Bookshelf

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

1. Carrying the burden, or being in an acute phase of depression or despair at the huge task of living a human life is not our own fault.
2. Though it can probably never be completely cured, we can try and change our perspectives, become intentional and active about our own mental state, learn to know what will help us and use the tools in those moments.
3. Being gentle and compassionate with ourselves, embracing vulnerability, and doing self-reflection can help us to grow our emotional resilience and find joy in the journey we’re all in.

🎨 Impressions

I’m glad that talking about mental wellbeing is so much more accepted in our current times. I remember that in my own childhood it still used to be a topic to avoid at all cost. Now I discuss it with many of my friends quite openly and I’m convinced it always helps both of us to talk about the emotional state one of us currently finds themselves in. I myself am no stranger to phases of sadness which border on depression. I put high pressure on myself and would like to be better than I actually am. It’s hard for me to accept the current state. You could argue that this is also precisely what helps me grow, because I’m not content with how things are. And in a way I agree, the thought of me not being “enough” serves me. But it’s also a thin line and failures often weigh heavier than achievements to me. People who know me well are aware of that, and it’s no accident that I was recommended to read this book from two separate people at around the same time this year. I’m very happy they did.

The book doesn’t claim to do anything, but it is in fact a guidebook for overcoming and dealing with these hard times. It is calming and friendly. It doesn’t accuse you and doesn’t look for causes. The book just is. I like that especially about it. There’s no ten step plan to get rid of it once and for all, because that would be an illusion. The author’s language is very careful and flowing, creating an atmosphere you’d imagine at a wellness retreat somewhere in the mountains or by the sea. It was amazing to me to feel what de Botton created with his words.

The first tenth of the book had a curious impact on me, though. I nearly stopped reading the book because its openness to talk about the bad state of mental health triggered something in me. It hit so close to home and somehow gave me the feeling of deteriorating instead of improving. I looked at the reviews and found some people say the same. But I also knew that it would change as the book went on.

In many parts I drifted away from the book and lost myself in my own thoughts. Usually, I find this annoying, because it normally means that the book doesn’t catch my attention. But I became aware that in this particular book, that’s a good thing. It started to get me thinking about my own perspectives and behavior towards myself. I was contemplating what was said when the lines started to blur and a minute later I “woke up” to re-read the page. It’s okay, but it took me a while longer to finish the book than it would have. Not that that’s a problem, quite the contrary. It made a more meaningful impact on me that way.

I was a bit surprised to find a huge amount of practical advice. Little things you can do to help yourself make it through. I particularly liked how it were mostly actual little things. Not the huge changes in life that some would think were necessary, no. Things like eating figs or taking long baths. Wonderful. Just the thought of both helps.

The chapters on relationships and parenting were interesting. I was expecting the active parenting of your own children, but it’s more about your role as a child in regard to your own parents that’s of consideration in the book. Makes sense. Finding and cultivating a relationship with a partner who values openness, vulnerability, and acknowledges their own shortcomings just as you are. How to listen, how to be present. How to never stop to talk with each other in a romantic relationship.

There was a big space in the book that was filled with art and its different forms and ways to affect our worldwide. I wasn’t expecting that but I was very happy about this new connection. New to me, that is. For me, music has always played the largest role in helping me through difficult phases, but not for Alain de Botton. He found it in paintings, photographs, but also in actual scenes in the country. He had many short chapters of just a few pages each for individual pieces of art in these categories which he used to explain the stories behind them, the creator’s thoughts, and what those pieces were doing for him and most others who appreciate them. To me, this was truly eye-opening. How visual art can be therapeutic in such a way I would have never thought of. In many cases I would have enjoyed reading a lot more pages on those single works. At the end of the chapter, there’s a bit about the importance of music and dance. He has a quote from Nietzsche ready in which the philosopher puts great value to both. Connecting this back to the Greek god Dionysos, he concludes that it unites us to behave silly and be idiots sometimes. I think that’s lovely and so disarming.

After that, some more practical thoughts are shared. None of them seemed out of place. The whole feel of the book is positive and honest and calming. I’m glad I read it.

