My dad recommended the book to me when I was 13. Now I’m 26. I read it after 13 years. I wish I read it earlier.

Russell sees through the time. What he described 100 years ago still holds true.

I became interested in reading it after In Praise of Idleness. I enjoyed the essay and looked for more Bertrand Russell books.

I like how the book starts with reasons for unhappiness. By the time you make it to chapters discussing happiness you feel you have the answer. That happiness is avoiding the unhappiness reasons. Don’t do what makes people unhappy. What makes the list from Russell more useful than a random list on the internet is the examples. Sometimes the unhappiness reasons are not the things that you make unhappy instantly. That’s why you don’t feel the need to stop them. Russell gives more explanation and tries to bring awareness to why it causes unhappiness in the long run.

Byronic unhappiness

The situation where someone is constantly sad about the world around them. They see the sad truths and think people who are happy are not smart enough to understand. Like the woman in Pluribus. The kind of people who say “The less I know the better.” This mindset is a symptom of unhappiness, most of the time because of another underlying reason.

The more you see and learn, you are exposed to more cruelty. The world has two sides. It’s also possible to just see the other side. But most likely this kind of unhappiness is caused by another reason. The person just reaches for some rational reason to justify unhappiness. To tell others they should be unhappy as well.

Competition

Competition destroys zest. The intention of doing something is to impress others. This is simply living for others. Most people agree working for someone else sucks. Why do people accept living for others?

The competitive habit of mind easily invades regions to which it does not belong. Take, for example, the question of reading. There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it. It has become the thing in America for ladies to read (or seem to read) certain books every month; some read them, some read the first chapter, some read the reviews, but all have these books on their tables. They do not, however, read any masterpieces. There has never been a month when Hamlet or King Lear has been selected by the Book Clubs; there has never been a month when it has been necessary to know about Dante. Consequently the reading that is done is entirely of mediocre modern books and never of masterpieces. This also is an effect of competition, not perhaps wholly bad, since most of the ladies in question, if left to themselves, so far from reading masterpieces, would read books even worse than those selected for them by their literary pastors and masters.

Boredom and Excitement

People mostly run away from boredom. When you get bored your mind starts to think of activities. These might be what you love to do and enjoy. Things you are passionate about. Have you noticed that when there are few distractions how many thoughts you get? The shower is one of the few places left with this magic.

When does it start to hurt? Excitement that involves no action mentally or physically. The kind that does not inspire you to do something. That’s the excitement that gives you fatigue.

The capacity to endure a more or less monotonous life is one which should be acquired in childhood. Modern parents are greatly to blame in this respect; they provide their children with far too many passive amusements, such as shows and good things to eat, and they do not realise the importance to a child of having one day like another, except, of course, for somewhat rare occasions. The pleasures of childhood should in the main be such as the child extracts from his environment by means of some effort and inventiveness. Pleasures which are exciting and at the same time involve no physical exertion, such, for example, as the theatre, should occur very rarely. The excitement is in the nature of a drug, of which more and more will come to be required, and the physical passivity during the excitement is contrary to instinct. A child develops best when, like a young plant, he is left undisturbed in the same soil. Too much travel, too much variety of impressions, are not good for the young, and cause them as they grow up to become incapable of enduring fruitful monotony. I do not mean that monotony has any merits of its own; I mean only that certain good things are not possible except where there is a certain degree of monotony. Take, say, Wordsworth’s Prelude. It will be obvious to every reader that whatever had any value in Wordsworth’s thoughts and feelings would have been impossible to a sophisticated urban youth. A boy or young man who has some serious constructive purpose will endure voluntarily a great deal of boredom if he finds that it is necessary by the way. But constructive purposes do not easily form themselves in a boy’s mind if he is living a life of distractions and dissipations, for in that case his thoughts will always be directed towards the next pleasure rather than towards the distant achievement. For all these reasons a generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly divorced from the slow processes of nature, of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase.

Fatigue

If you are tired for a day. It’s fine. You can have a good sleep and feel much better tomorrow. But being constantly tired is a cause of unhappiness and does not go away by itself.

In older times when the work was still mostly physical the fatigue was physical. Nowdays it’s mental.

Imagine the person who is worried about work when he’s at home or vacation. This person cannot let go of the worries and it can affect his sleep. So he cannot rest.

Focus on a problem when you can do something about it. Because worry comes when you cannot do anything but think about the problem. Instead, focus on what you can do. A lot of times people worry about life at work and worry about work at holidays.

Don’t get stuck on something for too long. Getting stuck on something and not making any progress causes fatigue. But using the same power that shows us the solution to problems during sleep we can avoid that. This was one of the oldest tips I got in programming that if you cannot figure it out sleep and come back tomorrow. It works all the time. Because when you focus on something so hard. The mind starts processing it in the background. Even when you are asleep This is one of the oldest tips I got in programming that if you cannot figure it out sleep and come back tomorrow. Using this you can focus on hard problems for some hours and then leave it. Get back to it after some time and it’s almost solved itself.

Another category of worry is not knowing what’s going to happen. In these cases Russell suggests to imagine what’s the worst that can happen. And then you’ll see it’s not that bad. The similar idea from Stoic “negative visualization” (premeditatio malorum) to feeling freer/less anxious: you imagine the worst-case outcome, and that reduces fear because the downside is usually less terrible than your mind predicts.​

Lastly, too much excitement can cause fatigue.

