I rather enjoyed this book, so I wanted to capture the main takeaway.
You can read it for yourself in Oliver's quaint British phrasings below (Paraphrased), or you can skip down to the bottom to catch my simple conclusions from the book (Conclusions).
Paraphrased
Happiness
Our best efforts to try to feel happy are often precisely the things that make us miserable.
And our constant efforts to eliminate the negative — insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness — is what causes us to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.
This needn't be depressing, though. Instead, it points to an alternative approach: a "negative path" to happiness that entails taking a radically different stance towards those things that most of us spend our lives trying hard to avoid.
It involves learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity, stopping trying to think positively, becoming familiar with failure, and even learning to value death.
In short, in order to be truly happy, we might actually need to be willing to experience more negative emotions — or, at the very least, to learn to stop running quite so hard from them.
Which is a bewildering thought, and one that calls into question not just our methods for achieving happiness, but also our assumptions about what happiness really means.
History
This viewpoint has a surprisingly long and respectable history.
You'll find it in the works of the stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, who emphasized the benefits of always contemplating how badly things might go.
It lies deep near the core of Buddhism, which counsels that true security lies in the unrestrained embrace of insecurity — in the recognition that we never really stand on solid ground and never can.
It underpins the medieval tradition of "memento mori", which celebrates the life-giving benefits of never forgetting about death.
And it's what connects new age writers with more mainstream recent work in cognitive psychology on the self-defeating nature of positive thinking.
Watts and Huxley
At the bottom of all this lies the principle that the counter-cultural philosopher of the 1950s and '60s, Alan Watts, echoing Aldous Huxley, labeled "the law of reversed effort" or "the backwards law".
It's the notion that: in all sorts of contexts, from our personal lives to politics, all this "trying to make everything right" is a big part of what's wrong.
Or, to quote Watts: "When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink, but when you try to sink, you float." And that: "Insecurity is the result of trying to be secure."
"In many cases," wrote Huxley, "the harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the less we shall succeed."
The "Negative Path"
The "negative path" is about rejecting the dichotomy (of "positivity" vs "gloom") and seeking, instead, the happiness that arises through negativity, rather than trying to drown negativity out with relentless good cheer.
If a fixation on positivity is the disease, this approach is the antidote.
Paradoxes
There are many paradoxes here, and they only get deeper the more you probe.
For example:
- Is a feeling or a situation truly "negative" if it ultimately leads to happiness?
- If "being positive" doesn't make you happy, is it right to call it "being positive" at all?
- If you redefine happiness to accommodate negativity, is it still happiness?
And so on.
None of these questions can be tidily resolved.
This is partly because the proponents of the negative path share only a general way of seeing life, rather than a single strict set of beliefs.
But it's also because one crucial foundation of their approach is precisely that happiness involves paradoxes — that there is no way to tie up all the loose ends, however desperately we might want to.
Stoicism and Buddhism
Stoicism teaches that: the realization that we can often choose not to be distressed by events, even if we can't choose events themselves, is the foundation of tranquility.
Buddhism teaches that our willingness to observe the inner weather of your thoughts and emotions is the key to understanding that they need not dictate your actions.
Both of these approaches offer a different yet similar way of resisting the irritable reaching after better circumstances or better thoughts.
Conclusions
Constant efforts to try to feel happy actually make you miserable.
Constant efforts to eliminate insecurity, uncertainty, failure, or sadness is what causes you to feel so insecure, anxious, uncertain, or unhappy.
Constant efforts to avoid these negative things just exacerbates them.
Instead you can learn to enjoy uncertainty, embrace insecurity, familiarize with failure, and value death.
A willingness to experience negative emotions is precisely the path to be truly "happy".
Generally, our constant, desperate attempts to "make everything right" is a big part of what's wrong.
"Insecurity is the result of trying to be secure." — Alan Watts
The problem is our fixation on, desperation for, and obsession with becoming happy and avoiding negativity.
Desperation breeds insecurity.
Resist the irritable striving for better circumstances and better thoughts. (This is the path of endless dissatisfaction.)
Seek instead the happiness that arises through negativity, rather than trying to drown negativity out with relentless good cheer.
(If you want to learn more, there is a long history of this philosophy in Stoicism and Buddhism.)