Notes

Some of the interviews in this book were originally conducted in the course of reporting assignments for the Guardian. In a small number of other cases, scenes have been compressed or dialogue reconstructed from memory.

1: On Trying Too Hard to Be Happy

has been accused of denying access to reporters … Lowe denies the charge: See Eric Anderson, ‘Media Barred from Get Motivated! Seminar, at Least for Now’, Albany Times Union blog ‘The Buzz’, 21 July 2009; and Tamara Lowe’s comment, at blog.timesunion.com/business/media-barred-from-get-motivated-seminar-at-least-for-now/

has filed for bankruptcy: See Rebecca Cathcart, ‘Crystal Cathedral Files for Bankruptcy’, New York Times, 18 October 2010.

increased economic growth does not necessarily make for happier societies: This is an endlessly contested subject, with rival psychologists and economists constantly doing battle, and as ever it rests on contentious definitions of happiness. But one of the very biggest and most up-to-date reviews of the data, which found an absence of correlation in the long term between economic growth and improved wellbeing, is Richard Easterlin et al., ‘The Happiness-Income Paradox Revisited’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (2010): 22463-8.

increased personal income … doesn’t make for happier people: See previous note; and see also Daniel Kahneman et al., ‘Would You Be Happier If You Were Richer? A Focusing Illusion’, Science 312 (2006): 1908-10. And perhaps more to the point, it certainly seems to be the case that if you set out to achieve material goals, you’ll be less happy than those with other priorities: see Carol Nickerson et al., ‘Zeroing in on the Dark Side of the American Dream’, Psychological Science 14 (2003): 531-6.

Nor does better education: See for example Robert Witter et al., ‘Education and Subjective Wellbeing: A Meta-analysis’, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 6 (1984): 165-73.

Nor does an increased choice of consumer products: The canonical resource on this is Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice (New York: Ecco, 2003).

Nor do bigger and fancier homes: Robert H. Frank, ‘How Not To Buy Happiness’, Daedalus 133 (2004): 69-79.

research strongly suggests they aren’t usually much help: One example is Gerald Haeffel, ‘When Self-help is No Help: Traditional Cognitive Skills Training Does Not Prevent Depressive Symptoms in People Who Ruminate’, Behaviour Research and Therapy 48 (2010): 152-7. To be fair, studies have shown some specific self-help books to have a beneficial effect, notably Feeling Good by David Burns - see Eric Stice et al., ‘Randomised Trial of a Brief Depression Prevention Programme: An Elusive Search for a Psychosocial Placebo Control Condition’, Behaviour Research and Therapy 45 (2007): 863-76.

the ‘eighteen-month rule’: For more on this, see Steve Salerno, Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless (New York: Crown, 2005).

venting your anger doesn’t get rid of it: Brad Bushman, ‘Does Venting Anger Feed or Extinguish the Flame? Catharsis, Rumination, Distraction, Anger, and Aggressive Responding’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 28 (2002): 724-31.

‘when you try to stay on the surface of the water …’: Both quotations from Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity (New York: Vintage, 1951), 9.

‘the harder we try …’: Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays 1939-1956 (Lanham, Maryland: Ivan R. Dee, 2002), 225.

the ‘cult of optimism’, as the philosopher Peter Vernezze calls it: Peter Vernezze, Don’t Worry, Be Stoic (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 2005): xx.

one typical transcript: Daniel Wegner, White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts (New York: Guilford Press, 1989), 3.

he explained in one paper: Daniel Wegner, ‘How To Think, Say or Do Precisely the Worst Thing for Any Occasion’, Science 325 (2009): 48.

‘Metacognition … occurs when thought takes itself as an object’: Wegner, White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts, 44.

‘Metathoughts are instructions …’: Ibid., 54.

when experimental subjects are told of an unhappy event: Ibid., 128-9; see also Daniel Wegner et al., ‘Ironic Processes in the Mental Control of Mood and Mood-related Thought’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65 (1993): 1093-1104.

patients who were suffering from panic disorders: Chris Adler et al., ‘Relaxation-induced Panic (RIP): When Resting Isn’t Painful’, Integrative Psychiatry 5 (1987): 94-100.

Bereaved people who make the most effort to avoid feeling grief: Wegner, White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts, 9, in reference to Erich Lindeman, ‘Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief’, American Journal of Psychiatry 101 (1944): 141-8.

people instructed not to think about sex: Wegner, White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts, 149, in reference to Barclay Martin, ‘Expression and Inhibition of Sex Motive Arousal in College Males’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 68 (1964): 307-12.

