Rethink how to find lasting happiness
Oliver Burkeman is an award-winning journalist and contrarian thinker.
His book, the Antidote: Happiness for people that can’t stand positive thinking, Burkeman takes a not so subtle cannon and fires it at the self-help industry to explode the myths they peddle, that all you need for happiness is positive thinking.
If that’s all people really needed to be happy then we could be done with it by 9.05am each morning and go home.
He also argues that instead of buying the traditional self-help industry message that we need to have everything just right to be happy – he reckons we just drop trying to be happy all together.
It’s the conditions of happiness we place on ourselves that create a gap in our ability to be happy.
The key points I took away from his book are:
Accept failure is an inevitable part of life – being happy isn’t conditional on having material success or the absence of failure. It’s our attachment to these conditions that cause suffering, not the pain we experience from them.
Embrace suffering, not seek to avoid it – the more we choose to focus our energies on not feeling something, the more we end up suffering. In other words the more we try to not feel something, the more we end up feeling it and the less joy we experience in our lives.
Uncertainty is the only certainty in life – the threat of negative things is a certainty and part of life. To worry and obsess over the past and having all the answers to achieve closure just leads to misery. Rather than correct our negative thoughts – just let them be, and accept them.
Confront your fears by realising them – they aren’t that bad. By experiencing the unpleasantness of our fears, we see how much we’ve exaggerated them.
Detach yourself from your thoughts – observe them as if they were weather events. When we are attached to things we suffer when they change. If you have to finish an important assignment but end up procrastinating, detaching yourself from thoughts of whether you do or don’t’ do the work can free you to ‘just do it’.
Read this book if: you’re done with the happy-clappy self help books and want a dose of realism to help get you unstuck.