Happy (Kindle highlights) - Olivier Bruchez

‘What upsets people is not things themselves but their judgements about these things.’ (loc. 156-157)
Confirmation bias occurs when we notice things in the world that support our beliefs and pay less attention to things that contradict them. (loc. 263-264)
Thus ‘invisible’ conditions, including arthritis, cancer, drug addictions and AIDS, are supposedly healed, while the more manifest maladies (Down’s syndrome, a missing arm) are ignored. (loc. 529-531)
How does this relate to The Secret? In the same way that these victims of faith healers are told that they are at fault if the healing doesn’t happen, so Byrne tells her readers that they are to blame when the universe fails to provide its riches at our request. (loc. 553-555)
So for every advantage there is a danger, and rather than teaching you how to navigate safely away from self-delusion, Byrne and the healers encourage only greater and greater investment. (loc. 587-589)
It is absolutely the case that for the vast majority of people wealth does not significantly affect levels of happiness, despite how things might appear. (loc. 660-661)
Your happiness levels are largely defined by the balance of your personality. (loc. 662-662)
If you are prone to unhappiness when poor, you are very likely to be prone to unhappiness when rich. (loc. 664-665)
Some external conditions, such as having an accessible network of friends, do statistically make a difference in levels to which people report being happy. (loc. 666-667)
The success stories of the rich are misleading because they trumpet the notion that the random events of the external world can be subsumed under the driving will of the dynamic goal-setter. (loc. 712-713)
Events and our chief aims can be in most cases compared to two forces that pull in different directions, their resultant diagonal being the course of our life. (loc. 715-717)
Most of what happens in life is entirely out of your control, and while blind self-belief might disguise that fact for a while, it will eventually prove an anaemic opponent to brute reality. (loc. 723-724)
Welcome to the hedonic treadmill. (loc. 767-767)
It refers to the cycle of desire-fulfilment (‘hedonism’ means ‘the pursuit of pleasure’): we want something, we perhaps get it, we feel good for a while and then return to whatever default level of happiness or sadness we enjoyed before. Nothing really changes. (loc. 770-772)
Would the material desires you harbored when the world was full of people still be present in you if other people vanished? Probably not. (loc. 797-798)
Irvine’s thought exercise shows that our desires would diminish drastically if we didn’t need to impress anyone. (loc. 808-809)
This insidious envy that fuels so many of our desires is not then a product of the differences that exist between the strata of rich and poor. Instead, it is born from comparisons we make within our particular level of prosperity or success, where everyone is living in more or less equal comfort. (loc. 838-840)
In other words, it is not what we own that satisfies us but rather what we have in relation to what we feel is possible and attainable for ourselves. (loc. 872-873)
We might think that we’ll be finally happy when we get a job with a certain company, or begin a relationship with a certain person, but when we get there it’s still us looking out, with all the frustrations and distortions that might bring. (loc. 914-916)
Happiness is a chimera: it is imaginary and deceiving in many of its forms. Like the rainbow which so commonly symbolises it, happiness is an optical illusion that retreats or hides itself the closer you approach. (loc. 922-923)
PERHAPS I’VE CONVINCED you that many of the things we are assured will bring us happiness are unlikely to, and that a key to achieving whatever this state might be is to harness the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. (loc. 930-931)
The greatest burden a child must bear, we remember from Jung, is the unlived lives of its parents. (loc. 967-968)
Leading a considered life is about getting our story right for ourselves. It’s as simple as that. If we, at any point in our lives, can look at what we’re up to and feel that everything is more or less in its place, and that our story is on the right tracks, we will have a good basis for happiness. (loc. 975-978)
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? (loc. 982-984)
We cannot talk about happiness without distinguishing between two selves that both operate within us: the experiencing self and the remembering self. (loc. 986-987)
In other words, we don’t make decisions based on our experiences. We make them based on the stories of our experiences. And we don’t form our stories based on an accurate reflection of experience. We form them like novelists, and we look for a good ending. (loc. 1009-1011)
Would you go on a holiday knowing that all memory of it would be wiped from your brain (and camera) the moment it was over? Probably not. Mere pampering to the experiencing self is not enough; we want memories too. (loc. 1028-1030)
The considered life – in which we take back authorship of our narratives – gives some structure to that self-image and resists its distortion by others. (loc. 1109-1110)
Milan Kundera made the enduring point in The Unbearable Lightness of Being that there is no dress rehearsal for life. This is life; this is it, right now. It is a powerful and motivating thought. Each moment you live passes and is gone, never to return. Life is too brief to not consider how to experience it at its best. (loc. 1209-1211)
We are far less likely to come to idolise a person if we can recognise that what we admire about them are qualities that exist separately from the particular (and therefore flawed) example that they constitute. (loc. 1330-1332)
The important point to remember is that Socratic happiness was about self-questioning and about appreciating the reality of an unseen world that lies beyond the physical realm. We might glimpse it through a process of contemplation and self-realisation. Happiness was indistinguishable from a rising above, a virtuous elevation, a higher plateau. (loc. 1344-1346)
