Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

by Derren Brown

searching. Religious ethics are not about finding truth in our own value system but about learning how to see beyond the blinkered vision of our knowledge and grow closer to God.

Socratic happiness was about self-questioning and about appreciating the reality of an unseen world that lies beyond the physical realm. We might glimpse it through a process of contemplation and self-realisation. Happiness was indistinguishable from a rising above, a virtuous elevation, a higher plateau.

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

Aristotle suggests we are to fulfil what is highest in our nature, and rather than doing this in the way that Plato encourages (through the contemplation of lofty, eternal Ideas), we should instead use our reason to work out the best thing to do in the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

disposed towards the role of everyday pleasures in making us happy, and encouragingly looks for balanced qualities to ensure an ethical life. Thus virtue, according to Aristotle, could be found in balancing extreme qualities with their opposites: finding the mean.

So happiness is now to be found in virtuous activity of the soul carried out in accordance with reason.

The best sort of virtuous activity, Aristotle still suggests despite the common touch of his approach, is that of contemplation. The ability to devote ourselves to intellectual pursuits is what makes us unique and therefore

connects us to the gods, and thus contemplation is divine. ‘...

we might note that our remembering, story-forming self needs a narrative of happiness in the same way our experiencing self requires its pleasures. And here we might find that we sleep more peacefully if we see our lives as part of Aristotle’s telos, as a work in progress, one in which we could view daily irritations as a kind of test; one which teaches us virtue and where we can, step by step, and by considering the variables of each situation as it happens, move towards being a better (happier, kinder, more fulfilled) version of ourselves. We are in the realm here of the ‘considered life’ and the possibility of serenity that such a life can offer.

believed that ethical enquiry could allow us to see our target more clearly. The aim was not to identify the target as such, but to allow us to discriminate better and see more clearly. This approach sits well with the notion of pupils continuing their own instruction through engagement in rational argument and self-discovery.

area. Aristotle, as we know, treated human emotions as a shallow clear pool, fully accessible to the trained intellect and amenable to change through rational, dialectical scrutiny.

The Epicureans of the Garden chose to pursue pleasures and avoid pain. Yet pleasures were rationally chosen, so that they would not ultimately lead to misery. The point was to achieve happiness, which was identical to a life of pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

Epicurus tells us we have nothing more than our animalistic bodily senses to put to use.

And if we pay attention to what they tell us, we will find that the good

l...

of the highest pleasure, also happens to b...

Stoics taught, along with the Epicureans, that we should limit our desires, and that perceived problems in life are due to errors in judgement about those problems. If we change our attitude, the pain of those external factors can disappear.

Instead, troubling questions started to emerge: if all happiness

is subjective, and goodness merely a question of calculating how much happiness a certain act might bring, then what of virtue? Is goodness really to be found in the mere balance of pleasure? With no divine breath to animate and steer us, is man no more than a kind of automaton, a machine without a soul?

It is then not so much that we have a ‘God-shaped hole’ within us, as I was fond in my religious youth of insisting, but that there lurks within us something of Locke’s ‘uneasiness’, a perennial desire for satisfaction that takes place at the metaphysical level as well as the everyday and material. We have a ‘meaning-shaped hole’ because we are story-forming creatures, and stories should not meander without a point.

Mill, happiness should not be our goal per se, and to chase it directly is a mistake. Instead, we should see it as a by-product, something achieved indirectly through the process of individual

liberation from the levelling demands of society.

emphasising personal experience as the route to salvation:

What counts is not the work but our relationship to it.

The ideal he describes (and he goes into some detail about how to sensibly store capital and live off the interest) is to be wealthy enough to have expansive free time and the intellectual capabilities to fill it with contemplation and activity in the service of mankind.

happier horizons would be reached through the affirmation

of life,

not its denial. The joyous and powerful hero we need is a future Übermensch, or Superman. Current humanity is merely a bridge to a future race that will show us our glorious ideal. ‘Becom...

The gift

of therapy is not just to cure the deranged but to point all of us to where we have lost authorship of our stories, bring those reasons to consciousness and thus show us the gentle path to healing.

mechanisms to help us engage with our deep stories.

spirit. Today’s crisis is that we don’t know how to honour our deep needs, and we mistake recreation for happiness.

Unhappiness is seen as a sign of failure, not a healthy symptom of our natural condition. Unarmed with an appreciation of the intrigues of wondrous tragedy, and having forgotten the importance of myth, we are at a loss to contextualise – and value – the disconsolate yearnings of the soul.

‘Everything we need is easy to procure, while the things we desire but don’t need are more difficult to obtain.’

Conspicuous and invidious consumption are hallmarks of capitalism,

desire what we already have, rather than to desire more and more unnecessary things: ‘Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.’

reviewing the nature of our attachments can reduce anxiety and increase contentment.

‘A human being has virtue when he exercises his capacity for reason.’

So deciding the virtue of a person or thing comes from first understanding what that thing’s unique quality or purpose is in the world, and then seeing whether it is doing that as well as possible.

‘stupid to pray’ in order to achieve something virtuous in life, ‘since you can obtain it from yourself’7.

If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgement of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgement now.8

Likewise, our judgements about people are in truth responsible for how they seemingly ‘make’ us feel.

always in our power to represent events to ourselves in such a way they give us an advantage. Two thousand years later, we think of this as ‘reframing’: the reinterpretation of a negative event as something positive. Seeing the silver lining.

We cannot effectively choose to feel more positive about an event that is bothering us unless we have first understood that it is our judgements, which are responsible for how we feel. An encouragement to see the positive in a situation will not be effective if it clashes with a deeper story we are telling ourselves.

‘Man is disturbed not by things, but by the views he takes of them.’12

The message is not ‘blame yourself’ but to realise that whatever happens to you, it does not need to affect you, your core self, unless you choose to let it. Understood correctly, that is a powerful message of hope and a core survival skill for victims of oppression.

‘Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human

freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in

any given set of circumstances, to choose ...

2. Don’t try to change things you cannot control.