An additional twist was revealed in 2009: Joanne Wood et al., ‘Positive Self-statements: Power for Some, Peril for Others’, Psychological Science 20 (2009): 860-6.

‘There are lots of ways of being miserable’: Edith Wharton, ‘The Last Asset’, in The Collected Stories of Edith Wharton (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2003), 65.

‘doing the presumably sensible thing is counterproductive’: Steven Hayes, ‘Hello Darkness: Discovering Our Values by Confronting Our Fears’, Psychotherapy Networker 31 (2007): 46-52.

2: What Would Seneca Do?

a speech he gave to executives of the investment bank Merrill Lynch: See Jeanne Pugh, ‘The Eternal Optimist’, St Petersburg Times, 8 June 1985.

Healthy and happy people … generally have a less accurate, overly optimistic grasp: The classic study on ‘depressive realism’ is Lauren Alloy and Lyn Abramson, ‘Judgment of Contingency in Depressed and Nondepressed Students: Sadder but Wiser?’, Journal of Experimental Psychology 108 (1979): 441-85.

a particularly high-achieving week at work: Heather Barry Kappes and Gabriele Oettingen, ‘Positive Fantasies about Idealized Futures Sap Energies’, Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology 47 (2011): 719-29.

Oettingen had some of the participants rendered mildly dehydrated: Ibid.

writes the scholar of Stoicism William Irvine: In A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (New York: Oxford 2008), Kindle edition.

‘Things do not touch the soul’: Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations, Book IV, Trans. George Long; electronic text available at classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.html

‘the single most valuable technique’: In William Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life.

‘Whenever you grow attached to something’: Quoted in William Stephens, ‘Epictetus on How the Stoic Sage Loves’, at puffin.creighton.edu/phil/Stephens/OSAP%20Epictetus%20on%20Stoic%20Love.htm

‘Set aside a certain number of days’: Moral Epistles to Lucilius, Trans. Richard Gummere (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1917), 119.

‘Constantly regard the universe as one living being’: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations Book IV.

‘Never have I trusted Fortune’: Seneca, The Consolation of Helvia, Trans. Moses Hadas (New York: Norton, 1968), 111-12.

‘Do not despise death’: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations Book IX.

‘The cucumber is bitter? Put it down’: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations Book VIII; the translation here is by Arthur Loat Farquharson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1944).

America’s psychologists had voted him the second most influential: See Michael Kaufman, ‘Albert Ellis, Influential Figure in Modern Psychology, Dies at 93’, New York Times, 24 July 2007.

‘Whereupon thirty got up and walked away’: Myrtle Heery, ‘An Interview with Albert Ellis’, www.psychotherapy.net/interview/Albert_Ellis

‘Nobody took out a stiletto’: Ibid.

‘Because … when you insist that an undesirable event is awful’: Albert Ellis, How To Make Yourself Happy and Remarkably Less Disturbable (Atascadero: Impact, 1999): 60.

3: The Storm Before the Calm

immediately collapse onto the ground: This anecdote comes from Rick Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America (Boston: Shambhala, 1992), 252.

‘Fall, hands a-clasped’: See Jack Kerouac, Pomes All Sizes (San Francisco: City Lights, 1992), 96.

one Kerouac biographer: Ann Charters, Kerouac: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1994), 219.

‘One realises … that one’s brain is constantly chattering’: J. Krishnamurti, ‘Dialogue at Los Alamos’, March 1984; available at www.jkrishnamurti.org/krishnamurti-teachings/print.php?tid=1588&chid=1285

a series of experiments conducted in 2009: For details, and for Fadel Zeidan’s comments, see University of North Carolina at Charlotte release, ‘Brief Training in Meditation May Help Manage Pain, Study Shows’, at www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091110065909.htm, and Fadel Zeidan et al., ‘The Effects of Brief Mindfulness Training on Experimentally Induced Pain’, The Journal of Pain 11 (2009): 199-209.

In a related experiment by Zeidan’s team: See Fadel Zeidan et al., ‘Brain Mechanisms Supporting the Modulation of Pain by Mindfulness Meditation’, Journal of Neuroscience 31 (2011): 5540-8.

‘If we get the right emotion’: From a talk at the TED conference by Tony Robbins, viewable online at www.ted.com/talks/tony_robbins_asks_why_we_do_what_we_do.html

The author Julie Fast: See Julie Fast, Get It Done When You’re Depressed (New York: Alpha Books, 2008).

