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kalikabali's review against another edition
4.0
I absolutely loved this book. I am one of the people who can't stand self-help books especially ones full of "Get Motivated" "Be Happy" etc
And it isn't that I am a given to negative thinking all the time, I am a fairly optimistic person but have never figured out how just telling yourself to stay away from any negativity in life actually works unless you are either actively choosing to shut your eyes and ears to the stuff that happens around you or are in some kind of a denial.
So, the title itself attracted me to this book. And I quite enjoyed reading it. The author does a fairly good job of presenting arguments for the place for negative thinking and disproving the effectiveness of relentless focus on positivity and happiness in life. He goes through various philosophical traditions (Stoicism and Buddhism), cultural practices (Memento Mori) and a lot of stuff that has leaked from management/corporate speak into a more general "this is the way to live life if you want happiness".
Don't read if books like "The Secret" or authors like Paulo Coelho are your spiritual guides. But do read if you have secretly been dying to rant against all those heavy doses of feel good, but ultimately meaningless emissions from the various operations of the "Cult of Optimism"
And it isn't that I am a given to negative thinking all the time, I am a fairly optimistic person but have never figured out how just telling yourself to stay away from any negativity in life actually works unless you are either actively choosing to shut your eyes and ears to the stuff that happens around you or are in some kind of a denial.
So, the title itself attracted me to this book. And I quite enjoyed reading it. The author does a fairly good job of presenting arguments for the place for negative thinking and disproving the effectiveness of relentless focus on positivity and happiness in life. He goes through various philosophical traditions (Stoicism and Buddhism), cultural practices (Memento Mori) and a lot of stuff that has leaked from management/corporate speak into a more general "this is the way to live life if you want happiness".
Don't read if books like "The Secret" or authors like Paulo Coelho are your spiritual guides. But do read if you have secretly been dying to rant against all those heavy doses of feel good, but ultimately meaningless emissions from the various operations of the "Cult of Optimism"
erat's review against another edition
5.0
In spite of its title, this is not a happiness-for-sourpusses-howto book. It's unfortunate that the title is so misleading, as I imagine a lot of people will avoid the book over this minor misdirection.
The book is more of a cautionary tale for folks that are motivated by 'positive thinking' (cue Stuart Smiley: "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggonit, people like me."). I could go into the specifics of how the book does this but I'd end up copying the entire book into this review. Really, you just have to read it.
The basic idea: the "Cult of Optimism" (author's term) is flawed, it's overly simplistic, and in most cases it doesn't even work. By embracing negative scenarios, we allow ourselves to not only prepare and make solid decisions, but we also remove negativity's power over us. It's not new-age or holistic hocus pocus. It's acceptance that we can't control the universe and shouldn't bother trying. That, and wishing away negativity will ultimately hurt more than help us.
There is also discussion about ego and the dangers of goal-setting, Mexico's Day of the Dead, the "Get Motivated!" events that took over the US a few years ago, Buddhism...lots of stuff for a short 200 page book.
Just read it. Even if you hate self-help books like I do, or maybe you love them and can't imagine learning from a book that suggests acceptance of negativity and failure may cure personal angst and stress. Read it anyway. If nothing else, it'll get you out of your echo chamber.
The book is more of a cautionary tale for folks that are motivated by 'positive thinking' (cue Stuart Smiley: "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggonit, people like me."). I could go into the specifics of how the book does this but I'd end up copying the entire book into this review. Really, you just have to read it.
The basic idea: the "Cult of Optimism" (author's term) is flawed, it's overly simplistic, and in most cases it doesn't even work. By embracing negative scenarios, we allow ourselves to not only prepare and make solid decisions, but we also remove negativity's power over us. It's not new-age or holistic hocus pocus. It's acceptance that we can't control the universe and shouldn't bother trying. That, and wishing away negativity will ultimately hurt more than help us.
There is also discussion about ego and the dangers of goal-setting, Mexico's Day of the Dead, the "Get Motivated!" events that took over the US a few years ago, Buddhism...lots of stuff for a short 200 page book.
Just read it. Even if you hate self-help books like I do, or maybe you love them and can't imagine learning from a book that suggests acceptance of negativity and failure may cure personal angst and stress. Read it anyway. If nothing else, it'll get you out of your echo chamber.
roba's review against another edition
4.0
A really entertaining and useful tour of stoic-y thinking. As in his columns, Burkeman displays his fair and admirable mix of open-mindedness and skepticism.
sirchutney's review against another edition
5.0
The light hearted cover of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking can fool the reader into thinking this is an easy read. In fact, The Antidote is a powerful argument for embracing ambiguity and uncertainty (which includes our fear of death). It explores Stoicism, meditation, philosophy and psychology, mixed with offbeat situations and characters. The central idea is that we should accept negative feelings, thoughts and experiences as essential aspects of life. Do not try to avoid these.
