Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

I know I didn’t seek greater exposure for its own sake. If you do, you are embarking on a journey with no destination. You are unlikely to reach that point of ‘now I’m famous enough’ or ‘now I’m rich enough’.

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?

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. Once again, the insipidness of the cliché robs the principle of its power.

Indifferents The Stoics referred to these external things as ‘indifferents’. If we ultimately attach no importance to them, we can be sure that if they disappear from our lives, we won’t suffer too great a pain of missing them. ‘Permit nothing to cleave to you that is not your own,’ Epictetus says, ‘nothing to grow to you that may give you agony wh

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

There is, as we’ve discussed, a yearly salary figure up to which people report themselves as incrementally happier. The amount depends on the cost of living, but importantly, when people earn higher than that ‘comfortable’ figure, they don’t continue to grow happier. Again, we indirectly find happiness in the absence of a stressor (money troubles)

Meanwhile, back in ancient Greece, Eros, the god of love was hard at work. Socrates recommended that to live happily, we should elevate our relationship with this fickle deity. First, we should rise above an attraction to beauty in a particular person and allow ourselves to be drawn to a more general picture of beauty and finally to the Idea of bea

Once, the ancients saw the adoption of the wise, rational life as a kind of co-existence with the gods. These rational natures, they believed, constituted the deific part of us, and the philosophical life offered a route to transcend ordinary existence. It allowed us to glimpse those higher realms of divinity (according to Plato) or perhaps move in

Our ruinous, dehumanising society began for Rousseau with the fact that we must work. This leads to us reflecting on our social position, and creates feelings of envy and vanity. The division of labour follows; governments grow to protect the inequality and the unnatural rights of property. And it would be up to human…

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