🍀 How the Book Changed Me

• I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that I strive to achieve some things of significance in life. I’d like to leave something of note behind when I’m gone. At the same time I’d like to impress certain people whose opinions of me are important to me, healthy or not. To achieve both I’m putting quite a lot of pressure on myself, possibly more than would be healthy. There are definitely times were I feel unworthy and undeserving. This book has helped me relax a bit more and ease off of the perceived expectations those mentioned people have of me. I know that I can achieve great things, but only if I chose to do them freely and not to please others. The temptation to resist pleasing others is difficult to ignore, but that task will now be a bit easier for me.
• On a more superficial level, the chapter on the importance of creating and consuming art for the benefit of one’s mental health has made an impact on me. The author focused on visual art while I respond more to creating and enjoying the art form of music. This new world he opened up to me is now more interesting to me than it was before.

📔 Highlights

I: Challenge

When we are interviewing for a new job or taking someone on a date, a healthy mind doesn’t force us to listen to inner voices that insist on our unworthiness. It allows us to talk to ourselves as we would to a friend.

Grounds for despair, anger and sadness are, of course, all around. But the healthy mind knows how to bracket negativity in the name of endurance. It clings to evidence of what is still good and kind.

We need only a few moments in the dark at 11 p.m. or 5 a.m. to wander the corridors of the deep mind with the torch of consciousness and ask: What have I looked at but never seen?

What am I really worried about right now? If we let the question resonate for a time, allowing its true profundity to emerge, we stand to find that, waiting until we have quietened the noise, there is a pain we knew all along, looking up at us with startled, wise eyes, like those of a tortoise we find hiding beneath a car or a fox burrowed in a corner of the garden. We can continue the questioning: Why is this thing so worrying? And then: What could I tell myself to make this less bad? And finally, we can ask ourselves to complete a sentence: I feel compassion for myself because …

First, and most importantly, a competent parent is someone who can feel inordinately pleased that their child has come into the world – and never ceases to remind themselves or their offspring of the fact, in direct and indirect ways, at small and large moments, pretty much every day.

There are no more tenacious defenders of their parents’ legacies and reputations than those who were maligned, ignored or physically harmed.

The temptation can be to rush in and give an answer full of blustering, impatient confidence. Of course it will be fine! Nonsense, there’s no tiger! And so on. But the properly loving response is to take the worry as seriously as its progenitor does and address it head on, without scoffing or denying the scale of the concern.

Small children tend never to blame those who have harmed them. They depend on them far too much to dare to question their authority. They turn the hurt in on themselves: they wonder, for example, why they aren’t good enough, rather than wondering what business an adult has in humiliating and crushing the spirit of a four-year-old.

We should get better at detecting when illness might be drawing in, what the triggers for it might be. Then, when it is upon us, we should do and decide nothing. We shouldn’t send emails or deliver judgement on our lives or plan for the future. We should, as much as possible, stop all mental activity and rest.

The priority is therefore to go back and, just like Otsuka in her project, stand beside our younger selves in all their difficulties. We should slip into our bed the night we were sobbing after having been shouted at. We should take ourselves to school and sit at the desk next to ours and tell ourselves what we so needed to hear but never did.

It is one thing to promise us all a chance of success, it is another to hint – as our era constantly does – that a modest destiny is essentially unacceptable.

We can no longer look elsewhere to explain why we have floundered; we can no longer blame the gods or bad luck. Winners make their own luck, goes the modern mantra, so we must logically also pay the full, unmitigated price for our failures.

As ever, salvation comes through self-awareness. There is nothing inevitable about self-hatred. We are treating ourselves unkindly because people were in the past not especially kind to us – and we are being touchingly yet dangerously loyal to their philosophies of derision.

Whenever we sense our spirits sinking and folly and anxiety pressing in on us, we should abandon all endeavours and head to the bedroom. We should be as proud of our regimented sleep patterns as we are of a neat house or a flourishing career.

In our ill moods we’re unlikely to have the energy to cook or even think about food, so we can end up highly vulnerable to the blandishments of processed dishes. Yet we should take care that food never becomes yet another reason why we might hate ourselves or regret decisions.

It is a sign of our lack of civilization that we insist on thinking of baths primarily as tools to clean ourselves with rather than honouring them as what they truly are: instruments of mental health.

Our emotional difficulties with work tend to begin with the way that it apparently offers us an unparalleled chance to impress those who do not, or did not, originally believe in us.

Under the guise of a merely practical pursuit, it carries a heavy emotional mission: it is the means by which we try to earn our right to be.

But if accompanied by the right sort of care, a breakdown can allow us to review the role that work was playing in our lives and to cease using it as compensation for an emotional wound.

