Happiness Springs From Within

Revisiting "Happy" by Derren Brown

I regularly recommend Derren Brown’s book Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine on the show. It’s one of the best explanations I’ve seen of why Stoicism can be a personally beneficial philosophy. It also doubles as a takedown of some popular self-help books that can serve to exploit, distract, and obscure readers’ genuine attempts to better themselves. Here’s an updated version of an old Twitter thread of mine digging into some of the book’s most valuable insights.

Rythme, Joie de vivre (1930) | Robert Delaunay (French, 1885-1941)

“The ordinary man places his life's happiness in things external to him, in property, rank, wife and children, friends, society, and the like, so that when he loses them or finds them disappointing, the foundation of his happiness is destroyed.”

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

In his book, Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine, the illusionist and mentalist Derren Brown writes:

"The vital changes to our happiness do not come from outside circumstances, however appealing they might seem."

Failure to understand this fundamental truth leads many of us to fruitlessly mount the hedonic treadmill in a constant search for the Next Thing, the one that will *finally* make us happy.

Brown illustrates how we chase many of our desires—things we think will make us happy— to impress other people. We delude ourselves into believing that the approval of these 'other people,' many of whom we don't even know, will lead to happiness for ourselves. He refers to William B. Irvine’s book, On Desire: Why We Want What We Want, which poses this clever question (I’m paraphrasing):

You wake up one morning to discover you are the last person alive on earth. Everything else, from cars to houses and beautiful art, is exactly where the now-gone former owners had left it. Ignoring the question of the crushing loneliness you might feel, do you think you'd want all the things you currently covet in the real world?

Irving suggests that, while you may go on a Lamborghini spree for the first few months, before long, you would find that a humble abode was easier to maintain than a palace, comfy clothes were preferable to expensive ones, and you would likely stop caring about your meticulously designed appearance. I agree. I expect we might quickly find that without others to impress, the things we currently obsess over would simply lose all appeal.

It’s an excellent thought experiment, as it forcefully reminds us that happiness always comes from within, never from outside ourselves. As Brown says, it “shows that we choose our lifestyles – our houses, our clothes, our watches – with other people in mind. One way or another, we project a style designed to make others admire or envy us.”

As a young father, I was lucky to have already believed this. In the first of what would become a volume of letters to my children, I wrote to my then 6-day-old son:

"You will always be only as good, only as happy, only as successful as you perceive yourself to be. Happiness springs from within, never from without. Virtue too; honor; and love. All the things that make a life worth living. Thus, if you are unhappy, don’t look outside yourself for causes, the reside within; likewise, if, like me, you are happy, understand the source within your soul.”

And yet, how quickly and often I forgot my own advice.

We're all sometimes unconsciously influenced by the opinions of other people. Given the tribal nature of our species, it's pretty hard for us to consistently remember to ask ourselves, “Is this REALLY something I think will make me happy, or is it simply me trying to impress other people?” If we're brutally honest with ourselves, we probably will find that a great deal of what we do is to impress others.¹ This is not only a bug of HumanOS but perhaps a fundamental component of life itself - I’ve read that this appears in every species, from ants to apes.

So, what does this have to do with happiness?

A lot.

Since we're not going to wake up in an Irving world where we are suddenly the last human alive, presented with a smorgasbord of the world’s finest things like we’re at an all-you-can-eat buffet, we need to understand that happiness is not a goal in itself; rather, it is a by-product of other endeavors that we find meaningful.

A lot of our contentment comes down to the stories we believe about ourselves. But we often forget that, as the author and editor of our lives, we can CHANGE the stories we constantly tell ourselves and EDIT the stories that others, from our parents and family to our teachers and friends, tell us about ourselves.

We are often totally unconscious of the effects these external narratives have on how we see ourselves. In his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values, author Robert Pirsig points out, rather caustically, that our susceptibility to external narratives is imprinted on us by authority figures from a young age, as a way of creating a stable social order in which we are conditioned to act as THEY — system and society — want:

"Little children were trained not to do ‘just what they liked’ but…but what?…Of course! What others liked. And which others? Parents, teachers, supervisors, policemen, judges, officials, kings, dictators. All authorities. When you are trained to despise ‘just what you like’ then, of course, you become a much more obedient servant of others—a good slave. When you learn not to do ‘just what you like’ then the System loves you."

For the shorter version, just listen to Pink Floyd’s Album, The Wall.

Our stories are just that—OUR stories — and we can learn to rewrite and reimagine them as we see fit. I've done this for quite a while, and you'd be amazed at how many of your beliefs — yes, even some of your most dearly held ones — were authored by other people and organizations.

This process of learning, unlearning, and learning again isn’t easy (I’ve written about it many times before, for example here, here, here, and here). But the rewards are more than worth it. As Marcus Aurelius said, "The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts."

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1. Previous guests Rob Henderson, David Pinsof, and Will Storr all discuss signaling and our fundamental urge for status. As Rob says, "sometimes the strongest signal is refusing to play the signaling game (which itself sends a signal. There’s no escaping signaling.)"