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The Conquest of Happiness

Summary

Amazing book, and I really love Russell's writing - it's succinct and dry. This book is squarely in the 'must read again' category. What's important to remember when reading this is that Russell is a mathemtician at heart, and spent his life proving logic. So there's no 'gut-feel' observations here. He's talking about his life going from unhappy to happy and proving to the reader what it is that made him happy. In that sense, it should be taken as practical advice you can use.

The book is split in sections, with the first half describing features of an unhappy life (like envy, sense of sin, persecution mania, byronic unhappiness) and the second half focusing on features of the happy life (including work, family, impersonal interests and my favourite - zest).

The main lesson I took from it is that to achieve happiness, you need to focus your energy and attention on things outside of you (i.e. not self-centred), and ensure you are intensely interested in a broad range of things. This isn't to say be interested in everything - that very much leads to an unhappy life - but you should be well-rounded in what you focus on.

On the other side, avoid obvious things like, envy (which is a very self-centred feeling), self-pity and other wasteful feelings like worry. And it's also up to you to find the joys in life. People that claim they know too much about the world and there are too many problems in the world to enjoy it are unhappy for other reasons. It's up to you as an individual to work out what to focus on (that is not self-centred) and give it your interest - that will lead to happiness.

Happiness is not easy. There are likely biases that have been baked into you from a very early age and it needs to be worked on. To work on it, you need to look at things deeply and think through how they came to be. It can require years of thinking through why you are certain ways, but know that you can get through it.