‘Inspiration is for amateurs’: Quoted in Julie Bernstein and Kurt Anderson, Spark: How Creativity Works (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 13.

‘People … think that they should’: Shoma Morita, Morita Therapy and the True Nature of Anxiety-Based Disorders, Trans. Akihisa Kondo (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 53.

‘Many western therapeutic methods focus’: See James Hill, ‘Morita Therapy’, at www.moritaschool.com/content/morita-therapy.

‘Clear mind is like the full moon in the sky’: Stephen Mitchell, Ed., Dropping Ashes on the Buddha: The Teaching of Zen Master Seung Sahn (New York: Grove, 1994), 51-2.

4: Goal Crazy

In 1996, a twenty-eight-year-old from Indiana: My account of Christopher Kayes’s travels, his account of the 1996 Everest disaster, and his interpretation of the 1963 Everest study, along with quotes from Ed Viesturs, James Lester, Beck Weathers and others are drawn from an interview with Kayes and from his fascinating book Destructive Goal Pursuit: The Mount Everest Disaster (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

a largely forgotten psychology study: My primary source is Christopher Kayes, Destructive Goal Pursuit, but the study in question is detailed in James Lester, ‘Wrestling with the Self on Mount Everest’, Journal of Humanistic Psychology 23 (1983): 31-41.

a journalist from the technology magazine Fast Company: Lawrence Tabak, ‘If Your Goal Is Success, Don’t Consult These Gurus’, Fast Company, 18 December 2007.

‘Consider any individual at any period of his life’: Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 2, Trans. George Lawrence (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 369.

The psychologist Dorothy Rowe argues: In Tim Lott, ‘Why Uncertainty is Good for You’, The Sunday Times, 24 May 2009.

Here are the words of one blogger: See David Cain, ‘How To Get Comfortable Not Knowing’, at www.raptitude.com/2009/06/how-to-get-comfortable-not-knowing

the economist Colin Camerer and three of his colleagues: Colin Camerer et al., ‘Labor Supply of New York City Cabdrivers: One Day at a Time’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 112 (1997): 407-41.

a 2009 paper with a heavy-handed pun for its title: Lisa Ordóñez et al., ‘Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side-effects of Overprescribing Goal-setting’, Academy of Management Perspectives 23 (2009): 6-16.

One illuminating example of the problem: My account of GM’s ‘twenty-nine’ campaign is drawn from Sean Cole, ‘It’s Not Always Good To Create Goals’, from the website of the American Public Media radio show Marketplace, accessible at www.marketplace.org/topics/life/its-not-always-good-create-goals, and Drake Bennett, ‘Ready, Aim … Fail’, Boston Globe, 15 March 2009.

Gary Latham and Edwin Locke’s response: Gary Latham and Edwin Locke, ‘Has Goal-setting Gone Wild, or Have Its Attackers Abandoned Good Scholarship?’, Academy of Management Perspectives 23 (2009): 17-23.

‘When we try to pick out any thing by itself’: John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 211.

‘The continued existence of complex interactive systems’: Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 124.

‘I’m not sure if my goals drove me’: Steve Shapiro, Goal-free Living (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley, 2006), xii.

In survey research he commissioned: Steve Shapiro, Goal-free Living, v.

A few years ago, the researcher Saras Sarasvathy: Information and quotations about effectuation come primarily from Leigh Buchanan, ‘How Great Entrepreneurs Think’, Inc. Magazine, February 2011; and the website www.effectuation.org.

‘The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning’: Erich Fromm, Man for Himself (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 45.

‘To be a good human’: In Bill Moyers, A World of Ideas (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 448.

5: Who’s There?

‘a slow movement at first’: All quotations from Eckhart Tolle are drawn either from my meeting with him, or from his books The Power of Now and A New Earth. See Oliver Burkeman, ‘The Bedsit Epiphany’, The Guardian, 11 April 2009; Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now (Novato, California: New World Library, 1999) and A New Earth (New York: Dutton, 2005).

‘supremely powerful and cunning’: This and following quotes are from René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, Trans. Michael Moriarty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 16.

‘A viewer of The Matrix’: Christopher Grau, Ed., Philosophers Explore the Matrix (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 13.

‘For my part, when I enter most intimately’: David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Selections from a Treatise of Human Nature, Ed. Thom Chittom (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2004), 200.

no ‘centre in the brain’: Quoted in Jullian Baggini, ‘The Blurred Reality of Humanity’, Independent, 21 March 2011.

