In Praise of Stoicism - Derren Brown's Happy. Book Review. - Areo

31/8/2019 In Praise of Stoicism: Derren Brown’s Happy. Book Review.
- Areo
Culture & Media, Psychology
In Praise of Stoicism: Derren Brown’s

Happy. Book Review.
January 21, 2019 · 24 minute read · by Iona Italia
toicism has got a bad rap lately. In the popular imagination, it is associated
S with reluctance—particularly male reluctance—to show vulnerability or talk
frankly about emotions. The new APA guidelines on treating men and boys
mention “components of traditional masculinity such as emotional stoicism”
and “male stoicism” among the societal messages which they, as an institution, wish to
combat. Dylan Gallimore has recently discussed this in this magazine, as has Ben Sixsmith
in Quillette. The controversial Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life has been interpreted as a
recommendation of Stoic attitudes. Stoicism has become associated with an aspect of toxic
masculinity, caricatured as a bottling up of emotions, an unwillingness to admit weakness
which, at its worst leads men to fail to seek desperately needed treatment for depression
and anxiety or con de in friends who might o er comfort. Such attitudes, some feel, have
contributed to men’s higher rates of suicide. I believe this is wrong-headed. It’s time to
reappraise Stoicism. Derren Brown’s book provides both a eld guide to the Stoics and
multiple suggestions as to how to incorporate their teachings into one’s life. It is a
glorious, erudite romp through history and philosophy; a deeply compassionate and
empathetic examination of human foibles; and a self-help book for hardened skeptics like
me, who usually despise the genre. It eased my depression. I cannot recommend it highly
enough.
Self-help is one of the most frustrating genres. The vast majority of these works are imsy
volumes, written in a glib, condescending tone, stu ed with facile truisms and overly pat,
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clearly ctional case studies designed to stretch a single threadbare idea to wafer-thinness
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31/8/2019 In Praise of Stoicism: Derren Brown’s Happy. Book Review. - Areo
over the regulation 200 pages, eked out with dad jokes and lengthy retellings of warmed-
over psych experiments (many of which have since failed to replicate). This subject is
treated with less care than almost any other—only diet books are more abundant, more
full of cheap salesmanship and more dispiritingly trashy. And yet it is surely one of the
most important topics of all: how to live a happier life.
Hypnotist, mentalist and stage magician Derren Brown is the unlikely author of this
surprisingly scholarly tome, which is by turns profound and poetic and yet full of practical
advice. Brown alternates between detailed historical surveys, literary close readings,
examples from his own life and striking thought experiments.
It is not an easy book to summarize. Arguments develop over many pages—the analysis of
anger is particularly exhaustive—and cannot be reduced to bullet points. The subject
matter is kaleidoscopic and the shifts in focus extreme. The book contains large-scale,
virtuosic romps through history. One moment, Brown is tracking shifting attitudes
towards man’s natural state from the Greeks to the present day, elucidating the attitudes of
Epicurus, Aquinas, Luther, Locke, Schopenhauer, Borges and Freud along the way; the
next, he is describing, in minute detail, how he overcame his irritation at a lady with a
persistent throat-clearing tic on a long train journey. In one chapter, he details the e ects
that Twitter trolls had on the stars of his Net ix shows Apocalypse and Hero at 30,000
Feet, catapulted into their fteen minutes of notoriety: “We are given technology that far
surpasses that which put man on the moon, and use it to tweet spite from the toilet,” he
notes acerbically. And in another he o ers extended thought experiments on the nature of
time itself and advice on how to prepare for death.
What makes this compendium a coherent whole is the consistency of his approach and
the even tone of his prose. Brown is pensive, disarmingly honest and detail-oriented
throughout. Self-help authors usually conceive of themselves as tutors and make the
mistake of speaking to us as if we were children. Brown, like all the best writers, addresses
his readers as intellectual equals. He draws on positive psychology and on a “Western
philosophical tradition, which … has o ered millennia of rich advice to help us approach
the span of our lives constructively”—and which, Brown argues, has been languishing in
academic departments, when it could o er us a guide to “how best to live.”
A Magician Against Magical Thinking
he book opens with a lengthy, vivid and savage debunking of the doctrine of
T positive thinking, epitomized by Rhonda Byrd’s bestseller, The Secret, and
exploited by everyone from faith healers to the authors of guides to business
success. With its roots in the nineteenth-century New Thought Movement,
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founded by Phineas Park Quimby, positive thinking teaches that we can in uence the 
universe into ful lling our deepest desires. Through the power of self-belief alone, we can
achieve worldly success, fame and riches. Brown describes this idea as “deeply infantile”: it
posits us as wailing infants, trusting that a maternal, nurturing universe will provide for
our every need, if we only cry loudly enough.
In addition to their egocentricity, such cults are both irresponsible and inhumane. They
completely discount the possibility that things may go wrong. Blind, unwavering faith in
the future success of a business project, for example, is far more likely to prove a recipe for
bankruptcy than a uence. Survivorship bias distorts our understanding of how the world
works—as does the narcissism of many successful people, who are keen to attribute their
money or fame to merit, not chance. Such books are full, Brown argues, of
the self-serving rationalisations of people who, upon becoming successful, now wish to
feel that they have rightfully earned their status … So they look back over their
journey and lter through it for evidence of their deservedness. The perpetual and
overwhelming play of random chance is glossed over, and in its place a hero’s journey
is invented.
This philosophy places the responsibility for her fate rmly on the individual, for good or
ill. Like Calvinism, it suggests the idea of an elect, who can be recognized by their
prosperity, by having been favored in this world. The ipside of this smug, self-
congratulatory attitude is the callous idea that the unfortunate have only themselves to
blame, since success is within everyone’s power: you have only to think positive thoughts.
This is a form of magical thinking: god or the universe will provide if you only believe.
Brown has made a career of exposing the fakery of the charlatans who peddle such
blandishments; a long section of the book describes his experiences with an especially
slimy specimen of the genus: the evangelical faith healer.
But faith healers at least ostensibly deal with matters of life and health—by contrast with
the shallowness of the type of happiness positive-thinking hucksters usually o er. One
scene in the lm version of The Secret shows a woman staring longingly at a diamond
necklace in a jeweler’s window. After applying the requisite mental hocus pocus, she is
shown, beaming with joy, with the necklace hanging around her neck. This is a
consumerist notion of happiness. As Brown puts it, it “reduces the mighty macrocosm to a
pandering mail-order catalogue.”
Happiness cannot be found in the cultivation of self-belief, Brown argues. As he puts it in a