In the ruins, we may be able to ask ourselves new questions: What do I actually want to do? Whose opinion do I really care about? We’ll have slain the dragon of prestige and may now be ready to live on our own terms for the first time.

We should go back to what work should always have been for us, which is a source of intrinsic satisfaction, before it got saddled with the task of assuring us of our value as a human being in the eyes of an imagined hostile and sceptical audience.

Our flawed brains are fateful generalizers from their earliest moments. They take the raw material of our young lives and extrapolate universal theories from it which can destroy our chances of responding adequately to the diverse and novel conditions of adult reality.

II: Love

[..] the properly self-loving person isn’t the one who congratulates themselves when they have pulled off an astonishing feat; it’s the one who knows how to speak to themselves in a kind voice when everything has gone wrong, who can remain kind in the face of ill fortune, who doesn’t have to berate or criticize themselves without mercy.

Yet it is not the simple fact of being let down that counts very much; the true problem is created when there hasn’t been an opportunity to process our disappointment. Irritation is only toxic when it hasn’t been extensively and thoughtfully aired.

Wiser couples know that nothing should ever be too small to cover at length, for what is ultimately at stake in a marathon conversation about a single word or a minuscule event in the hallway can be the fate of the entire relationship.

We yearn to feel that another person appreciates the scale of our despair and the magnitude of our sense of injustice, while at the same time being deeply suspicious of, and alert to, anyone who might too hastily be trying to make our distress go away.

Saying ‘I know’ or ‘oh yes’ won’t – as psychotherapy knows – be quite enough. What we need to do instead is to paraphrase what our ailing companion has said, to build sentences that repeat back to them the essence of the difficulty they have expressed but in different words.

All that we are chiefly in search of when we are at our lowest point is evidence that we are in company.

As therapy sees it, the chief difficulty is not to identify someone’s problem but to help them see, feel and accept it.

I need you to accept – often and readily – the possibility that you might be at fault, without this feeling to you like the end of the world.

III: Art

Once we have learned to draw value from inexpensive things, we can never be poor, whatever our ostensible level of wealth, and we can never be bored, however quiet things might have become.

[Mount Fuji’s] beauty, visible on a clear day when its cone is newly sprinkled with snow, makes it a little easier to accept that we will die, that our plans will be ground to sand, that what we achieve will not matter and that we are as nothing next to the aeons of time to which the earth has been witness.

Nature doesn’t care one bit about us – which is both the origin of our damnation and, when we have learned to identify with its motions, a source of redemption.

We have to live knowing that most of what we do is in a cosmic sense ridiculous. Our lives are no more profound than those of an earthworm and almost as fragile.

We should be allowed to weep without being hectored into positivity. Our true overlooked right is not, after all, the right to happiness; it is the right to be miserable.

children lack the language or wherewithal to be able to explain them with requisite adequacy. Their feelings are an outgrowth of the manic sensitivity, unconfined intelligence and wild imagination of the infantile mind. Small people are, in the best and most inspiring of ways, slightly mad.

Generally, we tend to notice nothing, but we may make an exception for one particular time and place: the first day in a new destination. There and then, for once, we too may be shaken from our customary lethargy.

we need whenever we can to try to look at our lives, with which it is so easy to get dispirited and about which it is so forgivable to despair, as though we were still in some ways on that hopeful, endlessly fascinating first day somewhere else,

IV: Freedom

Then again, ‘greatness’ in literature doesn’t come from living pompously among high-flown abstractions; great writers are ultimately simply those who know how to speak with special honesty about the panic and sadness of an ordinary life.

We don’t actually ever need the whole of society to love us. We don’t have to have everyone on our side. Let the Robert Greenes of this world – and their many successors in newspapers, living rooms and social media down the ages – say their very worst and nastiest things and be done with them. All that we need is the love of a few friends or even just one special person and we can survive.

Because our lives are so brief it is the quality of our experiences, rather than the extent of our possessions, that matters.

We should shake ourselves free from such inhibitions by loosening our hold on any remaining sense of dignity and by accepting frankly that we are by nature completely idiotic, great sacks of foolishness that cry in the night, bump into doors, fart in the bath and kiss people’s noses by mistake – but that far from being shameful and isolating, this idiocy is in fact a basic feature of our nature that unites us immediately with everyone else on the planet. We are idiots now, we were idiots then and we will be idiots again in the future. There is no other option for a human.

