Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

by Derren Brown

Tidy narratives are things we choose to apply; meanwhile, experience is messy and active and not reducible to these clean nouns and designations. Moralising is our attempt to distract from something complicated and painful in order to make it appear manageable, so that we can avoid feeling uncomfortably challenged

Fame does not make you happier; instead, the nice things get nicer and the nasty things get far worse.

Lucretius, the Epicurean poet, knew this, writing that riches and honours make us feel further from death. Certainly for some, leaving a legacy becomes more important as they grow older; it is another means of reaching for immortality.

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

recognise and beware the toxic blend of low self-esteem and grandiose self-regard known only to the truly damned.

Only you carry your story in the world, and it must vanish with you.

As the novelist Milan Kundera phrased it: ‘What terrifies most about death is not the loss of the future but the loss of the past. In fact, the act of forgetting is a form of death always present within life.’

One of the qualities of death is that it does not bring with it any closure. It does not bring our lives to an end in the way the last chapter of a novel or the last scenes of a film wind up the story and give meaning to the events that have come before. Death does not allow our lives to come to some sort of fruition. It simply curtails life. It may stop it in its tracks quite suddenly, or we might be permitted to hear the trundling of its dark carriage from a distance, but it does not complete the story for us. That’s for us to do, if we are given the chance.

When it comes to arguments for the existence of such things that we can’t really measure or point to or see, we generally have to rely on something called ‘inference to the best explanation’. This means that if a defender of souls (or ghosts or other unverifiable entities) wishes to be taken seriously, he has to be able to show that a soul is the best explanation for something that already exists (or ‘X’). If an X can be found that necessitates the existence of a soul to explain it, then we have a good argument for the existence of souls. A soul (that we can’t see) needs to be the best explanation for another phenomenon that we can see and appreciate.

Many atheists might proudly proclaim that our lives have no ultimate meaning, yet the business of finding significance in one’s life is perhaps the most important part of being human.

Meaning is not to be scoffed at. If we don’t find it in some considered form, we commonly look for it in prescribed forms of spirituality.

The deep experience of transcendence is lost once it is reduced to words like ‘God’ (or for that matter ‘transcendent’), let alone when it is personified in our image. What God might have once meant has long disappeared. Nietzsche’s famous declaration that ‘God is Dead’ was lamenting this very issue.

although on a normal day-to-day level, the information given to me by my senses is generally enough to get by, I can also appreciate there is a world beyond my mere perception of it.

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.

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.

Our reputations are not in us; they are stories sustained in the minds of other people.

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.’

Christopher Hitchens used it in more recent times when discussing the prospect of an afterlife: 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.’

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.

Rose Kennedy, the philanthropist mother of the assassinated Kennedys, is attributed with the following words: ‘It has been said, “Time heals all wounds.” I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.’

We have moved on from the folklore, but not the deep stirrings that gave rise to the folklore in the first place.

If you are facing your own death, and have the clarity of mind and opportunity to make such choices, then realise that for you to own your death, to author it and to shape it, is tremendously important. You are the protagonist and the author. If you do not insist on this central role, you may find yourself reduced to a mere cameo.

The needs of a present that has a future are different from one that does not.

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.

Objecting to the differing viewpoints of others is a huge waste of time.

‘Although the physicality of death destroys us, the idea of death saves us,’6 writes the existential psychoanalyst Irvin D. Yalom.

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.

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.

Be grateful to your unconscious for looking out for you, while also acknowledging that it’s being hilariously oversensitive.

Maybe we dreaded turning thirty, but once it arrived wasn’t it surprisingly positive?

We also need others to live on after us and without us. We need to die and others need to live. Which means ultimately that the continuing lives of others matter more to us than do our own.

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.

Heraclitus told us: ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.’

A good relationship, like a good parent or a good death, need only be ‘good enough’, consisting of two people navigating each other’s inadequacies with kindness and sympathy. At its best, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke tells us, it ‘consists in two solitudes protecting, defining, and welcoming one another’.

Rilke suggests ‘imagining an individual’s experience as a larger or smaller room … most people are only acquainted with one corner of their particular room, a place by the window, a little area to pace up and down’.

To live without anxiety is to live without growth.

Very few people find a better partner without the pain of breaking up with a previous one. We don’t change our career without first letting our current job get us down. We don’t start anything new without the pain of ending the old or the frustration of enduring it. Disturbance, then, can be a signal that we are moving in the right direction: namely, out of our comfort zone. To remain tranquil and comfortable would deny us our growth. To remain happy would stop us from flourishing.

We do not need to fear the world, or treat it with suspicion. Any monsters that dwell there are our own.