Jessica Stillman

Oct 25, 2023 (entrylevelrebel.medium.com)

Scientists did an experiment not too long ago where they asked volunteers to solve tricky problems, like stabilizing a shaky Lego tower or figuring out geometric puzzles. Almost always, they observed, the study subjects tried to add something. This was true even when taking away bricks or shapes was objectively the faster, easier way to solve the problem.

The scientists called this phenomenon “subtraction bias” and declared it a shared feature of the human mind. People just tend to prefer to solve problems by addition rather than subtraction. And what holds true of engineering challenges and brainteasers also holds true of happiness (and intelligence).

For greater well-being, subtract misery

If you would like to be happier in your work and life, chances are excellent your first impulse will be to add something. Maybe you could exercise or meditate more? Perhaps a new career direction would solve your woes? Indeed, those are often good happiness moves, but as Harvard happiness researcher Arthur Brooks recently pointed out in The Atlantic, they are only half the happiness equation.

Yes, we can improve well-being by adding joy to our lives. But we can also achieve the same aim by subtracting misery. Brooks even links to a test that can tell you which approach is likely to be more successful for you. What practices or habits should be on the chopping block if you want to stop overlooking the subtractive approach to greater happiness? For inspiration, Brooks looks to the writings of the great philosopher and Nobel laureate in literature Bertrand Russell.

Russell, who has been coming up strangely often in my reading lately, believed “unhappiness to be very largely due to mistaken views of the world,” and broke these common misery-inducing mistakes into eight categories.

1. Fashionable pessimism

In plenty of circles these days, being grumpy and cynical is taken as a sign of depth and intelligence. This is not a new phenomenon, Brooks points out. Melancholy was all the rage in Victorian times, too. Choosing moodiness to look cool was dumb then, continued to be dumb in Russell’s time, when he mocked it mercilessly, and is dumb now.

2. Social comparison

Russell believed that “what most people fear is not falling into destitution but ‘that they will fail to outshine their neighbors,’” Brooks explains. Keeping up with the Jones is a never-ending game that can lead to lifelong discontent. And if you don’t believe the Nobel laureate, there’s modern science to prove it. The solution to social comparison, according to Russell, is to “focus on what you have and feel grateful.”

3. Envy

Closely linked to the above mistake, envy is the condition of feeling bad because someone else has more than you. Russell’s proposed this cure for envy: “Whoever wishes to increase human happiness must wish to increase admiration.” Rather than suffer because of other people’s excellence, celebrate and learn from it.

4. Evading boredom

“We are less bored than our ancestors were,” Russell wrote in 1930, “but we are more afraid of boredom.” Imagine what he would have made of the smartphone era! But the truth is, no gadget or streaming service can fully save you from boredom. They can, however, distract you from essential but uncomfortable reflection and creative growth. The solution is to fight to regain your capacity to just sit quietly and notice the world around you.

5. Coping with fear

Anxiety has only increased since Russell’s day, and it remains a thief of joy. “Russell believed that anxiety is rooted in fear of ‘some danger which we are unwilling to face,’” Brooks notes before highlighting modern science on the biological basis of anxiety disorders. But whatever the cause of your free-floating fear, not going to the effort of finding ways to tame it will make you miserable. Russell — and Tim Ferriss — suggests the best cure is forcing yourself to mentally face your fears until they lose some of their terror.

6. Senseless guilt

Should you feel guilty and make amends if you did something wrong and hurt someone? Of course, but Russell argued against a baseless sense of sin or feeling guilty just because you are doing well and others are doing less well.

7. Virtuous victimhood

Russell again feels ahead of his time with his warnings against playing the victim. “Russell was critical of what he called ‘persecution mania,’ in which one is ‘perpetually the victim of ingratitude, unkindness, and treachery.’ One version of this is what some researchers have called ‘virtuous victimhood,’” explains Brooks. Of course, sometimes people really are victims of injustice, but putting unending victimhood at the heart of your identity is a recipe for unhappiness.

8. Fear of public opinion

According to hospice nurses and others who work with the dying, among the most common deathbed regrets is living a life you thought others expected of you rather than one that was true to you. Russell apparently would not have been surprised. “One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny,” he wrote.

