Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

by Derren Brown

the desire to be happy, to obtain happiness, to claim our right to be happy, remains the most enduring and conspicuously self-defeating aspect of our modern condition.

A good magic trick forces the spectator to tell a story that arrives at an impossible conclusion, and the clearer the story is, the better. Normally, everything you need to solve the puzzle happens right in front of you, but you are made to care only about the parts that the magician wants you to. When you join up those dots, so misleadingly and provocatively arranged, you are left with a baffling mystery.

We turn the memory of a holiday or a meal into something entirely wonderful or completely appalling, depending on the story we have decided for ourselves of a successful or failed event.

We are, each of us, a product of the stories we tell ourselves.

It is hard to think about your past without tidying it up into a kind of story: one in which you are cast as the hero or victim.

Schopenhauer wrote, ‘Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.’

It’s a cheap lie, which feeds upon one of our most prevailing wishes: that we can control things outside of our control, like the forces of fate.

Of course decide to open a coffee shop if that’s viable, and of course, where helpful, be single-minded; however, your determination will be interacting with random fortune, not a listening, caring universe; the project may well come to nothing, and it’s good to be prepared for that.

As Joseph Campbell wrote about middle age, ‘There is perhaps nothing worse than reaching the top of the ladder and discovering that you’re on the wrong wall.’

We choose whom to impress based on how impressive they seem to us, and if they fail to be convinced by our attempts, then we tend to feel anxious. This is neither a healthy nor a happy cycle.

You, with your usual thoughts and predilections and capacity for dissatisfaction, find yourself on that sandy strip of paradise or in that turquoise sea, and you realise you have brought all of those disappointing aspects of yourself along with you.

Like the rainbow which so commonly symbolises it, happiness is an optical illusion that retreats or hides itself the closer you approach.

I don’t think it’s ultimately helpful to adopt single labels as some kind of identity.

If we don’t assume more conscious authorship of our stories, others will write them for us, and we will invariably find ourselves fundamentally bored or anxious and prone to any number of complaints from within.

without any means of identifying and engaging with our stories, we might quickly find ourselves at the mercy of whatever voices happen to be loudest around us.

The greatest burden a child must bear, we remember from Jung, is the unlived lives of its parents.

Why should the anticipation of future introspective thoughts triggered by illness in the final few months of our lives dictate the choices we make now and for decades ahead? Is 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?

Some people may be happy to hand over responsibility to a single architect and have him do all the work and decision-making. Religion offers this relinquishing of responsibility, and for many it’s very appealing. Most ‘complete’ solutions provide a framework that largely removes the need to continue asking the kind of existential questions the considered life provokes. The answers have been provided for you.

We are far less likely to come to idolise a person if we can recognise that what we admire about them are qualities that exist separately from the particular (and therefore flawed) example that they constitute.

There is a sort of muscle-memory to ethics: we learn to act in a way that is appropriate until it comes naturally.

If we hope for something deeper in life than distraction, we might note that our remembering, story-forming self needs a narrative of happiness in the same way our experiencing self requires its pleasures.

Original sin is a profoundly toxic picture; I cannot imagine a more damaging story for a culture to create for itself than the idea that every one of its members is inherently evil. Of course it serves a purpose: as a piece of mythology it encourages us to strive for good and find unison with goodness. But more straightforwardly, it is one of those extraordinarily life-denying ideas that can only be dreamt up by religion.

‘Everywhere you go,’ the Zen saying goes, ‘there you are.’

non-believers might scoff at religious people who believe that sacred statues and other icons supernaturally connect them to the divinities for whom such objects stand as mystic avatars. But we are still prone to the same superstitious thinking. To appreciate this, try taking a knife and repeatedly stabbing a photograph of a loved one, and preferably one who has recently passed away. You’ll soon appreciate the power of the graven image.

In the future, post-Enlightenment movements would seek to provide that absent component, which of course would largely amount to secular renderings of the cosmic answers that religion had previously provided.

It is then not so much that we have a ‘God-shaped hole’ within us, as I was fond in my religious youth of insisting, but that there lurks within us something of Locke’s ‘uneasiness’, a perennial desire for satisfaction that takes place at the metaphysical level as well as the everyday and material. We have a ‘meaning-shaped hole’ because we are story-forming creatures, and stories should not meander without a point.

