Happy - Derren Brown Flashcards
This book aims to point us to the work of some people who have rigorously thought through what it is to live well.
The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of the parents - Carl Jung
There is nothing either good or bad thinking makes it so -Hamlet
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world - Schopenhauer
Whilst having less than you need is a source of unhappiness, having more than you need does not make you happier.
In the 19th century, the US was in the grip of Calvinism, a harsh puritanism version that insisted on extensive and unforgiving self-examination (mental self-flagellation) coupled with punishing hard labour.
There is nothing worse than reaching the top of the ladder and discovering you’re on the wrong wall - Joseph Campbell
The success story is a fiction, because it’s also a recipe for failure. The world fetishises self-belief.
Hedonic treadmill - the cycle of desire-fulfilment
‘On Desire’ - thought experiment. You wake up realising you are the last person on Earth…would the material desires you harbour when the world was full of people still be present in you if other people vanished?
Did we gather here to merely learn what greed was?
Equality is a uniquely modern thought.
We feel envy towards those closer to us. Sociologists refer to ‘reference group theory’. Nobody is envious of the Queen.
When you travel you always take yourself with you.
Jessie and Celine in Before Sunrise - ‘That’s why so many people hate themselves. They are sick to death of being around themselves.’
Leading a considered life is about getting our story right for ourselves. It’s about regaining authorship of our lives where the centre of gravity is rooted in ourselves.
Kahneman - remembering vs experiencing self. The tyranny of the remembering self. It has the upper hand.
The career ‘story’ is usually established for us early on. It is a script that we follow.
When we shut parts of ourselves off, they re-emerge as pathologies and anxieties or reasons for therapy. Our authentic selves are not being honoured.
Nietzsche (Gay Science) - the idea of eternal recurrence. Would you live your life over and over again as it happened?
Dunning-Kruger effect - the cognitive bias of illusory superiority
Historical antecedents:
Confucius “Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance”
Darwin “Ignorance more frequently begets (brings about) confidence than does knowledge”
Bertrand Russell “One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”
Conspicuous consumption - the purchasing of goods to display our economic success
Invidious consumption - the purchasing of goods in order to make others envy us
Adverts generally work on the principle of creating in us a feeling that we lack something. ‘Create an anxiety relievable by purchase’
Both forms of consumption are hallmarks of capitalism.
What happens when the desire to impress others is removed?
Epicurus - you must desire what you already have.
Goods are now built with artificially short lifespans e.g. lightbulbs
We must nurture a sentimental attachment to what we currently own.
We are all attached to far too many unnecessary objects.
To choose not to buy something, even if we can afford it, might allow some space for clarity: what do we actually like? What really suits us?
Neediness is the destroyer of love - Lucretius
If we feel we could live sufficiently without our partners, this can greatly improve our relationship with them.
Epicureanism, in its encouraging of self-sufficiency and natural reclusiveness, is a philosophy that best suits the diffident mindset. We should have a ‘lower threshold for stimulation’.
Diffident - modest or shy because of a lack of self-confidence
Central to stoic philosophy are our judgements. Key to the tranquil life.
Marcus Aurelius - one of the greatest Roman emperors who wrote down his thoughts in a private notebook - became known as ‘Meditations’. He was known as a ‘philosopher-king’ for his blameless character and temperate way of life.
Nobody, and nothing save our own judgements, truly ‘makes’ us feel anything. Let’s understand anger as a response to our own judgements or interior narrative about what others have done/said.
‘Venting’ does not solve emotional problems - it may just legitimise a feeling of anger
Marcus Aurelius reminds us to take responsibility for the judgements we make and to reconsider those judgements in a way that helps us.
‘The same experience befalls another, and he is unruffled and remains unharmed; either because he is unaware or because he exhibits greatness of soul.’
Epictetus ‘Man is disturbed not by things, but by the views he takes of them’.
Victor E Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning: ‘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’.
Once we stop blaming the world for our problems we can achieve some control.
Relinquishing Control
To achieve the Stoic ideal is to live in the glow of psychological fortitude/robustness they called virtue.
Schopenhauer said that we do not have the control over our lives we like to believe. You have AIMS pulling in once direction, and the forces of life (or the universe, or fate) pulling in the other. They operate independently of you wishes. Most of what happens in life is entirely out of your control. Blind self-belief can only disguise this fact.
