Happy

We are, each of us, a product of the stories we tell ourselves.

We tell the story we want to tell, and we live out those stories every day. Some of these stories are consciously constructed, but others operate without our knowledge, dictated by scripts handed to us by others when we were young.

While it remains clear that having less than you need is a source of unhappiness, having more than you need does not make you happier.

Plan for success; prepare for failure. And the universe doesn’t care either way.

Your happiness levels are largely defined by the balance of your personality. How happy you are by default is largely set.

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.

You do not have the control over your life that you might like to believe. You will of course have certain aims, pulling you in one direction. However, life is constantly pulling back in the other. Irrespective of how much ‘you believe in yourself’, the forces of life (or the universe, or fate) will continue to do their own thing. They operate independently of your wishes.

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.

By projecting ourselves always into the hereafter we miss out on the present, on knowing ourselves and the richness of the current moment. By trying to control what we can’t, we all but guarantee frustration and disappointment.

The things we desire really do little other than fuel further desires and teach us what greed is.

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. That is the tension that causes dissatisfaction.

When you travel (or for that matter attend a party), you always take yourself with you.

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.

We cannot talk about happiness without distinguishing between two selves that both operate within us: the experiencing self and the remembering self.

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.

Without a solid sense of self, we can’t help but swing between these unpleasant extremes.

If we hope for something deeper in life than distraction, we might note that our remembering, story-forming self needs a narrative of happiness in the same way our experiencing self requires its pleasures.

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.

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.

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.’

‘Those who possess the power of securing themselves completely from their neighbours, live most happily with one another, since they have this constant assurance’.

Neediness sets up another futile aim: we can never get enough from people towards whom we feel needy.

If we feel we could live sufficiently without our partners, this can greatly improve our relationship with them. When we are sure we could not survive without them, we are likely to bring a theme of intense jealousy or anxiety into the relationship.

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.8

The message is not ‘blame yourself’ but to realise that whatever happens to you, it does not need to affect you, your core self, unless you choose to let it.

‘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.’

Under our control are our thoughts and actions. Not under our control is everything else, including fame, power, the behaviour and thoughts of other people, our property and our reputation.

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.

Blind optimism rarely thinks to distinguish between what is and what is not in our control, and instead relies on rhetoric and the inculcation of sheer faith to have us believe that everything is under our sway – even the universe itself – if only we believe and desire strongly enough.

Our misplaced efforts to wield control tend to backfire is that very human concern, known to many but not to all, of wanting people to like us.

If, instead, I were to pay attention to the Stoic fork and did not try to control what was beyond my domain, I might think ‘I will be the nicest and friendliest person I can be around people.’ Beyond that, how they choose to respond to me is their business, not mine.

Learn to desire what you already have, and you will have all you need.

By undoing our attachment to external things and people, we can value them more.

The Stoics were early espousers of determinism: namely that all events, including our own actions, are ultimately determined by causes external to the will.

Understanding we are only in control of our thoughts and actions, we can choose how to respond to events whenever they prove less than ideal, without making ourselves unhappy.

We know already the two big questions we might ask ourselves when we are feeling mad, bad or sad: 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?

Morning previews and evening reviews,

By seeing ourselves from the outside, we are a step removed from any feelings otherwise provoked by the scene. This practice of distancing is known amongst contemporary psychologists as a therapeutic technique.

What we mean by ‘anger’. Aristotle defined it as ‘a longing, accompanied by pain, for a real and apparent revenge for a real or apparent slight, affecting a man himself or one of his friends, when such a slight is undeserved’.

We are likely to feel angry when certain social rules are broken. You might have formulated a rule that it is wrong for a person, when sitting across a table from you, to browse his phone.

The only major difference, worth bearing in mind, is that CBT is about fixing certain troubles, whereas the key vision of Stoicism is the enhancement of an ‘ordinary’ life to connect more powerfully to one’s fellow human beings and to move more in accord with the universe.

Here is our core process: Trigger > judgement > inhibitions > behaviour. There are other factors too, which bear upon the entire process. Our core beliefs about the world and what happens in it will play a huge part.

Clients of a cognitive behavioural therapist are helped to study the specifics that propel them from experiencing a trigger to exhibiting anger (or anxiety, or any other undesired response).

We wish to make progress with a character trait, such as minimising anger, we would be well advised to start asking trusted friends how we’re doing. There is surely no more direct route to self-deception than the avoidance of feedback.

The kind of rational techniques taught by the Stoics must be applied straight away before anger gains any ground. From the point of view of narrative forming, we would wish to form a compelling but helpful story about the event – that is, one that does not make us angry – before we shape one that insists we should be furious.

Recommended technique for nipping anger in the bud is to simply wait. Time is a vital factor in allowing anger to dissipate.

