Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

by Derren Brown

The Stoics even said that a Stoic sage (a semi-fictional role model for the seeker of virtue) would still, while being tortured on the rack, be able to smile and think ‘This is happening to my body, but it isn’t happening to me.’ We may find this too far-fetched, as did many of the Stoics’ contemporaries, but the reality is that for the person being tortured or abused, the kind of detachment that the Stoic message encourages might be the only comfort remaining. 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. Viktor E. Frankl’s extraordinary memoir from the concentration camps, Man’s Search for Meaning, is a moving testimony to this fact: ‘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 one’s own way.’