tweet: “Life is largely a catalogue of embarrassment & failures to do oneself justice. What
a task to still pursue something worthwhile and try to take responsibility amidst one’s
mess!” The book attempts to provide some suggestions for how to do this, employing what
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Brown, drawing on Martha C. Nussbaum’s work, calls a “permeable Stoicism.” This 
involves limiting our desires; recognizing the power of the narratives we tell about our
lives and reframing those stories; relinquishing control over things we have no power to
change; learning to appreciate how transience gives temporary things value; and, most
importantly of all, nding connection with others.
Seek and Ye Shall Not Find
he rst stumbling block towards true happiness is, Brown explains, the search
T itself—that is, our tendency to regard happiness as an ideal to strive for. He
traces the growth of this idea from early Christianity to the present day: as we
gradually moved away from a model in which we are born tainted with
original sin and our purpose is to atone for that through a virtuous life and become
reconciled to god and towards a noble savage model, in which we must seek to return to
an original state of innocent happiness in childhood—as Wordsworth argued, for example
—or in a more primitive state of society, as Rousseau believed. Religious duties were
replaced by “the notion of progress towards a secular kind of salvation,” the unalienable
right enshrined in the US Constitution: the pursuit of happiness.
Happiness, however, tends to elude us when we search for it directly. Scottish

