When some misfortune threatens, consider seriously and deliberately what is the very worst that could possibly happen. In his discussion of envy, Russell suggested that we should give children a sense of their perfection, a belief in their absolute superiority.

The Conquest of Happiness | Bertrand Russell | Taylor

So when we have a salary that is sufficient for us, we should not look to compare it with the salary of others. Everybody knows a businessman who has been ruined is better off so far as material comforts are concerned than a man who has never been rich enough to have the chance of being ruined. feels himself a citizen of the universe, enjoying freely the spectacle that it offers and the joys that it affords, untroubled by the thought of death because he feels himself not really separate from those who will come after him.At the age of five, I reflected that, if I should live to be seventy, I had only endured, so far, a fourteenth part of my whole life, and I felt the long-spread-out boredom ahead of me to be almost unendurable.

THE CONQUEST OF HAPPINESS ACCORDING BERTRAND RUSSELL THE CONQUEST OF HAPPINESS ACCORDING BERTRAND RUSSELL

A universal basic income surely will be a welcome solution to the economic problems from unemployment.This is due partly to having discovered what were the things that I most desired, and having gradually acquired many of these things. It is recorded that Tolstoy, in his younger and unregenerate days, was awarded the military cross for valor in the field, but when the time came for him to be presented with it, he was so absorbed in a game of chess that he decided not to go. This method of escaping censure is, however, impossible to many of those whose tastes and opinions cause them to be out of sympathy with the herd. But Russell means it in a more everyday sense, an experience that we all, more or less, have had: the feeling that others talk badly of us, that they mock us or gossip about us behind our backs.

The Conquest of Happiness - Academia.edu The Conquest of Happiness - Academia.edu

Conventional people are roused to fury by departures from convention, largely because they regard such departures as a criticism of themselves.External discipline is the only road to happiness for those unfortunates whose self-absorption is too profound to be cured in any other way. External interests, it is true, bring each its own possibility of pain: the world may be plunged in war, knowledge in some direction may be hard to achieve, friends may die. Consequently the man whose sole concern with the world is that it shall admire him is not likely to achieve his object. With the introduction of agriculture mankind entered upon a long period of meanness, misery, and madness, from which they are only now being freed by the beneficent operation of the machine. Life is too short to be interested in everything, but it is good to be interested in as many things as are necessary to fill our days.

The Conquest of Happiness - Wikiquote The Conquest of Happiness - Wikiquote

In the previous two posts ( one, two), we talked about Bertrand Russell and his theory of what makes us unhappy: competition, anxiety, envy and the fear of the opinion of others are just a few common factors that contribute to an unhappy life. The working life of the businessman has the psychology of a hundred-yards race, but as the race upon which he is engaged is one whose only goal is the grave, the concentration, which is appropriate enough for a hundred yards, becomes in the end somewhat excessive. Envy, in fact, is one form of a vice, partly moral, partly intellectual, which consists in seeing things never in themselves, but only in their relations. All come determined to be happy, with the kind of grim resolve with which one determines not to make a fuss at the dentist's. The businessman's religion and glory demand that he should make much money; therefore, like the Hindu widow, he suffers the torment gladly.To discover a system for the avoidance of war is a vital need for our civilisation; but no such system has a chance while men are so unhappy that mutual extermination seems to them less dreadful than continued endurance of the light of day. We can probably all verify that too many of the people we know are addicted to various ways of wasting time, just so that they don’t experience the monotony of their lives: computer games, TV shows, but also extensive holidays, dangerous and exciting hobbies, and even just getting drunk over the weekend, every weekend, are ways of combating monotony.