Adventure Garden
Powered by 🌱Roam Garden📖 Happy by Derren Brown
Metadata
Author: Derren Brown
Recommended by: Ali Abdaal
Started: September 5th, 2021
Finished:
Blog Link: https://withadventure.com/?p=1058at-10582
Synopsis:
Everyone says they want to be happy. But that's much more easily said than done. What does being happy actually mean? And how do you even know when you feel it?
Across the millennia, philosophers have thought long and hard about happiness. They have defined it in many different ways and come up with myriad strategies for living the good life. Drawing on this vast body of work, in Happy Derren Brown explores changing concepts of happiness - from the surprisingly modern wisdom of the Stoics and Epicureans in classical times right up until today, when the self-help industry has attempted to claim happiness as its own. He shows how many of self-help’s suggested routes to happiness and success – such as positive thinking, self-belief and setting goals – can be disastrous to follow and, indeed, actually cause anxiety.
Key Arguments and Takeaways
What is happiness?
Happiness is a chimera - it is imaginary and deceiving in many of its forms.
For it to be solid, our happiness would not rely on fortuity or what we happen to have. It would be fundamentally about who we are.
Chasing happiness is ineffective.
Epicurus said happiness isn’t reliant on material merchandise – the main thing is how we feel about having or coming up short on specific things.
Happiness is dependent upon ourselves, who we are, and how we choose to respond to things outside of our control.
Ultimately it is not up to material possessions or manifestation or some trick to make us happy - we have to find happiness within ourselves, without influence of the external being necessary to make that happen.
Inter-Disciplinary Connections
Many of the arguments in this book are also supported by Stoicism and particularly relate back to Epicureanism
Ideas from the Enlightenment period partially responsible for the current (flawed) beliefs of inherent equality and opportunity.
Highlights and Literature Notes
Once Upon a Time
We are, each of us, a product of the stories we tell ourselves.
Regardless of how hard we try, we are all biased. We all have a background and focus on different aspects of each experience we have. In this way, we experience every emotion, every event, every encounter through our own lens and it is impossible for us to be completely objective.
The objective event or experience we had doesn’t matter. What matters is the details in how we feel about the event as we experience it and the stories we tell ourselves about it afterwards.
This does not mean that tragic events don't matter, only that the most important part of any experience is how we respond to it. In this same way, trauma is different for every person.
Perhaps the first mark of emotional maturity is to realize that there is an enormous gulf between the events of the world and what we do with them.
...other people are not accountable for how we feel. No one, however ludicrously they behave, has the right or the direct means to affect your self-control or dignity. No one need annoy us so much that we in turn become a source of annoyance to others.
What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgements about these things. Epictetus
This ancient wisdom is the source of many therapy models, including NLP and CBT.
It is not the events that happen to us that cause our problems, it is the stories we tell ourselves about those events that cause our problems.
We are trapped inside our own heads. Our beliefs and understandings about the world are limited by that perspective.
When someone else is telling you a story, you realize that they're telling the story from their own perspective, and that there might be a different truth in another person's perspective. Why do we not realize this when we review our own stories about ourselves?
The Problem with Being Positive
The New Thought Movement was founded by a philosopher and inventor named Phinease Parkhurst Quimby in the nineteenth century.
This is the idea that the power of positive thinking will physically change your life because everything is as it should already be and we just need to learn to harness the power we already have to control illness and the physical world.
Byrne's Law of Attraction actually stems from the New Thought Movement.
This system insists on constant self-examination, which is constant interior labor.
Any system which claims your lack of happiness or fortune is because you don't believe enough or have enough faith in your own abilities is a scam.
It is particularly foul for placing the blame for its inevitable failure on its poor victims.
Any questioning of the system is in itself questioning faith - therefore you do not believe enough and it's your fault it has failed.
This lie catches us because it feeds upon the idea that we can control things that are actually outside of our control.
If this doesn't work out, as it may not, irrespective of your enthusiasm, there is more in life that can make you happy. Don't attach too much to this one goal.
...goal-setting has become for many, a way of life, synonymous with worthwhile achievement and personal progress.
Don't let yourself fall into the trap of determining your self worth by whether or not you meet the goals you've set for yourself. Your goals are not the fundamental source of your happiness.
Many 'happiness hacks' or self help books tell us that if we don't meet our goal or don't get what we want in life it's because we didn't plan enough or we didn't try hard enough or believe enough - setting the blame for failure on us. Why is there even somewhere to place blame? Why are we relying so heavily on these things that not getting there or not having them will make us unhappy? The idea is not to set the right goals or learn better how to set goals, the idea is to change our mental framework for how we think about happiness.
The vital changes to our happiness do not come from outside circumstances.
Wanting
Hedonic Treadmill - the idea that there is an initial happiness at new things, and that happiness then dissipates over time.
Term first coined in 1970s, but earlier Stoics were well aware of the idea.
Idea later developed by psychologist Michael Eysenck in the 1990s.
Would the material desires you harbored when the world was full of people still be present in you if other people vanished?
We might find this notion - that we spend so much energy and time seeking the approval of our peers - quite eye-opening.
The things we desire really do little other than fuel further desires and teach us what greed is.
Reference Group Theory - the idea that in forming our self-identity, we compare ourselves to those in our peer group. Our cognitions, perceptions, attitudes, and conceptions of ourselves are all tied in with those to whom we liken or contrast ourselves.
The groups with which we choose to identify will dictate whether we decide we're doing well or falling short.
