Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

by Derren Brown

Bittersweet transience lends context and value. It is intoxicating in the first six months of love to pledge ourselves for the rest of our lives.

Fortune will always continue on her own path, providing one day and denying the next; the Stoic does not fight fate but quietly separates his business from hers.

‘You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realise how seldom they do.’

rather than merely trying to think himself out of the annoyance these people might provoke when it happens, he is doing his best to ensure that their irksome personalities don’t bother him in the first place.

‘Continuous familiarity hides the ways in which something might vary slightly from what is required; so by interrupting their viewing, they use repeated discrimination to keep the viewing fresh and more likely to catch minor variations.’

Muting is a Stoic move: it makes no attempt to control what is beyond me and simply removes me from any feelings of irritation.

Selective perception. This is confirmation bias at work. We commonly pay attention to the things that confirm our pre-existing beliefs.

It is not for me to pass judgement on those prisoners who put their own above everyone else. Who can throw a stone at a man who favours his friends under circumstances when, sooner or later, it is a question of life or death? No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.

Do not seek to have events happen to you as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well.

Do your best to convince them. But act on your own, if justice requires it. If met with force, then fall back on acceptance and peaceability. Use the setback to practise other virtues. Remember that our efforts are subject to circumstances; you weren’t aiming at the impossible. Aiming to do what, then? To try. And you succeeded. What you set out to do is accomplished.

‘Composure, calmness and charity is nowhere near as kind and considerate and inoffensive to those who come across it as to those who possess it.’

To merely label oneself a ‘Stoic’ is to renounce one’s own voice. A considered life should not, like the pious one, be a matter of subjugation to any label, under which all the ‘consideration’ has been previously done for you.

So we can be an unassailable rock some of the time and a rolling pebble on other occasions. Whatever helps us the most.

We no longer seek to stand in defiance of others and the emotions they engender; instead, we can imagine an easy, free-flowing relationship with the rest of our race. The porous rock gives us an image of both strength and confluence, and as the water (of fortune and of others’ influence) flows through us, we remain steady without a need for defiance.

Aim to psychologically manoeuvre yourself into a position where developing your talent and balancing it with suitable energy provide you with enough enjoyment, happiness and money to get by. Fame and riches should only ever be seen as fortuitous side effects. But they are more likely to come if you focus on developing what is under your control: your talent and energy.

Death does not allow our lives to come to some sort of fruition. It simply curtails life. It may stop it in its tracks quite suddenly, or we might be permitted to hear the trundling of its dark carriage from a distance, but it does not complete the story for us. That’s for us to do, if we are given the chance.

If we could perceive the fourth dimension, we wouldn’t see those single slices like the circles seen by the Flatlanders; we’d see a kind of wormy-balloony object that encapsulates the whole life in one go.

In general, the intensity and dedication with which very many human activities are pursued cannot be explained without reference to the awareness that our opportunities are finite, that we cannot choose these activities indefinitely many times.

Everything worthwhile in your life draws its meaning from the fact you will die. We need death in order to live. ‘The meaning of life,’ wrote Kafka, reputedly, ‘is that it stops.’

We must somehow embrace transience and connect where we can with the present moment in order to overcome our fear of death. Likewise, we must connect with death in order to experience the richness of the here and now. We fear an enemy that, perhaps more than anything else, makes our lives significant.

‘It has been said, “Time heals all wounds.” I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.’

‘Although the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death saves us,’6 writes the existential psychoanalyst Irvin D. Yalom.

With further thought, we might even elevate our lives by accommodating ourselves to it right now, before it threatens to become urgent and terrifying. Death, perhaps uniquely amongst the objects of our dread, instructs us how to live.

If, though, we become fixated on the future, we miss out on the tranquillity and richness of real experience. We achieve equilibrium by finding a ‘good-enough’ compromise. Embracing the present moment does not have to mean a brainless, passive giving of oneself over to the flow. It can be engaged and active.

We can wish, as much as we remember to do so, not for things to be exactly as they are per se, but for things to be however they happen to be.

Perhaps death was not quite the annihilation she had thought. Perhaps it was not so essential that her person or even memories of her person survived. Perhaps the important thing was that her ripples persist, ripples of some act or idea that would help others attain joy and virtue in life, ripples that would fill her with pride and act to counter the immorality, horror and violence monopolising the mass media and the outside world.

When Barbara gives a short talk at her mother’s funeral, she is reminded of one of her mother’s favourite phrases: ‘Look for her among her friends.’

The approach of death gives us a chance to pay attention to how our lives might affect those we know. We are dealing with the end of our story, and it is the end of the story that colours the rest.

Knowing that life after our deaths will continue with positive memories of us in place might help us to engage richly and simply in our lives, and end our stories as satisfyingly as possible.

When I do something like you, you’ll be on my mind or through Cause I forgot you left me behind to remind me of you.

It is not enough that we die. We also need others to live on after us and without us. We need to die and others need to live. Which means ultimately that the continuing lives of others matter more to us than do our own.

Heraclitus told us: ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.’

‘Street photography is a fitting refuge for those who look at life from a distance. It both sanctifies our remoteness (by offering the standpoint of the observer) and challenges it, insisting we approach with a spritely curiosity. It offers a safe route back into the world: the camera is an entry ticket to daunting social situations and extraordinary environments where we might otherwise feel entirely out of place. Suddenly we have a role: a reason to be present. And for those of us smitten by its appeal, it provides a means of fortifying and forgetting ourselves, while extending out into the world with a controlled compassion.’