The Antidote
The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman
🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences
This book deconstructs the commonly held obsessions of the ‘power of positive thinking.’
Instead, it advocates that we should take the negative path to happiness.
This involves confronting the worst-case scenario; not setting goals; embracing failure; seeing the hidden benefits of insecurity and having a better relationship with death.
🎨 Impressions
This is an insightful, and alternative guide to happiness, through harnessing negative thinking and things not going to plan. Burkeman takes us on a journey through the world of the ‘backwards law’ - from a remote mindfulness retreat in the woodland in Massachusetts, to Day of the Dead in Mexico City, to slums outside of Nairobi, to modern day stoics and specialists in the art of failure.
How I Discovered It
This book was used as some of the ideas that fed into Mark Manson's work, which I really enjoy, so wanted to read some of the 'source' material. This book also aligns with some of my own views about self-development, happiness and positive thinking.
Who Should Read It?
If you think that positive thinking, visualisations, goal-setting etc are the only way, this will challenge your views. This is an alternative path to happiness that is rarely focused on in the current self-development world.
✍️ My Top 3 Quotes
True security lies in the unrestrained embrace of insecurity - in the recognition that we never really stand on solid ground, and never can.
There’s never any closure in an awe-inspired life, only constant acceptance of the mysteries of life. The greatest benefit of negative capability—the true power of negative thinking—is that it lets the mystery back in.
Uncertainty is where things happen. It is where the opportunities – for success, for happiness, for really living – are waiting.
📒 Summary + Notes
The Problem with Positive Thinking
Typical positive thinking advice suggests: Decide to think happy and successful thoughts, banish sadness and failure, and happiness and success will follow.
However, when you dedicate a lot of mental effort to scanning your mental landscape for negative thoughts in order to root them out, paradoxically, the opposite happens. Instead of losing them, you’ll enlarge those very negative thoughts.
The effort to try and feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. He argues that “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.”
Burkeman suggests we should accept the idea that you will inevitably die. Learn to celebrate your failures. See the wisdom in your pessimistic thoughts.
Living meaningfully starts with the negative path to happiness–one which embraces uncertainty, insecurity, and the realities of every day life–so you can better appreciate when things go right. Unrealistic positive expectations are not only ineffective, they're often counterproductive.
The Stoic Art of Confronting Worst-Case Scenarios
The Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, who emphasised the benefits of always contemplating how badly things might go. It lies deep near the core of Buddhism, which counsels that true security lies in the unrestrained embrace of insecurity - in the recognition that we never really stand on solid ground.
Spending time and energy thinking about how well things could go, it has emerged, actually reduces most people's motivation to achieve them.
Burkeman and others who’ve attempted ‘self-humiliation’ exercises tend to learn, nothing particularly bad happens at all. The imagined worst-case scenario wasn’t accurate, they didn’t feel terribly humiliated, and the feeling of self-consciousness was bearable.
Our modern-day cult of positivity often urges individuals to engage in “positive visualisation,” imagining things going right. This is supposed to make us feel happy, motivated, and brave. Unfortunately, positive visualisation fails to deliver. Experiments suggest that simply imagining an achievement is too psychologically satisfying — it causes people to relax prior to meeting their goal in reality.
Benefits of Negative Visualisation:
One of greatest enemies of human happiness is 'hedonic adaptation' - any new source of pleasure is swiftly relegated to the backdrop of our lives, we become accustomed to it. Regularly reminding yourself you might lose any of the things you currently enjoy will reverse the adaptation effect. "Whenever you grow attached to something, do not act as thought it were one of those things that cannot be taken away." -Epictetus
Antidote to anxiety. Confronting the worst-case scenario saps it of much of its anxiety-inducing power. Happiness reached via positive thinking can be fleeting and brittle; negative visualisation generates a vastly more dependable calm.
Getting Over Yourself
Meditation has little to do with achieving any specific desired state of mind. It's about non-attachment - approaching life without clinging or aversion.
Rather than merely enjoying pleasurable things during the moments in which they occur, and experiencing the unpleasantness of painful things, we develop the habits of clinging and aversion: we grasp at what we like, trying to hold on to it forever, and push away what we don't like, trying to avoid it at all costs.
Learn how to stop trying to fix things, to stop being so preoccupied with trying to control one's experience of the world, to give up trying to replace unpleasant thoughts and emotions with more pleasant ones, and to see that, through dropping the 'pursuit of happiness', a more profound peace might result.
It is illuminating to note, here, how the daily rituals and working routines of prolific authors and artists - people who really do get a lot done - very rarely include techniques for 'getting motivated' or 'feeling inspired.' Quite the opposite: they tend to emphasise the mechanics of the working process, focusing not on generating the right mood, but on accomplishing certain physical actions, regardless of mood.
The Hidden Benefits of Insecurity
The ego thrives on focusing on the future, since it's much easier to think compulsively about the future than about the present.
"Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now." Eckhart Tolle
"When you listen to a thought, you are aware not only of the thought, but also of yourself as the witness of the thought. A new dimension of consciousness has come in." Eckhart Tolle
The thought then loses its power over you, and quickly subsides, because you are no longer energising the mind through identification with it. The is the beginning of the end of involuntary and compulsive thinking.
Goals - When Trying to Control the Future Doesn't Work
Imagining what kind of goal-driven success you want to have, does more harm than good. Goals are just a particular kind of attempt to control the future. And, as humans keep forgetting, our ability to control the future is extremely limited.
When you set a goal, you absorb it into your identity. This raises the stakes too much. The identity-based goal then causes people to take crazy risks and to pursue things even after they’ve become undesirable or outright impossible. Goal-chasers double down in the face of uncertainty, even when they should be changing course.
Many of us, and many organisations, would be better to spend less time on goal setting, and, more generally, to focus with less intensity on planning for how we would like the future to turn out.
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.
Steve Shapiro: Giving up goals and embracing uncertainty instead. Promised to help him achieve more, by permitting him to enjoy his work in the present. Goal-free living simply makes for happier humans.
The most valuable skill of a successful entrepreneur isn't vision or passion. It's the ability to adopt an unconventional approach to learning an improvisational flexibility not merely about which route to take towards some predetermined objective, but also a willingness to change the destination itself. This is a flexibility that might be squelched by a rigid focus on any one goal.
The Case for Embracing Your Errors
Evolution itself is driven by failure; we think of it as a matter of survival and adaptation, but it makes equal sense of think of it as a matter of not surviving and not adapting.
The vulnerability revealed by failure can nurture empathy and communality.
We too often make our goals into parts of our identities, so that failure or mistakes becomes an attack on who we are.
Training to failure isn't an admission of defeat - it's a strategy.
Death as a Way of Life
The more you remain aware of life's finitude, the more you will cherish it, and the less likely you will be to fritter it away.
Living more meaningfully will reduce your anxiety about the possibility of future regret at not having lived meaningfully - which will, in turn, keep sapping death of its power to induce anxiety.
