Hundreds of self-help books are published every year. Each one, directly or indirectly, has the same purpose: how to make you happy. How to get rich so you’ll be happy. How to be thin so you’ll be happy. How to overcome depression so you’ll be happy. How to find a relationship so you’ll be happy. How to have high-colonic enemas so you’ll be happy.
There is an irony in these extensive, groaning shelves. The very fact that there are so many of these books suggests that the target is extremely elusive—that happiness isn’t easy.
Conjure in your mind the image of a caveman.
In your vision, he probably looks rather stupid. But he is us. Our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, has been around in pretty much the same form for over a hundred thousand years. And, stupid or not, our caveman has dreams. He longs for a world in which good-tasting food is readily available and starvation is unlikely. He wants freedom from the predators that occasionally make off with members of the tribe. He wants his children to stop dying from diseases he does not understand. When he is himself ill, he wishes that someone would help him get well.
Then he shakes his head, frowns at himself for wasting time, and returns to the business of survival. Pointless to wish for a world that could never exist.
But it can—and does.
In the developed world, we live a life of luxury unparalleled in the history of the species. There’s food in the fridge, there’s a roof over our heads, there’s hot water in the faucet, there’s hot air in our furnaces and leaders, and every product we can think of is within reach. We have a longer life span than ever. We’re healthier for longer. The neighbors are not, for the most part, trying to kill us. The infant mortality rate is low, and the lifespan is long.
It is a world that our caveman, and the kings of not so very long ago, would quite happily have killed for (and one which the present-day citizens of many less privileged nations dream about). If we could reach back in time and bring our ancestors to the present world, their eyes would widen in amazement. We would show them our cars, our aircraft, our hospitals, our grocery stores, and the climate-controlled rooms where we sit in comfortable chairs to do our “work.”
They would stare at us with a sudden realization. “I’ve died. This is the promised realm our priests talked about. Your days are spent in comfort and bliss. Can I stay?”
Then you tell them that there is a blight in this paradise. Most people are not filled with joy. Many spend much of their time in a state of dissatisfaction. Some are hospitalized in deepest misery. Millions are given medication to lift their moods to a tolerable level. Publishers bring out hundreds of books on how to find the happiness that microwave ovens and stable societies and Zumba classes have somehow failed to provide. Bus shelters advertise distant destinations to which the inhabitants of this world can escape.
Escape? Our caveman can think of nothing more wonderful than to be imprisoned here. He doesn’t understand. He cannot.
Something has gone wrong.
Misery sneaks up on you.
Many years ago, I was midway through my predoctoral internship in psychology when misery popped by for what turned out to be a yearlong visit.
At first I had no idea what was happening. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, I could barely read a sentence, and a flight of stairs might just as well have been the Annapurna Circuit. Nothing appealed. At times, it seemed I could barely talk. Once, in a depressive fog, I greeted a new patient with the pronouncement, “This is Randy Paterson,” causing the poor woman to peer around to see if I might be introducing her to someone more promising than I was.
A flippant list of a few symptoms does not serve to illuminate the sheer wretchedness of much of this period. I could go on, but let’s leave that for another day.
I was treating depression, for goodness’ sake, and still failed to notice it overtaking me. When I finally twigged, I was tempted to dismiss it. Young, healthy, pursuing a career I’d chosen at the age of eight—what did I have to be so unhappy about?
The answers, rolling their eyes, eventually tapped me on the shoulder, annoyed that I hadn’t noticed them standing there.
Some were outside my control. The internship demanded long hours on multiple wards, seeing patients with both psychiatric and physical illnesses, many of the latter being terminal cases. One of my best friends at the time was dying. My internship was far from the friends I’d developed in graduate school, in a bedroom community known chiefly for the cheerful ease with which the residents had evacuated some years before, when a train carrying toxic chemicals derailed. (The miracle, so the local joke went, was not that everyone got out but that they ever returned.)
Some of the factors, however, were the result of my own choices. I didn’t need to work quite as much as I did, and I was pushing myself in the evenings and on weekends to write my dissertation. I was drinking far too much coffee and eating too much gelatinous hospital food. I wasn’t staying in contact with friends, seldom left my slum apartment (in a neighborhood that was red-circled by the social workers at the hospital), and got almost no exercise.
I scraped through, largely by fantasizing that I was my own patient and (mostly) following the standard recommendations. I exercised more, cut the coffee, took weekends off, ate better, made a point of seeing friends, and so on. Still, it took almost a year before I was back to what I usually considered my normal state.