The price to pay for affection isn’t compliance. We can gradually take on board a highly implausible-sounding but redemptive notion: that we can prove lovable and worthy of respect and at the same time, when the occasion demands it – as it probably will a few times every day – utter a warm-sounding but definitive ‘no’.

So convinced are we that insights of worth lie beyond us, we have omitted to consult the treasury of thoughts and visions generated every hour by our endlessly brilliant, fatefully unexplored minds.

All of us need to learn to develop a ‘late style’, ideally as early on in our lives as possible: a way of being wherein we shake off the dead hand of habit and social fear and relearn to listen to what entertains us – and so can stand the best chance of properly pleasing others too.

We’ve imagined we understand the city we live in, the people we interact with and, more or less, the point of it all. But of course we have barely scratched the surface. We have grown bored of a world we haven’t begun to study properly. And that, among other things, is why time is racing by.

We might live to be a thousand years old and still complain that it had all rushed by too fast. We should be aiming to lead lives that feel long because we manage to imbue them with the right sort of open-hearted appreciation and unsnobbish receptivity, the kind that five-year-olds know naturally how to bring to bear.

V: Hope

All societies have collectively clung to highly peculiar ideas that in time have been revealed to be deeply mistaken and – often – close to insane. It would be impossible if the same were not true of our own times.

Buddhism cannily understood that most humour arises from the omnipresent gap between our hopes and the available reality. We laugh not because things are happy but precisely because we have been helped to recognize that they are so damnably and incorrigibly sad. Our laughter represents a release of tension at the awfulness of everything.

Voltaire was enraged. Of course science wasn’t going to improve the world; it would merely give new power to tyrants. Of course philosophy would not be able to explain away the problem of evil; it would only show up our vanity.

‘I have only twenty acres,’ replied the old man; ‘I and my children cultivate them; and our labour preserves us from three great evils: weariness, vice, and want.’

We should know well enough at this point that humans are troublesome and will never achieve – at a state level – anything like the degree of logic and goodness we would wish for. We should never tie our personal moods to the condition of a whole nation or people in general, or we would have to weep continuously.

We need a project. It shouldn’t be too large or dependent on many. The project should send us to sleep every night weary but satisfied. It could be bringing up a child, writing a book, looking after a house, running a small shop or managing a little business.

The melancholic position is ultimately the only sensible one for a broken human. It’s where we get to, after we have been hopeful, after we have tried love, after we have been tempted by fame, after we have despaired, after we have gone mad, after we have considered ending it – and after we have decided conclusively to keep going. It captures the best possible attitude to pain and the wisest orientation of a weary mind towards what remains hopeful and good.

think highly of life is, through a Hindu lens, a fundamental intellectual error. As Hinduism sees it, our real purpose is to be done with life for ever. That is the true summit of existence.

We continually exaggerate both the importance of setbacks in our individual lives and, more broadly, the significance of these lives within the greater span of planetary existence. And as a result we panic far more than we should and we laugh far less than we might. Anyone who thinks of a five-hour journey as ‘long’ or a three-minute download time as ‘slow’ is going to have problems finding perspective around a great many travails.

We may not even be misanthropes at all; we may just secretly, without having known it ourselves, have all along belonged to that narrow aristocracy of the heart: the happy few. Cynics are only idealists with awkwardly high standards.

Conclusion

Astronomy is the true friend of the melancholy mind, NASA and ESA its presiding deities. Through our immersion in space, our alienated perspectives can be confirmed and returned to us with dignity.

And there are thoughts we should be ruthless in chasing out: about how some people are doing so much better than us, about how inadequate and pitiful we are, about what a disappointment we have turned out to be. The latter aren’t even ‘thoughts’, they have no content to speak of, they cannot teach us anything new. They are really just instruments of torture and symptoms of a difficult past.

We’ll need ruthlessness in expunging certain other people from our diaries: people who harbour secret resentments against us, who are latently hostile to self-examination, who are scared of their own minds and project their fears on to us. A few hours with such types can throw a shadow over a whole day, as their unsympathetic voices become lodged in our minds and feed our own ample stores of self-doubt. We shouldn’t hesitate to socially edit our lives in order to endure.

We are good enough as we are. We don’t need huge sums of money or to be spoken of well by strangers. We need time to process our feelings and – lying in bed, say, or in the bath – soothe our frightened minds. We should take pride in our early nights and undramatic routines. These aren’t signs of passivity or tedium.