A more useful way to think of it is as a much-needed counterweight to a culture fixated on the notion that optimism and positivity are the only possible paths to happiness.” Nor should it be taken “as implying that there’s necessarily anything wrong with optimism. “You don’t do yourself any favors by walking into the path of oncoming buses,” Burkeman explains. It’s important not to confuse the negative path with contrarianism or cynicism. “It is our constant efforts to eliminate the negative - insecurity, uncertainty, failure or sadness - that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain or unhappy.” “The effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable,” Burkeman writes. The negative path to happiness isn’t a rejection of positivity it’s a route to finding joy by not searching for it so tenaciously. It’s fair to question Burkeman’s thesis right off the bat: If striving for happiness makes us less so, are we destined to be permanently morose? The simple answer is no. The Antidote is an examination of this paradox. His theory, that there is a “negative path to happiness,” is based on the idea that the less we strive for jubilation, the more of it we experience. What Burkeman unearthed was a counterintuitive route to building more joy in our lives. Even money doesn’t boost mood above a certain basic level.īurkeman began to ask what, if anything, increases happiness? Are there strategies for finding bliss - or are we doomed to a particular mood? Research shows, for example, that self-help books rarely improve our collective mood and that a thriving “happiness industry” - replete with self-help books, well-known motivational speakers and celebrity psychologists - does not correlate with a statistical increase in satisfaction. “For a civilization so fixated on achieving happiness,” writes Burkeman in his best-selling new book, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking (Faber & Faber, 2013), “we seem remarkably incompetent at the task.” Hilarious and compulsively readable, The Antidote will have you on the road to happiness in no time.As a veteran journalist covering psychology and personal development, Oliver Burkeman has encountered most of the strategies for being happy. In an approach that turns decades of self-help advice on its head, Oliver Burkeman explains why positive thinking serves only to make us more miserable, and why ‘getting motivated’ can exacerbate procrastination.Ĭomparing the personal philosophies of dozens of ‘happy’ people-among them philosophers and experimental psychologists, Buddhists and terrorism experts, New Age dreamers and hard-headed business consultants-Burkeman uncovers some common ground. They all believe that there is an alternative ‘negative path’ to happiness and success that involves coming face-to-face with, even embracing, precisely the things we spend our lives trying to avoid.īurkeman concedes that in our personal lives and the world at large, it’s our constant efforts to eliminate the negative-uncertainty, unhappiness, failure-that cause us to feel so anxious, insecure and unhappy. The Antidote: Happiness for people who can’t stand positive thinking is an exploration of a radically new path to happiness.
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