Success at being human would amount to the best, or most virtuous, use of reason. Flourishing – Aristotle’s take on happiness – is ‘an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue’. (loc. 1376-1378)
So happiness is now to be found in virtuous activity of the soul carried out in accordance with reason. The best sort of virtuous activity, Aristotle still suggests despite the common touch of his approach, is that of contemplation. (loc. 1394-1396)
And here we might find that we sleep more peacefully if we see our lives as part of Aristotle’s telos, as a work in progress, one in which we could view daily irritations as a kind of test; one which teaches us virtue and where we can, step by step, and by considering the variables of each situation as it happens, move towards being a better (happier, kinder, more fulfilled) version of ourselves. (loc. 1418-1421)
Aristotle also felt strongly that virtue requires action; mere noble intentions are not enough. We are social creatures; a solitary life is not worth living. Our personal happiness, then, was linked to the welfare of the community. (loc. 1439-1441)
We are not as susceptible to rational enquiry – least of all our own – as Aristotle would like to believe. His system, we might note as moderns, does not take into account the turbid domain of the unconscious. (loc. 1454-1456)
Epicureans lived a simple, ascetic life, believing that by limiting themselves to a few natural desires (such as friendship, bread and water), they would be far happier than those who finally bring pain upon themselves through entertaining greater needs. (loc. 1477-1479)
Where Plato pointed to a purified, shimmering ideal of Reason (we remember how he said that the concepts that touch us in our daily lives are tawdry reflections of a pure, idealised version of the true Ideas that exist on a higher plane), Epicurus tells us we have nothing more than our animalistic bodily senses to put to use. And if we pay attention to what they tell us, we will find that the good life, of the highest pleasure, also happens to be the simplest. (loc. 1500-1503)
Stoics taught, along with the Epicureans, that we should limit our desires, and that perceived problems in life are due to errors in judgement about those problems. If we change our attitude, the pain of those external factors can disappear. This may sound familiar to modern minds acquainted with the notion of ‘reframing’ a problem as an opportunity, and it is one of the Stoics’ most powerful and prevailing ideas. (loc. 1505-1508)
In the same way that we always take ourselves with us on our holidays, and suffer the disappointment of our unavoidable presence, so too do we move away from family but remain the same child. ‘Everywhere you go,’ the Zen saying goes, ‘there you are.’ (loc. 1667-1669)
Perhaps it’s no surprise to learn that once we had equated happiness with pleasure, compared man with machine, and located virtue in a series of felicific calculations, we started to feel something was missing in the new vision. We required, of course, a measure of spirituality, which we had dispensed too proudly along with the tyranny and superstition of religious authority. (loc. 1708-1711)
We have a ‘meaning-shaped hole’ because we are story-forming creatures, and stories should not meander without a point. (loc. 1725-1726)
It is a common part of human experience to feel that we don’t belong. In fact, it is often cited as the greatest human concern. We may feel when around particular people that we have nothing to contribute, or have that miserable sensation that everyone else shares some fundamental part of normal human experience that we lack. (loc. 1758-1760)
It is to Rousseau, then, that we are unconsciously indebted when we yearn to flee work and the stresses of society and spend time on a remote island, without Internet, commuting or phone signal, living plainly and rustically. (loc. 1790-1791)
Rousseau is concerned with that hedonic treadmill, or Locke’s ‘uneasiness’: civilisation cultivates new desires, which in turn breed anxiety and further wants. A more primitive life, on the other hand, leads to fewer desires, which means less frustration and therefore more happiness. (loc. 1798-1800)
Opera houses and museums sprang up throughout Europe as secular cathedrals to Art. The artist himself gained a cultish repute of untouchable genius which lingers to this day. (loc. 1837-1838)
Now, without God, the Romantics offered the mysterious and ecstatic to us all. We had reclaimed ‘joy’ and ‘spirit’ for ourselves through a direct communion with nature. We no longer needed God. We could each become God. (loc. 1864-1866)
One important new idea that emerged from Marx for our purposes is as follows: we saw work as an activity that was supposed to endow us with happiness and a sense of humanity. This was a strange new concept, and although it sprang up as a reaction against capitalism, there is no doubt that it is now part of the capitalist creed. How many of us talk proudly of working non-stop as if it were something to be admired? Or identify with our jobs more than anything else in life? (loc. 1891-1894)
Why should the business of the firm you visit every day between certain hours be of any relevance when you are hoping to make an interesting personal connection with someone at a party? (loc. 1904-1906)
What counts is not the work but our relationship to it. Schopenhauer, refreshingly, ascribed far more importance to what one does with one’s leisure. (loc. 1912-1913)
To allow for natural unhappiness in our lives and not berate ourselves for feeling it is to stand against the tyranny of the positive-thinking ethos that surrounds us daily. (loc. 1996-1998)
Today’s crisis is that we don’t know how to honour our deep needs, and we mistake recreation for happiness. (loc. 2023-2024)
But we are not arriving at this philosophy out of laziness; as a considered choice, demanding less has the potential to be enormously enriching. (loc. 2049-2051)