After graduation, I specialized in the treatment of anxiety disorders, coyly shying away from seeing too much in the way of depression. A bit too close to home for comfort.
Homesick for mountains, I applied for every possible job on the West Coast and (fate having a delicious sense of humor) was offered a position as coordinator of a hospital-based mood disorder program. I accepted and, contrary to my own predictions, stayed there for nine years before opening a private clinic with a focus on—you can guess—mood problems. Our hospital team ran groups for people in the grip of more than just garden-variety misery. All had been hospitalized; most of them, several times. Their struggle easily dwarfed anything I had gone though. In my own cushioned life, I had visited the edge of the valley, but clearly had not dropped to its very bottom.
Early on, we began conducting a discussion exercise as part of the first session of the program. Our clients had been struggling to feel better for months—in some cases, for decades. They were understandably skeptical that anything we might do in our little group would be helpful. So we turned it around.
“Imagine that you could earn $10 million for just half an hour’s work—let’s say tomorrow morning between 11:00 and 11:30. All you would have to do is make yourself feel worse than you do now. Worse, in fact, than you’ve felt in the past week. How would you do it?”
Sometimes people would object, saying that it still wouldn’t be worth the money or that they feared getting stuck there. One woman gazed balefully across the table at me. “So far, I have been doing this for free. Ten million? Fine.”
What ensued, invariably, was a free-for-all of ideas that came haltingly at first and then in a flood. After one session, a hospital cleaner stopped in the hall as I was locking up and asked what had been going on in there. “Depression group,” I said. “But they were laughing,” she said, frowning. “You don’t hear a lot of laughter in this building.”
Each time we did the exercise, however, the humor would subside when I asked, “When you wake up in the morning, and you’re already miserable, what do you feel like doing?” They would begin listing many of the same things that they had just nominated as strategies to feel worse.
“Why do you think that is?”
Some worried that perhaps they just liked being depressed. But this didn’t fit. Of all the experiences they’d had, depression was almost always the most wretched. They didn’t like it at all.
Misery changes everything. It affects how we feel, how we think, what we do—and it alters our impulses. When we are miserable, we are usually tempted to do precisely what, at other times, we know will make it worse. The result can be that we appear to be bringing on our own discomfort.
“In this group,” I and the other leaders would say, “we’re going to try to become aware of these impulses—and often we’re going to try to do the opposite. Most of what we talk about won’t seem tempting or promising or even logical. The strategies may feel wrong. But what feels right when you’re miserable is what feeds the misery, not what feeds you.”
Clinical depression, as should be obvious, is an extreme form of human misery. But there is no clear border dividing it from its milder cousins. Many of my present-day clients are less than happy about their lives, but not clinically depressed. Some arrive at my office doing just fine—but having heard about the new field of positive psychology, they wonder if they can go from tolerable or middling life satisfaction to better than average. Some of the strategies are unique to where a person starts out. Most are not.
We can learn from the answers given by the truly depressed to the Ten-Million-Dollar Question. Indeed, most of the strategies in this book first arose in those groups. You can ask the question of yourself. If you wanted to feel worse rather than better, what would you do?
This book, it must be noted, is not intended for those in the deepest valley of depression. At such a time, people often need other strategies and another voice. They may be put off by any chirpiness of tone. Instead, this book is for the larger population—those who have not fully explored the canyons of human emotion. Misery is a normal human experience. We all encounter it to varying degrees, and often we are surprised by its knock. So rather than waiting, let’s open the door and set out to find it.
A misery safari. Pith helmets are optional.
What causes a person’s mood to rise or fall? Apart from mysterious fluctuations in the internal soup in which our brains simmer, what factors launch a person upward to the pinnacles of happiness or propel them to the valley floor?
We can divide the answers into two categories.
The first—let’s call it Column A—comprises the inventory of catastrophe that can overtake us. Despite our privileged society, tragedy and disappointment still exist. Cars collide. Cells metastasize. Industries fail. Bodies age. Partners leave. Friends move. Roofs leak. Poverty and disease still thrive. We are not in full control of the circumstances of our lives. We can imagine that we have arranged our lives so carefully, with such foresight, that we have assured our happiness—and yet we know that circumstance can sweep it all away.
So there are limits to our personal influence. We can do all the right things and still get hit by a bus. If we are five feet tall, we can practice and perfect our basketball skills all we like, but we will still never play in the NBA. We can eat right, give up smoking, and take our vitamins, and we are still guaranteed to slip off the dish before our 120th birthday.
