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

Guest review by Ignaty Dyakov: THE ART OF POSSIBILITY by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander

"There are many books on self-development ... What is different here is the angle, the point of view and the calibre of stories, parables and personal experiences which fill this book."

Ignaty Dyakov wears several hats (apart from a deer-stalker and a faux-fur Russian hat). A Chartered Linguist, he has authored a series of unconventional Russian and ELT textbooks, which help students learn grammar and vocabulary through fun-to-read detective stories. They are now used at universities and schools all over the world, US, UK and France being the biggest markets. Ignaty is currently on the Management Committee of the Society of Authors, where he also chairs the Educational Writers Group.

In recent years, after he qualified as a life coach and Ayurvedic consultant, he has set up a health and wellbeing coaching practice in the Midlands. He works on a one-to-one basis, delivers talks and workshops and writes articles on a holistic approach to health, complementary therapies and coaching methods. More information can be found on www.lifesensei.uk or on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/lifesenseiuk/

In his spare time, he loves writing and reading short stories, walking, vegan cooking and a bit of DIY.

There are many books on self-development written by motivational speakers, business performance coaches, and inspirational gurus. Some will be considered classics, some will have merit, many will be vanity projects. Among them one finds a book co-authored by a conductor. A conductor, I hear you ask, a conductor? What can an orchestra conductor teach us about life, mindset, positive thinking? Admittedly, the usual ideas, mostly, what a well-read person with at least some analytical inclinations would know anyway. What is different here is the angle, the point of view and the calibre of stories, parables and personal experiences which fill this book to its cover.

Two authors: an introvert and an extrovert; a wife and a husband; a psychotherapist and a conductor; a quiet, more theorising voice with the narrative of case studies and personal childhood stories and a full-bodied brass ensemble of… to appreciate Benjamin’s impetus, one might want to watch a talk or two of his on YouTube. Authors of each story in the book are clearly identified, but we would probably feel who has penned it – Ben or Roz.

The Zanders’ mindset is pretty much summarised in the first line of The Art of Possibility: “Waiter,” I said in an exuberant mood, “I have a perfect life, but I don’t have a knife” (that is, of course, Ben talking). It is all here: harmony, mischief, directness, positivity. What follows is the explanation of twelve practices, which can either work altogether, or be picked up individually – whatever each of us, readers, might find useful. There are chapters on passion and igniting a spark, on creating frameworks for possibility or being a contribution; my favourite ones are ‘it’s all invented’, ‘rule number 6’, and ‘giving an A’.

It is indeed all invented. We don’t see the world, but a map of the world, one of many. The world seems to us sorted and packaged, with the help of the culture we live in, the education we get, the personal journey we make. The famous experiment, in which Me’en people in Ethiopia were presented with photographs for the first time and were unable to ‘read’ them, proves that without the conventions of modern life we wouldn’t see anything but a shiny piece of material. The frames our minds create define (or rather confine) what we think to be possible, what solutions we find. If we remember that we are the inventors, we can create new frames.

This leads us nicely to the practice called ‘Rule Number 6’, which reads, “Don’t take yourself so goddamn serious”. It is based on a widely publicised story of two prime ministers, in which one PM observes remarkable and instant transformation in staff behaviour every time his counterparty announces ‘Remember Rule Number Six’. There aren’t any other rules, by the way. If we follow said rule and lighten up over our demands, caprices and entitlements, the Zanders point out, we will be transported into a new universe, co-operative in nature.

Grades rarely say much about the work done, they are just matching one student’s work against another’s. We then take the same approach to life and assign different grades to people, events, or places. This doesn’t offer any reflection on them, but creates a strain of competition and, often, a blow to morale. The practice of assigning an A to anyone and anything at any time gets you to a place of respect, which, in turn, provides said people, events, or places room to realise themselves. The Zanders say, “This A is not an expectation to live up to, but a possibility to live into”.

A book on developing a positive mindset could easily be indigestible: king-size in many hundreds of thousands words, ideally simmered in small font, boiled with a pinch of patronising, over-spiced with guru-style ‘revelations’ and professional jargon. The Zanders created quite a different type – simple, concise, yet versatile and full of real-life examples. How fascinating!

The Art of Possibility is published by Harvard Business School Press.