Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

by Derren Brown

Yet our entire past, which we feel (in many ways correctly) is responsible for how we behave today, is itself just a story we are telling ourselves in the here and now.

Sometimes, focused energy is a very helpful thing, but it doesn’t guarantee any results. And you should be prepared for when things don’t work out. Plan for success; prepare for failure. And the universe doesn’t care either way.

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.

We look for happiness in places that are supposed to offer it, but parties have a habit of being disappointing, and the promotion or new car does not quite yield the joy we expected.

when you travel (or for that matter attend a party), you always take yourself with you.

Seneca highlighted the core point: ‘You need a change of soul, not a change of climate.’

Rousseau’s sentimental suspicion of the modern world laid the groundwork for any number of present-day advertisers to exploit and develop our lingering intuition that ‘natural’ must equal ‘good’.

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

‘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.’

Epicureanism is a philosophy that best suits the diffident mindset. I like Susan Cain’s description of us ‘having a lower threshold for stimulation’.5

Reinhold Niebuhr, from a 1943 sermon: God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.

The key to why this works is that when we let things go that we can’t control, nothing bad happens.

We should never aim to achieve anything that is out of our control, therefore we can always feel in control of the outcome.

Epictetus gives us this advice: Remind yourself that what you love is mortal, that what you love is not your own. It is granted to you for the present while, and not irrevocably, nor for ever, but like a fig or bunch of grapes in the appointed season; and if you long for it in the winter, you are a fool

We can benefit from remembering the words of the novelist David Foster Wallace: ‘You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realise how seldom they do.’7

Perfection is not important, just keeping going is all that matters.

We are normally awoken abruptly by an alarm clock when we could do with an extra hour of sleep, and if we have allowed ourselves a brief time to lie in bed and adjust to the morning, we tend to resort to that most banal of pastimes: browsing our phones. We check social media or see what emails have come through. One connects us with the rabble; the other starts our day with problems to which we are obliged to find solutions. Perhaps we check the news and again without realising we emerge into our day smothered by demands from the outside world, which root themselves unpleasantly in our groggy, too-malleable consciousness. We have prepared our psychological state for the day by laying the groundwork for envy (we see that a friend has bought a new gadget we want but can’t afford) and by letting our barely sentient minds absorb the concerns of work communicated overnight to our inbox. Those first few moments of the day, when we are still suggestible enough to slip back into dreams unfinished, have been invaded by the outside world’s blaring cries for our weary attention. And our brains, still spongy and soaked in semi-sleep, have had nothing of the preparation needed to distance themselves from the onslaught. Already by the time our shower has brought us into the fully waking world, it is too late: we have begun our day at the mercy of the crowds.

We are given technology that far surpasses that which put man on the moon, and use it to tweet spite from the toilet.

Life is much easier if we get off our high horses.

You have the same faults as those who annoy you

No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same.

W. B. Yeats warns us: ‘Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.’

partly due to the fact that I’d rather cut off my own balls with blunt bacon scissors than host a dinner party.)

I’d be a sort of vampire figure, and that appeals, especially if I could be one of the really hot ones (which I would be).

Love is a risk: we attach ourselves to someone and they to us, and we face the world together.

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.’

Rose Kennedy, the philanthropist mother of the assassinated Kennedys, is attributed with the following words: ‘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.’

Yet that fifth regret – ‘I wish that I had let myself be happier’ – does rather linger in the air, does it not?

And, I might add, we’ll always be exciting and sexy to someone.

We might sometimes pay patient heed to our sorrow, allow it to penetrate into us, knowing that it is an important articulation of what was already there. It is showing us that something demands our attention. We do not need to fear the world, or treat it with suspicion. Any monsters that dwell there are our own.