Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

It will be some time before titles such as ‘Climb Out Of Your Own Arse’ populate the shelves dedicated to self-improvement. Possibly, with a resurgence of interest in the lessons of ancient philosophy, we might one day realise that a large part of improving the ‘self’ is to shift the focus from ‘self’ to ‘other’. As I have written elsewhere, the he

Focus has again shifted from mere ‘happiness’ to the more meaningful concept of ‘value’, in an attempt to reconcile the alienation that Marx sensed between man and his God, his work and his fellow creatures. Rather than seek transcendence through a journey into the self (as the Romantics encouraged), the very notion of the self was now seen as dang

It’s hard for us to imagine what our lives would have been like if we had been born earlier. If on the other hand we imagine dying later, we picture ourselves having a longer life and have a rough idea of what that might entail. Death deprives us of the benefit of those future years we can easily imagine, whereas we don’t feel that prenatal non-exi

A large part of the popularity of psychotherapy is explained by the fact that the demands of a consumer society have made us neglect our standpoints; we have allowed our centre of gravity to be shifted to a point outside of ourselves and have lost track of what we actually might want and like in our lives.

we associate the need for psychoanalysis with mental disturbance, as if therapy were a shameful thing to undertake. Yet we are all disturbed to one degree or another, all somehow repressed and to varying extents shut off from our true selves: this is the human condition and precisely what we should address to increase our quotient of happiness. The

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 tha

the entirely superfluous things we desire, whether they be gadgets, fame or wealth, are much more difficult to secure and very rarely satisfy us. There is always more or better to be had. Such unnecessary things, of course, constitute the vast majority of our desires. And once we realise that satisfaction is relative, we see that we may never achie

Locke’s daring idea that we are propelled through life by nothing more than an impetus towards pleasure and away from pain, and that we should make our decisions by calculating the balance of both. There is an echo of Epicurus in this rational, materialist approach to making ethical choices. Our lives, Locke said, reminding us of that hedonic tread

The other reason is, I think, more interesting, and is of use to us as we consider the question of happiness in our ordinary, mortal lives. We would not just look back and feel the dead weight of over-familiarity. Something in us, conscious or otherwise, would look forward and find that without the framework provided by precious finite time, all en

To move from perceiving the behaviour to feeling the emotion, we have to do a bit of work ourselves. We engage in a little internal storytelling first. We might quickly bring to mind a series of previous cases where the friend has acted in a similar way. We’ll be sure to form that pattern in the way most likely to infuriate ourselves. We might imag