Late on Saturday night, as I was finishing my final tour at the hotel, I started to cough and sneeze. Shit, I thought to myself, I’m coming down with something.
Sadly, that proved to be correct. By the time I got home, the sneezing fits were more frequent and my throat was beginning to turn raw. By the following morning, I was down with the full blown man flu, and laid up on the couch for the rest of the day. On Monday morning I went to work (there was stuff I had to get done) but cried ‘uncle’ just after noon and headed home again. As a younger man, I used to be of the ‘unless you’re dead or hospitalized, you go in to work’ school of thinking; thankfully, I’ve come to learn just how stupid that is, which is why I managed to avoid infecting three engine companies of the Boulder Fire Department today and sixty people on the Sunday night ghost tours I was supposed to give.
The one upside, however, is that between bouts of sneezing, coughing, and falling asleep on the settee, I was able to get a little reading down. Tonight I finished the book I’ve been coming to grips with for the past two weeks, and while I don’t review everything that I read by any means, this particular title is crying out for a wider audience.
American readers can be forgiven for never having heard of Derren Brown at all. To most Brits, he’s best known as a master illusionist, one whose shows continue to delight and confound (apart from the rare few who persist in the belief that he employs stooges, a fact that he steadfastly denies). I heartily enjoyed Derren’s earlier book, Tricks of the Mind, but Confessions of a Conjuror left me a little cold.
All of which brings us to this: Happy. Not to mince words, I believe that Derren’s latest book will be truly life-changing for the right type of reader. It is that rarest of books: one that I felt had been written for me personally. There’s very little about magic or illusion in here. This is essentially a 400+ page discourse on the ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism, and how one might usefully and practically apply it to their own life in order to help bring about that most elusive of goals: Happiness.
Stoicism wasn’t anything new to me. I had fallen in love with the Mediatations of Marcus Aurelius when I was a teenager, and it’s still a book that I pull regularly from the shelf to this day. Derren Brown’s success is in taking the teachings of Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and the other Stoics, and making them both accessible and understandable to a 21st century audience. His method for doing this (the “trick,” if you will) entails the reader coming to understand that his or her entire life is a story; a narrative; one that we tell ourselves about ourselves, and one which ultimately shapes our self-perceptions and worldview.
Many of the principles which can be found at the core of the Stoic philosophy are utterly simple; the devil lies in the execution. Brown explains in great detail how supposedly negative events themselves rarely hurt us; it is usually our beliefs, feelings, or judgments concerning those events which do.
Much space is devoted to the fact that material goods, money, and other ephemeral pleasures rarely serve to bring true lasting happiness. Brown talks about the reasons why this is, citing a great deal of scientific research in addition to quoting other learned authors on the subject of happiness. He also discusses helpful, practical ways in which we can deal with anger, hurt, aggression, addiction, and the ever-present fear of death (the book ends on a tour de force note, with a section on how we can die well).
The book can also be seen as an assault on the multi-billion dollar industry of self-help and positive thinking. Derren reserves much of his ire for fads such as The Secret, and details extensively how “the power of positive thinking” can actually be harmful to us. Take the example of the U.S. airman captured by enemy forces during the Vietnam War. It is both saddening and enlightening to hear that many of those men who did not survive their brutal captivity were optimists by nature, and insisted on thinking positively: “We’ll be out by Christmas…OK, we’ll be out by the 4th of July…OK, we’ll be out by Thanksgiving…” When holiday after holiday rolled around and they found themselves to be still incarcerated, many of these POWs began to literally curl up and die…whereas the officer who fell back upon the principals of Seneca and the Stoics made it through eight years of hell, ultimately surviving to regain his freedom.
I am going to make a concerted attempt to incorporate some of these concepts into my own way of thinking and living, and I heartily commend Derren’s book to everybody. Everybody. We can all learn something from this well thought-out piece of philosophical writing, and I would go so far as to say that it is currently my favorite book of 2016.
Pick up a copy and read it carefully. I doubt that you’ll be disappointed.