Of course we baulk at what sounds like merely ‘settling for less’: it goes against everything we understand about what it is to be successful, dynamic and in charge of our lives. At first glance, it suggests complacency and lack of vision. But we are not arriving at this philosophy out of laziness; as a considered choice, demanding less has the potential to be enormously enriching. (loc. 2048-2051)
‘Everything we need is easy to procure, while the things we desire but don’t need are more difficult to obtain.’ (loc. 2062-2063)
We are all attached to far too many unnecessary objects, and they affect our happiness as they each bring with them this risk of pain. (loc. 2122-2123)
We could, if we find ourselves wanting to buy something we don’t really need and can’t comfortably afford, decide to reject it on Epicurean grounds. (loc. 2124-2125)
He reminds us to desire what we already have, rather than to desire more and more unnecessary things: ‘Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for.’ (loc. 2129-2131)
Keeping our desires simple makes us less fearful of what the ancients called ‘fortune’: with less to worry about, the unpredictable nature of life is less likely to bother us. (loc. 2143-2144)
If we feel we could live sufficiently without our partners, this can greatly improve our relationship with them. (loc. 2153-2154)
1. If you are pained by external things, it is not they that disturb you, but your own judgement of them. And it is in your power to wipe out that judgement now. (loc. 2220-2222)
Nobody, and nothing save our own judgements, truly ‘makes’ us feel anything. (loc. 2232-2233)
So let’s acknowledge that when we find ourselves infuriated with people, irritated by our partners, annoyed, embarrassed, sad or scared, those feelings are in truth provoked by an exhausting little voice inside our head, and/or from the exaggerated pictures we show ourselves. (loc. 2266-2268)
Beating a pillow might legitimise our feelings of anger, encouraging us to relive them later, and we may become too attached to a venting activity that we feel should bring us catharsis and find ourselves searching for an assuagement that never comes. (loc. 2329-2331)
It is, as Marcus tells us, always in our power to represent events to ourselves in such a way they give us an advantage. Two thousand years later, we think of this as ‘reframing’: the reinterpretation of a negative event as something positive. Seeing the silver lining. (loc. 2344-2346)
If you insist that you are purely the victim of your situation, or that the anguish you feel about something is entirely justified by the event in question, consider whether someone else you know might respond differently to it. Whether someone you know would find themselves in the same circumstances but be likely to deal with them in a more positive way. If you can imagine that, then you can notice that the key to your emotional response is not the events but the way you deal with them. (loc. 2388-2392)
We can expect to feel the fear at the moment of the near-accident, but we can then choose not to replay the event again and again in our minds and make ourselves feel terrible. (loc. 2433-2435)
We can pay attention to our responses to events and the stories we tell ourselves about them. We can check to see if we are increasing the pain caused by a negative event by exacerbating things and searching for negative patterns, rather than simply accepting first impressions and events as they are. We can take responsibility for how we feel by realising that ultimately it is our after-the-event, ongoing reactions to what happens around us that are the cause of our problems. The point of this is not to blame ourselves. It is to begin to dissolve unwanted frustrations and anxieties. (loc. 2443-2447)
We now have our first building block. We can pay attention to our responses to events and the stories we tell ourselves about them. We can check to see if we are increasing the pain caused by a negative event by exacerbating things and searching for negative patterns, rather than simply accepting first impressions and events as they are. We can take responsibility for how we feel by realising that ultimately it is our after-the-event, ongoing reactions to what happens around us that are the cause of our problems. The point of this is not to blame ourselves. It is to begin to dissolve unwanted frustrations and anxieties in our lives. Once we stop blaming the world for our problems, we can achieve some control. (loc. 2443-2448)
1. Don’t try to change things you cannot control. (loc. 2464-2465)
Our partners will never entirely fit in with our plans for them, and neither should they. (loc. 2519-2520)
The need to manage and regulate – to feel authorship when we are not experiencing it where we should – does not easily go away. It’s a fascinating and too often debilitating part of our natures, and those who are gripped by it are always deserving of our empathy. (loc. 2563-2566)
We only feel envy towards people who are roughly equal to us in terms of status. (loc. 2572-2572)
The key to why this works is that when we let things go that we can’t control, nothing bad happens. The situation can’t get any worse, and generally we get to feel an awful lot better. For me, the relief I feel when I remind myself that a source of annoyance is fine, is none of my business, is akin to the surge of joy that would fill my lungs as a child when I realised it was a Saturday and I didn’t have to go to school. Thus the thought itself, if allowed to deeply settle, provides its own clear reward. (loc. 2576-2580)
Even if that instruction it’s fine takes a while to truly make itself felt in our bones, we have a clear target that we are aiming for. (loc. 2582-2583)