Enlightenment thinker Hugh Blair argued that happiness could not be found by simply
seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, since, he observes, people often enjoy activities, such
as haymaking and rowing, which involve uncomfortable physical exertion. Happiness,
Blair concluded, was to be found in absorption in something outside and greater than the
self. Likewise, J. S. Mill, cited in the book, recognized that “happiness should not be our
goal per se, and to chase it directly is a mistake.” Happiness is a feeling that sneaks up on
you while you are not pursuing it directly. In fact, the pressure to nd happiness, Brown
argues, “can be deeply counter-productive and lead simply to more anxiety.” Freud, Brown
explains, believed that the therapist’s task was not to make his patients happy, but to help
them overcome their neuroses and return them to a state of “natural unhappiness.”
Sadness is inevitable and it is hubris to believe that we can avoid it. What we can do is try
to avoid adding to it through unrealistic expectations, futile attempts to control things
beyond our power and unhelpful interpretations and narratives.
Looking for Happiness in All the Wrong Places
esides, as Brown points out, “we tend to grossly misunderstand what will make
B us happy.” We stubbornly equate greater material prosperity with greater
happiness, even though all research suggests that, once our basic needs have
been met, increases in wealth do not bring concomitant increases in
contentment. “The natural ights of the human mind,” Samuel Johnson writes in the
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Rambler, “are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.” The protagonist of 
his novel, Rasselas, is restless and dissatis ed even in the elysian Happy Valley of his
childhood. As our possessions increase, so do our desires, in a well-known cycle
psychologist Michael Eysenck named the hedonic treadmill. Consumerism fetishizes and
feeds desire. It is the pretty face of greed. “We indirectly nd happiness in the absence of a
stressor (money troubles) not in the having of something,” Brown suggests.
We seek happiness in professional success, in fame, in accolades, in reputation—all things

lent us by others, distorted re ections, not the thing itself. “If you unconsciously think that
more money … will make you happier because it will bring you higher status, then you
are basing your idea of happiness on what other people feel,” Brown points out. And we
intuitively know that there is an important di erence between others’ perceptions of us
and reality. Musing on the slippery nature of fame, Brown writes: “When the public face
provokes so much idolisation, a sort of dissonance is likely to occur: it is as if the star has a
twin who is receiving all the attention, [leaving] a gap left by an unnoticed and un-
nurtured true self.” This phantom twin is also the subject of the eponymous short ction
Borges y yo (“Borges and I”):
I receive news of Borges in the post and I see his name in a list of professors or in a
biographical dictionary. … I live; I let myself live, so that Borges can weave his literary
tales and that literature is my justi cation. … I am fated to lose myself, forever, and
only the odd instant of me will survive, in the other. Little by little, I surrender
everything to him, even though I’m aware of his perverse habit of falsifying and
exaggerating [my translation].
Yet the fetishizing of self-esteem will not ultimately bring happiness either. The messages
you can do anything you set your mind to and you can achieve everything you desire only fuel
an unrealistic sense of entitlement. And they lead to an unhealthy, sel sh xation on
yourself. “The message to believe more and more in ourselves is precisely what we need
less of. When we consider things that make us angry … where does that fermentation
process so often begin other than in the exultation of the self?,” Brown asks. Self-esteem
often teeters dangerously close to self-aggrandizement. This is especially
counterproductive if we care what others think about us—which most of us do, very
much. Self-importance is a repellent quality which will win us no friends, while generosity
and kindness are not only appealing to others, but bring intrinsic satisfaction. George Eliot
recognizes this when she writes, in Middlemarch, “What do we live for, if it is not to make
life less di cult for each other?” As Brown puts it, “A large part of improving the ‘self’ is
to shift the focus from ‘self’ to ‘other’ … the heart of true self-improvement surely lies in
becoming kinder.”
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We are left, then, with what Brown calls a “meaning-shaped hole,” which we may attempt
to ll through conventional religion—which Brown, an evangelical Christian in his youth
and now an atheist, rejects as “dogmatised.” In a beautiful passage on religious prophets,
Brown speculates that such gures began as a “signpost to the transcendent,” but were
quickly transformed into idols, becoming “the misplaced focus of worship,” as religions
solidi ed into codes of practice and articles of dogma, too impersonal and arbitrary in
form to really help us. New Age spirituality is too sentimental and narcissistic to provide a
replacement.
We Tell It Slant
t the heart of Stoicism is a belief in the power of the stories we tell ourselves.
A As Epictetus puts it, “What upsets people is not things themselves, but their
judgements about these things.” Much, though not all of our unhappiness—“a
constituent part” as Brown puts it—stems not from the events of our lives, but
from our interpretations of those events. This is also a central tenet of cognitive
behavioral therapy (CBT): our emotions are responses to our internal narratives. A
popular misconception holds that Stoicism is about repressing feelings; but Brown’s
version is more concerned with changing them. Alter the story and you alter your
emotional reaction to it. “Stories a ect us deeply,” Brown explains. “This book is at heart
about how we might take control of those stories, with a view to living more happily.” This
is a familiar idea, but it’s developed here in a far more sophisticated way than it is in
classic works of CBT, such as David Burns’ Feeling Good, with their schematic division of
mental statements into catastrophizing, mind reading, all-or-nothing thinking, etc.
As a conjuror and hypnotist, Brown is an expert in fooling people. Magic is about

