The Conquest of Happiness

Bertrand Russell again . . . yeah, Big Frank knows; this thread is getting pretty long. Big Frank just has to ride this thing out and it could be some time. Russell wrote a lot (around 2,000 words everyday of his adult life), and he lived to the age of 98, so he had a lot to say about a lot.

Big Frank just finished Russell's book, "The Conquest of Happiness". It is a little bit dated; he wrote it in 1930, and he devotes a considerable amount of text to the upper crust of society and a slim layer of professions (artists, scientists, and businessmen). Women in his book are largely women of leisure and of the upper class. As a result, much of the book can be skimmed, but there is still a lot of useful advice on how to conquer happiness. His approach, conquering, requires effort, by his own admission; happiness is a matter of attitude, engagement in life, purposeful thinking, and the overcoming of obstacles to happiness.

The greatest obstacle to happiness, according to Russell is being self-absorbed. Russell in the first chapter relates how he learned to enjoy life more: "Very largely it is due to a diminishing preoccupation with myself. . . Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself, and my deficiencies; I came to center my attention increasingly on external objects; the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection.

Russell goes through a variety of the causes of unhappiness: competition, envy, the sense of sin, persecution mania, etc. 'Worry' can be centered on many of these unhappy tendencies. Russell calls for a look outward to the external world as one way out of worry: "One's ego is no very large part of the world. The man who can center his thoughts and hopes upon something transcending self can find a certain peace in the ordinary troubles of life which is impossible to the pure egoist."

In the final chapter Russell contrasts the happy and the unhappy man. The unhappy man: "One of the great drawbacks to self-centered passions is that they afford so little variety in life. the man who loves only himself cannot, it is true, be accused of promiscuity in his affections, but he is bound in the end to suffer intolerable boredom from the invariable sameness of the object of his devotion." On the other hand, "The happy man is the man who lives objectively, who has free affections and wide interests, who secures his happiness through these interests and affections and through the fact that they, in turn, make him an object of interest and affection to many others. To be the recipient of affection is a potent cause of happiness, but the man who demands of affection is not the man upon whom it is bestowed. the man who receives affection is, speaking broadly, the man who gives it."