Instead, we can enter the game with the aim of ‘I will play this game as well as I can.’ Now we can make sure that we do that: how well we play is under our control. We may not win, but we can successfully play to the very best of our abilities as we intended. If our opponent starts to beat us, we are not failing. And again, it’s no coincidence that we will almost always play better when we approach a game with this attitude. We will feel less anxiety and pressure, and are far more likely to remain focused and comfortable. Our game improves. (loc. 2625-2629)
Epictetus is showing us not only how to perform better but also how to circumscribe bad feelings when things don’t go as well as would have been ideal. This is a far more delicate approach to ‘no failure’ than we would expect from the roaring motivators of modern times. (loc. 2633-2635)
If we ignore everything over the other side of that line – everything that we do not control, everything other than our own thoughts and actions – we tend to remove anxiety and even achieve more success. And by reminding ourselves, as and when pressures arise, to distinguish between the component parts of what we can and cannot command, we start to live our lives in the glow of tranquillity: one that the classical philosophers tell us is a realistic and achievable model of happiness. (loc. 2649-2652)
Seneca recommended that we mentally rehearse losing everything we have – family and property – to learn to value them more and be ready for when fortune strikes and they are taken from us. In fact, he went so far as to say we should, every now and then, purposefully go without the luxuries in our lives and live for a day here and there as a pauper, estranged from people and things that bring us comfort, in order to soften the blow should we ever find ourselves destitute. (loc. 2663-2666)
Learn to desire what you already have, and you will have all you need. (loc. 2674-2675)
Are we being seriously asked to distance ourselves from our loved ones to protect ourselves from future loss? No. The Stoic route to valuing things is to accept that whether they come or go from our lives is not under our control. This understanding allows us to enjoy them even more, because we know that we will not have them in our lives forever. (loc. 2677-2680)
It is inevitable: through death or choice, your closest relationships will end. (loc. 2683-2683)
Remembering this invites us to express our feelings to those we love now while we can, to never take them for granted, and to not regret, when it’s too late, that they never knew how important they were to us. And we will mitigate the future shock and despair that might otherwise hit us if we lose them for good. (loc. 2683-2686)
This is a matter of degree: to fixate upon the mortality of our children or the transience of most friendships would bring its own form of anxiety and defeat the Stoic purpose. But an occasional reminder of how lucky we are to have the gift of these relationships in our lives can only do us good. (loc. 2692-2694)
To treasure something is to hold on to it carefully, realising that it is precious and risks being lost or taken from us. It is only the finite nature of our relationships that gives them their meaning. Bittersweet transience lends context and value. (loc. 2700-2702)
The Stoics were early espousers of determinism: namely that all events, including our own actions, are ultimately determined by causes external to the will. (loc. 2757-2758)
It’s fine that people are rude or ignorant. It’s fine. If we were in their shoes, with their history and their current pressures, we would act the same way. We certainly shouldn’t let them make us act rudely or ignorantly out of frustration. (loc. 2809-2812)
Why is it OK to not try to fix or change this? What would happen if I left it? What terrible thing would occur? (loc. 2818-2818)
Each of us is born into a world where we know no better than to internalise every message we receive as being one about us. (loc. 2823-2824)
I am responsible for how I feel about external events. What am I doing to give myself this feeling? Is this thing that’s upsetting me something which lies under my control? If not, what if I were to decide it’s fine and let it go? (loc. 2935-2938)
‘You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realise how seldom they do.’ (loc. 2998-2999)
When we feel anger in a conversation we often try to hide it; we soften our voices and ‘try’ to seem calm. Our anger will, however, most likely be very evident indeed, and usually more impactful than a bellowing display. (loc. 3024-3026)
Much of our unhappiness comes from ruminating over past events or worrying about possible future ones. Guilt, in particular, is very pervasive. (loc. 3034-3035)
Thus foresight, perhaps the greatest blessing given to humanity, is transformed into a curse. Wild animals run from the dangers they actually see, and once they have escaped them worry no more. We however are tormented alike by what is past and what is to come. A number of our blessings do us harm, for memory brings back the agony of fear while foresight brings it on prematurely. No one confines his unhappiness to the present. (loc. 3050-3053)
Perfection is not important, just keeping going is all that matters. (loc. 3075-3076)
The point is not to see the world as full of mean and ungrateful men and women. The point is that we will meet people we don’t like, or people who are ignorant or rude, and if we can avoid being dragged down by those people, then we can be of better service to both them and ourselves. (loc. 3106-3108)
We must remember this if Stoicism ever seems detached and cold to us. Its ultimate aim is not an emotionless detachment from others but is rather about living in harmony with what the ancients called ‘Nature’ and being a productive part of humankind. (loc. 3111-3112)
Stoicism could be seen as a kind of quarantine of Eastern spiritual ideas, systemised and intellectualised for Western tastes, until they later came to inform early Christianity. (loc. 3143-3144)
We have already touched upon the instruction to recognise the importance of the present moment, which is shared by both movements. Both Buddhists and Stoics also encourage us to rehearse ‘non-attachment’. They share a goal of tranquillity, to be reached through detaching oneself from the passions that tie us to worldly cares. (loc. 3144-3147)
