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

by Oliver Burkeman

But the point is central to any ‘negative’ approach to happiness: it is rarely wise to struggle to change the weather.

When thinking comes, behind it is clear mind. When thinking goes, there is only clear mind.

Only 3 per cent of them said they had. Two decades later, the researchers tracked down the class of ’53, to see how their lives had turned out. The results were unequivocal: the 3 per cent of graduates with written goals had amassed greater financial wealth than the other 97 per cent combined.

Whether or not we use the word ‘goals’, we’re forever making plans based upon desired outcomes.

It is precisely this preoccupation that the followers of the ‘negative path’ to happiness call into question – because it turns out that setting and then chasing after goals can often backfire in horrible ways. There is a good case to be made that many of us, and many of the organisations for which we work, would do better to spend less time on goalsetting, and, more generally, to focus with less intensity on planning for how we would like the future to turn out.

Maybe issue here is a focus on external goals (outcomes) instead of internal ones that specify the *actions* to be taken.

that what motivates our investment in goals and planning for the future, much of the time, isn’t any sober recognition of the virtues of preparation and looking ahead. Rather, it’s something much more emotional: how deeply uncomfortable we are made by feelings of uncertainty.

Faced with the anxiety of not knowing what the future holds, we invest ever more fiercely in our preferred vision of that future – not because it will help us achieve it, but because it helps rid us of feelings of uncertainty in the present.

As we will see later in this chapter, though, there is a powerful alternative possibility: we could learn to become more comfortable with uncertainty,

and to exploit the potential hidden within it, both to feel better in the present and to achieve more success in the future.

Clinging too tightly to goals is one of the principal ways in which we express the obsession with reaching that next patch of ground.

What might it mean to turn towards uncertainty – to learn to develop a tolerance for it, or even to embrace it?

Shapiro’s counterargument to his sceptical clients begins with what he calls ‘the happiness and self-worth side of things’: goal-free living simply makes for happier humans.

‘You can have a broad sense of direction without a specific goal or a precise vision of the future,’ Shapiro told me. ‘I think of it like jazz, like improvisation. It’s all about meandering with purpose.’

The most valuable skill of a successful entrepreneur, Chris Kayes is convinced, isn’t ‘vision’ or ‘passion’ or a steadfast insistence on destroying every barrier between yourself and some prize you’re obsessed with.

Rather, it’s the ability to adopt an unconventional approach to learning: an improvisational flexibility not merely about which route to take towards some predetermined objective, but also a willingness to change the destination itself.

Effectually minded people, on the other hand, examine what means and materials are at their disposal, then imagine what possible ends or provisional next directions those means might make possible.

foundation of effectuation is the ‘bird in hand’ principle: ‘Start with your means. Don’t wait for the perfect opportunity.

Start taking action, based on what you have readily available: what you are, what you know and who you know.’

Instead – and there are distinct echoes, here, of the Stoic focus on the worst-case scenario – ask how big the loss would be if you failed. So long as it would be tolerable, that’s all you need to know.

But regardless of exactly what happened to him that night in Belsize Park, his insights are worth considering because of his perspective on a topic that most of us, most of the time, take entirely for granted: the idea of the self.

‘There is this complete identification with the thoughts that go through your head,’ Tolle said, his accent betraying a trace of his native Germany, when I asked him what he thought was the biggest barrier to happiness for most people. ‘It’s just a total absence of awareness, except for the thoughts that are continuously passing through your mind. It is the state of being so identified with the voices in your head’ – and at this point he emitted a tight Germanic chuckle – ‘that you think you are the voices in your head.’

It is when we identify with this inner chatter, Tolle suggests – when we come to think of it as us – that thinking becomes compulsive.

We come to see our thinking and our continuing to exist as people as one and the same thing.

But he takes things further, suggesting that these judgments, along with all our other thoughts, are what we take ourselves to be. We’re not only distressed by our thoughts; we imagine that we are those thoughts. The ego that results from this identification has a life of its own.

The way out of this trap is not to stop thinking – thinking, Tolle agrees, is exceedingly useful – but to disidentify from thoughts: to stop taking your thoughts to be you, to realise, in the words of The Power of Now, that ‘you are not your mind’.

We should start using the mind as a tool, he argues, instead of letting the mind use us, which is the normal state of affairs.

It is enough, for now, to enquire within: don’t you feel a certain tranquility when you seek to become the witness to your thoughts, rather than identifying with them completely?

