Attachment, this argument runs, is the only thing that motivates anyone to accomplish anything worthwhile in the first place. If you weren’t attached to things being a certain way, rather than another way – and to feeling certain emotions, rather than others – why would you ever attempt to thrive professionally, to better your material circumstances, to raise children, or to change the world?
Ultimately, what defines the ‘cult of optimism’ and the culture of positive thinking – even in its most mystically tinged, New Age forms – is that it abhors a mystery. It seeks to make things certain, to make happiness permanent and final. And yet this kind of happiness – even if you do manage to achieve it – is shallow and unsatisfying. The greatest benefit of negative capability – the true power of negative thinking – is that it lets the mystery back in.
Mainly, it’s not that there are things you can’t say. It’s that there are things you can’t say without the risk that people who previously lacked a voice might use their own freedom of speech to object.
We spend our lives failing to realise this obvious truth, and thus anxiously seeking to fortify our boundaries, to build our egos and assert our superiority over others, as if we could separate ourselves from them, without realising that interdependence makes us what we are.
Richard Reid, the would-be ‘shoe bomber’, had been tackled and subdued on board a flight from Paris to Miami, thereby initiating the era of compulsory shoe-checking for all travellers.
The goal, it seemed, had become a part of their identity, and so their uncertainty about the goal no longer merely threatened the plan; it threatened them as individuals.
Each time you kiss your child goodnight, he contends, you should specifically consider the possibility that she might die tomorrow. This is jarring advice that might strike any parent as horrifying, but Epictetus is adamant: the practice will make you love her all the more, while simultaneously reducing the shock should that awful eventuality ever come to pass.
Smart phones have been ubiquitous for years, of course – but much more recently, there seems to have been a shift in social norms. For many people, the unwritten rules of sidewalk choreography now include this: If what I’m reading or watching on my phone is sufficiently interesting to me, it’s entirely up to you to get out of my way, just as if I were very frail, or three years old, or blind. Or a lamppost.
Rate your individual acts as good or bad, if you like. Seek to perform as many good ones, and as few bad ones, as possible.
Develop a strong attachment to your good looks – as opposed to merely enjoying them while they last – and you will suffer when they fade, as they inevitably will; develop a strong attachment to your luxurious lifestyle, and your life may become an unhappy, fearful struggle to keep things that way.
You want it to be one way. But it’s the other way. – Marlo Stanfield in The Wire.
Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism. –.
It was called Ending the Pursuit of Happiness, and its author, a man named Barry Magid, argued that the idea of using meditation to make your life ‘better’ or ‘happier’, in any conventional sense, was a misunderstanding.
The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning,’ argued the social psychologist Erich Fromm. ‘Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.’ Uncertainty is where things happen. It is where the opportunities – for success, for happiness, for really living – are waiting.
This need not be taken as an argument for abandoning all future planning whatsoever, but it serves as a warning not to strive too ardently for any single vision of the future. As Chris Kayes pointed out, the mountaineers who died climbing Everest in 1996 did successfully reach their goal; they ascended to the summit. the tragic unintended consequence was that they didn’t make it back down alive.
He may be right about the importance of not fearing failure, but then again, you don’t hear speeches or read autobiographies by people who were unafraid of failure and then did indeed simply fail.
One of the more distasteful aspects of positive thinking – and of conventional approaches to happiness in general – is the way in which they seem to encourage self-absorption. Then again, ‘selfless’ approaches to happiness.
Healthy and happy people, research suggests, generally have a less accurate, overly optimistic grasp of their true ability to influence events than do those who are suffering from depression.
They may never speak to you again, but that won’t matter: you will have won the argument, using Science.
It was commonplace for colleagues to write comic poetry to each other, predicting the manner in which they might die.