The Antidote: Book Thoughts

I was digging the garden recently when it occurred to me that I’d noticed a distinct shift in both my thoughts and conversations over the last few years. When meeting up with long-time friends after a long period, our conversations were no longer excitable tales of recent adventures and how well everything was going but an altogether more sullen affair. The typical conversation went like this:

Hey, how’ve you been? Alright you? Yeah alright cheers. What you been up to recently? Ah not much mate, you? Same mate, same.

There was this sense that nothing was worth talking about anymore which permeated the first part of the conversation, as though the inevitable events that constituted the latest period of our lives were somewhat arbitrary. It normally took 15 minutes or so before you’d learn about their adventures growing their own potatoes or drama at work.

Additionally, I’d felt this same feeling internally, a gnawing feeling that I was past my best and somehow fading into banal irrelevance as I aged. Looking to remedy this, I wanted to find a book written about ‘how to be happy’. Knowing this area of publishing was fraught with snake oil and despising the deeply American flavour of sickening positivity, I specifically asked ChatGPT for something with the right amount of British scepticism.

Having spent the whole day listening to The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman, I can say it’s a great little book. Beautifully, it started with a tale of a trip to some basketball court in Texas to hear of ex-presidents and sus sounding pseudo-religious types extolling the virtues of banishing all negativity before thoroughly debunking the value of such an activity.

I don’t really know how to do book reviews, so here are some of the key things I took away. I’ve probably bastardised and twisted all the arguments and insights here, but I guess that’s the point.

Yeah, it might go tits up, but do it anyway. It won’t be as bad as you think.

A key theme of the whole book is centred around negativity, consequences and failure. Several anecdotes are told. There’s a woman who developed a crippling fear of intimacy for the fear of contracting HIV. No amount of telling her that it’s a super slim chance would allay her fears. The remedy here is ‘yep, you might get HIV, and that would be pretty shite in the grand scheme of things, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world’. Knowing that something bad might happen, internalising it, then doing it anyway allows you to take control and take reasonable precautions.

Stoicism is legit.

I’m reasonably sure my dad has no idea what stoicism is, let alone read a book on the subject, but he might as well be Marcus Aurelius. So much of this way of thinking has shaped my upbringing and resonates extremely deeply with me. Here are some of the key ideas I took away, in the language of a Barnsley scruff.

There’s no use crying over spilled milk is there?

Stoicism teaches the idea that in life there are lots of things you can’t control. People do nasty things, bad shit happens to you. You can’t control this. What you can control is how you internalise and react to this. Again the idea of failure and misfortune permeates this. It’s entirely possible for you to do everything right and it still go tits up. Recognise this, internalise it.

Shurrup whining about it.

There’s a bit of nuance here, though. The key bit is not to let everything bounce off you, or to bottle everything up. You’ve got to take a minute, recognise you’re feeling the way you’re feeling, soak it up, then let go. If you don’t dwell at all you lose the opportunity to learn from your experiences. But dwell too long and you let the emotion consume you until you become paralysed by them or act out on pure emotion.

Nowt lasts forever.

This is another key theme throughout the book. There’s a whole section which crosses over into Buddhism which talks about the idea of being comfortable with the shifting nature of things. Accept that you might lose your house, or a relationship might break down or that you might die.

There’s loads more to stoicism, but this isn’t a lecture, and I don’t know half of it anyway. I should read more on the subject.

You don’t have to be motivated to turn up

The mainstay of the traditional motivational speaker is in the name itself, they seek to provide motivation. In fact, the name of the event in the basketball court was called Get Motivated! (Fuck off mate.) A key bit I took from the book is the idea that getting stuff done isn’t predicated on being motivated at all. There’s no rule which says you have to be motivated to get something done. In fact, adding that rule adds some sort of acceptance gate for starting which in turn makes you less likely to start.

The book talks about the well-documented habit of truly productive people to substitute motivation or divine inspiration for a more mechanical process of simply dragging your arse out of bed and doing it anyway. This concept is intrinsically true to me but easy to forget. It’s the reason I’m writing this blog post now. I’ve been waiting for some sort of incredible topic to start writing more on my blog, but it ain’t coming. Pick something and just start.

This was not mentioned at all in the book, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. I often drastically overestimate what I can do in a month but underestimate what I can do in a year. Picking that one weekend you’re gonna finish the whole garden is dumb. Go out every day with your shovel for an hour.

Meditation???

I’m not sure what point I have here other than I think maybe I should try meditation. My mind-state means it will probably be physically painful for me to stay still that long. But maybe that’s why it’ll be valuable?

Goals are for losers, be like a frog

There was a lengthy section all about goals and goal setting, and how they may actually be counter-productive to progress while also making you feel like shit. I feel this in my bones, my life is littered with endless 3 and 5-year
plans. What I can say for sure is that I failed to complete most of them, and the ones I did finish largely left me feeling unfulfilled.

What is definitely true, though, is that the pursuit of these goals has almost always led me down some meandering garden path, which has ultimately led to an opportunity which has made me happier or improved my life.

I’m not sure I’m totally against goals in the totalitarian way that some detractors were in the book. I think that goals can be incredibly useful ways to break up seemingly impossible tasks into manageable chunks and achieving them. Buuuutt, I think that you’ve gotta be careful that you don’t mindlessly pursue the goal for the goals sake. Don’t sacrifice all the other elements of your life and be ready to change your mind or the goal in the face of new evidence and always be willing to take that side quest, it might turn out to be the main storyline.

The idea of being like a frog is that you go and sit on a lily pad while the sun is on it, then when the sun goes away you move to the next one, without planning your lily pad strategy for the next 5 years. I’ll be honest, I thought the metaphor was a bit shit, but I liked the concept.

The wisdom of life is knowing when to pursue an idea with tenacity and when to fuck it off as a bad job.

Conclusion

I’m not sure I learned how to be happy from the book. But I think maybe I did learn that being happy and positive all the time is sort of a dumb goal in and of itself. It stands to obvious reason that you can’t have positive without negative and highs without lows for contrast.

I did have a nice moment while sitting and listening to it quietly during a break from digging my imperfect, unfinished garden where it hit me that the weather was nice and my big old tree looked beautiful. Maybe that was meditation and happiness all in one?