The Antidote

Through positive thinking and related approaches, we seek the safety and solid ground of certainty, of knowing how the future will turn out, of a time in the future when we'll be ceaselessly happy and never have to fear negative emotions again. But in chasing all that, we close down the very faculties that permit the happiness we crave.

I got a lot of use out if this book. It's also very quotable:

“Who says you need to wait until you ‘feel like' doing something in order to start doing it? The problem, from this perspective, isn't that you don't feel motivated; it's that you imagine you need to feel motivated. If you can regard your thoughts and emotions about whatever you're procrastinating on as passing weather, you'll realize that your reluctance about working isn't something that needs to be eradicated or transformed into positivity. You can coexist with it. You can note the procrastinatory feelings and act anyway.”“And here lies the essential between Stoicism and the modern-day ‘cult of optimism.' For the Stoics, the ideal state of mind was tranquility, not the excitable cheer that positive thinkers usually seem to mean when they use the word, ‘happiness.' And tranquility was to be achieved not by strenuously chasing after enjoyable experiences, but by cultivating a kind of calm indifference towards one's circumstances.”“True security lies in the unrestrained embrace of insecurity - in the recognition that we never really stand on solid ground, and never can.” “The effort to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is out constant efforts to eliminate the negative - insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness - that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.” “Sometimes the most valuable of all talents is to be able not to seek resolution; to notice the craving for completeness or certainty or comfort, and not to feel compelled to follow where it leads.” “It is alarming to consider how many major life decisions we take primarily in order to minimise present-moment emotional discomfort.” “Pain is inevitable, from this perspective, but suffering is an optional extra, resulting from our attachments, which represent our attempt to try to deny the unavoidable truth that everything is impermanent.”

A must read in this ocean of positive thinking and impossible goal settings society. This book teaches you a lot about how the whole positive thinking movement can do you more damages than good, while thinking about possible failures and the possibility of death can, inversely, lead you toward a better understanding of life and its challenges.

I don't think I'd go that far: I don't hate positive thinking. Nevertheless, Burkeman takes a close look at what science has discovered about positive thinking and, though I hate to smash your rose-colored glasses, it is really not pretty. Positive thinking can lead to some pretty negative thinking. Oddly.

So Burkeman takes another approach. It's to face reality. To look at it carefully. But dispassionately. Realistically.
I like this. It seems a little silly to go around saying, “Life just gets better and better every live long day.” Sometimes, frankly, it doesn't. And it doesn't do any good to walk around, saying it, shouting it, with your fingers in your ears, honestly.

Take a look at this book. It's a hard cold look at happiness. That just might make you much happier.

Burkeman presents the reader with a negative way of thinking about happiness. By abandoning the active quest for and overt quest for happiness, he suggests, we can redefine happiness as a state that includes death and other losses and sadnesses. He examines Stoicism, Buddhism, the Mexican Day of the Dead celebration, to create an approach to happiness that is more realistic, and therefore more useful, that the “happy happy joy joy” approach of the motivational speakers and popular American/British culture. Not a great book, but a very good and useful one.

I had a friend, once, who would spend her idle hours in bookstores, browsing the titles in the self-help section. Her interest was not necessarily in the content of the books—there was no rush for growth and betterment in her browsing—but instead in the delivery, in how self-help books, ostensibly, actually provide the help they claim.

The Antidote is exactly the kind of self-help book she'd enjoy. It bills itself as a guide for “happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking;” as such, it positions itself as a self-help book for people who don't necessarily believe they need help.

The message of The Antidote is simple enough: positive thinking can be a hindrance to achieving happiness. Instead, Oliver Burkeman focuses on seven other strategies, none of them groundbreaking, all of them self-evident but illuminating when put together.

I've been told that I come across as permanently-happy, and overly-positive. The truth is that my happiness and positivity aren't results of positive thinking, but instead of the same strategies Mr. Burkeman elucidates but that I had never named or thought of in a regimented fashion: stoicism (don't get bothered), Buddhism (feel and experience deeply), goal eradication (embrace uncertainty), self-release (you are not your mind), failure (don't hide your errors), and memento mori (contemplate mortality—something I do often, it seems).