British journalist Burkeman is straightforward and cynical. The Antidote contains ideas from the writer’s popular Guardian feature “This Column Will Change Your Life” strung together in a coherent narrative, leading to some inevitable conclusions.
Happiness
Don’t think of a bear. Too late, you’ve just done it. Trying to avoid an outcome is one we are most drawn to. This is why positive thinking doesn’t work. Add low-self esteem too and you’ll end-up less happy than when you started. The unwanted feelings become ever more solidified.
Burkeman explores Stoicism as a possible way forward, which is: Real Stoicism...involves developing a kind of muscular calm in the face of trying circumstances.
He suggests that is you visualise a successful outcome, then your motivation to achieve a goal reduces. By using negative visualisation you focus on what can go wrong, then cultivating a calm indifference towards things outside of your control. It is by adopting this process that you achieve tranquility.
After all it’s not a situation, events or people that cause us distress: Real Stoicism...involves developing a kind of muscular calm in the face of trying circumstances.
By considering losing the things you take for granted then you cultivate gratitude and reduce hedonic adaptation. As he says here:
"Thinking about the possibility of losing something you value shifts it from the backdrop of your life back to centre stage, where it can deliver pleasure once more."
He goes onto say:
"… reassurance can actually exacerbate anxiety: when you reassure your friend that the worst-case scenario he fears probably won’t occur, you inadvertently reinforce his belief that it would be catastrophic if it did. You are tightening the coil of his anxiety, not loosening it."
All too often, the Stoics note, things will not turn out for the best. But it is also true that, when they do go wrong, they’ll almost go less wrong than you feared. Thus, negative thinking should be something we do, and not something that happens to us.
Happiness isn’t about trying to control circumstances, hoping that the universe fall in line with your plans. This approach to negative thinking isn’t the opposite of positive thinking. It involves embracing our insecurities, flaws and sorrows and acknowledging that because we are human, we fail and make mistakes.
Burkman also advises that you avoid becoming hooked on mental narratives which promote how things should or shouldn’t be. By doing this then you avoid attachment, a Buddhist idea:
"We “pursue” happiness because we think it comes outside of ourselves. But it’s also because we think things are outside of ourselves that we are stressed about them and worry about them. Whatever can be found can also be lost.
There’s nothing wrong with striving to accomplish something, or making friends, or loving your spouse and children. The Buddha himself, after all, spent his life after his enlightenment associating with people, and teaching them. Non-attachment does not require extreme asceticism or shunning human contact. Non-attachment comes from the wisdom that nothing is truly separate."
The self is best thought of as some kind of a fiction, albeit a useful one. It’s difficult to control the chattering stream of thinking which makes up who we are, this ‘I’ that does not exist. Clinging to a particular version of a happy life, while fighting to end all possibility of an unhappy one, causes more problems than it solves.
Goals
Burkeman also backs up my thoughts on goal setting. He highlights a specific example. Everest climbers who had been lured into destruction by their passion for goals. The more they fixated on the endpoint, the more that goal became not just an external target but a part of their own identities. They reinterpreted negative evidence as a reason to invest more effort and resources in pursuit of the goal. And so things would go even more wrong.
To avoid the anguish that follows lack of goal achievement, you have to accept the mood you’re in then just get on do what you have to do. Sometimes you can’t make yourself feel like acting. Taking a non-attached stance: Who says you need to wait until you ‘feel like’ doing something to start doing it? Note the procrastinatory feelings and act anyway. The working routines of prolific authors and artists – people who do get a lot done – rarely include techniques for ‘getting motivated’. Quite the opposite: they tend to emphasise the mechanics of the working process. We can take action without changing the way we feel.
Interestingly, he also uncovers that The Yale Study of Goals never took place.
For me goals have to be set at an high level to be of any use. Some people have known for awhile now what they want, but just haven’t pursued it, and for them, it just takes a little contemplation to realize what they’ve wanted all along. Others will have a more difficult time, as they have never figured out what their dream is, or what they’d like to do. A simple exercise to help is to imagine you are eighty years old. Complete the sentences: ‘I wish I’d spent more time on…’ and ‘I wish I’d spent less time on…’. The answers should help provide guidance of your true life goals. Start living your life so that you will get to that point.
