The Antidote

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.