Lockdown Sunday extra: THE ANTIDOTE - Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, by Oliver Burkeman, reviewed by Nick Manns

"What would Keats do?"

Nick Manns taught English in comprehensive schools in south London and the Midlands for 20 years. He is the author of four novels for young adults, including Control Shift and Dead Negative, and is a founder (and director) of Dyslexia Lifeline, a company based at De Montfort University, Leicester. 

Imagine: you’re standing in a tube carriage and as the train slows to enter a station, you announce to everyone, in a big, loud confident voice the name of the approaching stop… ‘Chancery Lane’, say. And then continue your journey, loudly advising your fellow travellers of different destinations: ‘Holborn…Tottenham Court Road…Oxford Circus…’ and so on. Ceasing only when your own stopping-off point has arrived.

This unusual scenario was an exercise undertaken by the Guardian’s roving reporter on the psyche, Oliver Burkeman, at the behest of a New York psychologist. The exercise wasn’t just to expose him to pain and humiliation, but to enable him to recognise that his (and our) feelings about situations aren’t the result of stuff, ‘out there’, but the consequence of our attitudes towards them. The public announcements weren’t inherently ‘embarrassing’ – those (real) feelings were the result of Burkeman’s perception of the situation. These moments, where external events trigger an internal response, are two a penny, of course:

irritation at the man at the checkout who tries to (slowly) locate his debit card; anger at the idiot in the car ahead who’s barely doing 20 (in a 30 mph zone).

Burkeman has been reporting on psychology and philosophy for the Guardian’s This Column will Change Your Life, for donkey’s yonks and in The Antidote he reports on our fear of failure, uncertainty and insecurity. How come, he asks, is the affluent West, ‘so fixated on achieving happiness’, and so poor at delivering on that expectation? It’s with this conundrum that he sets out on his globe-trotting exploration to find out what might work – and report back on his findings. This journey takes him to a motivation seminar (for 15,000 people) in Texas (optimistically titled GET MOTIVATED!) to Africa’s second largest urban slum (Kibera, outside Nairobi). He walks through the hostile streets of Mexico City on the Day of the Dead (to share a communal vigil in a cemetery) and he reports back on the fad for goal setting.

He notes that there’s a huge ‘happiness industry’ out there (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, anyone?) whose failure can be measured in the annual increase of new titles. He notes that goal setting led to the bankruptcy of General Motors in 2009 and the death of eight climbers on Everest during one bleak day in 1996. And he goes to Kibera to find out why, despite the lack of running water, electricity and sanitation; the high rate of HIV and sexual violence, numerous surveys of the populace indicate that the people there are happier than those in the developed world.

So, what gives: what did he learn from his experiences? What can we take from this richly rewarding book?

There isn’t one ‘magic bullet’ that will solve all our difficulties: Waterstone’s isn’t going to slip you the keys to nirvana. Burkeman notes that goal setting can be useful (but not when it becomes dogma – as in the fetish for SMART targets); being positive can help get stuff done (but not when it means being upbeat at all costs) and he suggests a reassessment of ways of thinking and of apprehending the highs and lows of life.

He acknowledges the power and relevance of two (complementary) schools of thought: the approaches of both modern-day Stoics and Buddhists. Burkeman reports that the key lesson that the Stoics of Ancient Greece and Rome (and cognitive behavioural therapists) impart is the need to face-up to those things we fear, because our anxieties magnify possible outcomes and ‘struggling to escape our demons gives them their power’. You might not fancy announcing tube stops but it isn’t going to kill you. (He reports on other fun activities to test your mettle).

Burkeman also explores Buddhist thinking. During a week-long retreat in central Massachusetts, in which the key injunction was to focus on breathing, despite initial difficulties (he couldn’t get the irritating song Barbie Girl from intruding on his attempts at bliss), he learnt to observe and accept the stray thoughts – the fears, worries and anxieties – that came and went. There was no pressure to banish ‘pessimistic thinking’ or ‘be positive’: he learnt that it was all so much mental weather. And he also learnt a more profound lesson: that it’s a mistake to conflate mental chatter with any notions of ‘self’.

Burkeman acknowledges this approach to life is uncannily close to the thinking of a 22 year old, 200 years ago. While trudging back from a pantomime in December 1817, John Keats ruminated on how people might confront the vicissitudes of daily living. He felt that a ‘person of achievement’ possessed something he termed, ‘Negative Capability’. Such a person would be able to cope with ‘uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…’.

In his gloss on this, Burkeman writes: ‘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 be compelled to follow where it leads.’

And so, after braving Mexican gangsters and risking humiliation on the Central Line, Burkeman’s take-away is that although we might not be able to write Ode to a Nightingale, we could learn to resist the urge to clamber onto the stage of our mental theatre and try to fix that which we find disagreeable.

‘Bond Street, anyone?’

The Antidote is published by Vintage.

See also: The Art of Possibility, by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander, reviewed by Ignaty Dyakov

The Darker the Night, the Brighter the Stars by Paul Broks, reviewed by Nick Manns