boundary line depends on it having two sides. When you think about it, it doesn’t make much sense to describe a boundary as something that keeps two things apart. It makes more sense to describe it as the place at which they meet – or, more accurately, the place at which they are exactly the same thing.

‘Really,’ Watts wrote, ‘the fundamental, ultimate mystery – the only thing you need to know to understand the deepest metaphysical secrets – is this: that for every outside, there is an inside, and that for every inside, there is an outside, and although they are different, they go together.’

Our sanity depends on maintaining a coherent sense of self, and on setting healthy boundaries between ourselves and others – and neither Alan Watts nor Eckhart Tolle wishes to imperil your sanity. Instead, the conclusion to which both their thinking leads is that the self is best thought of as some kind of a fiction, albeit an extremely useful one – and that realising this, instead of doing everything we can to deny it, might be the route to fulfilment.

Ducks bear no grudges.

‘Security is both a feeling and a reality,’ as Schneier puts it, ‘and they’re not the same.’

‘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.’

‘Just because you have social problems, it doesn’t mean you don’t have happiness.

But living with fewer illusions meant facing reality head-on.

It’s only because there are castle walls that there is anything to attack.

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.

‘I feel really sorry for the developer on this one,’ Sherry said, indicating the breath mints that inadvertently resembled crack. ‘I mean, I’ve met the guy. Why would he ever have spent any time on the streets, in the drug culture? He did everything right, except go out on the streets to see if his product looked like drugs.’

Failure is everywhere. It’s just that most of the time we would rather avoid confronting that fact.

‘Think about it,’ Denrell observed afterwards. ‘Incurring large losses requires both persistence … and the ability to persuade others to pour their money down the drain.’

Failure is occasionally spectacular at first, but people who fail dwell largely in obscurity.

Dennis’s focus on risk-taking raises an intriguing additional point, which is that the willingness to fail is itself one of the personality traits we may come to overvalue as a result of survivor bias.

In other words, we will fight so hard to preserve our symbolic immortality that we will sacrifice our physical lives. In order to deny death, we will die. Even worse, we will deny that this is what we are doing, until the point at which we can deny it no longer.

‘It is [fear] that makes people so willing to follow brash, strong-looking demagogues with tight jaws and loud voices,’ wrote Becker – leaders ‘who seem most capable of cleansing the world of the vague, the weak, the uncertain, the evil. Ah, to give oneself over to their direction – what calm, what relief.’

Death spells the end of the experiencing subject, and thus the end of any capacity for experiencing the state we fear.

The psychotherapist Irvin Yalom, in his book Staring at the Sun, points out that 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.

The psychologist Russ Harris suggests a simple exercise: 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.

What we need more of, instead, is what the psychologist Paul Pearsall called ‘openture’. Yes, this is an awkward neologism. But its very awkwardness is a reminder of the spirit that it expresses, which includes embracing imperfection and easing up on the search for neat solutions.

But negative capability need not involve embracing an ancient philosophical or religious tradition. It is also the skill you’re exhibiting when you move forward with a project – or with life – in the absence of sharply defined goals; when you dare to inspect your failures; when you stop trying to eliminate feelings of insecurity; or when you put aside ‘motivational’ techniques in favour of actually getting things done.