TB: The Conquest of Happiness (Bertrand Russell)
Core Thesis
Ordinary unhappiness is largely self-inflicted through mistaken views of the world, mistaken ethics, and mistaken habits of life — and is therefore within the power of the individual to cure. The essentials of happiness are simple: food and shelter, health, love, successful work, and the respect of one's community. The secret is wide interests and friendly reactions. To be without some of what you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
Key Takeaways
Happiness requires outward orientation
- "Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so." (Same insight as Mill.)
- If your child is ill, you don't feel that all is vanity — restoring the child to health is what matters. Genuine engagement with the world defeats abstract meaninglessness.
- The man who centers his thoughts and hopes on something transcending self can find peace in ordinary troubles; this is impossible for the pure egoist.
- To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.
- The secret of happiness: let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to things and persons be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.
Boredom, desire, and wealth
- To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.
- The man who acquires easily things for which he feels only moderate desire concludes that attaining desires does not bring happiness.
- Too much excitement dulls the palate for every kind of pleasure; too little may produce morbid cravings. A certain power of enduring boredom is essential to a happy life and should be taught to the young.
- A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men — unduly divorced from the slow processes of nature.
- Vanity, beyond a point, kills pleasure in every activity for its own sake, leading to listlessness and boredom.
Worry and decision
- The wise man thinks about his troubles only when he can do something about them.
- When a difficult or worrying decision has to be made: give it your best thought, make the decision, and do not revise it unless new facts emerge. Nothing is so exhausting as indecision.
- Consider seriously and deliberately what is the very worst that could possibly happen — and give yourself reasons it would not be such a terrible disaster. Your worry will diminish to an extraordinary extent.
- Every kind of fear grows worse by not being looked at.
Envy
- Envy is one of the most potent causes of unhappiness. To realize the causes of your own envious feelings is a long step toward curing them.
- The habit of thinking in terms of comparison is fatal. When anything pleasant occurs, enjoy it in full without stopping to think it is not so pleasant as something happening to someone else.
- You cannot get away from envy by success alone — there will always be someone more successful.
The unconscious and deferred thinking
- Think about a difficult topic with great intensity for a few hours or days, then give orders that the work is to proceed underground. After some time, return to find the work has been done.
- Men who feel they must "sleep on it" before an important decision are profoundly right.
On fatigue
- Purely physical fatigue (if not excessive) tends to cause happiness — it leads to sound sleep, a good appetite, and zest for simple pleasures.
- An orderly mind thinks about matters adequately at the right time rather than inadequately at all times.
Mental Models
- The Middle Way — Russell's happiness recipe is a middle way between excessive excitement and morbid withdrawal
- Slow is Smooth and Smooth is Fast — Russell's advocacy for boredom tolerance and deferred underground thinking is the same principle