Uncertainty
Security is a kind of death whereas insecurity is another word for life. Faced with the anxiety of not knowing what the future holds, we invest ever more in our preferred vision of that future. Not because it will help us achieve it, but because it helps rid us of feelings of uncertainty in the present.
Consider any significant decision you’ve ever taken that you subsequently came to regret: you felt the gut-knotting ache of uncertainty; afterwards, having made a decision, did those feelings subside? If so, this points to the troubling possibility that your primary motivation in taking the decision wasn’t any rational consideration of its rightness for you, but the urgent need to get rid of your feelings of uncertainty.
Try asking yourself if you have any problems right now. The answer, unless you’re currently in physical pain, is likely to be no. Most problems involve thoughts about how something might turn out badly in the future, or thoughts about things that happened in the past. A staggering proportion of human activity is motivated by the desire to feel safe and secure.
In turning towards insecurity we may come to understand that security itself is a kind of illusion – and that we were mistaken, all along, about what it was we thought we were searching for. People have always believed that they are living in times of unique insecurity. Many of the ways in which we try to feel safe don’t make us happy.
We protect ourselves from physical danger by moving to safer neighbourhoods, but the effects of such trends on community life have been demonstrated to have a negative effect on collective levels of happiness. We seek the fulfilment of strong romantic relationships and friendships, yet striving too hard to achieve security in such relationships stifles them.
What’s the solution then? Like a frog: You should sun yourself on a lily-pad until you get bored; then, when the time is right, you should jump to a new lily-pad and hang out there for a while. Continue this over and over, moving in whatever direction feels right.
Death and Love
Reduce the terror induced by the mere thought of death. Fearing being dead yourself makes no sense. You don’t look back with horror at the eternal oblivion before you were born. Live a life suffused with the awareness of its own finitude, and you can hope to finish it in something like the fashion that Jean-Paul Sartre hoped to die:
"… quietly … certain that the last burst of my heart would be inscribed on the last page of my work, and that death would be taking only a dead man."
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung, and maybe broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no-one. The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you.
In Summary
After reading the book you realise that no matter how bad the situation, there is always a worse one. What the cult of optimism and positive thinking tries to do is to end uncertainty, to make happiness fixed and final. And unfortunately it all to often has the opposite effect. Accept your fear and your failure, don’t repress them or hide them under a bogus positive mindset.
British journalist Burkeman is straightforward and cynical. The Antidote contains ideas from the writer’s popular Guardian feature “This Column Will Change Your Life” strung together in a coherent narrative, leading to some inevitable conclusions.
Happiness
Don’t think of a bear. Too late, you’ve just done it. Trying to avoid an outcome is one we are most drawn to. This is why positive thinking doesn’t work. Add low-self esteem too and you’ll end-up less happy than when you started. The unwanted feelings become ever more solidified.
Burkeman explores Stoicism as a possible way forward, which is: Real Stoicism...involves developing a kind of muscular calm in the face of trying circumstances.
He suggests that is you visualise a successful outcome, then your motivation to achieve a goal reduces. By using negative visualisation you focus on what can go wrong, then cultivating a calm indifference towards things outside of your control. It is by adopting this process that you achieve tranquility.
After all it’s not a situation, events or people that cause us distress: Real Stoicism...involves developing a kind of muscular calm in the face of trying circumstances.
By considering losing the things you take for granted then you cultivate gratitude and reduce hedonic adaptation. As he says here:
"Thinking about the possibility of losing something you value shifts it from the backdrop of your life back to centre stage, where it can deliver pleasure once more."
He goes onto say:
"… reassurance can actually exacerbate anxiety: when you reassure your friend that the worst-case scenario he fears probably won’t occur, you inadvertently reinforce his belief that it would be catastrophic if it did. You are tightening the coil of his anxiety, not loosening it."
All too often, the Stoics note, things will not turn out for the best. But it is also true that, when they do go wrong, they’ll almost go less wrong than you feared. Thus, negative thinking should be something we do, and not something that happens to us.
Happiness isn’t about trying to control circumstances, hoping that the universe fall in line with your plans. This approach to negative thinking isn’t the opposite of positive thinking. It involves embracing our insecurities, flaws and sorrows and acknowledging that because we are human, we fail and make mistakes.
Burkman also advises that you avoid becoming hooked on mental narratives which promote how things should or shouldn’t be. By doing this then you avoid attachment, a Buddhist idea:
"We “pursue” happiness because we think it comes outside of ourselves. But it’s also because we think things are outside of ourselves that we are stressed about them and worry about them. Whatever can be found can also be lost.