Remember the x-y diagonal: aims versus fortune where 45 degree diagonal is a more realistic interplay.
Another powerful notion comes from Epictetus: don’t try to change things you cannot control.
If something is not under our control, we can recognise it as such and decide that IT’S FINE AS IT IS.
The division between what we can and cannot control is known as the ‘Stoic fork’.
Under our control: our thoughts and our actions
Not under our control: other people’s thoughts, our reputation, what our partner fears of finds stressful i.e.nothing else matters. Let them go. It is enormously liberating.
In relationships, it is only when we stop projecting our needs that we can release the other person from the tyranny of your expectations.
When we let go of things that we cannot control, NOTHING BAD HAPPENS. The power of IT’S FINE can really make itself felt.
So in matters of partial control like trying to achieve promotion, only our thoughts and actions are worthy of attention. It’s also saying, ‘I can only do so much’.
Pay attention to the Stoic fork: if we ignore everything over the other side of that line, we tend to remove anxiety and achieve more success.
Stoics took non-attachment to external things very seriously. Seneca recommended that we mentally rehearse losing everything we have. Always remind yourself that what you love is mortal.
It is only the finite nature of our relationships that gives them meaning.
External events will proceed as planned without our involvement, and that knowledge can encourage us to treat them as they occur with a Stoic, qualified indifference.
We should not become too attached to our ambitions and realise that our tiny aims are an insignificant part of the myriad of plans, thwarted and realised, that make up the grand scheme of fortune as it unravels itself.
We don’t need to believe there is a wisdom inherent in the unravelling. Model of evolutionary theory can help here: random mutations occur and some by-products of that randomness - conducive to survival - stick around and are carried forward. There is no grand design, just a principle at work.
We must become attuned to the reality of cosmic indifference.
Amor fati - the love of fate. To align ourselves with fortune we cease to control it. We must aim for the uncompromising acceptance of life as it is (we must accept the facticity of existence). Nothing bad happens if we stop trying to fix things we cannot control.
The Greeks understood the relationship between man and the machinations of the universe. Their tragedies taught us that we need to learn raw humility in the fickle face of fate.
Applying Stoic Methods
Montaigne mentions Seneca frequently in his essays -forms part of a general resurgence of interest in Stoicism during the 16th century. Seneca writes about the wisdom of non-attachment to external things. It is okay not to be fame-hungry or wary of being better known: it might even be preferable.
There is nothing completely in our power except our thoughts.
Marcs Aurelius wrote in Meditations:
Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do
Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you
Sanity means tying it to your own actions
We are seeking to tie our well-being to our OWN actions. The idea is simple, but its execution can feel difficult.
We cannot expect perfection in ourselves. We can hold the image of the perfect Stoic sage before us and can accept that he is all but fiction.
Stoic thinking was designed to be life-changing and profoundly transformative, not just intellectually interesting.
Start talking to yourself - engage more in silent dialogue with yourself.
Don’t add to first impressions. Consider how easily we interpret silence or non-engagement. We easily arrange events into a narrative in which someone is choosing to ignore us.
Ask yourself: do I have a problem right now? Guilt is very pervasive. We are fallible human beings. Give yourself a break.
We need to make these Stoic techniques part of the fabric of our lives, so we can achieve tranquility.
Prepare for the day ahead - do not resort to your phones immediately when you awake. Do not let those first few moments of the day be invaded by the outside world’s blaring cries for our weary attention.
Buddhism and Stoicism have common routes - they encourage us to rehearse ‘non-attachment’. They share a goal of tranquility. Both possess their wise sages who are deemed to have achieved this enlightened state, but the Stoic sage is not presumed to actually exist.
We must try to return the centre of gravity to its correct place.
Most people are less than enamoured with their jobs, yet consider time spent at work as ‘the day’. The remaining hours are seen as subservient and marginal.
Arnold Bennett recommends an hour and a half to be stolen from each day and spent improving the mind.
Alain de Botton / Derren Brown
We very rarely apply the same scepticism to our own stories as we do to others (think in films when it says ‘based on a true story’)
We fixate so much on trying to achieve things in the future and we are fed that insidiously from a young age. Life is supposed to be like a piece of music. We are meant to dance along the way.