controlling the narrative: about making people suspend their disbelief as you spin a
delightful but impossible yarn. He has demonstrated the power of suggestion in some
especially dramatic ways. In his 2012 Channel 4 show Fear and Faith, Brown gave the
placebo Rumyodin (an anagram of your mind) to groups of volunteers, claiming variously
that it would clear up allergies, help people quit smoking or overcome phobias and social
anxiety. Surprisingly, it worked—and the e ects persisted even after Brown revealed that
his team had administered only saline solution and icing sugar. Even more theatrically, in
his Net ix show Miracles for Sale and the subsequent stage show Miracle, Brown
demonstrates how susceptible people are to faith healing. In an episode of Derren Brown
Investigates, he trails a psychic—greasy charlatan Joe Power. At one point in the show,
Brown demonstrates how easy it is to fake psychic abilities by cold-reading a member of
the public. Even though Brown tells her explicitly that he does not possess any
supernatural gifts and is simply using suggestion, showmanship and psychology, she
stubbornly refuses to believe him. “I think Derren really is psychic,” she says.
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The power of our own internal narratives is the source of superstitious belief: “Each of us
is born into a world where we know no better than to internalise every message we
receive as being one about us.” We are our own protagonists and the world, to us, is
merely the setting of our tale, a backdrop to our adventures. Every event and circumstance
is as telling as the clues in an Agatha Christie mystery. This is the source of much anguish:
when events go against us, we take it personally, we feel the universe is out to get us.
The stories we tell shape our conceptions of ourselves. Brown writes: “Our entire past,
which we feel … is responsible for how we behave today, is itself just a story we are telling
ourselves in the here and now.” “I’m like this because this happened to me,” we tell
ourselves, and are encouraged in this by “familiar fragments of psychoanalysis and
atulent bubbles of self-help advice.” We are psychic ships of Theseus, every somatic cell
replaced many times and yet the mental patterns, the design, remaining the same. But,
while it is tempting to see ourselves as merely victims of circumstance, the products of our
pasts, the fact that two di erent people can respond very di erently to the same event
demonstrates that it is our reactions, not the events themselves, that matter. “Out There
and In Here are two very di erent kingdoms,” notes Brown, citing Marcus Aurelius, “two
people with di erent judgements will live, by all accounts, in two di erent worlds.” Stoic
philosophy warns us to regard our own narratives about ourselves with the same
skepticism we generally reserve for those of others. Brown describes our memory as like a
biopic playing in our heads, roughly based on real life, but not literally factual in every
detail. Like any tale, it has been crafted to convey a speci c message, follow a particular
narrative arc. We are slaves to story. We view ourselves as omniscient authors, yet we are
all the unreliable narrators of our lives.
This narrative bias can stymie empathy. We over-interpret the words and actions of others,
we mind-read and embellish. “We create for ourselves a little narrative and respond to
that,” as Brown puts it. And we operate with perverse double standards when it comes to
judging others and ourselves: in both directions. When someone upsets or annoys us, we
see every instance of his bad behavior as part of a pattern, an indication of character.
“We’ll be sure to form that pattern in the way most likely to infuriate ourselves,” Brown
suggests. Our own bad behavior, of course, we ascribe to a thousand speci c mitigating
circumstances. The annoying actions of those we have decided to dislike are intrinsic to
their characters; our own are temporary aberrations. Yet, while we are overly
condemnatory of those we dislike, we fail to recognize what we nd likable in others. We
are social animals and we want to be loved, and yet we believe, against all the evidence,
that to be liked we must either impress or resemble others. As Brown points out, though,
“we know, from every day of our own experience … that status and similarity are not
especially attractive traits.” Most of us do not welcome honest feedback about our
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personal foibles: such criticism cuts deep because we fear being shunned, being judged
unlovable—a needless anxiety, as we will realize if we can take a step backwards and
examine those beliefs:
Consider your friends: you have formed an a ection for them despite their obvious
points of de ciency … These minor regrets, far from undermining your fondness, are
in fact an important part of it; people’s vulnerabilities are near impossible to untangle
from their strengths.
Judgmentalism—whether its object is others or ourselves—is a symptom of being stuck

