A Recommendation of Importance
Normally, I am not a fan of self-help books. Most of them quite frankly repel me. But recently I have read one that I consider to be very, very important. It is the “The Conquest of Happiness” by Bertrand Russell. I only began to read it because I had read “A History of Western Philosophy” by him and knew him to be a great philosopher and mathematician. And I thought if a guy that smart writes about a topic that important, it is worth having a read. And worth a read it was.
Your average book about happiness tends to be written by some sort of Buddhist Monk clothed in some sort of coloured cloth, which promotes the idea that if you inhale deeply and think intently about everything being roses, everything will be roses. People who endorse this sort of thing usually also like horoscopes and tend to be, as a rule of thumb, not very shrewd or incisive. On the other end of the spectrum are those that smell the bullshit from afar, conclude that the concept of happiness, as it is usually conceived, is utterly useless, stop considering the matter once and for all, and get on with their lives. I was a member of the second camp. But having read “The Conquest of Happiness” I must concede that I was wrong, or at least not completely right, and that there are many important and useful things to be said on the topic of human happiness. Russell’s book works forward from the assumption that there is one set of factors that diminish one’s chances of experiencing a persistent state of cheerful, friendly well-being — the negative causes of unhappiness — and another set of factors that increases one’s chances — the positive causes of happiness. The first half of the book is about the former, the second half about the latter. Now, even very sceptically-minded people must admit that this is a very reasonable way of approaching the question and I actually wondered, when I read the book, why these very simple questions of “what diminishes human happiness?” and “what promotes human happiness?” are only rarely asked in such a clear manner.
Besides the intelligent approach of the book, what astonished me was quite simply the amount of things in the book that I hadn’t thought of myself and, more importantly, the amount of things, that I couldn’t think even if I considered the topic for a long time. And that is quite simply because Bertrand Russell is smarter than I am, a lot smarter. And with all due respect to you reader, this is very likely to be true for you too. So, for us mere mortals, the entire thing is like a ‘secret revealed’ show on a topic that is important to each one of us. And to put it bluntly, here is what you should do: go to Amazon.com (or just click), order the book, look forward to its arrival, read, improve, read, improve, continue until consistently happy. If only one person is actually prompted by this post to take up the initiative, I shall not have written in vain.
Read Twice Book Recommendations is a series of book recommendations in which I exclusively recommend books that I either have read twice or genuinely would. The point is that all recommendations should really be that good. Also, I believe, that one has to eat one’s own soup. Guest post submissions to the “Read Twice Book Recommendations” Medium publication are welcome. Just contact me, if you’d like to write a post.
