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

by Oliver Burkeman

pre-prepared meals packaged with a half-sized bottle of cooking wine, which customers, understandably, assumed was meant for drinking. (Then they tasted the wine. And then they stopped buying Heublein Wine & Dine Dinners.)

(As McMath points out, you should never mention sweat when marketing anti-sweat products, because shoppers find it repulsive. It’s entirely unclear, meanwhile, what the ‘look of buttermilk’ might be, let alone why you might wish your hair to sport it.) But

The spiritual ruminations of Eckhart Tolle and Alan Watts, meanwhile, point to an even deeper kind of failure: the ultimate – and ultimately liberating – failure of the ego’s efforts to maintain its separation and security.

Evolution itself is driven by failure; we think of it as a matter of survival and adaptation, but it makes equal sense to think of it as a matter of not surviving and not adapting.

Or perhaps more sense: of all the species that have ever existed, after all, fewer than 1 per cent of them survive today. The others failed.

But as we’ll see, this may only be because we are so naturally skilled at ‘editing out’ our failures, in order to retain a memory of our actions that is vastly more flattering than the reality. Like product managers with failures stuffed into a bedroom closet, we will do anything to tell a success-based story of our lives. This leads, among other consequences, to the entertaining psychological phenomenon known as ‘illusory superiority’. This mental glitch explains why, for example, the vast majority of people tell researchers that they consider themselves to be in the top 50 per cent of safe drivers – even though they couldn’t possibly all be.

The first big problem with our reluctance to think about or analyse failure – whether our own or other people’s – is that it leads to an utterly distorted picture of the causes of success.

This is the problem with homilies such as those of Richard Branson, who writes: ‘Being unafraid of failure is, I believe, one of the most important qualities of a champion.’ He may be right about the importance of not fearing failure, but then again, you don’t hear speeches or read autobiographies by people who were unafraid of failure and then did indeed simply fail.

As Christopher Kayes’s notion of ‘goalodicy’ suggests, we too often make our goals into parts of our identities, so that failure becomes an attack on who we are. Or, as Albert Ellis understood, we alight upon some desired outcome – being happily married, for example, or finding fulfilling work – and elevate it into one we feel we must attain, so that failing at it becomes not just sad but catastrophic. To use the Buddhist language of attachment and non-attachment, we become attached to success.

This is one of those traits that many people seem secretly, or not so secretly, proud to possess, since it hardly seems like a character flaw – yet perfectionism, at bottom, is a fear-driven striving to avoid the experience of failure at all costs. At its extremes, it is an exhausting and permanently stressful way to live.

To see and feel things as they really are, ‘we have to crash. Only then can we drop through to a more authentic self. Zen transmits its legacy from this deeper place. It is a different kind of failure: the Great Failure, a boundless surrender. Nothing to hold on to, and nothing to lose.’

‘Incremental theory’ people are different. Because they think of abilities as emerging through tackling challenges, the experience of failure has a completely different meaning for them: it’s evidence that they are stretching themselves to their current limit.

Should you wish to encourage an incremental outlook rather than a fixed one in your children, Dweck advises, take care to praise them for their effort rather than for their intelligence.

The incremental mindset is the one most likely to lead to success – but a more profound point is that possessing an incremental outlook is a happier way to be, even if it never results in any particularly outstanding success.

This seems to parallel the notion of focusing on right action (what’s within your control) instead of a specific outcome (often only partially within your control).

Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me

‘What is the most wondrous thing in the world?’, the spirit wants to know. Yudhisthira’s reply has become one of the poem’s best-known lines: ‘The most wondrous thing in the world is that although, every day, innumerable creatures go to the abode of Death, still man thinks that he is immortal.’

1973 by Ernest Becker, in his magnum opus The Denial of Death.

Indeed, an enormous proportion of all human activity, in Becker’s view, is ‘designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man’.

‘Death is nothing to us,’ he says, ‘since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.’ You might fear a painful dying process. You might dread the pain of losing others to death; our focus here is not on the terrible pain of grief. But fearing being dead yourself makes no sense. Death spells the end of the experiencing subject, and thus the end of any capacity for experiencing the state we fear. Or as Einstein put it: ‘The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there’s no risk of accident to one who’s dead.’

The one great fear that governs our lives, from this perspective, stands exposed as a kind of error. It’s as if, instead of imagining death, we had all along been imagining something more like being buried alive – deprived of all the benefits of existence, yet somehow still forced to experience the deprivation.

Epicurus has a second, connected point to make about the non-scariness of death, which has become known as the ‘argument of symmetry’. Why do you fear the eternal oblivion of death, he wonders, if you don’t look back with horror at the eternal oblivion before you were born – which, as far as you were concerned, was just as eternal, and just as much an oblivion?

But coming to understand death as something that there is no reason to fear, yet which is still bad because of what it brings to an end, might be the ideal middle path.

It is a transformation he describes, borrowing the language of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, as a move from focusing on ‘how things are’ to the fact ‘that things are’ – on the sheer astonishing is-ness of existence.

‘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,’ Apple’s founder Steve Jobs once said, in a speech that was speedily co-opted by several gurus of positive thinking,

‘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.’

Start thinking this way, Yalom points out, and it becomes a virtuous circle. Living more meaningfully will reduce your anxiety about the possibility of future regret at not having lived meaningfully – which will, i...

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.

I looked out over the cemetery, strewn with marigolds and crowded with huddled figures. Beyond its edges, no lights illuminated the blackness, but inside, the fires and the hundreds of flickering candles lent the night a kind of cosiness, despite the chill. The musicians carried on playing. Death was in the air, and all was well.

Sometimes the most valuable of all talents is to be able not to seek resolution; to notice the craving for completeness or certainty or comfort, and not to feel compelled to follow where it leads.

True negative capability entails moderation and balance and refraining from too much effortful struggling – including in the practice of negative capability.

‘Proficiency and the results of proficiency’, wrote Aldous Huxley, ‘come only to those who have learned the paradoxical art of doing and not doing, of combining relaxation with activity, of letting go as a person in order that the immanent and transcendent Unknown Quantity may take hold.’

Ultimately, what defines the ‘cult of optimism’ and the culture of positive thinking – even in its most mystically tinged, New Age forms – is that it abhors a mystery. It seeks to make things certain, to make happiness permanent and final. And yet this kind of happiness – even if you do manage to achieve it – is shallow and unsatisfying. The greatest benefit of negative capability—the true power of negative thinking—is that it lets the mystery back in.

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