Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

by Derren Brown

We are, each of us, a product of the stories we tell ourselves.

Regardless of how hard we try, we are all biased. We all have a background and focus on different aspects of each experience we have. In this way, we experience every emotion, every event, every encounter through our own lens and it is impossible for us to be completely objective. The objective event or experience we had doesn’t matter. What matters is the details in how we feel about the event as we experience it and the stories we tell ourselves about it afterwards. This does not mean that tragic events don't matter, only that the most important part of any experience is how we respond to it. In this same way, trauma is different for every person.

Some of these stories are consciously constructed, but others operate without our knowledge, dictated by scripts handed to us by others when we were young. We can carry around the psychological legacy of our parents for our whole lives, whether bad or good. Where they have unfulfilled wishes and regrets, these are commonly passed to us as a template for storytelling. Many of these templates make it hard for us to feel happy:

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

This ancient wisdom is the source of many therapy models, including NLP and CBT. It is not the events that happen to us that cause our problems, it is the stories we tell ourselves about those events that cause our problems.

Perhaps the first mark of emotional maturity is to realise that there is an enormous gulf between the events of the world and what we do with them.

other people are not accountable for how we feel. No one, however ludicrously they behave, has the right or the direct means to affect your self-control or dignity.

We are trapped inside our own heads. Our beliefs and understandings about the world are limited by that perspective.

When someone else is telling you a story, you realize that they're telling the story from their own perspective, and that there might be a different truth in another person's perspective. Why do we not realize this when we review our own stories about ourselves?

It’s a cheap lie, which feeds upon one of our most prevailing wishes: that we can control things outside of our control, like the forces of fate.

Any questioning of the system is in itself questioning faith - therefore you do not believe enough and it's your fault it has failed. This lie catches us because it feeds upon the idea that we can control things that are actually outside of our control.

The vital changes to our happiness do not come from outside circumstances, however appealing they might seem.

We forget that nothing happens in life independently of other things. You may find yourself a partner and get married as intended but then suffer the loss of other dreams that you now regret abandoning. You may become a millionaire by thirty-five but at the expense of your personal relationships. The goal has proven too specific, too isolated; upon reaching your destination you realise with companionless regret that this solitary and lonely place was too remote and too much has been left behind. Or if the journey’s end is not so lonely, or if success is reached without too much sacrifice, what then? The enjoyment of arrival is usually short-lived; the happiness envisioned and rehearsed for years is unlikely to last. Why? Because it does not arrive quite as satisfyingly as suspected; because we quickly get used to it; above all, because when one arrives one is still oneself, with whatever tendency towards dissatisfaction or restlessness that may bring.

Schopenhauer also uses the game of chess to give us another image of how our goal-setting might be unrealistic. When playing chess, we start out with a plan, but our plan is affected by the inclinations of the other player. Our plan must modify itself constantly, to the point that, as we carry it out, several of its fundamental features are unrecognisable. To stick blindly to the same goals would be to deny that a second, independent player was at the board.

Welcome to the hedonic treadmill. Ancient philosophers such as the Stoics and Epicureans – and we will look more closely at them later – were very aware of it, though the term was first coined in the 1970s1 and later developed by a psychologist called Michael Eysenck in the nineties. It refers to the cycle of desire-fulfilment (‘hedonism’ means ‘the pursuit of pleasure’): we want something, we perhaps get it, we feel good for a while and then return to whatever default level of happiness or sadness we enjoyed before. Nothing really changes.

Would the material desires you harbored when the world was full of people still be present in you if other people vanished?

We might find this notion – that we spend so much energy and time seeking the approval of our peers – quite eye-opening.

the things we desire really do little other than fuel further desires and teach us what greed is.

Reference Group Theory - the idea that in forming our self-identity, we compare ourselves to those in our peer group. Our cognitions, perceptions, attitudes, and conceptions of ourselves are all tied in with those to whom we liken or contrast ourselves.

Sociologists refer to ‘reference group theory’: the idea that in forming our self-identity, we compare ourselves to those in our peer group. Our cognitions, perceptions, attitudes and conceptions of ourselves are all tied in with those to whom we liken or contrast ourselves.

the groups with which we choose to identify will dictate whether we decide we’re doing well or falling short,

Rarely, before the seventeenth century, was it questioned that vast differences of wealth and status existed between different levels of society.

