Peter RuddFiled under: the sweet life | Tags: failure, happiness, negative path to happiness, Oliver Burkeman, uncertainty
To be happy, relish uncertainty, insecurity and failure. Stop running from these negative things; our wellbeing may depend on how we react to these very human emotions, says Oliver Burkeman:
[Research] points to an alternative approach [to happiness]: a ‘negative path’ to happiness that entails taking a radically different stance towards those things most of us spend our lives trying hard to avoid. This involves learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity and becoming familiar with failure. In order to be truly happy, it turns out, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions – or, at the very least, to stop running quite so hard from them.
Happiness is a Glass Half Empty, Oliver Burkeman
Book: The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking
Filed under: the sweet life | Tags: failure, happiness, insecurity, negative thinking, Oliver Burkeman, positive thinking, The Antidote
It turns out there’s a long tradition in philosophy and spirituality that’s about embracing negativity, about easing up on all this positive thinking, and learning instead to bathe in insecurity and uncertainty and failure, to confront your mortality and to find the enormous potential for happiness that’s lurking inside all that.
Oliver Burkeman, author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking
Filed under: brave new world, the sweet life | Tags: alain de botton, bohemian, bourgeois, failure, success
In our recent economic downturn, people say that there is a culling happening, that the brightest and the best are being retained in their companies while the dubious and slovenly are let go. They say that this is a good thing, as the fit become fitter and human progress is assured. No one really says what happens to all the people that slip through the cracks: trampled underfoot perhaps, but anyway out of sight out of mind.
This version of who sinks and who swims doesn’t fully square with my experience. I have found that, at least sometimes, the loyal and boring tend to rise quickly and entrench, while the smart get restless and make waves and are let go, or get bored and leave of their own accord.
Filed under: brave new world, the sweet life | Tags: alain de botton, envy, equality, failure, loser, merit, Oprah, self help, success, tragedy, work, worship
Alain de Botton writes and speaks with a perfect blend of erudition and accessibility. He’s on the vanguard of a new movement to popularize philosophy. But we hate ideas, we’re a ‘just do it’ culture, how can there be a movement with any traction to popularize philosophy?
Consider that in this society and the world, we are going through a great deal of tumult and change: a lot of unemployment, corruption, and general upheaval. And consider too that perhaps we need to question some of the ideas that have formed the basis of everything that went wrong and got us into this mess. In theory, new ideas gain traction when enough people start to think that the ‘just do it’ culture should pit stop and begin to listen to people who broker in ideas, like philosophers, like de Botton.
A philosopher, and someone who knows philosophy, can tell you why a perpetually positive society has lots of envy and depression. And why a meritocratic society can become very cruel. And he can tell you that one very real way out of our hyper competitive work and social culture is an understanding of Greek tragedy which sets at its theatrical center, failure. He can tell you how our analytic ways of thinking preclude the truth that our relative successes and failures in life are often very haphazard.
coromandal 