Are you happy? If so, what is making you happy? Are you
always happy (or at least most of the time), and do you think everyone has the
right to be happy?
I ask because I have recently finished reading Derren
Brown's new book, Happy: Why More or Less
Everything is Absolutely Fine, which poses, and seeks to answer, the
questions, "What does being happy actually mean? And how do you even know
when you feel it?" I have actually been told that it is possible that I
don't know how to be happy, and the question of happiness is one that has
challenged scholars and the writers of my favourite sit-com alike (see the
episode of Frasier: Cranes
Go Caribbean, in which Frasier asks his ex-wife Lilith, "Do you think
I know how to be happy?"), so what does the state of happiness actually look
like? Pinning down happiness is tricky; as Alan Watts writes in The Wisdom of Insecurity (which I am
quoting not having read the book, but from seeing Derren Brown reference it), it
is like trying to tie up water in a paper package. Most dictionaries define
happy along the lines of "delighted, pleased, or glad, as over a particular
thing," and happiness as the state of being happy, so happiness, or being
happy is, on these terms, a quite transitory emotion. It's the emotion we feel
when our sports team win - a feeling that may only last until their next match,
especially if they lose that one - or after a particularly pleasant evening
spent with friends, but is it really a lasting state of mind? Perhaps not;
perhaps we need another term, but for the moment, happy will have to suffice.
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| "Do you think I know how to be happy?" |
I approached Derren Brown's book with the expectation that
it would be at least in part a self-help book, but this being written by a man
who, in his most recent stage show ostensibly performed 'miracles' as a means
of debunking the faith healers and their spectacular - and completely
ineffective - cures for all manner of maladies, it was never going to be that
straightforward. In fact, Brown is critical of the self-help manual, which in
his opinion, "can be counter-productive and lead simply to more
anxiety," so what help we are being offered in his book is less a
'get-happy-quick' scheme and more a method for identifying the things that are
barriers to our happiness, and then removing them.
There is much in Derren Brown's book about stoicism, and if
I had considered the subject before I read it, would have thought a stoic to be
someone who bore hardships lightly and with fortitude, accepting the challenge
they faced as inevitable and beyond their control, much like Londoners during
The Blitz. In my ignorance, I was not aware - or perhaps had once known and
later forgotten - that Stoicism is a school of Greek philosophy founded by Zeno
of Citium in the early 3rd century BC. The first of Stoicism's basic tenets is
that "If you are pained by external things, it is not that they disturb
you, but your own judgement of them. And
it is in your power to wipe that judgement now."[1]
And how often do we react if we feel slighted by others by feeling hurt, when
there was no intention to hurt us, where the slight was unintended and the pain
we feel is solely a construct of our own mind? Oh yes, there will be times when
events do hurt us and we are
justified in feeling hurt, pained or disturbed; the key is identifying whether
or not that is the case.
Stoicism's second basic tenet may be summed up by American
theologian Reinhold Niebuhr's oft quoted Serenity
Prayer; "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot
change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the
difference." Or more pithily, don't worry about things you cannot change.
Now both of these tenets of Stoicism are possibly easier
said than done. If, like me, you are a habitual worrier it is not easy to shake
off the ingrained, entrenched behaviours that mean that I - and people like me,
of whom I imagine there are millions - will
worry about things I cannot alter, and will
struggle to see the difference between an event and their reaction to it.
Which is where I often find self-help books on many subjects to be ineffective;
it is all very well saying that to conquer a fear, or to alter a pattern of
behaviour one should do a certain thing, but without explaining how to do that thing, that advice is
useless, a bit like the instruction manual for a music player that I had which genuinely
said, "To increase the volume, increase the volume." And the funny
thing is that Derren Brown's book seems to offer little practical instruction
on how to stop worrying about the things one cannot change, yet for once, I
find that I've read a book that tells me what to do, but not how, and that is
still fine. It is perhaps that I have had the patterns of behaviour that cause
me anxiety and make me worry pointed out to me and have realised that in many
cases, worrying is futile and that sometimes, even when I am disturbed by
events, I am looking at the wrong driver of that disturbance.
To give an example, when I retired at the end of 2012, I was
happy to do so; it came at pretty much the age I had always wanted to retire
at. Since then there have been times when I have been unhappy and thought that
perhaps my retiring was a factor, or the cause of my
unhappiness. Except it wasn't, other factors were to blame, factors which would
have been in effect had I retired or not, and instead of blaming retirement for
my unhappiness I ought to have identified the real cause and what - if anything
- I could do about it. I have a lot to be grateful for, which I need to
recognise and be content with. I also have a habit - one which I am strenuously
fighting to break - of worrying on other people's behalf, perceiving them to
have a problem and worrying how they will solve it, while all the while, they
may not even consider whatever it is to be a problem!
And sometimes it is not practical to expect to be happy,
because despite some people believing it to be so, is it really our birthright?
Nor may it be desirable: sometimes, as Derren Brown says, 'good enough' is
sufficient. If, as I would contend, happiness is a transitory emotion, then it
must be so that whenever we consider ourselves happy, it is because we have
been unhappy, and could be so again just as easily.
If we desire to
always be happy we are riding for a fall, perhaps we are better off being
content. You may say that being happy or being content are the same thing, and
that my belief that it is preferable to be content rather than happy is mere
semantics, but I see contentment as being satisfied with what one has rather
than continually aspiring to more - a 'more' that does not necessarily exist,
to be content with 'good enough' and not to demand perfection. I'll settle for
that...and being stoic.
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