Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

by Derren Brown

It starts when we are young: we choose these subjects for GCSE in order to study these ones at A level, in order to go to this university, to study this subject, to get this job, to get this promotion and work our way up this corporate ladder, to what? Meanwhile, our lives are relegated to something that happens, to borrow from Schopenhauer, ad interim: in the meantime; unattended.

The places and things that insist most loudly that they will make us happy rarely do. Joy alone, says Schopenhauer, has declined to be present at the festival. It prefers to arrive quietly and alone elsewhere, unceremoniously and unannounced.

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.

We may also appreciate that those positive qualities continue to reside in a person even when they are annoying us and seem to have lost all their redeeming aspects.

If happiness lies in the relationship between what we desire and what we have, we are being encouraged to consider the first part of that equation rather than obsess over the second.

If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgement of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgement now.

‘Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.’

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

‘The meaning of life,’ wrote Kafka, reputedly, ‘is that it stops.’

We fear an enemy that, perhaps more than anything else, makes our lives significant. The will to see our projects extended makes us human and means that we are likely to want to fight death when it comes. It’s as if we are attending a fantastic party and are told we have to leave. We don’t want to go. But neither, really, do we want it to last forever. It would be unbearable if it did. Part of what makes the party so good is that it comes to an end.

We resurrect our loved ones whenever we find ourselves thinking and feeling like them. We carry them with us, in that blueprint of how to think and feel that they have left behind. And the closer we are to them, the more we understand them, the more accurate that blueprint will be. It turns out, then, to be the positive connections between people that provide the mechanism for our ‘self’ to survive death in any meaningful way. It turns out to be love.