Stoic premeditation is no more than a matter of taking a quiet few minutes to consider the day ahead from the robust, yet open perspective that comes from absorbing their principles. (loc. 3155-3156)
The Pythagoreans had been instructed to ‘never do anything without previous deliberation: in the morning forming a plan of what was to be done later, and at night to review the day’s actions’. (loc. 3164-3166)
If we are able to find time and space each day to redress the balance, and if we use it to remind ourselves that so much of our life has nothing to do with us, and that it is only with our thoughts and actions that we need to concern ourselves, we will soon find that our centre of gravity returns to its correct place. (loc. 3174-3177)
Anger certainly seems to have an evolutionary basis. It serves a social purpose: displays of anger encourage others to change their behaviour and thus work to stop people transgressing societal rules that keep us cohabiting comfortably. (loc. 3288-3290)
We are born with instincts of love, openness and accord. As we grow, we tend to become attached to external goods and our own safety. Aggression results from this interplay between our natures and the circumstances in which we find ourselves: ‘Life, if we attach ourselves to it, alienates us from our own humanity.’ (loc. 3343-3345)
Regardless of our temperament, it clearly serves us to be less bothered by irritants, displays of disrespect and transgressions of perceived rules. Being disturbed less leaves us happier. (loc. 3395-3396)
Anger, then, gets in the way of us making our point. We may feel desperately entitled to it, due to feelings of panic, or the outrage we feel in response to the story we have concocted about other people’s motives and so on. But if given free rein, it will defeat our objective: to express ourselves convincingly. (loc. 3425-3428)
Anger destroys relationships and cuts through love of any sort. (loc. 3429-3430)
Our aims are not merely to avoid anger; they are also to deal with the situation at hand constructively and appropriately. (loc. 3624-3625)
The most widely recommended technique for nipping anger in the bud is to simply wait. Time is a vital factor in allowing anger to dissipate. (loc. 3626-3627)
Perhaps it would help us to call anger by another name: panic. (loc. 3645-3646)
For those who become silently, privately angry, remember that the point of delay is to spare others a misjudged response, not an excuse to merely sulk. (loc. 3677-3678)
Venting our anger is not good for us. (loc. 3702-3703)
The instruction to resist curiosity, then, is a refinement of the rule to only concern yourself with what lies within your power. (loc. 3780-3781)
Anger often comes to us, but more often we come to it. (loc. 3799-3799)
We are terrible at reading each other’s thoughts. Yet we consistently behave as if we have been endowed with this entirely handsome ability. (loc. 3817-3818)
Remove your judgement about the supposed hurt and make up your mind to dismiss it, and your anger is gone. How then will you remove it? By reflecting that what hurts you is not morally bad. (loc. 3828-3830)
Motivations are rarely black and white, and our futures are seldom, if ever, as drastically and obviously cast as we imagine. (loc. 3857-3858)
The trick of bringing other people to mind is of enormous use in dispelling anger. (loc. 3949-3949)
We might use a friend, an admired luminary, even a fictitious character, as a role model who can spring to mind when we find ourselves incensed. How might they deal with this situation? How would they coolly laugh it off or rise above it? This might give us some distance from our own story and offer a more helpful, convincing perspective. Or, if a friend were suffering with this particular problem, how would we advise them? Those calming words of wisdom we would offer – what would they be? (loc. 3951-3954)
People who prioritise impressing people rather than letting themselves be impressed by others make it hard for those others to like them. (loc. 3991-3992)
People’s vulnerabilities are near impossible to untangle from their strengths. (loc. 4015-4015)
‘We’re not so different.’ The same genes that give us similar bodies also give us similar brains and therefore similar thoughts. (loc. 4034-4035)
All of us are inconsiderate and imprudent, all unreliable, dissatisfied, ambitious – why disguise with euphemism this sore that infects us all? – all of us are corrupt. Therefore, whatever fault he censures in another man, every man will find residing in his own heart. (loc. 4037-4039)
When people injure you, ask yourself what good or harm they thought would come of it. If you understand that, you’ll feel sympathy rather than outrage or anger. (loc. 4062-4063)
It’s a powerful thought. Understand where the person is coming from. Instead of fumbling for reasons to be annoyed, empathise with their behaviour. Let anger dissolve into love. (loc. 4116-4117)
However strong people may appear, they struggle too, and when they upset us, they are very likely in pain. (loc. 4131-4132)
To lower our expectations is to greatly reduce our anger: if we don’t expect things to work out brilliantly, we’ll be less frustrated when they don’t. (loc. 4187-4188)
Do not seek to have events happen to you as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well. (loc. 4210-4211)
When it comes to securing change in the world, we should only aim to try our best; all else is folly. (loc. 4226-4227)
What an extraordinary suggestion for life: rein in your aims. It plays against every goal-setting, positive-thinking, believe-in-yourself-and-you-can-achieve-anything mantra of modern life. We have to keep reminding ourselves that it isn’t a recipe for motionless complacency. Yet with such modest expectations, we can still change the world. (loc. 4240-4242)
We are moving from blaming others (for their actions) to blaming ourselves (for our judgements) to blaming no one. (loc. 4270-4271)
