Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

by Derren Brown

Events and our chief aims can be in most cases compared to two forces that pull in different directions, their resultant diagonal being the course of our life.

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.

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.

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’ … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’6

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. We might choose to identify far more with our hobby of paragliding, or the daily demands and rewards of trying to be a good-enough father or mother. In the meantime, we can stop asking people what they do for a living and recognise it for the meaningless and frequently discouraging enquiry that it is.

we mistake recreation for happiness.

‘Everything we need is easy to procure, while the things we desire but don’t need are more difficult to obtain.’

‘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.’

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.

if we were sure that we could – after a period of adjustment – get by happily enough without the relationship in question, we might find it easier to be less demanding and enjoy what the other person chooses to give. If we feel we could live sufficiently without our partners, this can greatly improve our relationship with them. When we are sure we could not survive without them, we are likely to bring a theme of intense jealousy or anxiety into the relationship.

our judgements about people are in truth responsible for how they seemingly ‘make’ us feel.

when we let things go that we can’t control, nothing bad happens. The situation can’t get any worse, and generally we get to feel an awful lot better.

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

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.

We can look at the things and people we value each day with the knowledge that we will most likely lose them at some point, and love them all the more for that.

the love of fate – amor fati.

I am responsible for how I feel about external events. What am I doing to give myself this feeling?

Is this thing that’s upsetting me something which lies under my control? If not, what if I were to decide it’s fine and let it go?

Don’t add to first impressions

‘You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realise how seldom they do.’7

Do I have a problem right now?

Guilt is attached to the past in the same way that fear is attached to the future. If we have let ourselves down, it is difficult, but highly therapeutic, to admit as much to ourselves and realise we could have done better; we make a mental note for next time, apologise if need be to the people concerned, and move on. We are fallible human beings and

You may have had the experience of stopping smoking and then three months later, after a stressful couple of days, you smoke one cigarette again. You immediately feel that you have failed. Within a week or two, you’re back to twenty a day. Epictetus’s more helpful thought is to embrace tenacity over perfection. One cigarette after three months is a fantastic success after years of smoking twenty a day. Maybe in another three months you’ll have another one. Perhaps six months after that, you’ll have a third. Perfection is not important, just keeping going is all that matters.

Rational meditation

Seneca provides an alternative approach to morning premeditation. For such people he suggests a nightly review:

When the day was over and he had withdrawn to his room for his nightly rest, he questioned his soul: ‘What evils have you cured yourself of today? What vices have you fought? In what sense are you better?’ Is there anything better than to examine a whole day’s conduct?12

Third-person perspective

Finding time

Most people (and Bennett was petitioning the large number of white-collar workers amongst his readers who had accrued since the Industrial Revolution) are less than enamoured with their jobs, yet consider time spent at work as ‘the day’. The remaining hours of the day are seen as subservient, marginal; we get up with barely enough time to get ready and leave, and then after work we merely wind down, then ‘think about going to bed’ for nearly an hour before retiring. These remaining hours constitute the majority of our existence, yet still we denigrate them before the minority proportion that in itself brings us little true enjoyment.

We are born with instincts of love, openness and accord. As we grow, we tend to become attached to external goods and our own safety. Aggression results from this interplay between our natures and the circumstances in which we find ourselves: ‘Life, if we attach ourselves to it, alienates us from our own humanity.’9

Some good reasons to avoid anger

Not making the point

Anger,

gets in the way of us making our point. We may feel desperately entitled to it, due to feelings of panic, or the outrage we feel in response to the story we have concocted about other people’s motives and so on. But if given free rein, it will defeat our objective: to express ourselves convincingly.

Our inevitabl...

No licence

Seven ways of removing anger

‘rational emotive behaviour therapy’

The parallels between CBT and Stoicism remain remarkably striking; the only major difference, worth bearing in mind, is that CBT is about fixing certain troubles, whereas the key vision of Stoicism is the enhancement of an ‘ordinary’ life to connect more powerfully to one’s fellow human beings and to move more in accord with the universe. There is a love-drive at the heart of the ancient school, which is not present in the problem-specific raison d’être of CBT.

it is our judgements that cause us problems, as opposed to events themselves; the instigation of more appropriate alternative judgements; and the instruction to systematically review one’s work. Both have us question what is in our control and what is not, and remind us, when we are at the mercy of our over-imaginative narratives, to return to the present moment rather than fixate upon the past or future.

Trigger > judgement > inhibitions > behaviour.

factors such as our beliefs, moods, and our levels of tiredness and hunger, impact greatly upon that sequence of trigger > judgement > inhibition > behaviour.

By fully accepting the fact that we are responsible for our angry responses (and not those who anger us), we are crossing the wide river to more tranquil pastures, from which it is very difficult to return.

‘Anyone who doesn’t fuel a fire puts it out, and anyone who doesn’t feed anger in the early stages and doesn’t get into a huff is being prudent and is eliminating anger.’

The best course is to reject at once the first incitement to anger, to resist even its small beginnings, and to take pains to avoid falling into anger. For if it begins to lead us astray, the return to the safe path is difficult, since, if once we admit the emotion and by our own free will grant it any authority, reason becomes of no avail; after that it will do, not whatever you let it, but whatever it chooses. The enemy, I repeat, must be stopped at the very frontier; for if he has passed it, and advanced within the city gates, he will not respect any bounds set by his captives.25

From the point of view of narrative forming, we would wish to form a compelling but helpful story about the event – that is, one that does not make us angry –

Wait

The best corrective of anger lies in delay. Beg this concession from anger at the first, not in order that it may pardon, but in order that it may judge. Its first assaults are heavy; it will leave off if it waits.

We want to hang on to our anger because we feel we need it to effectively communicate something important. But this is wrong: it only gets in the way and makes people less likely to understand us. Perhaps it would help us to call anger by another name: panic.

Usually, when we are angry, we are scared. We are scared that someone’s actions will leave us helpless, or in some way betrayed, overwhelmed or abandoned. We