Life can impose a dizzying array of circumstances upon us that may limit our happiness or create misery: war, poverty, refugee status, personal misfortune of any stripe. You may be born with any of a variety of constraints—sensory, intellectual, social, familial. We can be fired, dumped, duped, flooded, infected, bombed, bullied, struck, abandoned, bankrupted, blind-sided, T-boned, or poisoned by an undercooked hamburger.
Some events, in retrospect, seem to have been so unlikely that it never occurred to you to worry about them. Just when my own life was going pretty well, I was shot off my bicycle by a deer that had been struck and air-launched by a passing vehicle. Sometimes it appears that fate has it in for you. I took my deer impact as a message from the fates to make some much-needed changes in my career. “Look what we can do! Get on with your life, or next time it’ll be a moose.”
In addition to these capricious whims of fate, however, there are many influences on our moods that lie within our own control. Let’s put these in Column B.
We can choose what to eat, how to spend our time, how much exercise to get, and what to make priorities in our lives. All of these will influence—within the limits fate imposes upon us—how happy or miserable we become. We may not be able to live to be a thousand years old no matter what we do, but we can increase the likelihood of reaching a relatively healthy ninety. Whatever our lifespan, we can choose to spend our years isolated in front of a computer monitor or fully engaged with humanity and existence.
Even the factors outside our control may not impose limits that are as rigid as they appear. Some who have gone through horrific tribulations or who labor under what we might imagine to be intolerable circumstances are, despite it all, fairly happy. We might imagine that we could never again be upbeat if our partner left us or if we lost our job or if our home burned down. But read any number of biographies, and you find people who have gone through unimaginable losses and eventually returned to a full emotional life. We too may be surprised by joy just when all chance of it seems to have been extinguished.
So what’s this book about? Well, there’s no point in sitting in a field either summoning or attempting to avert an asteroid strike. The events of Column A are out of our control. We will take as given the fact that every one of us has circumstances that are immutable and unwelcome. Our efforts will instead focus on Column B: the mood-influencing factors that lie within the scope of our own choices. Within these pages, we will examine elements of life that can be controlled or selected, for good or ill.
There are many in the world who might look at the comfort, luxury, and leisure of life in developed countries and assume that misery would be impossible in such a place. Surely there is a lower limit to how awful a person can feel when the refrigerator is full. This appears not to be the case, however. As the data on life satisfaction, depression, and suicide all attest, no amount of wealth or good fortune can entirely prevent misery.
Our species has a talent for it.
Happiness seems like such a straightforward thing, and we appear to have every advantage that our ancestors might have asked for. Why are we so bad at achieving it?
One answer is the caveman himself. Our ancestors developed in a primitive, tribal world inherited from earlier hominid species—one that continued fairly well intact until not many thousands of years ago. Their bodies and their psychology were adapted to and shaped by that world. Take a fish, an admirably adapted creature, and plunk it in the desert; things will not go swimmingly. Take a hominid and plunk her in a vastly different world of computers, automobiles, television, and forty-hour workweeks, and she too has some difficulty adapting. The environment does not fit her nature.
“Oh, but wait,” says the know-it-all in the back corner. “Our cave people created this modern world specifically based on hominid needs and psychology—so it should be perfectly matched to us.”
This is not actually true, however. This world was created based on hominid desires, not on a dispassionate analysis of what might work best. Take creatures from a sugar-poor world who have consequently developed a powerful sweet tooth, and they will create a society of candy bars and soda pop. Because their bodies are not adapted to such an environment, they will have difficulty handling sudden sugar rushes, and they may exhibit a proneness to type 2 diabetes—as indeed has happened. The prevalence of seemingly inexplicable unhappiness may have a similar explanation. Our early surroundings have given us drives and instincts that, today, work against our best interests.
A related answer seems to lie within a peculiar wiring fault in humanity. As Daniel Gilbert so admirably described in his 2006 book, Stumbling on Happiness, human beings are remarkably poor at guessing what will make them happy in the future. Given that many of our decisions about present action are based on hypothesized future happiness, this means that we, as a species, constantly strike out confidently in precisely the wrong direction.
Yet another influence comes in the form of the messages we are given. In centuries past, we might learn much about life from the wisdom of our elders. Today, the majority of the messages we receive about how to live a good life come not from Granny’s long experience of the world, but from advertising executives hoping to sell us products. If we are satisfied with our lives, we will not a feel a burning desire to purchase anything, and then the economy may collapse. But if we are unsatisfied, and any of the products we buy actually delivers the promised lasting fulfillment, subsequent sales figures may likewise drop.