We close down empathy where it might help us to understand atrocities, and we overestimate its power when we all-too fuzzily imagine what another person might do, want or feel. It is prone to wild inaccuracy and self-delusion, but to possess it inaccurately is better than not having it at all. (loc. 4336-4338)
Fame does not make you happy. (loc. 4538-4538)
After the point of being financially comfortable, more money does not make you happier. (loc. 4599-4600)
Money, fame and success exist on the other side of that line in the realm of external indifferents: nice to have, but outside of our jurisdiction. They may be rewarding by-products, but they will never prove gratifying if they are chased directly. (loc. 4630-4631)
We need to be more imaginative, more patient, more attentive to the lessons of our own experience, more serious about the things we care for, more canny, more independent in our judgements. But most importantly, we have to figure out what we actually need. (loc. 4673-4675)
A love that can only be received is barely worth bothering about. (loc. 4831-4831)
We’ll aim for something richer and less neurotic, exploring age-old advice that living well and dying well are two sides of the same proverbial coin. (loc. 4971-4972)
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.’ (loc. 5030-5032)
Meanwhile, the human Mary’s situation is more compelling. Does she really learn something new when she steps out? Possibly, but a number of philosophers have argued that she does not. If she were truly possessed with the full extent of physical knowledge of colour, argues the philosopher Daniel Dennett, such knowledge would include an understanding of how and why our neurology would give us the experience of qualia. Nothing new would be acquired when stepping out. Others have argued that she might gain a new ability when seeing a colour for the first time (to recognise it, imagine it or remember it) but that it’s not correct to say that she has learnt any new knowledge. These intricate counter-arguments support physicalism and undermine the soul-defender’s case. (loc. 5239-5245)
Religions sprang from highly charged moments in history that, at the time, connected people with a powerful sense of the transcendent. Certain suffused images spontaneously arose from these original events and gave people a pathway to a deep and vital sense of mystery. A culture would have assembled itself around these symbols and celebrated the force they still held, but over time of course this potency and import were lost. Later, with the original experience long gone from human memory, the culture came to create formal rituals or dogmas in an attempt to offer a symbolic connection to what made it so vibrant at the start. Eventually, the immediate, resonant experience of the transcendent was reduced to a mere belief and a set of practices. History was then rewritten and miracles and teachings ascribed to the hero saviour, who, instead of remaining a signpost to the transcendent, became himself the misplaced focus of worship. (loc. 5261-5268)
I’m making a psychological point: that we can still view spirituality (in regard to having a sense of meaning, and a conscious dialogue with what lies beneath) as an important internal experience, perhaps more important than ever in this age of addiction and distraction. (loc. 5279-5281)
If we could perceive things-in-themselves without the fetters of our three-dimensional experience, then time as we know it, in the sense of a series of sequential moments, would very quickly disappear. We would not see one thing happening after another, like circles on Flatland; we would instead be able to see the whole balloon in one go. (loc. 5353-5356)
We can mistake one ‘now’ slice for reality, like the Flatlanders mistaking a circle for a balloon, unaware that there’s much more to come. (loc. 5359-5360)
Even someone who insists that death should not be feared is likely to jump out of the way if a car comes hurtling towards him. (loc. 5400-5401)
Death is definitely going to happen. The fear we’re discussing is more like a dread: that which accompanies the anticipation of something unwanted we know will happen to us. (loc. 5410-5411)
Epicurus is pointing out to us a common mistake he thinks we make: that we tend to imagine ourselves as dead (rotting in the ground and so on) and feel fear or revulsion. But he says this is a silly error: we will have neither that experience of decomposition, nor of the flames of the crematorium. By the time it happens, we simply won’t exist. (loc. 5427-5429)
How is it bad for her if she’s not around to experience being dead? Perhaps it’s not enough just to say that a thing is harmful, we also need to say when it is. Epicurus is saying that death and the harm it’s supposed to cause would have to happen at the same time. For this girl’s early death to be bad for her, we have to allow for the harm of death to happen while she’s alive. (loc. 5460-5463)
You now suffer the devastating experience of realising you have been not only cheated on but also been made a figure of ridicule. Would we say that the harm only occurs today, at this point of discovery? Surely it’s better to say that you have discovered an already bad situation, not that the situation is bad because you have discovered it? (loc. 5471-5474)
If I don’t feel harm, because I am ignorant of it, then how am I suffering it? (loc. 5478-5479)
We are surely not our reputations. Our reputations are not in us; they are stories sustained in the minds of other people. (loc. 5487-5488)
This is known as the symmetry argument. What ‘happens to us’ after death symmetrically reflects what ‘happened to us’ before birth. (loc. 5513-5514)
Yet, rather like the earlier Epicurean point that you won’t be around to experience death when it happens, Lucretius’s symmetry argument is somehow not entirely satisfying. Few of us are likely to throw up our hands, roll our eyes and cry ‘Of course!’ vowing never again to consider death a negative. (loc. 5517-5520)