The strategy of insecurity, that we should be comfortable with impermanence, is the one I struggle with most. Insecurity (particularly in the form of financial worrying) brings me anxiety; instead of embracing that insecurity, I fight that sentiment, much to my detriment. This is where I wish Mr. Burkeman's book was more than just a lit review. While The Antidote is excellent at positing theory and providing anecdotal and academic reference for those ideas, the information sits mostly at the surface level. There is a paucity of depth, and it is this reluctance to dive deeper that makes this self-help book feel like all the others, no matter what its claims.

Mr. Burkeman's “literature review” on happiness strategies pitches itself as just the kind of self-help book that would intrigue my friend, but fails to deliver on that pitch. There are some nuggets of goodness, but that is all they are: tasty morsels, but inherently not-filling. It's a book to pick off the shelf and peruse, but then return, fairly quickly, and continue browsing down the aisle.

(originally published on inthemargins.ca)

The light hearted cover of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking can fool the reader into thinking this is an easy read. In fact, The Antidote is a powerful argument for embracing ambiguity and uncertainty (which includes our fear of death). It explores Stoicism, meditation, philosophy and psychology, mixed with offbeat situations and characters. The central idea is that we should accept negative feelings, thoughts and experiences as essential aspects of life. Do not try to avoid these.

British journalist Burkeman is straightforward and cynical. The Antidote contains ideas from the writer's popular Guardian feature “This Column Will Change Your Life” strung together in a coherent narrative, leading to some inevitable conclusions.

Happiness
Don't think of a bear. Too late, you've just done it. Trying to avoid an outcome is one we are most drawn to. This is why positive thinking doesn't work. Add low-self esteem too and you'll end-up less happy than when you started. The unwanted feelings become ever more solidified.

Burkeman explores Stoicism as a possible way forward, which is: Real Stoicism...involves developing a kind of muscular calm in the face of trying circumstances.

He suggests that is you visualise a successful outcome, then your motivation to achieve a goal reduces. By using negative visualisation you focus on what can go wrong, then cultivating a calm indifference towards things outside of your control. It is by adopting this process that you achieve tranquility.

After all it's not a situation, events or people that cause us distress: Real Stoicism...involves developing a kind of muscular calm in the face of trying circumstances.

By considering losing the things you take for granted then you cultivate gratitude and reduce hedonic adaptation. As he says here:

“Thinking about the possibility of losing something you value shifts it from the backdrop of your life back to centre stage, where it can deliver pleasure once more.”

He goes onto say:

“... reassurance can actually exacerbate anxiety: when you reassure your friend that the worst-case scenario he fears probably won't occur, you inadvertently reinforce his belief that it would be catastrophic if it did. You are tightening the coil of his anxiety, not loosening it.”

All too often, the Stoics note, things will not turn out for the best. But it is also true that, when they do go wrong, they'll almost go less wrong than you feared. Thus, negative thinking should be something we do, and not something that happens to us.

Happiness isn't about trying to control circumstances, hoping that the universe fall in line with your plans. This approach to negative thinking isn't the opposite of positive thinking. It involves embracing our insecurities, flaws and sorrows and acknowledging that because we are human, we fail and make mistakes.

Burkman also advises that you avoid becoming hooked on mental narratives which promote how things should or shouldn't be. By doing this then you avoid attachment, a Buddhist idea:

“We “pursue” happiness because we think it comes outside of ourselves. But it's also because we think things are outside of ourselves that we are stressed about them and worry about them. Whatever can be found can also be lost.

There's nothing wrong with striving to accomplish something, or making friends, or loving your spouse and children. The Buddha himself, after all, spent his life after his enlightenment associating with people, and teaching them. Non-attachment does not require extreme asceticism or shunning human contact. Non-attachment comes from the wisdom that nothing is truly separate.”