We exist in a fog of messaging designed explicitly to influence our behavior. Not surprisingly, our behavior often shifts in precisely the manner intended. If you can be made to feel sufficiently inferior due to your yellowed teeth, perhaps you will rush to the pharmacy to purchase whitening strips. The lack of any research whatsoever correlating tooth shade with life satisfaction is never mentioned. Having been told one hundred times a day how to be happy, we spend much of our lives buying the necessary accoutrements and feeling disappointed not to discover life satisfaction inside the packaging.
Between the influences of our culture, our physiology, and our psychology, it appears that striving for happiness is a tiring matter; we’re swimming against a powerful current. We might almost say that happiness in such circumstances is unnatural.
If you are struggling through a wilderness and run up against an impenetrable wall, it only makes sense to look around and try the other direction. Given the thousands of books pointing toward happiness and their apparent lack of impact on global life satisfaction, perhaps we should turn our attention to the almost empty shelf nearby, the one reserved for guideposts to another destination: misery. If, in the presence of unparalleled wealth and privilege, we are capable of dissatisfaction, then perhaps misery is humanity’s true signature strength. Let’s optimize it.
This book, then, strikes off in the opposite direction to all those guides to the alleged good life. If we embrace misery as our goal, what is the path? Given the rarity of guides to this twilit land, one might think there would be little research to guide us. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Millions—perhaps billions—of dollars have been spent researching the question of how people become miserable. Today, if we want to be unhappy, we know how to bring it about. We have the technology.
Perhaps you are undecided about this quest. No matter. People buy travel guides all the time and never visit the regions covered. You need not sign a declaration in blood that you will commit to the path. But, in case one day you should choose this adventure, let’s describe the route.
In The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis (author of the Narnia books) describes a bus tour of heaven departing daily from the lower reaches of hell. Once there, the tourists are free to step off the bus and stay rather than returning, though few ultimately choose to do so. In this book, let us set off from the cave person’s vision of heaven and visit hell instead. We’ll explore the route and the signposts so you can find your way down anytime you like. Stay as long as you wish.
Of course, perhaps some days you are already there.
Misery is not just a destination. It’s a bit like tennis: a skill set that can be honed and perfected. In this book, you will learn a variety of strategies to become less happy. Along the way, you may discover that you have already mastered many of them and practice them regularly. But you can always get better—or perhaps I should say worse.
The techniques are grouped into four main sections. The first, “Adopting a Miserable Lifestyle,” describes the basic features of a depressing existence: things you can do on a day-to-day basis to enhance your unhappiness.
The second section, “How to Think Like a Miserable Person,” places you in an internal cinema and describes strategies for creating low mood via alterations in your thinking. Simply by working with the placement of your attention, you can create unhappiness no matter what your external circumstances might be. Think of it as a set of anti-mindfulness lessons.
The third section, “Hell Is Other People,” describes how to maximize your own unhappiness through your relationships. Social interaction is one of the most complex aspects of being human, and so it is relatively easy to toss a few spanners into the works.
Finally, in “Living a Life Without Meaning,” we take a broader view of human existence and ask how to steer the ship of life toward rockier shores. This section includes discussions of guiding principles and strategies to eradicate any sense of purpose from our lives.
Perhaps this all sounds quite daunting. The quest for misery can seem a lonely one—a solitary, quixotic journey into an unexplored wilderness, leaving behind all that we have known.
Nonsense.
In a world where so many are unhappy with their lot, our culture has created a well-signposted superhighway to misery that all may travel, and that, one way or another, most do. This autobahn is the smoother path, and it has innumerable on-ramps, no speed limit, and multiple lanes. It is the road to happiness that is individual, weed-strewn, and overgrown from disuse.
Most of the lessons to come will sound familiar. Many are maxims you have heard all your life—though to sweeten them they have been touted as routes to fulfillment. So rest easy. As you walk this path, you will be surrounded by millions, and your culture will line the route, cheering you on.
Climb aboard; we are about to depart. I will be happy to serve as your tour guide to hell. I’ve been there before. Just follow my umbrella; I’ll hold it aloft as I march on ahead.
I don’t have $10 million to offer you.
But hey: So far you’ve been doing this for free.
Every riverside path goes in both directions. Perhaps you are not committed to the downstream route—misery—which is where the rest of us are headed. Instead, you still want to go against the current in the opposite direction. Well, fine.
There is a rearview mirror installed in our tour bus, and along the way you can look at it as much as you wish. Listen closely to your guide. If, like your fellow riders, you want to embrace your unhappiness, follow the instructions given. If you secretly hope for the bus going the other way, simply do the reverse of what you are told.
Spoilsport.