This is amplified by the strong assumption that we all have inherent equality.
Before the 17th century it was rarely questioned that differences in wealth and status existed and played a role in each person's future.
Enlightenment philosophers like John Locke started questioning the role of the government and brought about a new idea - that governments exist in order to bring happiness to their people.
This helped fuel the American Revolution of 1776 and then the ideas were cemented into the Declaration of Independence.
The promise of equality, which despite efforts is not fulfilled, creates frustration and envy.
Modern America's obsession with positive thinking, and therefore the fetishizing of desire, has only exacerbated this potential for a very modern unhappiness.
Epicurus saw human needs in three categories
Natural and necessary needs - which cause pain if not satisfied.
Natural but unnecessary needs - not necessary for life but still desired.
Neither natural nor necessary needs - latest gadgets, luxuries, fame, etc.
Such unnecessary things, of course, constitute the vast majority of our desires. And once we realize that satisfaction is relative, we see that we may never achieve it as long as a notable disparity continues to exist between what we feel is worth attaining and what we actually possess.
Socrates, the first philosopher to turn knowledge into a tool for questioning our lives and finding ways to live better, explained: when you travel, you always take yourself with you.
Regardless of what we think will bring us happiness - that fancy travel destination, moving to a new city, finding a new job, etc. - we will always be there. If we ourselves are inherently unhappy, we will remain unhappy in that new situation. Perhaps there will be temporary happiness (Hedonic Treadmill) but that happiness will pass and we will be left with what was already there. Happiness is not found in the external.
It's just, usually, it's myself that I wish I could get away from. Seriously, think about this. I have never been anywhere that I haven't been. I've never had a kiss when I wasn't one of the kissers. You know, I've never gone to the movies when I wasn't there in the audience. I've never been out bowling, if I wasn't there, making some stupid joke. That's why so many people hate themselves. Seriously. It's just they are sick to death of being around themselves. Jesse, 📺 Before Sunrise
You need a change of soul, not a change of climate. Seneca
You bring your unhappiness and dissatisfaction with yourself and your place in the world with you. Going on vacation just gives you a different backdrop.
This is part of the problem of using travel to 'get away from it all.'
Happiness is a chimera: it is imaginary and deceiving in many of its forms. Like the rainbow which so commonly symbolizes it, happiness is an optical illusion that retreats or hides itself the closer you approach.
The Considered Life
If we do not take control of our stories, others will tell them for us.
We may allow others to be the voice of our stories, like a Church or our family.
We may decide to live in opposition to those voices, allowing the transgressors of our past to tell our stories.
Or we might not give any thought to it at all and allow our lives to be defined by the job we perform.
This may be a job we don't enjoy, and so we leave the 'living' part for weekends or holidays.
If we wait until the weekends to allow ourselves to live, we are voluntarily forfeiting 71% of our lives to someone else. A time, during which, we are fully present and aware, but filled with no life or happiness.
The trouble with this pattern is that these tiny moments of freedom are often marked by excessive partying or excessive drinking, any attempt to pack as much experience and happiness into as little time as possible in an attempt to redress the balance after a stressful and depressing week - except it never does balance out and we always remain in a state of stress and depress that compounds week after week until it culminates into complete mental burnout.
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?
Two Selves
Daniel Kahneman theorizes that we cannot talk about happiness without distinguishing between two selves that both operate within us - the experiencing self and the remembering self.
When we look back over our lives and decide if we've had a happy life, that is our remembering self.
Some things that satisfy the remembering self may not have been pleasant in the moment and thus not satisfying to the experiencing self.
This is intuitively the difference between happiness and pleasure - the former comes from a judgement we make and the later relates to what we feel in a particular moment.
We don't make decisions based on our experiences. We make them based on the stories of our experiences.
This is important because perception is not reality and we don't make these decisions based on an accurate reflection of the experience we had, we make decisions based on how we perceived that experience - which includes all of the feelings, thoughts, and influences we had in that moment and before that moment.
Our capacity for storytelling allows us to misremember the extent of pain or pleasure we felt during an experience.
Instead, what matters, is the story, and particularly the ending of the story, that we tell ourselves about the experience after the event.
Both selves are important, but it is perhaps the remembering self we should pay more attention to.
Would you go on a holiday knowing that all memory of it would be wiped from your brain the moment it was over? Probably not. Remembering things is just as important as experiencing them.
Regaining Authorship
When our stability relies principally on external factors, we shuttle back and forth between the two. We avoid pain, seek comfort, and become bored.
We seek out something 'new' to fill the void and quickly grow bored of it or bite off more than we can chew.
To reduce this negative cycle, we have to take control of our own stories. Taking back authorship of our narratives gives some structure to our self-image so that we can resist its distortion by others.
It's not particularly effective to reject all external influence because in that case we are still reliant on them to define our behavior and our stories about ourselves. We take what they say is true and insist to ourselves the opposite.
A considered life is one in which we deeply engage with our own story. That means we need to identify what our story is and then know how to move it forward.
Our pathologies are not badges of honor but helpful alarm bells: reminders from the psyche that we have reached the edge of the path and need to re-orient to move forward into whatever greatness might be on offer for us.
Identifying and making mental illness a core part of personality may prove counter-productive over time.
The Roots of Self-Enquiry
There is no dress rehearsal for life. This is life; this is it, right now.
A Very Brief History of Happiness
References The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts - trying to tie up water in a paper package.
Our notions of happiness are a product of the age we live in.