Epicurus’s argument rests on the questionable but key presumption that harm and the experience of it have to happen simultaneously, Lucretius is taking as a given the idea that we treat the past and the future in similar ways. (loc. 5526-5528)
If Epicurus’s argument rests on the questionable but key presumption that harm and the experience of it have to happen simultaneously, Lucretius is taking as a given the idea that we treat the past and the future in similar ways. (loc. 5526-5528)
We feel very differently about pain that has happened in the past and pain that is yet to come. Pain we prefer to be behind us, and positive experiences in our future. We have a certain ‘future bias’ that means we care more about what’s yet to happen. An abyss of nothingness ahead of us, then, is not the same to us as one that’s been and gone in the past. (loc. 5545-5548)
Lucretius is trying to answer the deprivation account of death by pointing out that we don’t feel deprived of the time we could have lived before we were born. But here is a difference: the deprivation that comes with death is something we can imagine. We know what we’re being deprived of: grandchildren, our home, our loving relationships, even that sense of I that enjoys those things. It stings in a way that the prenatal abyss does not. (loc. 5564-5567)
An answer to Lucretius, then, is to point to deprivation; it undoes his presumption of symmetry. (loc. 5570-5571)
If the key to why we fear death is that it deprives us of furthering our projects and seeing them to completion, we might find some value in reassessing how much we value the completion of those projects. (loc. 5586-5588)
When we know that we will come to experience every permutation of happenstance (or near enough if we consider even a lifespan of a mere trillion years), and when everything that can happen eventually will, then that life starts to look strangely empty and pointless. (loc. 5631-5633)
Something in us, conscious or otherwise, would look forward and find that without the framework provided by precious finite time, all engagements would be fruitless. (loc. 5650-5651)
It is easy enough to imagine similar creatures that could remain so engaged in the present moment that an eternity would remain compelling for them. But we’re not made like that. Our engagements, rooted in the future, are part of our identity. If we had to exist as primitively and short-sightedly as a bird (and birds are very bright) in order to find immortality bearable, then we wouldn’t be us, and we would have once again reached a point where this endless life has been stripped of meaning. (loc. 5674-5678)
Death is harmful for us, but it is to be preferred in the face of its alternative: immortality. (loc. 5687-5688)
If it is of little help, it is because there is a difference between death being necessary or positive in the abstract, and feeling remotely positive for us, now, when it happens. (loc. 5701-5702)
We may realise that death is good for us, but we don’t ever want it when it comes: it almost always comes too soon. (loc. 5703-5704)
Immortality may be the antithesis to death in the abstract, but it’s not what we seek when we fear our own demise. We may be happy to die eventually, just not now. (loc. 5708-5710)
Each period of a child’s life, as it zips by at disarming speed, is likely to feel extraordinarily precious to a parent, and the fact each age will never be revisited makes it more significant. (loc. 5735-5736)
It’s as if we are attending a fantastic party and are told we have to leave. We don’t want to go. But neither, really, do we want it to last forever. (loc. 5754-5755)
We might never achieve, or even want to achieve, a feeling of detachment from our loved ones, especially after they die. Our grief, and the feeling of angry incomprehension with which we view a world that can go on smiling while we are in such pain, may feel superlatively important to hang on to. Grief is an honest expression of loss and of how much we treasured someone who has now gone. (loc. 5796-5798)
Life is growth, and if it does not involve a perpetual passing away, then we can neither grow nor live in any meaningful sense. (loc. 5802-5802)
We have moved on from the folklore, but not the deep stirrings that gave rise to the folklore in the first place. (loc. 5814-5815)
Strange and foreign, death became ‘possibly more terrifying than the old Catholic understanding of hellfire. The Enlightenment’s gifts were decidedly two-edged’12. The public now saw the inevitable as something, in the individual instance at least, to be fought and defeated as an enemy. (loc. 5840-5843)
Alongside this celebration of medicine and scientific knowledge, the story-forming part of us was left ungratified by the absence of meaningful ceremony. (loc. 5843-5844)
We may accept that death is a good, certainly as opposed to immortality, but this seems of no comfort when we face our own death. (loc. 5886-5887)
Unwilling to upset or burden those she loves, the dying person does not speak about her fears to her family and friends. Horrified at the thought of saying the wrong thing or appearing to ‘write off’ their dying beloved, the living do everything to avoid mentioning it as well. (loc. 5891-5894)
Death, we remember, does not round off a life with the satisfying ending of a novel or a film. It does not ‘complete’; it curtails. It is up to us to bring the story to a close by recognising it as such. (loc. 5907-5909)
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. (loc. 5913-5915)
We all want our loved ones to die peacefully, but we don’t know what to do once their death becomes an imminent possibility. (loc. 5955-5956)
The top five regrets of the dying. They were: I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. I wish I hadn’t worked so hard. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. I wish that I had let myself be happier. (loc. 5988-5991)
It is natural for our needs to be different when our life still extends brightly before us. (loc. 5997-5998)
The needs of a present that has a future are different from one that does not. (loc. 5999-6000)
