The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking - by Oliver Burkeman

Date read: 2022-03-07
How strongly I recommend it: 6/10
(See my list of 150+ books, for more.)

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A British reporter goes out to seek the "antidote" for a good life by looking for contradictory information on what makes you happy. It's a mix of Stoicism & Buddhism packaged up in an easy-to-read format. Recommended for anyone who may be interested in either practices, but nothing very new if you're already well-versed. Plus, there are plenty of better source documents to read on both topics.

My Notes

The effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is our constant efforts to eliminate the negative – insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness – that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.

The ‘negative path’ is about rejecting this dichotomy, and seeking instead the happiness that arises through negativity, rather than trying to drown negativity out with relentless good cheer. If a fixation on positivity is the disease, this approach is the antidote.

In experiment after experiment, people responded to positive visualisation by relaxing. They seemed, subconsciously, to have confused visualising success with having already achieved it.

We can always step back and ask: “Is it other people that bother me? Or the judgment I make about other people?”’ It was a method of thinking he regularly employed himself, Long explained, to deal with everyday distresses, such as road rage. Were other drivers really behaving ‘badly’? Or was it more accurate to say that the cause of his anger was his belief that they ought to behave differently?

We elevate those things we want, those things we would prefer to have, into things we believe we must have; we feel we must perform well in certain circumstances or that other people must treat us well. Because we think these things must occur, it follows that it would be an absolute catastrophe if they did not. No wonder we get so anxious: we’ve decided that if we failed to meet our goal it wouldn’t merely be bad, but completely bad – absolutely terrible.

Non-attachment need not mean withdrawing from life, or suppressing natural impulses, or engaging in punishing self-denial. It simply means approaching the whole of life – inner thoughts and emotions, outer events and circumstances – without clinging or aversion. To live non-attachedly is to feel impulses, think thoughts, and experience life without becoming hooked by mental narratives about how things ‘should’ be, or should never be, or should remain forever. The perfectly non-attached Buddhist would be simply, calmly present, and non-judgmentally aware.

Thoughts – and emotions – bubble up in much the same uncontrollable, unbidden fashion in which noises reach the ears, smells reach the nose, and so on. I could no more choose for thoughts not to occur than I could choose not to feel chilly when I was woken by the ringing of the morning bell at five-thirty each day – or, for that matter, than I could choose not to hear the bell.

That what motivates our investment in goals and planning for the future, much of the time, isn’t any sober recognition of the virtues of preparation and looking ahead. Rather, it’s something much more emotional: how deeply uncomfortable we are made by feelings of uncertainty. Faced with the anxiety of not knowing what the future holds, we invest ever more fiercely in our preferred vision of that future – not because it will help us achieve it, but because it helps rid us of feelings of uncertainty in the present.

In fact, it promised to help him achieve more, by permitting him to enjoy his work in the present, rather than postponing his happiness to a point five years in the future – whereupon, in any case, he would surely just replace his current five-year plan with another. The idea triggered a shift of perspective for Shapiro that would eventually lead to his reinvention as an advocate for abolishing goals.

Compulsive thinking is what we take to be the core of our being – and yet compulsive thinking relies on our feeling dissatisfied. The way out of this trap is not to stop thinking – thinking, Tolle agrees, is exceedingly useful – but to disidentify from thoughts: to stop taking your thoughts to be you, to realise, in the words of The Power of Now, that ‘you are not your mind’.

Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now.’

International surveys of happiness – including several reputable research projects such as the World Values Survey – have consistently found some of the world’s poorest countries to be among the happiest.

It is because we want to feel secure that we build up the fortifications of ego, in order to defend ourselves, but it is those very fortifications that create the feeling of insecurity: ‘To be secure means to isolate and fortify the “I”, but it is just this feeling of being an isolated “I” which makes me feel lonely and afraid.’

It may well be true that successful entrepreneurs possess perseverance and leadership skills, of course. What is less obvious – and much less boring – is what the speaker neglected to mention: that those traits are likely to be the characteristics of extremely unsuccessful people, too.

‘Incremental theory’ people are different. Because they think of abilities as emerging through tackling challenges, the experience of failure has a completely different meaning for them: it’s evidence that they are stretching themselves to their current limit. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t fail. The relevant analogy here is with weight training; muscles grow by being pushed to the limits of their current capacity, where fibres tear and reheal. Among weightlifters, ‘training to failure’ isn’t an admission of defeat – it’s a strategy.

The more that you remain aware of life’s finitude, the more you will cherish it, and the less likely you will be to fritter it away on distractions.

The psychologist Russ Harris suggests a simple exercise: imagine you are eighty years old – assuming you’re not eighty already, that is; if you are, you’ll have to pick an older age – and then complete the sentences ‘I wish I’d spent more time on…’ and ‘I wish I’d spent less time on…’.