Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

by Derren Brown

‘Rumyodin’

Yourmind

Confirmation bias occurs when we notice things in the world that support our beliefs and pay less attention to things that contradict them.

the universe is not rearranging itself to supply what we want. We are just focusing our ambitions and thinking more positively about them.

As Joseph Campbell wrote about middle age, ‘There is perhaps nothing worse than reaching the top of the ladder and discovering that you’re on the wrong wall.’

A line misattributed to Plutarch and more accurately credited to Die Hard’s Hans Gruber runs as follows: ‘When Alexander the Great saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer’. And

You will of course have certain aims, pulling you in one direction. However, life is constantly pulling back in the other. Irrespective of how much ‘you believe in yourself’, the forces of life (or the universe, or fate) will continue to do their own thing. They operate independently of your wishes.

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.

The desire to eat creates a chain of smaller desires, some of which may be more intellectual than emotional in nature, but all are designed to ultimately satisfy a need. We are slaves to these desires in one form or another.

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? Probably not. Without anyone else to impress, why own an expensive car, a palace, fancy clothes, or jewelry?

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

Driven as we are to form these self-evaluations, the groups with which we choose to identify will dictate whether we decide we’re doing well or falling short, and are thus a vital component of our feelings of well-being.

‘the great possessions of the rich do not worry the poor’, adding, ‘on the other hand, if the wealthy man’s possessions fail, he is not consoled by the many things he already possesses. Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become; and the same is true of fame.’

Unnecessary desires are ‘without end’ because that disparity will always push us forwards to desiring more and therefore towards further dissatisfaction, and they are ‘difficult to satisfy’ because they either come at a great cost or because of their never-ending and self-perpetuating nature.

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.

The greatest burden a child must bear, we remember from Jung, is the unlived lives of its parents.

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. And we don’t form our stories based on an accurate reflection of experience.

Thus we might be terrific listeners with a disarming honesty that makes most people feel very comfortable in our company, while we ourselves are convinced we are merely awkward misfits, unable to play the kinds of social games everyone else seems to enjoy.

there is no dress rehearsal for life. This is life; this is it, right now. It is a powerful and motivating thought. Each moment you live passes and is gone, never to return. Life is too brief to not consider how to experience it at its best.

But Plato can help us: if we wish to take the sting out of a crush, there is no better way than getting to know its object.

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.

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

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.

strengthening the tie which binds every individual to the race, by making the race infinitely better worth belonging to. In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is therefore capable of being more valuable to others.

Rousseau’s solution to our unfortunate state of being was his Social Contract, which set out a means of reshaping society that would reduce egoism, restrain wealth and limit desires.

Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther was published, in which a lovesick man chooses to kill himself. The book led to an epidemic of melancholy and suicide amongst young Romantics who identified with Goethe’s hero.

On the Wether effect (reporting of suicides)

Immanuel Kant, the extraordinary Enlightenment philosopher, had laid down the thought that we could never come to know the real world which exists beyond our perceptions. Rational enquiry, he said, could never provide the path to understanding ‘objective’ reality, because the most our minds can do is set about organising and considering the world that we subjectively perceive.

Science, it follows, only explores relationships between things. It is therefore limited to the language of time, space and the other organisational tools that we use to arrange our world of perceived objects and ideas.

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. It may not be our work but rather what we do with the rest of our time that gives us our true sense of worth.

Schopenhauer on leisure

In practice, it relied on oppression to enforce its ideology. Our current consumer-culture alternative may celebrate self-interest and therefore bypass the need for persecution, but it tends to be equally as unfulfilling.

On Marxism

We remember Epicurus’s thought: ‘Everything we need is easy to procure, while the things we desire but don’t need are more difficult to obtain.’

‘The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.’

the demands of a consumer society have made us neglect our standpoints; we have allowed our centre of gravity to be shifted to a point outside of ourselves and have lost track of what we actually might want and like in our lives.

Epicurus would deny us such things as a fancy fan. Instead, he would have us not cultivate the need for such things in the first place, so that the pain of losing them when they are broken, lost or stolen would not compromise any enjoyment we might obtain from them in the meantime.

‘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.’

By epicurus

The end result of balancing our desires to sit more comfortably with what is available should be an increase in our sense of satisfaction and therefore our happiness.

Neediness sets up another futile aim: we can never get enough from people towards whom we feel needy.

‘A human being has virtue when he exercises his capacity for reason.’ A Stoic would also have said, ‘A house has virtue when it is well built and does its unique job as a house very well.’

1. 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.

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.

If something is not under our control, we can recognise it as such and decide that it’s fine as it is.

Like the projections we make upon our misplaced goals that we think will guarantee us happiness, it is an enterprise doomed to failure. Our partners will never entirely fit in with our plans for them, and neither should they.

We project our needs on to food in the way we do with our partners; many people overstuffing to feed a spiritual hunger or denying themselves in order to establish a secure area of jurisdiction (and along the way commonly demonising this or that ingredient or compound such as sugar or carbohydrates).

The simplicity of it’s fine, even if it’s a journey to get there, undoes all of that vexed toing and froing.

If we fixate on the thought ‘I must win this game’, then we are trying to control something that we cannot.

we can enter the game with the aim of ‘I will play this game as well as I can.’ Now we can make sure that we do that: how well we play is under our control.

It’s interesting that this Stoic ideal greatly reduces the likelihood of a feeling of failure. We should never aim to achieve anything that is out of our control, therefore we can always feel in control of the outcome.

‘Permit nothing to cleave to you that is not your own,’ Epictetus says, ‘nothing to grow to you that may give you agony when it is torn away.’

The Stoic route to valuing things is to accept that whether they come or go from our lives is not under our control. This understanding allows us to enjoy them even more, because we know that we will not have them in our lives forever.