Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

by Derren Brown

The damning word in the mother’s remark is ‘always’, because ‘always’ tells us there is a pattern, a story at work. And stories affect us deeply.

‘What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgements about these things.’

no longer thinking about cigarettes and can’t believe how effective the magic medicine has been. The injections and pills of course were fakes – the injection was saline and the pills contained only icing sugar. The dramatic transformations of the volunteers came about because they gave themselves permission to act differently. The idea of this drug coursing through their veins was enough to make them change their stories about who they were: ‘I am no longer the person with this problem, because a new medicine is solving that for me.’

The initial administration of the drug via injection was followed by homework: they had to report to us all the positive changes they were noticing. Naturally, this task would encourage them to live out their new story each day. This is ‘confirmation bias’ at work: one of the most reliable cognitive snares to which we are prone. Confirmation bias occurs when we notice things in the world that support our beliefs and pay less attention to things that contradict them.

Plan for success; prepare for failure. And the universe doesn’t care either way.

we establish a goal, which may well be misguided, because we tend to make incorrect judgements about what makes us happy.

If we stay true to our plan, we will need to sacrifice other aspects of our life to reach our intended destination. We forget that nothing happens in life independently of other things.

When work ends – through retirement or downsizing – many people become depressed, because their sense of self was too closely tied to such ends.

When we proudly denounce those who would undermine our self-belief, we emulate a model of strength we have been sold principally through the biographies of successful, strong entrepreneurs. We equate persistent commitment and the ability to laugh at one’s detractors with a recipe for success. But this is a lie. We believe it because we are told it through many channels, but its source springs from a powerful select few who boast about their life stories as they perceive them.

Many more will fail than succeed through blind self-belief.

we don’t read books of entrepreneurial failure, only the triumphs, so we cannot learn from those tales of dogged self-belief anything of value.

Arthur Schopenhauer describes, I think, a more accurate dynamic, in his Counsels and Maxims: Events and our chief aims can be in most cases compared to two forces that pull in different directions, their resultant diagonal being the course of our life.

Most of what happens in life is entirely out of your control, and while blind self-belief might disguise that fact for a while, it will eventually prove an anaemic opponent to brute reality.

We are told to live our lives by focusing on the future and by believing in ourselves at all costs. The result, too often, is waste and frustration. By projecting ourselves always into the hereafter we miss out on the present, on knowing ourselves and the richness of the current moment. By trying to control what we can’t, we all but guarantee frustration and disappointment.

without people around, would you still want these things? Would the material desires you harbored when the world was full of people still be present in you if other people vanished? Probably not.

Enlightenment philosophers such as John Locke then started to question the role of government, and a powerful new idea was born: that governments might exist in order to bring happiness to their people. This astonishing notion helped to incite the American Revolution of 1776, and the new nation cemented such principles into its Declaration of Independence: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’

Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame.’

it is not what we own that satisfies us but rather what we have in relation to what we feel is possible and attainable for ourselves.

We commonly spend our lives focused on the future: usually this carrot dangles before us in the form of a career ladder. It is easy to follow the carrot and harder to think about what might truly make us happy. We follow the former, not realising that we will never reach it to savour it, or that even if we do, we might find that particular carrot isn’t even edible.

Travel is one such distraction. We have all had the experience of looking forward to a holiday, of looking at photographs on a hotel’s website in order to choose a destination and imagining ourselves there, swimming in that sea or lying on that beach. The prospect is idyllic, and often making that trip will be a means of dealing with stress or discontent. The reality of the holiday, though, is often very different from its prospect and, by comparison, disappointing to one degree or another. Socrates, the first philosopher to turn knowledge into a tool for questioning our lives and finding ways to live better, explained why: when you travel (or for that matter attend a party), you always take yourself with you.

Jesse says to Céline: It’s just, usually, it’s myself that I wish I could get away from. Seriously, think about this. I have never been anywhere that I haven’t been. I’ve never had a kiss when I wasn’t one of the kissers. You know, I’ve never gone to the movies when I wasn’t there in the audience. I’ve never been out bowling, if I wasn’t there, making some stupid joke. That’s why so many people hate themselves. Seriously. It’s just they are sick to death of being around themselves.

‘You need a change of soul, not a change of climate.’

we must first do away with the notion that happiness is something straightforward, a simple thing to which we are entitled. Happiness is a chimera: it is imaginary and deceiving in many of its forms. Like the rainbow which so commonly symbolises it, happiness is an optical illusion that retreats or hides itself the closer you approach.

we are looking for a blueprint, a template, a considered piece of draughtsmanship to which we can refer when we come to make choices about who we are.

we are all disturbed to one degree or another, all somehow repressed and to varying extents shut off from our true selves: this is the human condition and precisely what we should address to increase our quotient of happiness.

Leading a considered life is about getting our story right for ourselves.

If we, at any point in our lives, can look at what we’re up to and feel that everything is more or less in its place, and that our story is on the right tracks, we will have a good basis for happiness.

Daniel Kahneman: that we cannot talk about happiness without distinguishing between two selves that both operate within us: the experiencing self and the remembering self.

