Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

by Derren Brown

it not potentially just as disastrous to live one’s life with the goal of dying happily and without regret, just to find that our regret is that we did not live for the moment while we could?

Milan Kundera made the enduring point in The Unbearable Lightness of Being that there is no dress rehearsal for life. 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. This is not about bungee jumping or forming an extravagant bucket list. It can happen in the ordinary moments of your everyday life. Life is short. We know this. But there is a contradictory thought, which I find every bit as exhilarating and which was central to the writings of the German nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It is called ‘eternal recurrence’: an idea that he drew from Indian philosophy. Time is infinite, Nietzsche points out, while the chances of a world appearing exactly like our own is (though very, very small) not quite zero. This means that eventually, as we move through infinite time, a world exactly like ours will appear again. And, given that we have endless time to play with, over and over again. In that world, of course, there will exist a repeated version of you, living exactly your life each time. If time is eternal, every configuration of events that has already happened will at some point happen again, and that will include a reliving of your life by a future version of yourself. Nietzsche finds the idea at first horrifying. That horror, however, leads to his realisation that a person living a considered and tru...

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

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.

Guilt is attached to the past in the same way that fear is attached to the future.

Palaces are most beautiful when viewed from afar, and stars shine most brightly from a distance.