There’s nothing wrong with striving to accomplish something, or making friends, or loving your spouse and children. The Buddha himself, after all, spent his life after his enlightenment associating with people, and teaching them. Non-attachment does not require extreme asceticism or shunning human contact. Non-attachment comes from the wisdom that nothing is truly separate."
The self is best thought of as some kind of a fiction, albeit a useful one. It’s difficult to control the chattering stream of thinking which makes up who we are, this ‘I’ that does not exist. Clinging to a particular version of a happy life, while fighting to end all possibility of an unhappy one, causes more problems than it solves.
Goals
Burkeman also backs up my thoughts on goal setting. He highlights a specific example. Everest climbers who had been lured into destruction by their passion for goals. The more they fixated on the endpoint, the more that goal became not just an external target but a part of their own identities. They reinterpreted negative evidence as a reason to invest more effort and resources in pursuit of the goal. And so things would go even more wrong.
To avoid the anguish that follows lack of goal achievement, you have to accept the mood you’re in then just get on do what you have to do. Sometimes you can’t make yourself feel like acting. Taking a non-attached stance: Who says you need to wait until you ‘feel like’ doing something to start doing it? Note the procrastinatory feelings and act anyway. The working routines of prolific authors and artists – people who do get a lot done – rarely include techniques for ‘getting motivated’. Quite the opposite: they tend to emphasise the mechanics of the working process. We can take action without changing the way we feel.
Interestingly, he also uncovers that The Yale Study of Goals never took place.
For me goals have to be set at an high level to be of any use. Some people have known for awhile now what they want, but just haven’t pursued it, and for them, it just takes a little contemplation to realize what they’ve wanted all along. Others will have a more difficult time, as they have never figured out what their dream is, or what they’d like to do. A simple exercise to help is to imagine you are eighty years old. Complete the sentences: ‘I wish I’d spent more time on…’ and ‘I wish I’d spent less time on…’. The answers should help provide guidance of your true life goals. Start living your life so that you will get to that point.
Uncertainty
Security is a kind of death whereas insecurity is another word for life. Faced with the anxiety of not knowing what the future holds, we invest ever more in our preferred vision of that future. Not because it will help us achieve it, but because it helps rid us of feelings of uncertainty in the present.
Consider any significant decision you’ve ever taken that you subsequently came to regret: you felt the gut-knotting ache of uncertainty; afterwards, having made a decision, did those feelings subside? If so, this points to the troubling possibility that your primary motivation in taking the decision wasn’t any rational consideration of its rightness for you, but the urgent need to get rid of your feelings of uncertainty.
Try asking yourself if you have any problems right now. The answer, unless you’re currently in physical pain, is likely to be no. Most problems involve thoughts about how something might turn out badly in the future, or thoughts about things that happened in the past. A staggering proportion of human activity is motivated by the desire to feel safe and secure.
In turning towards insecurity we may come to understand that security itself is a kind of illusion – and that we were mistaken, all along, about what it was we thought we were searching for. People have always believed that they are living in times of unique insecurity. Many of the ways in which we try to feel safe don’t make us happy.
We protect ourselves from physical danger by moving to safer neighbourhoods, but the effects of such trends on community life have been demonstrated to have a negative effect on collective levels of happiness. We seek the fulfilment of strong romantic relationships and friendships, yet striving too hard to achieve security in such relationships stifles them.
What’s the solution then? Like a frog: You should sun yourself on a lily-pad until you get bored; then, when the time is right, you should jump to a new lily-pad and hang out there for a while. Continue this over and over, moving in whatever direction feels right.
Death and Love
Reduce the terror induced by the mere thought of death. Fearing being dead yourself makes no sense. You don’t look back with horror at the eternal oblivion before you were born. Live a life suffused with the awareness of its own finitude, and you can hope to finish it in something like the fashion that Jean-Paul Sartre hoped to die:
"… quietly … certain that the last burst of my heart would be inscribed on the last page of my work, and that death would be taking only a dead man."
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung, and maybe broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no-one. The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you.
In Summary
After reading the book you realise that no matter how bad the situation, there is always a worse one. What the cult of optimism and positive thinking tries to do is to end uncertainty, to make happiness fixed and final. And unfortunately it all to often has the opposite effect. Accept your fear and your failure, don’t repress them or hide them under a bogus positive mindset.
beholderess's review against another edition
3.0
I've had high hopes for this book, as I do in fact hate positive thinking and the cult of optimism.
However, I think this book is lacking deep research and evidence, except anecdotal, about whether the negative capacity techniques the author suggests instead actually lead to a better life. More often than not, an example of one extraordinary person is taken as the main evidence.
