Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

by Derren Brown

we tend to suffer from one of two basic fears: the fear of abandonment or the fear of being overwhelmed.

For those who become silently, privately angry, remember that the point of delay is to spare others a misjudged response, not an excuse to merely sulk.

‘You make me angry’ or ‘You are so weird’ is neither respectful nor truthful, because the anger and sense of weirdness do not come from the other person, they come from the story we have made up.

Expressing our unhappiness in a sensitive way is one of the most productive things we can do in a relationship.

Resist curiosity

I also try to cut back a bit on my nosiness. I mean, knowing every single detail about everything, investigating and eliciting a slave’s every occupation, a friend’s every action, a son’s every pastime, a wife’s every whisper – this leads to many outbursts of anger, one after another every day, and these in turn add up to habitual discontent and surliness.33

classic errors we tend to make:

Selective perception.

We commonly pay attention to the things that confirm our pr...

Mind-reading.

we are terrible at reading each other’s thoughts. Yet we consistently behave as if we have been endowed with this entirely handsome ability.

Catastrophising.

Some people seem in a state of constant heightened emotional engagement with the world.

two people with different judgements will live, by all accounts, in two different worlds.

Those beset by feelings of anxiety are of course most prone to catastrophising. Our loved one is to spend time with an attractive new client at work: clearly they will fall in love. We have a sore leg: we must have a ripped tendon, or worse. We have picked at a spot: we will always be scarred and more prone to skin cancer. The language we use when we catastrophise becomes unnecessarily emotional, and contrasts become starker. Two experiences of being ignored at parties translates into ‘I’m always blanked by people … I’ll never find a partner because I’m just worthless’.

Use imaginary friends

The trick of bringing other people to mind is of enormous use in dispelling anger.

We might use a friend, an admired luminary, even a fictitious character, as a role model who can spring to mind when we find ourselves incensed. How might they deal with this situation? How would they coolly laugh it off or rise above it? This might give us some distance from our own story and offer a more helpful, convincing perspective. Or, if a friend were suffering

with this particular problem, how would we advise them? Those calming words of wisdom we would offer – what would they be?

4. Lower your self-belief

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

It will be some time before titles such as ‘Climb Out Of Your Own Arse’ populate the shelves dedicated to self-improvement. Possibly, with a resurgence of interest in the lessons of ancient philosophy, we might one day realise that a large part of improving the ‘self’ is to shift the focus from ‘self’ to ‘other’. As I have written elsewhere, the heart of true self-improvement surely lies in becoming kinder (from a place of strength).

We can remind ourselves of how easily we can identify negative patterns in other people (‘he’s pretty arrogant, he talks too much, she tends to put other people down’) but when such criticisms come our way, we object to the generalisation and insist on being given individual examples, each of which we can then explain away: ‘When do I do that?

The fury of Seneca’s driving demon has us believe in our anger that we are entirely faultless.

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

You have the same faults as those who annoy you

All of us are inconsiderate and imprudent, all unreliable, dissatisfied, ambitious – why disguise with euphemism this sore that infects us all? – all of us are corrupt. Therefore, whatever fault he censures in another man, every man will find residing in his own heart.

When you run against someone’s wrong behaviour, go on at once to reflect what similar wrong act of your own there is.38

By employing a more modest, realistic approach to self-appraisal, we connect with a community of flawed fellow beings and turn aggression into its opposite: love.

Understanding the offender’s motivation

When people injure you, ask yourself what good or harm they thought would come of it. If you understand that, you’ll feel sympathy rather than outrage or anger.

We make the same judgements.

There is at the heart of this anger a pang of existential melancholy: we play only peripheral parts in the lives of our friends. They are the chief protagonists of their own dramas; to them, we are merely supporting cast.

for the vast majority of the time, our friends do not think of us at all. And when they do, our anger at the loving and considerate lie they tell us to spare our feelings is misplaced.

We are never crazy or illogical in our actions; we always act from clear internal logic.

By appreciating our own complex narratives and judgements, we can recognise that such things exist to the same degree in those who offend us, rather than perceiving only idiocy or evil.

We each live out our contortion of the same shared truth.

We know how vile we can be when we are stressed, hungry, feeling abandoned or overwhelmed. At those moments, we have a desperate need for the world to slow down and appreciate that we are struggling. However strong people may appear, they struggle too, and when they upset us, they are very likely in pain.

We are hearing a frustrated expression of suffering from this other person and in the blink of an eye making it about our own afflictions. If we recognise this pattern, and take responsibility for it, we can, to some extent, be liberated from it.

Lower your expectations

Swaggering self-entitlement is chilling to behold and comes from an inflated level of expectation as to the extent to which others are likely to arrange every matter to one’s complete satisfaction.

Sometimes people will be hugely disappointing. This is, in our graph, the y axis of life itself, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Life, we are told when we are first refused a toy in a shop by a sensible parent, is not fair. It is fortune, not fairness that we meet, and we should not expect justice.

Think of everything, expect everything; even in good characters some unevenness will appear. Human nature begets hearts that are deceitful, that are ungrateful, that are covetous, that are undutiful. When you are about to pass judgement on one single man’s character, reflect upon the general mass.49

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.

It is simply the mental addition of the thought, ‘If nothing happens to the contrary’

As we get excited about a planned or expected future event, it’s a good thing to remind ourselves – unless it doesn’t work out.

The Stoics would not deny us feelings of excitement, but they would encourage us to retain this little reminder that we’re not ultimately in control. And this is done with a view to increasing our happiness.

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.51

This is a brilliant bit of thinking. We can aim high, seek to change the world, yet always be satisfied with the outcome. The Stoics have taken the reclusive Epicurean instruction to desire only what you already have, and allowed it to be active, engaged and vital.

It may not come naturally in the moment, but our aim should be to abnegate this bloated, boorish self and move towards our apparent aggressor. Lowering our expectations of the people around us is not to live at their whim and let them ‘get away with anything’; it is to stop obtruding our stories and priorities upon those of others and then whining when they don’t match up. Anger is just proof of how unrealistic your expectations were.