All we can do is try to anticipate that future narrative. (loc. 6027-6027)
Paying attention to certain future regrets might genuinely enhance our lives in the here and now. (loc. 6028-6028)
If you work in a creative field, and you are faced with a choice of doing a job for the money or doing a job for the fun of it, take the fun one whenever you can. You’ll rarely enjoy the work you do for money. (loc. 6039-6041)
Look at what takes up your time and see what is worth doing and what is not. Think about what provides enjoyment, connectivity, a sense of fulfilment, and what, when you look back, will have been a waste of time or stifled you. (loc. 6051-6053)
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. (loc. 6079-6079)
While working intensively over a ten-year period with patients facing death from cancer, I found that many of them, rather than succumb to numbing despair, were positively and dramatically transformed. They rearranged their life priorities by trivialising life’s trivia. They assumed the power to choose not to do the things that they really did not wish to do. They communicated more deeply with those they loved, and appreciated more keenly the elemental facts of life – the changing seasons, the beauty of nature, the last Christmas or New Year. Many reported a diminishment of their fears of other people, a greater willingness to take risks, and less concern about rejection. (loc. 6066-6071)
Our unconscious selves, eager to protect us and working by analogy, set in motion the defence pattern we learnt as a child, and, although it feels reasonable to us when we are in its grip, it is of course a gross overreaction to what’s happening to us as an adult in the present. (loc. 6095-6098)
Without gaining something of a detached vantage point and identifying our stories for what they are, we will still remain prey to our deep-seated beliefs about who we are and how the world must work, mistake them for concrete reality and inflict them upon our loved ones and everyone else. (loc. 6106-6108)
By bringing an unconscious process into the light of conscious attention, we undo its power. It is those parts of us of which we are unaware that have us most firmly in their clutches. (loc. 6125-6126)
Research suggests we are likely to become happier as we grow older, contrary to our usual expectations. (loc. 6169-6170)
Good enough. This releases new parents from the ideal that can otherwise easily be imposed upon them. (loc. 6196-6196)
The advice of this book is there to take and use as it might benefit us, with an aim to live ‘well enough’. (loc. 6204-6205)
This is why we can only aim for ‘good enough’ when it comes to embracing the present, for short of somehow remaining in a state of permanent focused meditation, we will always need to look forwards. (loc. 6250-6252)
We like to imagine ourselves having some personal relationship to the future, even after our death. We value being remembered, and engage in cultural traditions that aim to preserve certain aspects of the present, for example. With no future for human life, our relationship to it vanishes, and the point of many of our projects and behaviours too. (loc. 6341-6343)
We don’t realise how greatly we value future generations, Scheffler says, because we’re used to taking for granted the fact that human life will continue after we die. (loc. 6368-6369)
If we accept this and think of ourselves – our consciousness – as patterns of thinking, then our ‘self’ is something that to one degree or other can be experienced by other people too. (loc. 6393-6394)
When someone dies, they leave a glowing corona behind them, an afterglow in the souls of those who were close to them. Inevitably, as time passes, the afterglow fades and finally goes out, but it takes many years for that to happen. (loc. 6405-6406)
Happiness shows itself to be a kind of activity, something that happens through our fluctuating relationship to life, others, fortune and ourselves. (loc. 6466-6467)
When we reduce complex ideas to nouns and categories in order to navigate swiftly through them, we start to become mindless. The important notion of transcendence, for example, is reduced to words like ‘God’ that no longer stand for anything and can be easily discredited. (loc. 6471-6473)
Being granted authorship of our stories, and experiencing mindfulness rather than mindlessness, makes for happier and healthier lives. (loc. 6495-6497)
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. (loc. 6500-6502)
To live without anxiety is to live without growth. (loc. 6512-6512)
If you feel anxiety, let it sit. See if it is amenable to the lessons we have learnt from the Stoics. You don’t need to fix things that lie outside of your control. You also don’t need to fix the anxiety: it is a feeling that you have; it is therefore not you. The need to fix, to control is what fuels the anxiety in the first place. Let it be, and it will lose its excessive force. Then, once you are no longer running away with it, or trying to remove it, you might even welcome it. (loc. 6514-6518)
Anxiety is a signal that we are not in harmony with ourselves. (loc. 6520-6520)
To remain happy would stop us from flourishing. We can manage our anxiety in the ways we have discussed, but when it stirs, it is likely to be a helpful signal from an untended part of us that wishes now to be heard. If we shut our ears to these voices, they will come in time to own us, because the things that remain unconscious are always in charge. (loc. 6526-6528)
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 can manage our anxiety in the ways we have discussed, but when it stirs, it is likely to be a helpful signal from an untended part of us that wishes now to be heard. If we shut our ears to these voices, they will come in time to own us, because the things that remain unconscious are always in charge. (loc. 6525-6528)
The final call, then, is not to merely seek tranquillity but, from its strong shores, to welcome its opposite. (loc. 6537-6538)