within our own narratives, unable to appreciate that others, too, are the heroes of their
own tales: “The kind of self-consciousness that makes us uniquely human lies within the
complex, story-forming realms of the remembering self.” Brown borrows the concepts of
the experiencing and the remembering self from neuroscientist Daniel Kahnemann’s
bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow. We can liken them to the Dionysian and the
Apollonian, to the hedonistic experience of pleasure, the joy in doing, and to the very
di erent satisfaction of having done. Happiness, Brown writes, “comes from a judgement
we make, a sense of things being or having been right … and tends to be retrospective;
whereas [pleasure] relates to what we are being made to directly feel right now.” Brown
uses the example of the pleasure of spending the afternoon at a fun fair and the
satisfaction of spending it at the sickbed of an ailing friend.
Both are important. There are joys to be found in living in the moment, especially in
activities which allow us to enter a Csikszentmihalyian ow state, which Brown de nes as
an experience in which we nd our skills perfectly aligned with the challenges the activity
presents, perfectly poised between what Schopenhauer calls “the twin pitfalls of pain and
boredom.” To live our lives only with regard to the future is to miss out on the here and
now. We can only directly experience the present: past and future both exist in our
imaginations alone. But we are also creatures of memory and story: we cannot live simply
from moment to moment. We need pleasure and we need meaning. We need the
framework which anticipation and retrospection provide. As Walter Landor puts it, “The
present, like a note in music, is nothing but as it appertains to what is past and what is to
come.” It gains its meaning from context.
The Diagonal
raditional self-help advice emphasizes individual agency. With enough vision,