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.

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.

Such unnecessary things, of course, constitute the vast majority of our desires. And once we realise that satisfaction is relative, we see that we may never achieve it as long as a notable disparity continues to exist between what we feel is worth attaining and what we actually possess.

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.

Regardless of what we think will bring us happiness - that fancy travel destination, moving to a new city, finding a new job, etc. - we will always be there. If we ourselves are inherently unhappy, we will remain unhappy in that new situation. Perhaps there will be temporary happiness (Hedonic Treadmill) but that happiness will pass and we will be left with what was already there. Happiness is not found in the external.

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.

Happiness is a chimera: it is imaginary and deceiving in many of its forms.

happiness is an optical illusion that retreats or hides itself the closer you approach.

If we don’t assume more conscious authorship of our stories, others will write them for us, and we will invariably find ourselves fundamentally bored or anxious and prone to any number of complaints from within.

we might not give any thought to such matters and just feel, if questioned, that our life is defined primarily by the job we perform every day. This may be a job we don’t enjoy, and so we leave the ‘living’ part for weekends or holidays.

Is it not potentially just as disastrous to live one’s life with the goal of dying happily and without regret, just to find that our regret is that we did not live for the moment while we could?

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

The considered life – in which we take back authorship of our narratives – gives some structure to that self-image and resists its distortion by others.

By contrast, 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.

All you need to begin living a considered and fruitful life, Seneca said, is to wish it.

there is no dress rehearsal for life. This is life; this is it, right now.

We take it for granted that happiness is a birthright, a sign of a life successfully lived. We talk about being happy, or otherwise, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to understand.

it’s a shock to find out that our understanding of happiness is a social and historical construct, akin to many other questions of ethics and morality.

Our notions of happiness are a product of the age that we live in.

If you believe you are entitled to be happy, that this is a given for any human being, then read on. This notion of a right to happiness is a very modern idea and, as I have already said, the cause of much anxiety.

These gods weren’t used in this way to illustrate the twin poles of human experience until some two thousand years after Socrates, but still offer a noble way of thinking of our characters, as these two forces in our nature pull us one way then the other. Dionysus is our instinctive, animal side that sits in contrast with our mediating, careful self. Apollo is Edward Norton in Fight Club; Dionysus is Brad Pitt.

After Socrates’ death, the idea of happiness and virtue was developed and expanded by Aristotle, Plato’s most famous pupil. He tutored Alexander the Great (who grew up to conquer the known world) and was the first great – and maybe the greatest – biologist and taxonomist, classifying and studying an enormous range of plants and animals.

Aristotle’s approach was different from Plato’s, and far less lofty. He was very interested in life, and living, and his approach to ethics had none of the cool detachedness of the Platonist apprehending these sublime Ideals out there on some heavenly plane. Rather than the Truth being Out There, he encouraged us to look inwards to find out what matters most.

Aristotle was interested in how we might be good, rather than know goodness.

Plato did not have the common touch; Aristotle did to a greater extent, and his ideas are more intuitive to us today. He points to the fact that we judge something to be good if it does well the thing that it is uniquely designed to do.

Goodness and proficiency lie in the successful execution of the unique function of that person or thing.

Likewise, people should learn to best fulfil their nature. But what do human beings do when they are being particularly successful at being human?

what separates us from other forms of life? Aristotle supplies us with the answer: reason. What, then, is the highest aim of this reason? To ensure happiness. Success at being human would amount to the best, or most virtuous, use of reason.

Buried therein is another new thought: that there is an aim (or a telos) to human life.

He was more charitably 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.

There is a sort of muscle-memory to ethics: we learn to act in a way that is appropriate until it comes naturally.

Working from intuitive ‘common sense’, Aristotle thus built on Plato’s ethics to form a longer list of cardinal virtues: justice, courage, temperance, magnificence, magnanimity, liberality, gentleness, prudence and wisdom.

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

‘Virtue’, however, appears to the modern mind’s eye in only faint adumbrations of knightly incorruptibility. We rarely talk of people today in terms of their goodness or their virtue. We might describe someone as an ‘upstanding pillar of the community’, but such a cliché does not seem to touch upon the inner life of that person; in fact, it even has about it the whiff of potential scandal.