It could be argued that Burkeman does not go far enough. See how the Daily Mail taps into the fear of a large segment of the middle class that their respectable status is vulnerable and could be taken away any minute by a government or Europe that doesn't care. And worries about becoming insecure do seem to be at the root of a lot of anxiety in western societies. The right lesson to draw, he concludes, is that although extreme insecurity is a bad thing, it provides one huge benefit: you cannot be worried about losing your security if you don't have any to lose in the first place.
For instance, in Kenya he can see that simply taking the apparent happiness of its people at face value is "laden with problems", from the racism of thinking that "primitive" people are simpler souls than westerners to the political conclusion that nothing needs to be done to alleviate their poverty. And he spends the Day of the Dead in a Mexican hamlet to understand better why it's good to remind yourself vividly of your mortality.Īll of this provides plenty of opportunities to be pat, glib or superficial but Burkeman never takes them. He travels to Kibera in Kenya to see just why it is that the impoverished, slum-dwelling residents still seem to be pretty happy. So, taking the advice of Stoic-inspired psychotherapist Albert Ellis, he says the names of tube stations out loud at each stop, in order to get over the feeling that it would somehow be terrible if people thought him mad. The bulk of the book sees Burkeman walk down these paths increasingly less trodden. It is rather a family of approaches that share an interest in coming to terms with the imperfections of reality in a number of different ways. And so, paradoxically, it is by thinking more about the downers in life, such as the inevitability of death, the inescapability of suffering or the impossibility of security, that we achieve something like happiness.īurkeman is keen to emphasise that the negative path is not "one single, comprehensive, neatly packaged philosophy" and nor is it a "panacea".
This Burkeman calls the "negative path": the idea that the more we strive for happiness, and other psychological goods like security and confidence, the less we achieve them. Burkeman noticed that "something united all those psychologists and philosophers – and even the odd self-help guru – whose ideas seemed actually to hold water". Those same qualities are on display in The Antidote, which also allows him to go beyond the limits of the column and get almost as close as you can to a recipe for contentment while rejecting the whole idea of a wellbeing formula.
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