T determination and drive, we are told, we can further our own goals by molding
events in the outside world and in uencing the choices of others. We can keep
ourselves healthy, make people like us, make suitors fall in love with us, get
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publishers to accept our manuscripts, make hiring committees give us employment. The 
Stoics, by contrast, emphasize that, as Brown puts it, “most of what happens in life is
entirely out of your control.” The book’s central metaphor is drawn from Schopenhauer.
We should imagine our lives drawn on a graph, with our aims on the y-axis and the events
and circumstances we encounter on the x-axis: “We aim in one direction, events pull us in
the other, and the line of our life is drawn along the middle.” The result is a diagonal.
Personally, I use this metaphor when dieting too: I do not aim to lose weight because that
is outside my control. I cannot make the scale read out a lower number. I can only change
my eating and exercise habits and use the scale as a monitor to check on progress. It
provides feedback: like an interlocutor on the other end of a telephone line. I can try to
convey my meaning clearly and hope for a speci c response—I cannot control the words
issuing from the other person’s mouth. Life is a dialogue, and we can only shape our end
of the conversation. Brown compares it to a game of chess: we can move our pieces, but
there is always an opponent moving hers in response. It does not always make sense to
remain single-minded in pursuit of a goal. As in a chess game, we must adjust our
strategies as we go along. And, borrowing from Schopenhauer again, Brown likens life to
a game of tennis. If we decide we must win at all costs, we are attempting to bend fate to
our wishes—a futile aim. Instead, all we can do is play our best.
This is not defeatism. It is about relinquishing the burden of responsibility for things
outside our control. The sorting process by which we decide which things we can and
cannot in uence is known as the Stoic fork, and can be traced back to Epictetus. The
principle is very simple: our own thoughts and actions are under our control. Everything
else isn’t—and that includes other people’s behavior and our own fame, power, wealth
and reputation. All four of these are lent to us by others—the result of their choices: to
grant us their attention, to follow our lead, to elect us to o ce, to spend their money on
the goods or services we o er, to think certain thoughts about us. The Stoic fork is a
simple and even banal principle: we are all familiar with the version of it described in the
Serenity Prayer. But Samuel Johnson’s maxim that “men oftener require to be reminded
than informed” was never more apt. Much self-help advice is not as crude as that of the
positive thinking gurus, but it falls into the same trap: encouraging us to believe that
success and happiness are entirely within our control. This leads to a sense of entitlement,
to frustration, to completely pointless struggles. Instead, the Stoics advocate arete: a
psychological resilience against the accidents of fortune, a humility. Since we are not the
masters of our fates, we should rein in our aims; aspire not to glory and greatness, but
simply, as Brown, puts it, to “live ‘well enough.’” We should not make our dignity or our
self-worth dependent on externals that we cannot choose. This is the core of Stoic
philosophy, as expressed by Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning:
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—the
freedom to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own
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way.” Areo 
It is ironic that Brown should convey this message. He makes a living by appearing to
control fate. He rst attracted wide public attention after playing Russian roulette on live
television, the supreme demonstration of his con dence in this ability. (We should
probably not trust explanations of how this was done: according to some, by using
neurolinguistic programming to in uence his assistant to place the bullet in a speci c
barrel, and reading his ‘tells’ with a professional poker player’s expertise, in order to
gather from tone of voice where he had placed it. Remember that magicians lie for our
entertainment: the explanation is often part of the trick.) In his Net ix specials, Brown
thrusts unsuspecting members of the public into elaborate scenarios in which everyone
else is an actor while he, Prospero-like, manipulates every aspect of his subject’s
experience from behind the scenes to try to in uence his behavior with the ultimate view
to changing his perception of himself and outlook on life. In real life, there is no god-like
Derren gure o -stage, no deus ex machina. But we are equally subject to fortune’s whims,
actors in a play we have not scripted. All we can do is respond as best we can as we go
along. Hence the book’s subtitle: Why More or Less Everything Is Absolutely Fine. As Brown
remarks, “Anything other than our thoughts and actions—we can safely decide is ne … It
truly is ne to let go of these things. Nothing bad happens if we stop trying to x them.”
The Love Drive
espite a super cial similarity between his approach and that of Eastern
D philosophies which teach non-attachment, Brown sees Stoicism as fully
compatible with “an attitude of openness, [which] will allow us to connect …
with the human race at large.” Preoccupation with our own wellbeing can
make us self-absorbed. The anxiety which comes from attempting to control our
circumstances traps us within our own preoccupations:
As we grow, we tend to become attached to external goods and our own safety.
Aggression results from this interplay between our natures and the circumstances in
which we nd ourselves: ‘Life, if we attach ourselves to it, alienates us from our own
humanity.’
Stoicism allows us to escape the treadmill of our obsessions and fears and connect to
others. Unlike their predecessors, the Epicureans, the Stoics did not advocate a life of
cloistered contemplation: they wanted to be active in the world. This also, for Brown,
distinguishes Stoic philosophy from therapeutic techniques such as CBT, which are
focused on solving the patient’s individual problems, while Stoicism, Brown argues, is
outward-focused, with at its heart a “love-drive.” The self-examination it involves promotes
empathy. He cites Seneca: “there is no justice in blaming the individual for a failing shared
by all men.” The understanding that our conception of our personality, our understanding
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of our past, is just a story we are telling can help make us more open to “the complex 
narratives that lead to the imperfect behaviours of others.” For all the super cial
di erences between us in externals—in our levels of income, our looks, our occupations,
our places of residence, our fame or obscurity—in the internal workings of our minds, we
are profoundly alike. Even psychological outliers, like the mentally ill, simply possess to a
greater degree weaknesses that we can all recognize in ourselves. We know how easy it is