The self is best thought of as some kind of a fiction, albeit a useful one. It's difficult to control the chattering stream of thinking which makes up who we are, this ‘I' that does not exist. Clinging to a particular version of a happy life, while fighting to end all possibility of an unhappy one, causes more problems than it solves.

Goals
Burkeman also backs up my thoughts on goal setting. He highlights a specific example. Everest climbers who had been lured into destruction by their passion for goals. The more they fixated on the endpoint, the more that goal became not just an external target but a part of their own identities. They reinterpreted negative evidence as a reason to invest more effort and resources in pursuit of the goal. And so things would go even more wrong.

To avoid the anguish that follows lack of goal achievement, you have to accept the mood you're in then just get on do what you have to do. Sometimes you can't make yourself feel like acting. Taking a non-attached stance: Who says you need to wait until you ‘feel like' doing something to start doing it? Note the procrastinatory feelings and act anyway. The working routines of prolific authors and artists – people who do get a lot done – rarely include techniques for ‘getting motivated'. Quite the opposite: they tend to emphasise the mechanics of the working process. We can take action without changing the way we feel.

Interestingly, he also uncovers that The Yale Study of Goals never took place.

For me goals have to be set at an high level to be of any use. Some people have known for awhile now what they want, but just haven't pursued it, and for them, it just takes a little contemplation to realize what they've wanted all along. Others will have a more difficult time, as they have never figured out what their dream is, or what they'd like to do. A simple exercise to help is to imagine you are eighty years old. Complete the sentences: ‘I wish I'd spent more time on...' and ‘I wish I'd spent less time on...'. The answers should help provide guidance of your true life goals. Start living your life so that you will get to that point.

Uncertainty
Security is a kind of death whereas insecurity is another word for life. Faced with the anxiety of not knowing what the future holds, we invest ever more in our preferred vision of that future. Not because it will help us achieve it, but because it helps rid us of feelings of uncertainty in the present.

Consider any significant decision you've ever taken that you subsequently came to regret: you felt the gut-knotting ache of uncertainty; afterwards, having made a decision, did those feelings subside? If so, this points to the troubling possibility that your primary motivation in taking the decision wasn't any rational consideration of its rightness for you, but the urgent need to get rid of your feelings of uncertainty.

Try asking yourself if you have any problems right now. The answer, unless you're currently in physical pain, is likely to be no. Most problems involve thoughts about how something might turn out badly in the future, or thoughts about things that happened in the past. A staggering proportion of human activity is motivated by the desire to feel safe and secure.

In turning towards insecurity we may come to understand that security itself is a kind of illusion – and that we were mistaken, all along, about what it was we thought we were searching for. People have always believed that they are living in times of unique insecurity. Many of the ways in which we try to feel safe don't make us happy.

We protect ourselves from physical danger by moving to safer neighbourhoods, but the effects of such trends on community life have been demonstrated to have a negative effect on collective levels of happiness. We seek the fulfilment of strong romantic relationships and friendships, yet striving too hard to achieve security in such relationships stifles them.

What's the solution then? Like a frog: You should sun yourself on a lily-pad until you get bored; then, when the time is right, you should jump to a new lily-pad and hang out there for a while. Continue this over and over, moving in whatever direction feels right.

Death and Love
Reduce the terror induced by the mere thought of death. Fearing being dead yourself makes no sense. You don't look back with horror at the eternal oblivion before you were born. Live a life suffused with the awareness of its own finitude, and you can hope to finish it in something like the fashion that Jean-Paul Sartre hoped to die:

“... quietly ... certain that the last burst of my heart would be inscribed on the last page of my work, and that death would be taking only a dead man.”

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung, and maybe broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no-one. The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you.

In Summary
After reading the book you realise that no matter how bad the situation, there is always a worse one. What the cult of optimism and positive thinking tries to do is to end uncertainty, to make happiness fixed and final. And unfortunately it all to often has the opposite effect. Accept your fear and your failure, don't repress them or hide them under a bogus positive mindset.