We want to hang on to our anger because we feel we need it to effectively communicate something important. But this is wrong: it only gets in the way and makes people less likely to understand us.

Do battle with yourself: if you have the will to conquer anger, it cannot conquer you. Your conquest has begun if it is hidden away, if it is given no outlet. Let us conceal the signs of it, and as far as possible let us keep it hidden and secret.

Do you want to avoid losing your temper? Resist the impulse to be curious. The man who tries to find out what has been said against him, who seeks to unearth spiteful gossip, even when engaged in privately, is destroying his own peace of mind.32

Very many men manufacture complaints, either by suspecting what is untrue or by exaggerating the unimportant. Anger often comes to us, but more often we come to it. Never should we summon it; even when it falls on us, it should be cast off.34

If selective perception gives us the pre-chosen data from which to form our stories, mind-reading is a common means of building the narrative itself. In order to make this mistake, we must replay an event (the blanking at the party) or run through an imagined scenario (our child alone in her room) and dub over a commentary. It may happen briefly, but we must construct something along these lines in order to create an angry feeling. The point is: we could form a different commentary if we wished. We are choosing a hurtful or irritating one.

The subliminal ethos being subtly weaved is that good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people. This is utter balderdash. The reality is that good and bad things happen to all people, death perhaps being the most extreme (and yet the most common) example. As the saying goes, ‘Shit happens.’ Therefore, when I was diagnosed, rather than thinking (as specified in the NHS leaflet), ‘Why me, what have I done to deserve this?’ I thought ‘Why not me?’

Death can’t be bad for us, because we won’t be around to experience it when it happens.

We are surely not our reputations. Our reputations are not in us; they are stories sustained in the minds of other people.

Lucretius says that the eternal non-existence of death is something we’ve already been through. It happened before we were born. We’ve been in the eternal abyss once before, and we don’t feel any regret about it. So why fear returning? This is known as the symmetry argument. What ‘happens to us’ after death symmetrically reflects what ‘happened to us’ before birth.

Our bias that wants anything bad to be in the past leads us to a good reason as to why it is rational after all to feel that death is a bad thing. And this reason holds an important key, I think, to how we might enhance our time while we’re alive and well.

By reminding ourselves that our loved ones are not immortal, and that they might be taken from us at any point, we not only mitigate the shock if and when they do die, but we remember to value them more in the present.

No service to assure those who grieve that time will heal. Rose Kennedy, the philanthropist mother of the assassinated Kennedys, is attributed with the following words: ‘It has been said, “Time heals all wounds.” I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.’

It is not ‘correct’ to live in the moment, for the very reason that we are storytellers and right now is always part of a continuing narrative. We know from Kahneman’s work on the remembering and experiencing selves that how you look back on this moment will be more conducive to deciding if it’s a happy one than how you feel about it right now. We cannot merely instruct ourselves to be happy in the present moment, for we would need to return to our storytelling, time-orientated selves to decide if we had been successful.

The key to avoiding regret may lie as much in what story we choose to tell ourselves in the future as it does in what we do or don’t do now. All we can do is try to anticipate that future narrative and let it gently guide some of our choices up front.

Paying attention to certain future regrets might genuinely enhance our lives in the here and now. When I carry out this thought exercise,

Heidegger suggested there are two ways we can approach life: the everyday mode and the ontological mode. Most of the time, naturally, we exist in the everyday mode and might marvel at how things are in the world. However, in the ontological mode (‘ontology’ is the study of what it is to be), we stand back and look at the marvellous fact that things, and we, exist. Our attention is turned from the physical trappings of daily life to the deeper questions of being, and in this mode we are more likely to make worthwhile changes in our life. This, indeed, is part of the ‘considered life’ this book is talking about. Without stepping into this ontological mode, it will be hard to make sense of anything here.

GENERALLY FEEL defined by our past. Our past, however, is a story that we tell ourselves in the present.

Having a suitable figure such as a therapist or clear-minded friend or support group to gently suggest alternative viewpoints can be very helpful.

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.

But if we are convinced by this idea that without a future for humanity we would lose interest in a wide range of our activities and confidence in what we value (much like in the immortality case), then we arrive at a startling conclusion. It is not merely enough that we have in place the temporal finitude provided by our own death to ensure our lives have meaning. 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. Which means ultimately that the continuing lives of others matter more to us than do our own.

Rather than work to prevent climate change and other pressing environmental issues from a duty-bound place of begrudging responsibility, we can work to preserve future humanity for our own reasons, as we realise its survival matters more to us than we ever imagined.

It turns out, then, to be the positive connections between people that provide the mechanism for our ‘self’ to survive death in any meaningful way. It turns out to be love.