for others to misinterpret us—“all of us permanently lost in translation”—and that should
alert us to how easy it is to misinterpret others. The ease with which we can identify with
almost any su ciently honest and intimate autobiographical writing illustrates just how
much the tangled worlds of our inner experiences, so sedulously hidden from others,
actually have in common. As Alain de Botton observes, a good writer, while revealing his
own inner world, can make us feel he has peeped into ours. “Often,” Brown writes, “what
feels most intimate tends to be what we have most in common.”
A frequent misinterpretation of Stoicism is that it is cold and unfeeling. The Stoics often
encourage us to imagine what it would be like to lose our loved ones, so that we can
develop the strength to deal with that loss with equanimity. To regard this as callousness is
a misunderstanding of human psychology. Commitment-phobia and avoidance of
intimacy are often symptoms of fear, of a reluctance to invest emotionally because it
leaves us vulnerable to hurt. Stoicism provides a kind of mental training, which arms us
with the reassurance that we will be saddened, but not destroyed, by loss. It is a workout
that builds emotional strength, a caulking of the timbers to enable us to weather the
coming storms—a preparation we make precisely because the ocean voyage is so
rewarding.
Heaven Is Other People
n fact, the impermanence of things makes them more precious to us. Brown
I cites Freud’s maxim that “Transience value is scarcity value in time.” This
applies not just to relationships, but to every aspect of existence, Brown argues.
He retells Bernard Williams’ “The Makropulos Case: Re ections on the Tedium
of Immortality.” If we could live forever, Williams speculates, our lives would quickly lose
all meaning. There would be no urgency to any pursuit, no uniqueness to any experience,
since every experience would eventually be repeated an in nite number of times, to the
point of boredom and satiation. Without the risk of loss, there would be only endless
complacency. Brown writes:
Why value time together when you have in nite repetitions ahead of you? Would you
still fall asleep with interlocked forms and whisper ‘I love you’ every night for the rest
of time? Would you continue to surprise each other with breakfast on any of eternity’s
mornings you chose, knowing that the rapture of either activity would be quickly lost
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in the tiniest ickering instant of eternity’s interminable drudge? 
The original Stoics have little to say about the afterlife. But Brown, an atheist, ends the
book with musings on what will remain of us after death, coming to the same conclusion I
have elsewhere in this magazine that “we must be each other’s afterlife; we must be each
other’s heaven.” Two thought experiments, drawn from Sche er’s Death and the Afterlife
and P. D. James’ novel The Children of Men, demonstrate how much more we care about
humanity’s survival than our personal mortality. However much we may fear our own
deaths, death does not make life less meaningful to us. But if the human race were wiped
out by a meteorite (Sche er) or by complete infertility (James) we would surely nd all
our current endeavors pointless. We want to be survived.
It is the web of connections between us, Brown writes, that brings us a kind of
immortality, at least for as far into the future as we can envisage. He draws on Irvin
Yalom’s idea of “rippling”: we live on in the ways we have impacted others, in the traces
our in uence has left on their lives (and their in uences in turn are transmitted to others
in expanding concentric circles, with no foreseeable end until—at least—the extinction of
our species). He draws also on the ideas of Douglas Hofstadter: if what is most important
about us is our personality, which is not something tangible but a pattern, a way of
thinking and feeling, we will live on every time someone who knew us well attempts to
see things as we would have: “if for a while I think and feel like you (perhaps while
looking at a photograph of you or contemplating how you would behave in a certain
situation), I am approximating in my body your brain pattern, at least a rough version of
your ‘self.’ It won’t ever be quite you, but I can be you with, as Hofstadter would say, with a
‘Derren’ accent.”
A Caution Against the Stoics
toicism may not be ideal at all times and in all situations. We should be wary of
S suppressing feelings of anxiety, fear or sadness. It is very easy to fool ourselves
as to the extent and strength of our emotions, and when we do not express how
we are feeling it is much harder to come to terms with it. Amorphous,
unde ned worries tend to loom larger in the imagination, like ghostly shapes in the
darkness which return to lifelike proportions and forms when we shine a bright light on
them. Only once we have recognized and described our emotions can we begin to deal
with them. There may be truth in Freud’s contention that the repressed always returns to
haunt us, and in Jung’s conception of sti ed, unacknowledged feelings as “o ended gods,”
liable to take their revenge later. The male tendency to just tough it out, to tell no one, to
be strong and silent, may indeed contribute to the disproportionate number of male
suicides.
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Besides, anxiety is a motivator and sadness is a signal. These feelings are messengers,
wordless prompts. They indicate that we need to change something. A constant, unru ed,
Zen-like tranquility is inhuman—and unnecessary. As Brown concedes, “The Stoics can’t
always be right. We cannot demand from them a formula for our happiness, because no
such formula exists.” But, although the Stoics do not o er an adequate standalone guide to
life, Stoic philosophy should be part of everyone’s psychological toolkit. For those who
want to investigate their teachings more deeply, this book is an ideal guide.
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Iona Italia
Iona Italia, PhD, is a former academic who now works as a writer, editor and general
wordsmith. She is Areo's subeditor, host of the podcast Two for Tea and part of the team
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at Letter.Wiki. A Parsi of mixed Scottish and Indian ancestry, she has lived in ve countries
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and speaks four languages. Iona is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her most recent
book is "Our Tango World," published by Milonga Press UK and available on Amazon.
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in San Francisco “Conscious” and the T
August 27, 2019 · by Katya Rapoport Sedgwick Dualism
6 comments
Anonymous
January 23, 2019 at 10:49 pm
Fascinating and beautifully written. Has Derren Brown commented?
 4 
Reply
Iona Italia 
January 24, 2019 at 10:52 am
Thank you so much. No. I wish there were a way of bringing it to his
attention.
 3 
Reply
Iona Italia 
January 25, 2019 at 3:01 pm
Update: Derren has commented! He described the review as

