8 Causes of Modern Unhappiness
A Study of Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness
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Bertrand Russell didn’t understand why people were so unhappy all the time. He grew up in a rich aristocratic family in the United Kingdom, but he was lonely and suicidal as a teenager. He said the only thing that kept himself from suicide was wanting to learn more math.
Growing up, Russell had every advantage. His grandfather was a British Prime Minister. The influential philosopher John Stuart Mill was his godfather. He traveled to Paris and climbed the Eiffel Tower shortly after it was built. He co-authored the three-volume Principia Mathematica, which made him world famous in his field.
But looking around, it confused him that rich people were just as unhappy — if not more unhappy — than anyone else. Didn’t they have everything at their disposal to be happy? And more than any other generation in history?
He observed:
“Stand in a busy street during working hours, or on a main thoroughfare at a weekend, or at a dance of an evening…. You will find that each of these different crowds has its own trouble… In the work-hour crowd you will see anxiety, excessive concentration, dyspepsia, lack of interesting in anything but the struggle, incapacity for play, unconsciousness of their fellow creatures.”
In his 20s, Russell witnessed the suffering of someone close to him, and he developed what he called “a desire almost as profound as that of the Buddha to find some philosophy which should make human life endurable.”
In 1930, he published The Conquest of Happiness, which examined why society seemed to be so miserable. In the preface, he says the book contains merely “common sense,” but that the principles “increased my own happiness whenever I have acted in accordance with them.”