Both Stoics and their Epicurean rivals wanted to achieve ataraxia.
Ataraxia - lucid state of robust equanimity, characterised by ongoing freedom from distress and worry. The ancient Greek author Sextus Empiricus gave this definition: “ataraxia is an untroubled and tranquil condition of the soul.”
Fame
Schopenhauer and Seneca both made the point that fame is relative. It is prone to sudden disappearance and we would be mad to rely on as a source of happiness.
A better strategy is to treat fame and riches as pleasant side effects. We must focus on the activities we love. Money, fame and success exist on the other side of that line: nice to have but outside of our jurisdiction.
Financially, we should pay attention to what we NEED in order to flourish as part of a considered life.
Fame seduces us with immortality. It represents a transcendent form of life in a post-religious society.
Success is not under your control.
Formula for success = TALENT + ENERGY
Recognise and beware the toxic blend of low self-esteem and grandiose self-regard.
Death
When I die: Lessons from the Death Zone - Philip Gould
Epicurus thought that death cannot be bad for us because we won’t be there to experience it. Think about a profound, dreamless sleep.
Lucretius says the eternal non-existence of death is something we’ve already been through. It happened before we were born. This is known as the symmetry argument. Future bias is a good argument against him. His symmetry fails if past and future should not be treated the same. Deprivation undoes his presumption of symmetry.
Love is a risk: we attach ourselves to someone and they to us, and we face the world together. Without death any sense of urgency is lost.
The inevitable consequence of immortality is the unfathomable boredom it would impose on us. Everything worthwhile in your life draws its meaning from the fact that you will die.
We can forgive ourselves if our current priorities don’t match those we will later wish we had.
‘You should live in the moment’ is unhelpful an imperative. We can be aware of how we are likely to later judge our current actions and check that we’re not wasting time with things that do not evidently matter.
Maybe we do not need to work so hard.
You’ll never forget falling in love. Do so over and over again.
You’ll rarely enjoy the work you do for the money.
Look at what takes up your time and see what is worth doing and what is not.
Heidegger suggested there are two ways we can approach life: the everyday mode and the ontological mode. We naturally exist in the everyday mode (physical trappings of daily life). However, in the ontological mode we stand back and look at the marvellous fact that things exist. If we can focus on the deeper question of being we are likely to make worthwhile changes in our life.
Rearrange your life priorities by trivialising life’s trivia.
Assume the power to choose things you do not wish to do.
The lingering anxiety we have regarding our death is the tax we pay for our self-awareness.
The key to overcoming our pasts is to stop telling ourselves the same unhelpful story today and regain authorship.
The here and now is released from the tyranny of our imposing narratives.
The advice of this book is to aim to live ‘well enough’. The ‘enough’ reminds us of the x=y diagonal of the healthy life: here are our aims, while here is the rest of life.
We should live in the present while we plan for the future. Remember the Stoic reserve clause of ‘if things work out’ we can make plans without investing ourselves with undue emotion in their outcomes.
We can align ourselves with the x=y diagonal as much as we can.
The approach of death gives us a chance to pay attention to how our lives might affect those we know.
Death and the Afterlife by Samuel Scheffler poses the question: How far do human values and the meaning of life depend on our assumption that the lives of others will survive our own deaths?
It is not enough that we die. We also need others to live on after us and without us. We need to die and others need to live. The continuing lives of others matter more to us than do our own.
We don’t realise how greatly we value future generations because we’re used to taking for granted the fact that human life will continue after we die.
And Now
Stoics can give us a means of increasing our happiness by avoiding disturbance.
We can move in greater accordance with fate and align ourselves more realistically with the x=y diagonal of life.
There is no single perfect partner. No one is every entirely right for us because we are all broken. A good relationship need only be ‘good enough’.
No single life-goal will ever prove enough in its attainment
We should never expect easy answers. We must be nurtured to tolerate complexity, nuance and ambiguity. Issues can be multi-faceted.
We are infantilised when they use fairy-tale logic or fear to manipulate us or sell a story of events. We must not prefer the illusion of black-and-white thinking.