As the psychologist Michael Gazzaniga has demonstrated: See Michael Gazzaniga, The Ethical Brain (New York: HarperCollins, 2006): 149.

claims Paul Hauck: Paul Hauck, Overcoming the Rating Game: Beyond Selflove, Beyond Self-esteem (Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992), 46.

adapted here from the work of … Alan Watts: All quotations from Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity.

6: The Safety Catch

‘a pretty effective spear’: All quotations from Bruce Schneier come from my interview with him and from his essay ‘The Psychology of Security’. See Oliver Burkeman, ‘Heads in the Clouds’, Guardian, 1 December 2007; and Bruce Schneier, ‘The Psychology of Security’, accessible at www.schneier.com/essay-155.html

the 2020 Project … published a report: See www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_globaltrend2020_s4.html

‘the feeling that we live in a time of unusual insecurity’: Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity, 14.

‘As a matter of fact’: Ibid., 15.

‘To be vulnerable … is to be without defensive armour’: Quoted in Susan Schwartz Senstad, ‘The Wisdom of Vulnerability’; available at voicedialogue. org/articles-b/Wisdom_Of_Vulnerability.pdf

‘You can’t selectively numb emotion’: From a talk at the TED conference by Brené Brown, viewable online at www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability.html

‘To love at all is to be vulnerable’: Quoted in Vincent Genovesi, In Pursuit of Love: Catholic Morality and Human Sexuality (Collegeville, Minneapolis: Liturgical Press, 1996), 28.

‘The truth that many people never understand’: Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (New York: Harcourt, 1948), 91.

‘Becoming a Buddhist’: Quoted in Helen Tworkov, ‘No Right, No Wrong: An Interview with Pema Chödrön’, Tricycle, Fall 1993.

‘Things are not permanent’: Ibid.

‘It’s clear that poverty has crippled Kibera’: From Jean-Pierre Larroque, ‘Of Crime and Camels’, blog post at mediaforsocialchange.org/blog/of-crime-and-camels 22 July 2001

‘I find it so inspiring when you see people’: See ‘Colleen “Inspired” by Poor People’, unbylined article at www.metro.co.uk/showbiz/22368-coleen-inspired-by-poor-people

International surveys of happiness: All World Values Survey data is accessible at www.worldvaluessurvey.org. Also see, for example, ‘Nigeria Tops Happiness Survey’, unbylined BBC News article, 2 October 2003, at news. bbc.co.uk/2/hi/3157570.stm

Survey data from the Afrobarometer project: A good overview of this research is Carol Graham and Matthew Hoover, ‘Poverty and Optimism in Africa: Adaptation or Survival?’, prepared for the Gallup Positive Psychology Summit, October 2006, accessible at brookings.edu/views/papers/graham/20061005ppt.pdf

According to mental health researchers: The study is by the World Health Organization World Mental Health Survey Consortium, entitled ‘Prevalence, Severity, and Unmet Need for Treatment of Mental Disorders in the World Health Organization World Mental Health Surveys’, and was reported in ‘Global Study Finds Mental Illness Widespread’, unbylined Associated Press report, 7 July 2004.

‘It is simply self-evident’: Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity, 16.

7: The Museum of Failure

As the journalist Neil Steinberg has noted: Neil Steinberg, Complete and Utter Failure (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 31.

‘top 50 per cent of safe drivers’: Ola Svenson, ‘Are We All Less Risky and More

Skillful Than Our Fellow Drivers?’, Acta Psychologica 47 (1981): 143-8.

A fascinating series of studies of working scientists: See, for example, Kevin Dunbar, ‘Scientific Creativity’ from The Encyclopedia of Creativity, Ed. Steven Pritzker and Mark Runco (Waltham, Massachusetts: Academic Press, 1999): 1379-84; available at utsc.utoronto.ca/~dunbarlab/pubpdfs/DunbarCreativityEncyc99.pdf

‘If you’re a scientist and you’re doing an experiment’: From a PopTech conference talk by Kevin Dunbar, ‘Kevin Dunbar on Unexpected Science’, accessible online at poptech.org/popcasts/kevin_dunbar_on_unexpected_science

As he told the neuroscience writer Jonah Lehrer: See Jonah Lehrer, ‘Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up’, Wired, January 2010.

