The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life makes it Hard to be Happy

The talent for self-justification is surely the finest flower of human evolution, the greatest achievement of the human brain. When it comes to justifying actions, every human being acquires the intelligence of an Einstein, the imagination of a Shakespeare, and the subtlety of a Jesuit.

Being constantly the hub of a network of potential interruptions provides the excitement and importance of crisis management. As well as the false sense of efficiency in multitasking, there is the false sense of urgency in multi-interrupt processing.

To learn to die is to learn to live. Death is the giver of life.

It is not possible to be original by trying to be original - those who attempt this in the arts will be merely avant-garde. Originality is the product of an impulse to intense and overwhelming that it bursts the conventions and produces something new - again more by accident than design.

It may well be that an analysis of figures would reveal a law - the duration of a marriage is inversely proportional to the cost of the wedding. Or, to put it another way, any union celebrated with personalized toasting flutes is doomed.

The 1970s was the decade of liberation, of anger at injustice and demands for recognition and rights. But over time, the demand for specific rights degraded into a generalized sense of entitlement, the demand for specific recognition into a generalized demand for attention and the anger at specific injustice into a generalized feeling of grievance and resentment. The result is a culture of entitlement, attention-seeking and complaint.

Reverence for potential is a form of greed that believes there is always something better just ahead. But the spell of potential enchants the future at the expense of disenchanting the present. Whatever is actually happening today is already so yesterday, and the only true excitement is the Next Big Thing - the next lover, job, project, holiday, destination or meal. As a consequence, the most attractive solution to problems is flight. If there are difficulties in a relationship or at work, the temptation is to move on. This, in turn, rules out the satisfactions of confronting and surmounting problems and destroys the crucial ability to make use of tribulations, to turn to advantage whatever happens.

And a sensible work strategy might be: surrender to the task but not to the taskmaster, become absorbed in the work itself but never absorb the work ethos.

94 per cent of us think we do above-average work.

Imagine someone sitting alone in a room without television, radio, computer or phone and with the door closed and the blinds down. This person must be a dangerous lunatic or a prisoner sentenced to solitary confinement. If a free agent, then a panty-sniffing loser shunned by society, or a psycho planning to return to college with an automatic weapon and a backpack full of ammo.

And, like Buddha, Spinoza is often dismissed as a mere seeker of tranquillity – but what he valued most was joy, which he defined as a sense of empowerment created by the understanding mind. But, again as in the teachings of Buddha, understanding is not a passive, final state, but a process requiring ceaseless effort. In another insight prefiguring neurobiology, which defines living organisms as systems for optimizing life conditions, Spinoza suggested that our very nature is to strive. His Latin word for human nature, conatus, means ‘striving’ or ‘endeavour’: ‘The striving by which each thing attempts to persevere in its being is nothing other than the actual essence of the thing.’ And the striving has to be difficult to be valuable: ‘If salvation were readily available and could be attained without great effort, how could it be neglected by almost everyone? All that is excellent is as difficult to attain as it is rare.

Marxists interpreted everything in terms of class; Freudians in terms of childhood; and feminists in terms of gender.

Stupidity, selfishness and good health are the three prerequisites of happiness, though if stupidity is lacking the others are useless.

To survive is to strive. The problem is the tendency to strive for the wrong things, especially to emulate those who have found worldly success. The human creature is a search engine of great power and sophistication, but with little idea of how to choose search parameters or evaluate results. So, when misguided striving fails to provide satisfaction, there is a tendency to believe that the alternative must be a rejection of all striving, that the answer is to lie on a Caribbean beach lathered in coconut oil.

As Seneca put it: ‘The greatest hindrance to living is expectancy, which depends upon tomorrow and wastes today.

Şair R. M. Rilke modern çağın gittikçe daha az çaba talep edeceğini anlamıştı: “İnsanlar her soruna kolay çözüm, hem de kolayın en kolayını arıyorlar. Ama zor olana tutunmamız gerektiği gayet açık; her canlı yaratık zora sımsıkı tutunur.

Psikolog Daniel Nettle eskinin birçok düşünürünü tekrarlayarak mücadelenin kendisinin anlam olduğu teorisini ortaya atmıştır: “İnsan zihnindeki mutluluk programının amacı insani mutluluğu artırmaya yönelik değildir; çabalamaya devam etmemize yöneliktir.” İnsan, mücadele etmek üzere tasarlanmıştır. Buda, Spinoza ve Schopenhauer dahil birçok düşünür bunda hemfikirdir. Schopenhauer görüşünü tipik netliğiyle vurgular: “Bir şey için uğraştığımız zamanlar dışında varoluşumuzdan haz duymayız.

So a contemporary wedding is like the Olympic Games, a spectacle of detailed research and preparation but lasts only a short time. Even if it all goes according to plan, a wedding is over in a day, much of it spent being ordered around by photographers, and when the audience is gone and the costumes returned to their boxes (never again to be taken out), an ordinary man and woman look to each other and think: 'Is this all it is?

Hannah Arendt has argued that revolutions occur when contempt for bad governance becomes so widespread and corrosive that the system simply collapses -- a theory demonstrated by the fall of communism. So it may be useful to spread and intensify contempt for the boss by slyly fomenting sedition in the photocopying room.

Only Robinson Crusoe got it all done by Friday!

Çocuklar gibi kendinizi eğlendirmek ya da hırslılar gibi yaşama dair talimat bulma amacıyla okumayın. Hayır, yaşamak için okuyun.” - Flaubert

İnsanlar artık soyma zahmetine katlanamadıkları için portakal satışlarındaki düşüş cidden şok edici ve üzücü. Bu haberi okuduktan sonra daha sık portakal almaya ve portakalları daha zevkle yemeye başladım. Artık portakalı son derece yavaş, özenle, şehvetle ve hepsinden öte, zayiatsız savaşlar, vergisiz sosyal hizmetler, yaptırımsız haklar, çabasız şöhret, ilişkisiz seks, koşmak için giyilmeyen koşu ayakkabıları, çalışma gerektirmeyen ödev ve çekirdeksiz üzüm talep eden çağa yanıt babında, meydan okurcasına soyuyorum.

En son kimden “Kabahat bende” lafını duyduk? Sartre’ın “İnsan, doğası ve seçimlerinden tümüyle sorumludur” demesinin üzerinden yüzlerce yıl geçmiş sanki. Bugün tam tersi geçerli. İnsanlar ne doğalarından ne de seçimlerinden sorumlular.