The Antidote

"For what?", you ask.  It's an excellent question, and, to be honest, after reading "The Antidote," a Grisham-esquely titled book by Oliver Burkeman, I still can't answer it.  To the best of my knowledge, the word "antidote" appears nowhere else in the book.  Nitpicking aside, I found the book, based on columns the author published in the Guardian.Weekend magazine, well written and well researched.  Like a Michael Lewis story, but with weirder characters - as if Michael Lewis had written a non-fiction version of Harry Potter.  (That analogy occurred to me after the first couple of chapters.  Later, by coincidence, J.K. Rowling makes a brief appearance.)

Here's how the book starts:

The man who claims that he is about to tell me the secret of human happiness is eighty-three years old, with an alarming orange tan that does nothing to enhance his credibility.  It is just after eight o'clock on a December morning, in a darkened basketball stadium on the outskirts of San Antonio in Texas, and - according to the orange man - I am about to learn 'the one thing that will change your life forever.'  I'm skeptical, but not as much as I might normally be, because I am only one of more than fifteen thousand people at Get Motivated!, America's 'most popular business motivational seminar,'  and the enthusiasm of my fellow members is starting to become infectious. ...  'Here's the thing that will change your life forever.'  [Dr Schuller, author of more than 35 books on positive thinking] then barks a single syllable - 'Cut!' - and leaves a dramatic pause before completing the sentence '... the word 'impossible' out of your life!  Cut it out!  Cut it out forever!'  The audience combusts. ...

The book's subtitle is much more specific: "Happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking."   Although I can't remember how the book caught my eye, I imagine this is it. People rarely accuse me of being excessively positive, a characteristic that, according to Burkeman, I share with journalists like himself.

This early passage contains hints of what comes later:

The logic of Schuller's philosophy, which is the doctrine of positive thinking at its most distilled, isn't exactly complex: decide to think happy and successful thoughts - banish the spectres of sadness and failure - and happiness and success will follow.  It could be argued that not every speaker listed in the glossy brochure for today's seminar provides uncontroversial evidence in support of this outlook: the keynote speech is to be delivered, in a few hours' time, by George W. Bush, a president far from universally viewed as successful.  But if you voiced this objection to Dr. Schuller, he would probably dismiss it as 'negativity thinking.'  To criticize the power of positivity is to demonstrate that you haven't really grasped it at all.  If you had, you would stop grumbling about such things, and indeed about anything else.

A brilliant business model: the less effective the philosophy is, the more profitable it becomes, since it can't be falsified, and all 15,000 attendees become prospective customers for Schuller's next visit to San Antonio.  But Burkeman's takedown of Schuller's philosophy turns out to be more perspicacious than merely suggesting that not all positive thinkers are successful and happy (although, I hasten to add, Bush 43 is nearly universally viewed as happy, inexplicably so); he points out that the power of positivity may not even lead to positive thoughts.  This is the realm of ironic process theory, which evolved out of research conducted by Daniel Wegner, a Professor of Psychology at Harvard.  At its core, it suggests that certain things are harder - nee impossible - to do when you try to do them, such as "not thinking about a white bear."  Being happy is one such thing, Burkeman argues.  Paraphrasing Burkeman, we can glimpse it out of the corner of our eye, but can't see it when we look directly at it; "For a civilization so fixated on happiness, we seem remarkably incompetent at the task. ... 'Ask yourself whether you are happy,' observed the philosopher John Stuart Mill, 'and you cease to be so.'"  During a chapter on Buddhism, the astute reader will contemplate that the secret to happiness might be, paradoxically, to not care whether or not we are happy.

Breathtakingly negative topics - Stoicism; a guy who sat on a park bench for two years; failure; insecurity; Mexico's fascination with death; the world's largest pubic louse - succumb to Burkeman's cheerful, engaging prose.  At times I think the book is repetitive, but it doesn't feel repetitive; when he finds several interesting ways to say the same thing, I'll happily read them all.  Analogous to Clinton's "third way" in politics, Burkeman's opus is a third angle on happiness, between "the futile effort to pursue solutions that never seem to work, on the one hand, and just giving up, on the other."  Sounds plausible to me, paradoxes and all.