What I've Been Reading

The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking by
Oliver Burkeman.
Ben in his review rightly wrote that Oliver is underrated. I think Oliver Burkeman is David Brooks of UK. I cannot think of any other book that distills Seneca's stoicism with Bruce Schneier's thoughts on security !! Oliver is a master synthesizer.

• For one thing, who says happiness is a valid goal in the first place? Religions have never placed much explicit emphasis on it, at least as far as this world is concerned; philosophers have certainly not been unanimous in endorsing it, either. And any evolutionary psychologist will tell you that evolution has little interest in your being happy, beyond trying to make sure that you’re not so listless or miserable that you lose the will to reproduce.
• I began to think that something united all those psychologists and philosophers – and even the occasional self-help guru – whose ideas seemed actually to hold water. The startling conclusion at which they had all arrived, in different ways, was this: that the effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is our constant efforts to eliminate the negative – insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness – that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy. They didn’t see this conclusion as depressing, though. Instead, they argued that it pointed to an alternative approach, a ‘negative path’ to happiness, that entailed taking a radically different stance towards those things that most of us spend our lives trying hard to avoid. It involved learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity, stopping trying to think positively, becoming familiar with failure, even learning to value death. In short, all these people seemed to agree that in order to be truly happy, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions – or, at the very least, to learn to stop running quite so hard from them.
• This view of how emotions work, as the leading Stoic scholar A. A. Long points out, is the underlying insight behind contemporary cognitive behavioural therapy, too. ‘It’s all there [in the work of the Stoics],’ he told me. ‘Particularly this idea that judgments are in our power, that our emotions are determined by our judgments, and that we can always step back and ask: “Is it other people that bother me? Or the judgment I make about other people?”’ It was a method of thinking he regularly employed himself, Long explained, to deal with everyday distresses, such as road rage. Were other drivers really behaving ‘badly’? Or was it more accurate to say that the cause of his anger was his belief that they ought to behave differently?
• Uncertainty is where things happen. It is where the opportunities – for success, for happiness, for really living – are waiting.
• ‘To be a good human,’ concludes the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum, applying this perspective to her own field of ethics, ‘is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertainty, and on a willingness to be exposed. It’s based on being more like a plant than a jewel: something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.’
• To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung, and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no-one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with your hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. - C.S Lewis
• The point is not to ‘confront’ insecurity, but to appreciate that you are it. Watts writes: To understand that there is no security is far more than to agree with the theory that all things change, more even than to observe the transitoriness of life. The notion of security is based on the feeling that there is something within us which is permanent, something which endures through all the days and changes of life. We are struggling to make sure of the permanence, continuity, and safety of this enduring core, this center and soul of our being, which we call ‘I’. For this we think to be the real man – the thinker of our thoughts, the feeler of our feelings, the knower of our knowledge. We do not actually understand that there is no security until we realize that this ‘I’ does not exist.
• ‘Downfall’, writes the American Zen Buddhist Natalie Goldberg, ‘brings us to the ground, facing the nitty-gritty, things as they are with no glitter. Success cannot last forever. Everyone’s time runs out.’ She goes on: ‘Achievement solidifies us. Believing we are invincible, we want more and more.’ To see and feel things as they really are, ‘we have to crash. Only then can we drop through to a more authentic self. Zen transmits its legacy from this deeper place. It is a different kind of failure: the Great Failure, a boundless surrender. Nothing to hold on to, and nothing to lose.’
• At one point during the course of the 200,000-line Indian spiritual epic the Mahabharata, the warrior-prince Yudhisthira is being cross-questioned about the meaning of existence by a nature spirit on the banks of a lake, which is the sort of thing that happens in the Mahabharata all the time. ‘What is the most wondrous thing in the world?’, the spirit wants to know. Yudhisthira’s reply has become one of the poem’s best-known lines: ‘The most wondrous thing in the world is that although, every day, innumerable creatures go to the abode of Death, still man thinks that he is immortal.’
• The sixteenth-century essayist Michel de Montaigne was fond of praising the ancient Egyptians – ‘who in the height of their feasting and mirth, caused a dried skeleton of a man to be brought into the room, to serve as a memento to their guests’. (A writer’s working space, Montaigne also believed, ought to have a good view of the cemetery; it tended to sharpen one’s thinking.)