Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

by Derren Brown

We know of it today as the Serenity Prayer, attributed to the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, from a 1943 sermon: 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.

Although we profess to be in love, and to have lost ourselves in this other person, we are barely (at this early point) doing them the justice of considering them an actual human being. They begin as a projection of our needs; we hope that he or she will be the perfect match, the magical ‘other’ who will satisfy us. Like the projections we make upon our misplaced goals that we think will guarantee us happiness, it is an enterprise doomed to failure. Our partners will never entirely fit in with our plans for them, and neither should they.

Because those needs are unconscious, they are most powerful, for it is the shadowy, unacknowledged parts of us that wield most control.

learn to desire what you already have, and you will have all you need.

There is an ironic twist here: by undoing our attachment to external things and people, we can value them more.

it is inevitable: through death or choice, your closest relationships will end. Remembering this invites us to express our feelings to those we love now while we can, to never take them for granted, and to not regret, when it’s too late, that they never knew how important they were to us.

occasional reminder of how lucky we are to have the gift of these relationships in our lives can only do us good. This must come from considering the sobering thought that they will one day come to an end. If we knew these treasured relationships would last truly forever, to trip and dance through the Garden Immortal and never die, what effort would we make and for how long? Why buy flowers when they will never leave? Why value time spent together when you have infinite repetitions ahead of you? Would you still fall asleep with interlocked forms and whisper ‘I love you’ every night for the rest of time? Would you continue to surprise each other with breakfast on any of eternity’s mornings you chose, knowing that the rapture of either activity would be quickly lost in the tiniest flickering instant of infinity’s interminable drudge?

aim for the uncompromising acceptance of life as it is. To align ourselves with fortune; to cease trying to control it. This is the love of fate – amor fati.

It takes more than the words ‘it’s fine’ to really feel that something is fine. We will be very eager to justify feeling angry.

The Stoics point out to us that we ‘augment’ our bad impressions of appearances ‘with great wit’. We interpret and embellish, and make matters so much worse for ourselves.

We can benefit from remembering the words of the novelist David Foster Wallace: ‘You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realise how seldom they do.’

A number of our blessings do us harm, for memory brings back the agony of fear while foresight brings it on prematurely. No one confines his unhappiness to the present.

We are normally awoken abruptly by an alarm clock when we could do with an extra hour of sleep, and if we have allowed ourselves a brief time to lie in bed and adjust to the morning, we tend to resort to that most banal of pastimes: browsing our phones. We check social media or see what emails have come through. One connects us with the rabble; the other starts our day with problems to which we are obliged to find solutions. Perhaps we check the news and again without realising we emerge into our day smothered by demands from the outside world, which root themselves unpleasantly in our groggy, too-malleable consciousness. We have prepared our psychological state for the day by laying the groundwork for envy (we see that a friend has bought a new gadget we want but can’t afford) and by letting our barely sentient minds absorb the concerns of work communicated overnight to our inbox. Those first few moments of the day, when we are still suggestible enough to slip back into dreams unfinished, have been invaded by the outside world’s blaring cries for our weary attention. And our brains, still spongy and soaked in semi-sleep, have had nothing of the preparation needed to distance themselves from the onslaught. Already by the time our shower has brought us into the fully waking world, it is too late: we have begun our day at the mercy of the crowds.

Anybody can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.

An artist sees the world and notices a difference between how she feels it should be and how it actually is. The work of art she creates is a way of bridging the gap: a physical manifestation of that discrepancy.

anger commits criminal acts ‘after having replaced intelligence altogether, and shut it out of the house’.

Plutarch suggests we should ask friends for feedback as to how we are. We should make ourselves available ‘for periodic inspection’ to examine our habits and character, ‘to see if over a period of time any good features have been added or bad ones subtracted

There is surely no more direct route to self-deception than the avoidance of feedback.

Very many men manufacture complaints, either by suspecting what is untrue or by exaggerating the unimportant. Anger often comes to us, but more often we come to it. Never should we summon it; even when it falls on us, it should be cast off.

To a large extent, we struggle to understand ourselves through others; we look at other people’s behaviour and models of the world, and (perhaps too quickly) decide how they relate to ours. When someone reflects our own biases, we are happy and feel attraction; they have reinforced the peculiar script we are living out, and we need not, for a while, be quite so much on our guard. Sufferers of psychological conditions present rather more eccentric models of thinking yet are generally ruled by something that also stirs within us in embryonic form.

You ask what is the greatest failing in you? You keep accounts badly: you rate high what you have paid out but low what you have been paid.

Our centre of gravity must be brought inside where it belongs; locating it in others is where we get into trouble, regardless of whether it results in shyness or a brash need to impress.

like an actor playing a king, he let other people confer status upon him, playing none of it himself.

When we are happy, we have won the game, and the fact is self-evident; there’s no need to broadcast the victory.