When we look back over our lives and decide if we have had a happy time in this world, it is the remembering self that is making that judgement.

you might choose to spend an afternoon attending to a sick relative rather than go to a theme park with friends, choosing the least ‘pleasurable’ option and leaving your experiencing self less fulfilled. But this choice might furnish your future remembering self with a better story of how you spent your afternoon and even contribute to a wider sense of happiness regarding what you do with your life.

we don’t make decisions based on our experiences. We make them based on the stories of our experiences.

we don’t form our stories based on an accurate reflection of experience. We form them like novelists, and we look for a good ending.

When writing a stage show, one normally concentrates disproportionately on the finale, as while the ongoing emotions of each scene cater to the experiencing self, it is the finale that is most pertinent to the remembering self’s story of how much fun it had and how satisfying the whole experience has been.

Our capacity for storytelling allows us to misremember the extent of pain or pleasure we felt during an experience.

To live well and happily necessitates that we engage with this side of ourselves. If we don’t engage with our stories, taking our cue from passing pleasure, we pander only to our bestial experiencing self.

Up at seven, bath, coffee, write till midday, flute practice, lunch out at the inn, read at home till four, daily walk (which always lasted two hours, irrespective of weather), head to the library to read the London Times, then perhaps take in a concert or the theatre before returning home early to bed. He carried out this identical routine every day for twenty-seven years.

Schopenhauer gives us an image of what is left if our centre of gravity is not located securely within us. He points to pain and boredom as ‘the two foes of human happiness’3. When our stability relies principally on external factors, we shuttle back and forth between the two. We avoid pain, seek comfort, and become bored.

When an activity allows us to steer an x=y diagonal, we find ourselves happily in this ‘flow’ state, avoiding the tedium that arises when our skills outweigh the challenges we face, as well as the anxiety that follows when our obstacles become too great for us.

A considered life also informs and improves that otherwise fickle thing: our self-image. We don’t pay much conscious attention to the mental picture we carry around of ourselves, but it dictates so much of how we feel about our strengths and weaknesses. It’s part of the story we tell ourselves about how we are and how we are likely to behave in any situation.

It’s a rule in life that the more certain we appear about something, the less we know about it. It has a name – the Dunning–Kruger effect – and it is at work every time someone tells you with absolute certainty how things are in the world. The sign of the true expert is his modest awareness of how much more there is to know; how complex and nuanced the subject at hand insists on remaining.

The kind of self-image we may be best advised to seek, then, is not of ourselves as beautiful winners (as we are often told we should), but one wherein our strengths and weaknesses are realistically appraised with neither self-aggrandisement nor abnegation, and our share of inevitable failings looked upon with kindness and good humour.

a considered life is one in which we deeply engage with our own story. That means we need to identify what our story is and then know how to move it forward. If we don’t – if we swing between pain and boredom, or merely defy those who would dare to tell us what to do – we shut off important channels of development (and, therefore, life).

From that script we intuitively learn what will make us worthwhile, loved and happy. Be successful; be happy; help others; or destroy all competition. Then, as we grow into adults, these life scripts will prove insufficient for us.

when we shut parts of ourselves off, they re-emerge as pathologies and anxieties, or reasons for therapy. We are owned by feelings of depression, loneliness or anger because we are not living out – and most likely cannot even identify – our real stories.

four stages, set out by Evans, and upon which any presumption of change through philosophical consideration is based. 1. Humans can know themselves. We can use our reason to examine our unconscious beliefs and values. 2. Humans can change themselves. We can use our reason to change our beliefs. This will change our emotions, because our emotions follow our beliefs. 3. Humans can consciously create new habits of thinking, feeling and acting. 4. If we follow philosophy as a way of life, we can live more flourishing lives.

Life is short. We know this. But there is a contradictory thought, which I find every bit as exhilarating and which was central to the writings of the German nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It is called ‘eternal recurrence’: an idea that he drew from Indian philosophy. Time is infinite, Nietzsche points out, while the chances of a world appearing exactly like our own is (though very, very small) not quite zero. This means that eventually, as we move through infinite time, a world exactly like ours will appear again. And, given that we have endless time to play with, over and over again. In that world, of course, there will exist a repeated version of you, living exactly your life each time. If time is eternal, every configuration of events that has already happened will at some point happen again, and that will include a reliving of your life by a future version of yourself. Nietzsche finds the idea at first horrifying. That horror, however, leads to his realisation that a person living a considered and truly affirmed life would be happy for it to be lived over and over again for eternity:

Alan Watts, the compelling writer and talker who popularised Eastern ideas in the West, begins his book The Wisdom of Insecurity

Book

Socrates gave life to the very idea of the desire for happiness. Before him, we hadn’t considered it as acutely. And his great idea has obsessed humanity ever since.

two major ways of seeking truth: religion and science. Religion (at least our understanding of religion as laid out by St Augustine in the early fifth century) gives us a structure where God, grace, as well as beauty, truth, knowledge, justice and any other concepts we might care to identify with Him, exist quite independently of our own mortal soul-searching.

Aristotle’s take on happiness – is ‘an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue’.2