“gorgeous.” :)))
 1 
Reply
 Areo 
Anonymous
January 22, 2019 at 9:14 am
Amor fati.
 1 
Reply
Ray Andrews
January 21, 2019 at 9:40 pm
Thanks, that was a ne essay.
 3 
Reply
Iona Italia 
January 22, 2019 at 5:53 am
Thank you, Ray!
 
Reply
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In Praise of Stoicism - Derren Brown's Happy. Book Review. - Areo

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In Praise of Stoicism - Derren Brown's Happy. Book Review. - Areo

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31/8/2019 In Praise of Stoicism: Derren Brown’s Happy. Book Review.

Culture & Media, Psychology

In Praise of Stoicism: Derren Brown’s

A Magician Against Magical Thinking

Happiness cannot be found in the cultivation of self-belief, Brown argues. As he puts it in a

Seek and Ye Shall Not Find

Happiness, however, tends to elude us when we search for it directly. Scottish

Looking for Happiness in All the Wrong Places

We seek happiness in professional success, in fame, in accolades, in reputation—all things

As a conjuror and hypnotist, Brown is an expert in fooling people. Magic is about

Judgmentalism—whether its object is others or ourselves—is a symptom of being stuck

raditional self-help advice emphasizes individual agency. With enough vision,

The Love Drive

Heaven Is Other People

A Caution Against the Stoics

#Mental Health #Philosophy #Self Help #Stoicism

The In uence of Anti-Racist Scholarship-Activism on Evergreen College

Why the US Needs a Senate

You May Also Like

Culture & Media Philosophy, Psychology, Science & T

Saving Socialist Realist Art Annaka Harris’s

Fascinating and beautifully written. Has Derren Brown commented?

Update: Derren has commented! He described the review as

Thanks, that was a ne essay.

Thank you, Ray!

Enter your comment here...

#Academia #Alt-Right #Art #Christianity #Conservatism #Critical Theory #Culture

#Democracy #Donald Trump #Economics #Education #Evolutionary Psychology #Feature

#Islamism #Liberalism #Media #Mental Health #Philosophy #Political Correctness

#Political Polarization #Politics #Postmodernism #Psychology #Race #Racism #Regressive Left

#Religion #Science #Social Justice #Social Media #Terrorism #Women's Rights

Teaching Uncertainty: Cultivating a Heterodox Classroom and Life

From Syria to Venezuela: Mystifying Left-Wing Support of Dictators.

Marx vs Foucault: Reflections on History and Power

The Historicist Illusion of Enlightenment

Saving Socialist Realist Art in San Francisco

Annaka Harris’s “Conscious” and the Trap of Dualism

Is Misogyny Holding Western Women Back?

Join the Discussion

Anonymous on From Syria to Venezuela: Mystifying Left-Wing Support of Dictators.

4M on On Being a Proud Indian

philosman92 on Seven Key Misconceptions about Evolutionary Psychology

Mike on Teaching Uncertainty: Cultivating a Heterodox Classroom and Life

Robin Cox on From Syria to Venezuela: Mystifying Left-Wing Support of Dictators.

Robin Cox on From Syria to Venezuela: Mystifying Left-Wing Support of Dictators.

Culture & Media

Letter from the Editor

Science & Tech

What We're Reading

What's in the Works

Read from our Vault

2016– 2019 © Areo Magazine

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