A very frequent source of fatigue is love of excitement. If a man could spend his leisure in sleep, he would keep fit, but his working hours are dreary, and he feels the need of pleasure during his hours of freedom. The trouble is that the pleasures which are easiest to obtain and most superficially attractive are mostly of a sort to wear out the nerves. Desire for excitement, when it goes beyond a point, is a sign either of a twisted disposition or of some instinctive dissatisfaction. In the early days of a happy marriage most men feel no need of excitement, but in the modern world marriage often has to be postponed for such a long time that when at last it becomes financially possible excitement has become a habit which can only be kept at bay for a short time. If public opinion allowed men to marry at twenty-one without incurring the financial burdens at present involved in matrimony, many men would never get into the way of demanding pleasures as fatiguing as their work. To suggest that this should be made possible is, however, immoral, as may be seen from the fate of Judge Lindsey, who has suffered obloquy, in spite of a long and honourable career, for the sole crime of wishing to save young people from the misfortunes that they incur as a result of their elders’ bigotry. I shall not, however, pursue this topic any further at present, since it comes under the heading of Envy, with which we shall be concerned in a later chapter.

Sense of Sin

There are some beliefs with every person and even if pretending you don’t agree with them going against them diminishes happiness. Face your beliefs and reject the ones you don’t agree with or accept and follow them.

Persecution Mania

Inventor whose work is not appreciated. Person who hears bad opinions of self. Philanthropist helping others against their will.

Remember your motives are not as altruistic as they seem to yourself. Be realistic with your skills and merits. Do not expect others to be interested in you as you do yourself.

Reasons for Happiness

What are the ways to still be happy? These chapters are about work, intention, family. These are my favorite highlights.

Work makes you appreciate holidays.

With this advantage of work another is associated, namely that it makes holidays much more delicious when they come. Provided a man does not have to work so hard as to impair his vigour, he is likely to find far more zest in his free time than an idle man could possibly find.

Low Expectations.

man who underestimates himself is perpetually being surprised by success, whereas the man who overestimates himself is just as often surprised by failure

You need something to distract yourself from work. Related to the fatigue section.

The man who can forget his work when it is over and not remember it until it begins again next day is likely to do his work far better than the man who worries about it throughout the intervening hours. And it is very much easier to forget

Doing something because you love it makes you happy. This looks too simple to be true from outside.

Of the more highly educated sections of the community, the happiest in the present day are the men of science. Many of the most eminent of them are emotionally simple, and obtain from their work a satisfaction so profound that they can derive pleasure from eating and even marrying. Artists and literary men consider it de rigueur to be unhappy in their marriages, but men of science quite frequently remain capable of old-fashioned domestic bliss. The reason for this is that the higher parts of their intelligence are wholly absorbed by their work, and are not allowed to intrude into regions where they have no functions to perform.

The work that makes you happy is the one you believe in. Doing something you don’t believe in is disrespectful to yourself.

I believe, that only a small minority do so; the rest, for the sake of a livelihood, prostitute their skill to purposes which they believe to be harmful. Such work cannot bring any real satisfaction, and in the course of reconciling himself to the doing of it a man has to make himself so cynical that he can no longer derive wholehearted satisfaction from anything whatever. I cannot condemn men who undertake work of this sort, since starvation is too serious an alternative, but I think that where it is possible to do work that is satisfactory to a man’s constructive impulses without entirely starving, he will be well advised from the point of view of his own happiness if he chooses it in preference to work much more highly paid but not seeming to him worth doing on its own account. Without self-respect genuine happiness is scarcely possible. And the man who is ashamed of his work can hardly achieve self-respect.

This sentence is just beautiful.

Complexity in emotions is like foam in a river. It is produced by obstacles which break the smoothly flowing current

I feel this a lot.

Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young men and women of the West results from the combination of comfort with powerlessness. Powerlessness makes people feel that nothing is worth doing, and comfort makes the painfulness of this feeling just endurable

Genuine interest toward others is a source of happiness. Very close idea to what is in the How to Win Friends and Influence People book.

A friendly interest in persons is a form of affectionateness, but not the form which is grasping and possessive and seeking always an emphatic response. This latter form is very frequently a source of unhappiness. The kind that makes for happiness is the kind that likes to observe people and finds pleasure in their individual traits, that wishes to afford scope for the interests and pleasures of those with whom it is brought into contact without desiring to acquire power over them or to secure their enthusiastic admiration. The person whose attitude towards others is genuinely of this kind will be a source of happiness and a recipient of reciprocal kindness. His relations with others, whether slight or serious, will satisfy both his interests and his affections; he will not be soured by ingratitude, since he will seldom suffer it and will not notice when he does. The same idiosyncrasies which would get on another man’s nerves to the point of exasperation will be to him a source of gentle amusement. He will achieve without effort results which another man, after long struggles, will find to be unattainable. Being happy in himself, he will be a pleasant companion, and this in turn will increase his happiness. But all this must be genuine; it must not spring from an idea of self-sacrifice inspired by a sense of duty. A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation. To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.