Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

by Derren Brown

Again, we indirectly find happiness in the absence of a stressor (money troubles) not in the having of something.

we’re switching our focus to removing needless frustrations, not chasing happiness.

We only perceive one slice of time from moment to moment. There’s now … and now … and now. We treat before and after as aspects of the real world, whereas they are only bits of organisational language. Because of this mistake, we can play mental games that exploit the error. Are you exactly the same person you were when you were a baby? Will you be the same person when you are very old? What about tomorrow? Does it make sense to say that the person who will get out of your side of the bed tomorrow morning is the same identical person reading this page now?

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions.

WE ARE FRIGHTENED of things that we believe could cause us harm in some way. It may sound a mad question, but is death actually one of those things?

‘Either [death] is the worst thing for us as it denies us the one thing we have, or [it’s] a symptom of confusion to say it’s bad.’

You won’t be there when it happens

So death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us, since so long as we exist, death is not with us; but when death comes, then we do not exist. It does not concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more.2

You’ve already been there

the eternal non-existence of death is something we’ve already been through. It happened before we were born. We’ve been in the eternal abyss once before, and we don’t feel any regret about it. So why fear returning?

Death as deprivation

circle without a circumference

Jorge Luis Borges

‘The Library of Babel’.

What makes love so compelling? The fact that this is the one, short life we have and that we might spend a large part of it with this other person. That here is someone to cling to and grow with for our allotted lifespan. Here we are, broken and fraught in our own way, loving another who is broken and fraught in theirs, and who happens to love us too. But if we knew we were to have endless loves for eternity, there would be no reason to feel excited about this one. 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.’

Todd May

Death:

In the case of death, though, the subjectivity of harm is more apparent. Death is harmful if it thwarts our desires. But to what extent we experience it as harm depends on how attached we are to those desires. It harms us in that it deprives us of future life. But is that deprivation still harmful if we are happy to forego the future?

It will happen to all of us that at some point you get tapped on the shoulder and told, not just that the party is over, but slightly worse: the party’s going on but you have to leave. And it’s going on without you. That’s the reflection I think that most upsets people about their demise. All right then let’s – because it might make us feel better – let’s pretend the opposite. Instead, you’ll get tapped on the shoulder and told: ‘Great news: this party’s going on forever, and you can’t leave. You’ve got to stay. The boss says so and he also insists that you have a good time.’6

The Stoics tell us to think, when people die or things are destroyed, ‘I gave them back.’ What we have lost was never ours; we enjoyed them for a while and now they have returned to eternity.

Death’s Summer Coat,

Death, we remember, does not round off a life with the satisfying ending of a novel or a film. It does not ‘complete’; it curtails. It is up to us to bring the story to a close by recognising it as such. If a person knows she is dying, I would suggest that she needs from her loved ones every opportunity to take stock of her story and bring it to a meaningful end.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy

If you have something to ‘come out’ about, come out. If you carry a secret around with you, you learn to protect it in all sorts of ways that disconnect you from the rest of the world and the people in it. Meanwhile, the idea of your secret being discovered will come to fill you with horror. But the huge deal you have turned it into is not a reflection of how big a deal it is in the eyes of other people. To them, it’s just some information about you. Generally speaking, they don’t care. They’re far more likely to care if you’re happy, and they’ll certainly care if you’re obviously hiding something (and it will be obvious), but they are unlikely to care about the thing itself (if it doesn’t affect them). They don’t think about you and what you get up to as much as you think they do. And when you come out, the bubble you have built around you bursts, and life suddenly becomes so much more delightful: it’s like you’ve put down a heavy bag of rocks. You also realise that everyone else has his or her heavy bag of rocks, too. And you gain a much healthier perspective regarding how much people care about what you get up to. You’ll never regret falling in love. Do so over and over again. Lower your standards if necessary. It might lead to heartbreak now and then, but it’ll always be worth it in the end. If you work in a creative field, and you are faced with a choice of doing a job for the money or doing a job for the fun of it, take the fun one whenever you can. You’ll rarely enj...