This is just a taste of what Brooks and Russell have to say on each of these categories, so if you’d like to learn more, check out the complete article.

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Written by Jessica Stillman

Top Inc.com columnist/ Editor/ Ghostwriter. Book lover. Travel fiend. Nap enthusiast. https://jessicastillman.com/

By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)

“To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control,” philosopher Martha Nussbaum concluded in considering how to live with our human fragility. And yet in the face of overwhelming uncertainty, when the world seems to splinter and crumble in the palm of our civilization’s hand, something deeper and more robust than blind trust is needed to keep us anchored to our own goodness — something pulsating with rational faith in the human spirit and a profound commitment to goodness.

That is what Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) explores in the out-of-print treasure New Hopes for a Changing World (public library), composed a year after he received the Nobel Prize, while humanity was still shaking off the dust and dread of its Second World War and already shuddering with the catastrophic nuclear threat of the Cold War.

Bertrand Russell

Observing that his time, like ours, is marked by “a feeling of impotent perplexity” and “a deep division in our souls between the sane and the insane parts,” Russell considers the consequence such total world-overwhelm has on the human spirit:

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.

And yet, with his unfaltering reasoned optimism, he insists that there is an alternate view of our human destiny — one that vitalizes rather than paralyzes, based on “the completest understanding of the moods, the despairs, and the maddening doubts” that beset us; one that helps mitigate the worst of Western culture — “our restlessness, our militarism, our fanaticism, and our ruthless belief in mechanism” — and amplifies the best in it: “the spirit of free inquiry, the understanding of the conditions of general prosperity, and emancipation from superstition.” He examines the root of our modern perplexity, perhaps even more pronounced in our time than it was in his:

Traditional systems of dogma and traditional codes of conduct have not the hold that they formerly had. Men and women are often in genuine doubt as to what is right and what is wrong, and even as to whether right and wrong are anything more than ancient superstitions. When they try to decide such questions for themselves they find them too difficult. They cannot discover any clear purpose that they ought to pursue or any clear principle by which they should be guided. Stable societies may have principles that, to the outsider, seem absurd. But so long as the societies remain stable their principles are subjectively adequate. That is to say they are accepted by almost everybody unquestioningly, and they make the rules of conduct as clear and precise as those of the minuet or the heroic couplet. Modern life, in the West, is not at all like a minuet or a heroic couplet. It is like free verse which only the poet can distinguish from prose.

Illustration by Margaret C. Cook for a rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)

This torment, Russell argues, is simply the growing pains of our civilization. When we reach maturity, we would attain a life “full of joy and vigour and mental health.” Building on his lifelong reckoning with the meaning of the good life and the nature of happiness, he writes:

The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy; I mean that if you are happy you will be good. Unhappiness is deeply implanted in the souls of most of us.

[…]

A way of life cannot be successful so long as it is a mere intellectual conviction. It must be deeply felt, deeply believed, dominant even in dreams.

He offers a lucid and luminous prescription for attaining the good life, individually and as a society:

What I should put in the place of an ethic in the old sense is encouragement and opportunity for all the impulses that are creative and expansive. I should do everything possible to liberate men from fear, not only conscious fears, but the old imprisoned primeval terrors that we brought with us out of the jungle. I should make it clear, not merely as an intellectual proposition, but as something that the heart spontaneously believes, that it is not by making others suffer that we shall achieve our own happiness, but that happiness and the means to happiness depend upon harmony with other men. When all this is not only understood but deeply felt, it will be easy to live in a way that brings happiness equally to ourselves and to others. If men could think and feel in this way, not only their personal problems, but all the problems of world politics, even the most abstruse and difficult, would melt away. Suddenly, as when the mist dissolves from a mountain top, the landscape would be visible and the way would be clear. It is only necessary to open the doors of our hearts and minds to let the imprisoned demons escape and the beauty of the world take possession.

Complement New Hopes for a Changing World with the poetic scientist Lewis Thomas on how to live with ourselves and each other and Virginia Woolf on finding beauty in the uncertainty of time, space, and being, then revisit Russell on the four desires driving all human behavior and how to grow old.