The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

Another one by Oliver, to consider if I like Meditations for Mortals.

Nice, a bit muted in its main points. It is an exploration, Project Happiness-style, of what happiness is and how to feel happier, pushing a strong countertrend: motivational seminars often have the opposite effect because they make you anxious about feeling happy. Memento mori, instead, has you think about the hard parts of life and its limits, which helps you enjoy it fully. I liked his meditative trips to explore the worlds of seminar culture, monks, philosophers, and the view of the dead in a poor neighborhood in Mexico. An OK book; I would not reread it. It is also very similar to 10% Happier in parts.

Notes

• White bear challenge: try not to think of a white bear for a minute → you will fail. Our brain does not work like “forget the sad things.”
• Seminars → not very useful. The problem with these sessions is that they do not give you a practical framework for being happy. They just put you in the right mood to do things.
• Stoicism: good introduction. A stoic stays calm in the face of life’s adversities. They know everything is fragile.
• 🔑 Do a “Stoic Pause.” For example, while he was getting irritated in a supermarket line, he thought of the Stoics. What do I lose? Five minutes late? There are worse things.
• Introduction to meditation, similar to 10% Happier.
• Kayes’s studies: people sometimes perform better without a specific goal, because they are not stressed.
• Irene Mueni: “Happiness is subjective. You can be happy in a slum, unhappy in a city. The things you need for happiness aren’t the things you think you need.”
• Failure is everywhere. We just try to avoid facing it.
• But the more you think about it, the stranger it is. We manage to stress about minor things, yet the big darkness, death, does not make us anxious every day.
• Introduction to the mortality cult: Becker says that because it is so terrifying, our brain is in denial about death from birth.
• 🔑 Nabokov: our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness
• 🔑 Memento mori: remember that life is fragile and precious, and recognizing it makes you grateful for everyday things and aware that each day is a precious resource. This is the secret of happiness.
• The concept of negative capability: living with this mindset, stepping back and observing our life with a critical eye. And realizing that for a positive path, there are no shortcuts.
• Finale:

I did not make it a regular habit to humiliate myself on public transport systems in major cities. Nor did I relocate to rural Mexico, to live a life infused with death. So far, I haven’t even been on another silent meditation retreat since my week in Massachusetts. But in numerous smaller ways, a modest degree of negative capability has become my daily practice. Few days now go by without some occasion on which I’ll deploy what I have come to think of as the “Stoic pause” - which is all that it takes to remember that it’s my judgment about the infuriating colleague, or the heavy traffic, or the burned food, that is the cause of my distress, not the situation itself.