‘Think about it’: All quotations from Jerker Denrell are from my interview with him or from Jerker Denrell, ‘Vicarious Learning, Undersampling of Failure, and the Myths of Management’, Organization Science 2003 (14): 227-43; and Jerker Denrell, ‘Selection Bias and the Perils of Benchmarking’, Harvard Business Review, April 2005.

research into media commentators who make predictions: Jerker Denrell and Christina Fang, ‘Predicting the Next Big Thing: Success as a Signal of Poor Judgment’, Management Science 56 (2010): 1653-67; see also Joe Keohane, ‘That Guy Who Called the Big One? Don’t Listen to Him’, Boston Globe, 9 January 2011.

‘The Dome has a clear brand’: Ros Coward, ‘Wonderful, Foolish Dome’, Guardian, 12 March 2001.

‘Musing over failure is not a particularly American activity’: Neil Steinberg, Complete and Utter Failure, 3.

‘Downfall … brings us to the ground’: Natalie Goldberg, The Great Failure (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 1-2.

8: Memento Mori

“At bottom … no one believes’: Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death (New York: Moffat Yard, 1918), Google Books digitised version, 41.

‘Making a killing in business’: Sam Keen, Foreword to Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973), Kindle edition.

One typical set of terror management experiments: The Rutgers experiments are Mark Landau et al., ‘Deliver Us from Evil: The Effects of Mortality Salience and Reminders of 9/11 on Support for President George W. Bush’, Personal and Social Psychology Bulletin 30 (2004): 1136-50.

Christians show more negativity towards Jews: Jeff Greenberg et al., ‘Evidence for Terror Management Theory II: The Effect of Mortality Salience on Reactions to Those Who Threaten or Bolster the Cultural Worldview’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 58 (1990): 308-18.

Moralistic people become more moralistic: Abram Rosenblatt et al., ‘Evidence for Terror Management Theory: I. The Effects of Mortality Salience on Reactions To Those Who Violate or Uphold Cultural Values’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 57 (1989): 681-90.

more intense reactions of disgust: Jamie Goldenberg et al., ‘I Am Not an Animal: Mortality Salience, Disgust, and the Denial of Human Creatureliness’, Journal of Experimental Psychology 130 (2001): 427-35.

one such paper states: Ibid.

sympathetic to the theory of ‘intelligent design’: Jessica Tracy et al., ‘Death and Science: the Existential Underpinnings of Belief in Intelligent Design and Discomfort with Evolution’, PLoS One 6 (2011): e17349.

‘Well,’ Becker told him: See Sam Keen, ‘How a Philosopher Dies’; available online at samkeen.com/interviews-by-sam/interviews-by-sam/earnest-becker-how-a-philosopher-dies

‘Gradually, reluctantly’: Sam Keen, Foreword to Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death.

as the contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel points out: All Nagel quotations are from ‘Death’ in Mortal Questions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 1-10.

Jean-Paul Sartre: Quoted in Irvin Yalom, Staring at the Sun (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008), Kindle edition.

also one of the happiest: Two examples are an Ipsos Global survey that put Mexico third, detailed in ‘World is Happier Place Than in 2007 - Poll’, unbylined report, Reuters, 10 February 2012; and the 2010 findings of the Happiness Barometer project, sponsored by the Coca-Cola Company in association with Complutense University of Madrid, which put Mexico in first place: see www.thecoca-colacompany.com/presscenter/happiness_barometer.pdf

‘to ask her to “protect me tonight …”‘: Quoted in Elizabeth Fullerton, ‘Booming Death Cult Draws Mexican Gangsters, Police’, Reuters, 13 May 2004.

‘In our tradition’: Quoted in Judy King, ‘Los Dias de los Muertos’, in Mexico Connect, accessible at mexconnect.com/articles/1427-los-dias-de-los-muertos-the-days-of-the-dead

Epilogue

‘a touchstone moment’: Steven Edward Jones, Satire and Romanticism (New

York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 196. 205 ‘I had not a dispute but a disquisition’: Quoted in ibid., 195-6.

‘He will never come at a truth’: Quoted in Jacob Wigod, ‘Negative Capability and Wise Passiveness’, PMLA 67 (1952): 383-90.

‘openture’: All Paul Pearsall quotations are from Awe: The Delights and Dangers of Our Eleventh Emotion (Deerfield Beach, Florida: Health Communications, 2007).

‘Proficiency and the results of proficiency’ Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays 1939-1956, 225.

‘A good traveller has no fixed plans’: Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching: A New English Version, interpreted by Stephen Mitchell (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 27.