Book Review:
The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, by Oliver Burkeman
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2012)
By Anne Newins and Bob Buddemeier
As soon as we saw this title, we knew we had to read it. Anne has despised motivational and self-help literature and posters for decades. In fact, she used to share demotivational post cards with colleagues. Some samples are shown. To acquire your own, go to despair.com. Bob’s Life Guideline has for many decades been “Pessimists are seldom unpleasantly surprised.”
But, back to the matter at hand. Oliver Burkeman (oliverburkeman.com) is a British author and journalist and a long-time columnist for the Guardian newspaper. He also publishes a bimonthly email, The Imperfectionist, about “productivity, mortality, the power of limits, and building a meaningful life in an age of bewilderment.” The book follows these topics, pointing out that meaning and productivity are optional, and depend on one’s ability to deal constructively with the mandatory aspects of life – mortality and limits.
In The Antidote, Burkeman leads the reader through a winding path of ancient and modern philosophers, business leaders, psychologists, and others who have diverse ways of considering the meaning and purpose of life, which doesn’t necessarily mean being happy in a conventional sense. There are chapters about Stoicism, Buddhism, rational-emotive thinking, “the self,” and inevitably, death. He scoffs at the importance placed by many people on pursuing fixed, clearly defined goals. Burkeman blends research, interviews, and experience (including self-experimentation) with humor and integrative analysis to create a readable and informative argument.
One favorite quote is by psychologist Albert Ellis, who said, “If you accept that the universe is uncontrollable, you are going to be a lot less anxious.” Or as Stoic philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius claimed, “Things do not touch the soul. Our perturbations come only from the opinion that is within.” An equally pithy man-in-the street quote is attributed to a fellow attendee at a Get Motivated! seminar, who said at the end, “OK, I’m motivated now — is it time for some beer?”
An engaging chapter describes the Museum of Failures, an institution in Ann Arbor, Michigan that houses an enormous number of products that failed. The institution’s primary purpose is for manufacturers, whose representatives come and browse what has failed (for example, Fortune Snookies, fortune cookies for dogs, were flops). Who could have thought Clairol’s Touch of Yoghurt Shampoo, caffeinated beer, or TV dinners branded with Colgate’s toothpaste logos would have succeeded? Probably only someone imbued with the mindless optimism and singleness of purpose fostered by the peddlers of relentless positivism.
The latter portion of that chapter takes a more serious approach to the value of embracing failure and letting go of perfectionism. Burkeman notes that “There is an openness and honesty in failure, a down to earth confrontation with reality that is lacking at the higher altitudes of success.”
This book is more than a send-up of self-help books and the ilk of happiness gurus like Robert Schuller; it is a serious and useful guide to more self-acceptance, realism, contentment, and yes, even happiness. “The optimism-focused, goal-fixated, positive-thinking approach to happiness is exactly the kind of things the ego loves… Schemes and plans for making things better fuel our dissatisfaction with the only place where happiness can ever be found – the present.”
Copies of The Antidote may be found in the “Red Dot” uncatalogued section of the RVM library, the Jackson County library, or for reasonable prices online.
