Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

by Derren Brown

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.

Today’s crisis is that we don’t know how to honour our deep needs, and we mistake recreation for happiness.

Unhappiness is seen as a sign of failure, not a healthy symptom of our natural condition.

A clear and common example of this is how we deal with the sting of jealousy we might feel when a colleague talks excitedly about his promotion while we ourselves are frustrated with not moving ahead in our own career. As we’ve already seen, we only feel envy towards people who are roughly equal to us in terms of status, so we needn’t feel surprised to find we can harbour such a negative emotion towards a co-worker. But we can, in the same breath, acknowledge that his success is fine. We have no control over our colleague’s professional life or the happiness he gleans from it. If we dwell negatively upon his promotion, we may even find ourselves trying to ‘fix’ the feelings it provokes through put-downs or other similar behaviour, and in the meantime we are going to make ourselves miserable.

learn to desire what you already have, and you will have all you need.

Seneca provides an alternative approach to morning premeditation. For such people he suggests a nightly review: a retrospective alternative wherein we might drift more comfortably into sleep after considering our actions during the day just lived.

We make two common mistakes when we try to be liked: we either try to impress or we try to be like the other person.

People who prioritise impressing people rather than letting themselves be impressed by others make it hard for those others to like them.

To lower our expectations is to greatly reduce our anger: if we don’t expect things to work out brilliantly, we’ll be less frustrated when they don’t.

I try to be as minimally annoying as possible by declining panel shows and only rarely (and when utterly obliged to) doing TV interviews.

We can be needy and manipulative, bullying or seducing others into pandering to us, but we should expect to be resented for it. Where our behaviour is positive and less self-centred, though, something very different can happen. Great people influence and change us.