Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

The Stoics tell us to ‘remove disturbances’, but for some this might come to mean ‘hiding away safely’ where nothing can harm them. This is a meagre substitute for flourishing. Our ultimate aim is maybe not so much to be happy as to live fully and make sure we are moving forward. Rilke suggests ‘imagining an individual’s experience as a larger or s

Three weeks later, the first group, who had been given responsibility, was happier and healthier. Eighteen months later, they were still significantly more active and sociable. But most astonishingly, this group lived longer. The mortality rate was twice as high in the group that had all their decisions made for them. Being granted authorship of ou

A good relationship, like a good parent or a good death, need only be ‘good enough’, consisting of two people navigating each other’s inadequacies with kindness and sympathy. At its best, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke tells us, it ‘consists in two solitudes protecting, defining, and welcoming one another’.2 Likewise, a mature life, and a flourishing

The final call, then, is not to merely seek tranquillity but, from its strong shores, to welcome its opposite. It is a strong society that encourages dialogue with its enemies, and a fearful one that promulgates reductive nouns and categories (such as ‘Terror’) to demonise and avoid the unsettling complexities of active, untidy reality.

Why? Because the Stoics can’t always be right. We cannot demand from them a formula for our happiness, because no such formula exists; happiness is messy and fuzzy and active. Can disturbance be a good thing? Why would we not wish to pay attention to these disturbances if they have something to teach us? Anxiety is a signal that we are not in harmo

In old age, mindfulness can increase health by saving us from a diminishing sense of authorship of our stories. In a 1976 experiment by Langer and her colleagues, a number of elderly residents in a nursing home were given houseplants to look after and water. They were also encouraged to make decisions for themselves, such as where to receive visito

Mindfulness, on the other hand, when it is summoned, keeps us engaged firmly in the present and brings with it the riches that come from paying attention. Mindfulness has been adopted by the world of meditation, but it is not meditation, though meditation is one popular tool, suited to some, to increase it. Mindfulness is just paying deliberate att

When we reduce complex ideas to nouns and categories in order to navigate swiftly through them, we start to become mindless. The important notion of transcendence, for example, is reduced to words like ‘God’ that no longer stand for anything and can be easily discredited. In the meantime, we might turn to addictive behaviour or waste our time on di

Concepts fall prey to our projections, which reduce rich ideas to what we’d like them to be; these projections are often illuminated by our fears. Happiness is one of those concepts. We’ve seen it has been diminished already by a society that tells us we are owed happiness and can achieve it simply by believing in ourselves (and assembling fancy go