HOW TO LIVE A GOOD LIFE
52 surprising shortcuts to finding happiness
Searching for happiness? Don’t be authentic. Don’t follow your calling or heed your inner voice; don’t broaden your skills; don’t be flexible; and don’t chase excitement. I paraphrase — slightly — but these are some of the counter-intuitive lessons of Rolf Dobelli’s new book, The Art of the Good Life (Hachette Books, 2017).
Dobelli, a Swiss author and businessman, became internationally known after his 2011 self-help book, The Art of Thinking Clearly, achieved bestseller status in multiple countries. His new offering, restricts itself to 52 short chapters that make an intellectually rigorous attempt to grapple with a question that has troubled philosophers since classical antiquity: how to live a good life. It’s a conundrum at the heart of human thinking.
The 51-year-old, who studied both philosophy and business in his younger days, draws on the wisdom of the great philosophical thinkers as heavily as he does on that of modern-day business supremos, like Warren Buffett, and contemporary psychological research, to produce his compen- dium of lessons on how to achieve happiness in the 21st century.
“After writing The Art of Thinking Clearly, I realized the brain doesn’t work perfectly,” he says. “We make mistakes when we come to the good life, so I wanted to explore that further.”
Naturally, his business background has shaped his thinking but his new book, he says, is more applicable to life in general. “For this book, the Stoics are my biggest influence, starting from Zeno, the founder. They all come from the Socratic tradition. (Socrates) was the first guy to pose those questions.”
So what do Socrates, Zeno and their ilk have to say that’s relevant to our frenetically paced, technology-fuelled modern lives? A lot, it seems. To take one of his counterintuitive lessons as an example — don’t listen to your inner voice and “don’t make your emotions your compass” — Dobelli argues that “as our emotions are so unreliable,” we should take them less seriously.
Here he cites ataraxy, a term used by Greek philosophers to describe the ability to block things out and thus achieve “serenity, peace of mind, equanimity, composure or imperturbability.”
In a chapter called The FiveSecond No (the lesson is don’t do people favours), he cites Seneca, the Roman philosopher: “All those who summon you to themselves, turn you away from your own self.”
As for being ourselves — we must not “buy into the authenticity hype,” partly because we don’t understand ourselves and partly because by failing to construct a “second persona” or social veneer, we make ourselves vulnerable to exploitation.
Nor must we follow our calling: pinning everything on the fulfilment of a supposed vocation, he argues, does not bring happiness. Instead, find what you’re good at and focus doggedly on that; make a decision and then stick to it, to avoid being steered off course. Don’t prize action over waiting, zeal above deliberation. Slow down, Dobelli tells us.
Where the lessons grow harder to follow is where they clash with the infrastructure of modern life: that is, technology. Dobelli clearly believes it to be largely inimical to the good life. “No TV, no radio, no gaming consoles, no smart watch, no Alexa,” he writes. All waste our time, he believes — time in which we could be switching on our brains.
“Social media consumes a lot of time, it’s boastful, it leads to envy. Never in the history of mankind have more people compared themselves with others, and that causes misery. Then it cuts your attention into so many short pieces that we have lost the ability to stay focused on one train of thought for longer than a minute, which has very strong implications on the intellectual life of someone; debating issues becomes not a question of argument any more but little tweets.”
It’s hard to disagree, having more time to ourselves is seductive — but how does this work in practice?
“Avoiding email is difficult,” Dobelli concedes. “I couldn’t live without email, but some you can do without. I have a better life without social media. It’s an illusion to think you’re connected to the world because you have 400 friends on Facebook; better to have 10 real friends.”
Never in the history of mankind have more people compared themselves with others, and that causes misery.