Plus this book seems to lack a unified central thread. Here is this person with this interesting idea, and another with that, and next chapter is yet another with that, and it is not immediately clear how does it come together.
The author's understanding of positive psychology also seems a bit haphazard and lacking - he pretty much lumps everything characteristic of the contemporary American corporate self-help under that label.
That being said, I've still enjoyed the book, and I have learned some new things
However, I think this book is lacking deep research and evidence, except anecdotal, about whether the negative capacity techniques the author suggests instead actually lead to a better life. More often than not, an example of one extraordinary person is taken as the main evidence.
Plus this book seems to lack a unified central thread. Here is this person with this interesting idea, and another with that, and next chapter is yet another with that, and it is not immediately clear how does it come together.
The author's understanding of positive psychology also seems a bit haphazard and lacking - he pretty much lumps everything characteristic of the contemporary American corporate self-help under that label.
That being said, I've still enjoyed the book, and I have learned some new things
myk_yeah's review against another edition
5.0
This book totally changed my approach to life and helped me relax about "doing it right" or leading a perfectly productive life.
acordulfin's review against another edition
4.0
I got a lot of use out if this book. It's also very quotable:
“Who says you need to wait until you 'feel like' doing something in order to start doing it? The problem, from this perspective, isn't that you don't feel motivated; it's that you imagine you need to feel motivated. If you can regard your thoughts and emotions about whatever you're procrastinating on as passing weather, you'll realize that your reluctance about working isn't something that needs to be eradicated or transformed into positivity. You can coexist with it. You can note the procrastinatory feelings and act anyway.”
“And here lies the essential between Stoicism and the modern-day 'cult of optimism.' For the Stoics, the ideal state of mind was tranquility, not the excitable cheer that positive thinkers usually seem to mean when they use the word, 'happiness.' And tranquility was to be achieved not by strenuously chasing after enjoyable experiences, but by cultivating a kind of calm indifference towards one's circumstances.”
“True security lies in the unrestrained embrace of insecurity - in the recognition that we never really stand on solid ground, and never can.”
“The effort to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable. And that it is out constant efforts to eliminate the negative - insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness - that is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.”
“Sometimes the most valuable of all talents is to be able not to seek resolution; to notice the craving for completeness or certainty or comfort, and not to feel compelled to follow where it leads.”
“It is alarming to consider how many major life decisions we take primarily in order to minimise present-moment emotional discomfort.”
“Pain is inevitable, from this perspective, but suffering is an optional extra, resulting from our attachments, which represent our attempt to try to deny the unavoidable truth that everything is impermanent.”
readerette's review
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
slow-paced
4.5
Much of the book generated nothing actionable for me, but I think it was more about providing lots of anecdotes and methods beyond the confines of American positivity overload to help with a good mindset about finding happiness (or something better).
hamikka's review against another edition
3.0
I wish I could give this a higher rating, since a large part of the book is quite thought-provoking and cohesive. I like how he pulls together some very disparate philosophies and mindsets to counteract the positive positivity motivational propaganda. Unfortunately, I'm not sure why Eckhart Tolle was included at all, since seemingly little of his writings and almost none of the author's interview were actually referenced in the book. Lumping Alan Watts with Tolle's mishmash seemed confusing to the point of unfairness. The book picked up a bit after that nebulous middle section, but by then my skepticism was over-piqued and I just wanted to get through it to be finished with it.
Recommended, with reservations, and chapters 5 and 6 are highly skimmable.
Recommended, with reservations, and chapters 5 and 6 are highly skimmable.
debshelf's review against another edition
4.0
3.75 stars
After having been surrounding & bombarded by the "cult/ure of positive thinking" for most of my adult life, this book was a breath of fresh air. It helped me understand a few things about myself, for instance why affirmations have never helped me and usually just end up making me feel worse, and provided me with some tools with which to approach the more distressful parts of my life. I feel like I need to spend more time with the section of the book on Buddhism and Eckhart Tolle's "discoveries" about self, because I'll admit that I got a little lost in there. The sections on the Stoics and memento mori were the most helpful and illuminating for me, personally.
After having been surrounding & bombarded by the "cult/ure of positive thinking" for most of my adult life, this book was a breath of fresh air. It helped me understand a few things about myself, for instance why affirmations have never helped me and usually just end up making me feel worse, and provided me with some tools with which to approach the more distressful parts of my life. I feel like I need to spend more time with the section of the book on Buddhism and Eckhart Tolle's "discoveries" about self, because I'll admit that I got a little lost in there. The sections on the Stoics and memento mori were the most helpful and illuminating for me, personally.