While the evolutionary advantages of status are self-evident, it’s fascinating to me that despite our extraordinarily well-honed social radars, and the importance and appeal of getting on with people and being liked, we make such gross errors as thinking that being ‘impressive’ (in this least interesting sense) will make people like us.

We make two common mistakes when we try to be liked: we either try to impress or we try to be like the other person. Yet we know, from every day of our own experience of liking and disliking other people, that status and similarity are not especially attractive traits.

living amongst others is a vulnerable business, and the fear of social exclusion cuts deep, doubtless haunting us from a prehistoric time when such ejection meant lack of vital protection and certain death. To suspect that our peers have identified our weaknesses is a troubling thing.

Psychologist and author Richard Wiseman, while we were discussing people’s tendency to regret decisions in their lives, suggested the image of a jar of coloured threads: try to remove one and the whole bundle comes out with it. The same evocative image suits our purposes here: a friend’s occasional spinelessness is impossible to untangle from his striking kindness of which we are so fond; another’s occasional arrogance is commensurate with his appealing self-sufficiency and independence.

Much of the time we are likely to have misjudged, and the flawed or charged way another person points that out does not change the fact.

there is no justice in blaming the individual for a failing shared by all men’.

Seneca alerts us to how much anger can be avoided if we first say to ourselves in silence: ‘I myself have also been guilty of this.’

We make the same judgements. We can hardly blame others for acting in precisely the same way we would ourselves,

We can’t blame others for doing what we would most likely have done if we found ourselves in the same circumstances. If we had been that annoyed, or that protective, or felt cornered or scared to the same degree, we would have done the same thing. It doesn’t matter if we think the other person has reacted over and above how we would; the point is that we, under the same psychological conditions, would have very likely done the same.

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. In the same way that the complexities of a minor character can never be fully explored, we too are reduced in the eyes of those who know us to a handful of clear-cut characteristics as predictable and easily categorised as our dress sense.

‘You yourself … often do wrong,’ Marcus tells us, and, referring to those who have offended us, ‘You are not even sure that they actually do wrong.’44 Many actions serve a purpose that may be hidden from us, and we would have to find out much more information about a person’s motivations before we could decide with any certainty whether they were truly at fault.

It will be said that someone spoke ill of you; consider whether you spoke ill of him first, consider how many there are of whom you speak ill. Let us consider, I say, that some are not doing us an injury but repaying one, that others are acting for our good, that some are acting under compulsion, others in ignorance, that even those who are acting intentionally and wittingly do not, while injuring us, aim only at the injury; one slipped into it allured by his wit, another did something, not to obstruct us, but because he could not reach his own goal without pushing us back; often adulation, while it flatters, offends.

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

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.

The Stoics introduced a qualification to be used when making plans, a proviso to be attached to any hopes for the future. This exceptio, or reserve clause, is another manifestation of the distinction between what we do and do not control. It is simply the mental addition of the thought, ‘If nothing happens to the contrary’ to the end of any statement concerning our intentions.

Epictetus summarises our best relationship to fate in the Handbook: 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.

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.

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.

Rather than feeling road rage, we might find it remarkable that a hundred thousand people driving a hundred thousand cars at varying speeds around a major city manage to successfully coexist and get where they want to almost all of the time.

‘Composure, calmness and charity is nowhere near as kind and considerate and inoffensive to those who come across it as to those who possess it.’53 We are ultimately made happier by being less angry, in fact happier than we’ll make other people.

Psychologists have demonstrated that people gain more pleasure from acting altruistically than being on t...

Often what feels most intimate tends to be what we have most in common.

The particular misfortune of the paedophile is not that he is a walking manifestation of evil but that his or her sexual development (as much subject to nature, nurture and questions of identity as any of ours) has resulted in a potentially very harmful and unacceptable attraction. We rightly call it a disorder because of these damaging effects, but merely reacting with horror will do little towards solving a complex and difficult issue stemming from a sexual drive as real and compulsive as any of us are used to.

It’s in some ways like that dream holiday: it’s much less dreamy once we’ve arrived and realise we’ve brought ourselves with us.

When the public face provokes so much idolisation, a sort of dissonance is likely to occur: it is as if the star has a twin who is receiving all the attention. The jaw-dropping mansion and fleet of cars cannot fill a gap left by an unnoticed and un-nurtured true self, which might have atrophied at a young age if fame arrived uncommonly early. In these cases, the fans who love you are not people you could ever connect with in real life; they respond to your mediated, orchestrated, grotesquely sexualised twin right on cue, whilst remaining the very people that the real-life you has to spend much of your time avoiding.

We might enjoy the feeling of being loved, but we will not be satisfied until we also learn the joys of giving it away. Love becomes far more fulfilling when we realise it in large part consists of sensitively accommodating our lover’s inadequacies. A love that can only be received is barely worth bothering about.