‘Although the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death saves us,’

Heidegger suggested there are two ways we can approach life: the everyday mode and the ontological mode. Most of the time, naturally, we exist in the everyday mode and might marvel at how things are in the world. However, in the ontological mode (‘ontology’ is the study of what it is to be), we stand back and look at the marvellous fact that things, and we, exist. Our attention is turned from the physical trappings of daily life to the deeper questions of being, and in this mode we are more likely to make worthwhile changes in our life. This, indeed, is part of the ‘considered life’ this book is talking about. Without stepping into this ontological mode, it will be hard to make sense of anything here.

One of my patients … said to me, ‘What a pity I had to wait until now, till my body was riddled with cancer, to learn how to live!’

We might never rid ourselves of a lingering anxiety regarding our death; this is a kind of tax we pay in return for self-awareness.

Death, perhaps uniquely amongst the objects of our dread, instructs us how to live.

Whatever the past is, it has been and gone. If there are things you need to face in your past because they refuse to let you go, realise at least that they grip you not because they control you (they no longer exist), but because of the narrative they’ve left you with.

consciously note the way your unconscious machinations bring these old patterns to the fore, and then, where you can, quietly smile at them. Be grateful to your unconscious for looking out for you, while also acknowledging that it’s being hilariously oversensitive. Each time you gently deny it its power by nipping it in the bud through your own amusement, and practise instead a new response (that may not at first come naturally but which encourages a richer and more sympathetic world-view), you break these old neural connections and form a new pathway.

The here and now, we have seen, rarely contains problems; it is released from the tyranny of our imposing narratives. We might feel bad about events in the past or dread those yet to come, but rarely in the present – rarely right now – do we find ourselves in the middle of a serious difficulty. Right now we can gain some perspective by stepping back from our feelings and recognising that they are not us. Right now we can undo some of the grip of the past by recognising the patterns that rule over us. For those who find it difficult to switch off concerns

Neuroscientist and author Sam Harris describes a greater engagement with the present moment as the antidote to a fear of death. When we are focused non-judgementally on the present, we do not fret about growing old and dying. We are also freed from any obsessions with what we are trying to achieve in the future, and are likely to find that things around us become more compelling.

I have extended the ‘good-enough’ theory to most of my life and now my death. We are, at times, so often obsessed or feel pressurised into ‘being the best at …, the fastest at …, the cleverest at …’ I genuinely worry about all of this positive thinking/life coaching! … It is undoubtedly excellent to strive to achieve one’s maximum potential, but that should be to please ourselves, not be judged by others, and for me having led a ‘good-enough’ life with its share of wonders and disasters, I am content and so, ready for a ‘good-enough’ death.

While reading on the subject of death on a summer’s day in the garden of a hotel near Sheffield, I found my attention drifting from the page to a long-leafed, red-berried shrub next to me. For a while I considered: ‘What if I knew I was to die tomorrow? How utterly beautiful this plant is. I have no idea what it is called, and I have never paid attention to one before. What a stunning thing. What if I knew I would never see a plant or a red berry again? I would be able to stare at this for hours. God, what a beautiful thing.’

Schopenhauer said that when we die, the world disappears, as it can only ever exist in our perceptions.

When we are no longer around to perceive it, it vanishes in the blink of an eye. It’s an interesting thought to play with, but most of us would prefer to say that the world carries on happily without us once we’ve gone. This is life after us: the ‘after-life’, no less. Not a personal afterlife, and in that sense nothing to bring us much comfort. But in some important sense, it can do.

don’t think, ‘I’m not really a bitch when you get to know me, even if I act like one sometimes’; if you act like a bitch, you are a bitch. That’s what being a bitch means.

I guess then you did leave me something to remind me of you Every time I interrupt someone like you used to 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.

When someone dies, they leave a glowing corona behind them, an afterglow in the souls of those who were close to them. Inevitably, as time passes, the afterglow fades and finally goes out, but it takes many years for that to happen. When, eventually, all those close ones have died as well, then all the embers will have gone cool, and at that point,

it’s ‘ashes to ashes and dust to dust’.1

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.2

A good relationship,

At its best, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke tells us, it ‘consists in two solitudes protecting, defining, and welcoming one another’.2

You also don’t need to fix the anxiety: it is a feeling that you have; it is therefore not you. The need to fix, to control is what fuels the anxiety in the first place. Let it be, and it will lose its excessive force.