Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine

It is the same inane urge that has us expect easy answers. Politics tends to infantilise us, as do the media that communicate news to us. We are told that answers are black and white; that there are good guys and bad guys. We are not educated and nurtured to tolerate grown-up complexity and ambiguity. In an ideal society, a politician would explain

The Logos, or God’s Word, is His intention, and thus the universe is at one with God’s great plan. The Stoic notion (adopted by the Christians) is not dissimilar: it suggests a cosmic intention that runs through all things. They sometimes describe this force as Zeus, but we should not anthropomorphise in the way we do the Judaeo-Christian Breather

Many reported a diminishment of their fears of other people, a greater willingness to take risks, and less concern about rejection. One of my patients … said to me, ‘What a pity I had to wait until now, till my body was riddled with cancer, to learn how to live!’7

Lucretius says that the eternal non-existence of death is something we’ve already been through. It happened before we were born. We’ve been in the eternal abyss once before, and we don’t feel any regret about it. So why fear returning? This is known as the symmetry argument. What ‘happens to us’ after death symmetrically reflects what ‘happened to

The point of these and other traditions is that death becomes something communal and therefore familiar. Today, the Day of the Dead celebrations in Mexico still serve the same purpose: there is little room for fear when death is so beautiful and colourful. These traditions, so different from ours, call the oddities of our own into question. ‘Why do

James feels, as does Scheffler, that our understanding of human life as a whole ‘relies on an implicit understanding of such a life as itself occupying a place in an ongoing human history, in a temporally extended chain of lives and generations’.7 Without that wider context for our lives, it is not clear to what extent the ordinary pleasures of lif

The point, to repeat, of Stoic teaching is not to shut oneself off from life and other people by extirpating all emotions from one’s existence. There is a certain tension to Stoicism that Pierre Hadot contrasts with the relaxation of Epicureanism, when he makes the point that an authentic life would involve a vacillation between both poles.59 The S

Marcus Aurelius, presumably the most famous man of his time, repeatedly reminded himself that such glory was of little consequence. It comes and goes, as do all the people whose admiration you hope to secure. He compares one’s public – those who ‘applaud convincingly or on the contrary curse you or blame and rail beneath their breath’10 – to leaves

Marx’s thought was in many ways rooted in that of one Georg Wilhelm Friederich Hegel, the German late-Enlightenment philosopher with a teleological view of history, whom Schopenhauer hated and lost his students to. To Hegel, the chapters of humanity’s story are connected by violence and revolution. These charges are brought about by visionary revol