The ideal he describes (and he goes into some detail about how to sensibly store capital and live off the interest) is to be wealthy enough to have expansive free time and the intellectual capabilities to fill it with contemplation and activity in the service of mankind.

Previous philosophers had enquired into human nature; Nietzsche now casts aside all theories and demands we see the truth: that we are ourselves the authors of our nature, and must grasp that responsibility. Those who do will secure our future as a developed race.

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

Freud’s consulting room provided a confidential place for a person to talk, frankly and probably for the first time, about sex and anguish, to be understood and find healing. This in itself is a leap forward in the story of happiness, and perhaps for the first time in history a positive development that relates specifically to those who find themselves unhappy. While many of Freud’s approaches have been revised, we now live in a society where we can understand and appreciate that our troublesome urges and predilections might be the result of early trauma and come to understand ourselves and our complexities all the better.

Above all, matters of love and spirituality remain swathed in an opaque, sentimental mist, which renders them immune to any kind of rational investigation.

T. S. Eliot told us ‘Humanity cannot bear very much reality.’

Unhappiness is seen as a sign of failure, not a healthy symptom of our natural condition.

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

I am reminded of Noam Chomsky’s words: ‘The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.’

Pseudo-science is appealing because it is exciting and intense; science by contrast is slow and boring.

‘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.’

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.

Seneca writes that it is ‘stupid to pray’ in order to achieve something virtuous in life, ‘since you can obtain it from yourself’

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.

let’s acknowledge that when we find ourselves infuriated with people, irritated by our partners, annoyed, embarrassed, sad or scared, those feelings are in truth provoked by an exhausting little voice inside our head, and/or from the exaggerated pictures we show ourselves. The pictures or voice might refer to the past (if we’re feeling bad about something that has happened, even a split second ago), or the future (if we’re frightened of something that might happen, like a conversation or meeting we’re dreading). These intermediary thoughts step in and interpret external events as a good reason to feel bad, mad or scared. In essence, we make a judgement about the event and then react to that verdict.

This school of thought says that intellect is of the mind and emotions are of the body. We are born with our capacity for grief and anger and despair in place, whereas we learn reasoning through the society in which we live.

Steam and computer metaphors amount to the attempts of different eras to come to grips with something beyond their understanding by using a model of a technology dazzling and complex but just about graspable.

the inevitable limitations of each metaphor mislead us in their own way. Electronic- and computer-speak encourage us to see our brains (and therefore each other) as reliable machines that must necessarily produce predictable results if certain data are inputted correctly. This may be no more helpful than the correlative analogue model of the motion-producing steam engine, as revolutionary to the nineteenth-century mind as the computer has been to ours.

Brad Bushman and team at Iowa State University effectively demolished the myth that this kind of activity helps us to feel better. In fact, their research shows it actually tends to make us more aggressive. Beating a pillow might legitimise our feelings of anger, encouraging us to relive them later, and we may become too attached to a venting activity that we feel should bring us catharsis and find ourselves searching for an assuagement that never comes.

we should acknowledge that it is our judgements, not the external event, which is creating the anguish. In taking responsibility for it, we can look for a way out of the pain.

‘Man is disturbed not by things, but by the views he takes of them.’12 This truth is our starting point if we are to adopt Stoic principles. Epictetus later expands: ‘If, therefore, any be unhappy, let him remember that he is unhappy by reason of himself alone.’

If you insist that you are purely the victim of your situation, or that the anguish you feel about something is entirely justified by the event in question, consider whether someone else you know might respond differently to it. Whether someone you know would find themselves in the same circumstances but be likely to deal with them in a more positive way. If you can imagine that, then you can notice that the key to your emotional response is not the events but the way you deal with them.

‘Say to every harsh appearance – “you are an appearance, and not the only way of seeing the thing that appears,”’ Epictetus tells us.

In one passage, Marcus tells himself to see those things that infuriate him as no more than the equivalent of sawdust and wood clippings on the floor of a carpenter’s workshop. These things that obstruct us are the inevitable by-product of nature, and it would be mad to become enraged about them.