Instead of seeking ways to solve your problems in the future, it can be illuminating to try asking yourself if you have any problems right now. The answer, unless you’re currently in physical pain, is very likely to be no. Most problems, by definition, involve thoughts about how something might turn out badly in the future, whether in five minutes or in five years, or thoughts about things that happened in the past. It can be curiously difficult to identify any problems that afflict you at this very moment, in the present – and it is always the present.

When you rate your self highly, you actually create the possibility of rating your self poorly; you are reinforcing the notion that your self is something that can be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in the first place.

Rate your individual acts as good or bad, if you like. Seek to perform as many good ones, and as few bad ones, as possible. But leave your self out of it.

Yes, it is true that you wouldn’t be you without the relationships you’re in or the community to which you belong. But you also wouldn’t be you if it weren’t for all the physical objects in the world that aren’t you. We spend our lives failing to realise this obvious truth, and thus anxiously seeking to fortify our boundaries, to build our egos and assert our superiority over others, as if we could separate ourselves from them, without realising that interdependence makes us what we are.

Indeed, when Tolle hits his stride, there is no human outrage afflicting the world that he is not willing to attribute to our efforts to defend and strengthen our egos. War, tyrannies, and injustices of all kinds stand exposed as little but the efforts of insecure egos to fortify themselves: to harden their boundaries, to separate themselves, and to impose upon the rest of the world the thought patterns on which they have come to imagine that their very lives – although, in reality, only their egos – depend.

The desire for a feeling of security and safety doesn’t only lead us into irrationality in the field of counterterrorism. It leads us into irrationality all the time.

And if the most radical proponents of the ‘negative path’ are to be believed, in turning towards insecurity we may come to understand that security itself is a kind of illusion – and that we were mistaken, all along, about what it was we thought we were searching for.

Catholic monk and writer Thomas Merton expressed in his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain. ‘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.’

‘Becoming a Buddhist’, she says, ‘is about becoming homeless.’

‘Things are not permanent, they don’t last, there is no final security,’ she says. What makes us miserable is not this truth, but our efforts to escape it.

Because, at the end of the day, it’s not about your conditions. It’s about taking whatever you have and using it as best you can, together with your neighbours.

vulnerability may be a precondition for the very things that bring the greatest happiness – strong social relationships above all.

What the people of Kibera and others in similar situations all share is a lack of access to those things that the rest of us self-defeatingly try to use to quell our feelings of insecurity.

So there is this vulnerability, which is another way of saying that there’s less pretence. I don’t know that that makes you happier, necessarily … But when there’s less to latch onto – when there are choices you don’t have – then it changes things. You have to cut the crap.’

Above all, living in a situation of such inherent insecurity, while very far from preferable, was clarifying.

By eliminating gods and the afterlife, the scientific picture of the universe seems to have sapped individual human lives of any special meaning; we fit in only as mere organisms, living out our brief lives for no reason and then perishing. This, he suggests, is the source of the ultimate insecurity, the one that underlies all the others.

Which brings us to the crux of the matter: it is because we want to feel secure that we build up the fortifications of ego, in order to defend ourselves, but it is those very fortifications that create the feeling of insecurity: ‘To be secure means to isolate and fortify the “I”, but it is just this feeling of being an isolated “I” which makes me feel lonely and afraid.’

To understand that there is no security is far more than to agree with the theory that all things change, more even than to observe the transitoriness of life. The notion of security is based on the feeling that there is something within us which is permanent, something which endures through all the days and changes of life. We are struggling to make sure of the permanence, continuity, and safety of this enduring core, this center and soul of our being, which we call ‘I’. For this we think to be the real man – the thinker of our thoughts, the feeler of our feelings, the knower of our knowledge.

We do not actually understand that there is no security until we realize that this ‘I’ does not exist.

The real reason why human life can be so utterly exasperating and frustrating is not because there are facts called death, pain, fear, or hunger. The madness of the thing is that when such facts are present, we circle, buzz, writhe, and whirl, trying to get the ‘I’ out of the experience … Sanity, wholeness and integration lie in the realization that we are not divided, that man and his present experience are one, and that no separate ‘I’ or mind can be found … [Life] is a dance, and when you are dancing, you are not intent on getting somewhere. The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.

But it does mean that feeling secure and really living life are, in some ultimate sense, opposites.

And that you can no more succeed in achieving perfect security than a wave could succeed in leaving the ocean.

Surf the insecurity

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