Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

by Derren Brown

To allow for natural unhappiness in our lives and not berate ourselves for feeling it is to stand against the tyranny of the positive-thinking ethos that surrounds us daily.

Now, more than ever before, we are presented with a coruscating array of narcotics and divertissements, which pander to the myopic, amnesic fancies of our experiencing self.

Intention was the key: philosophy taught the Stoic student merely to aim the arrow clearly at the target. Whether or not the arrow reached the bull’s eye was a matter for fortune and not a concern for the student.

Each of us is born into a world where we know no better than to internalise every message we receive as being one about us.

Pierre Hadot, the late, though still hugely compelling, French philosopher and historian of philosophy, has written emphatically that the Stoic works must be read in their proper context as ‘spiritual exercises’.