Zest: The Secret to a Happy Life? #49

Bertrand Russel on what makes us happy

Hello and welcome! In the past few episodes we've been talking about Russell's diagnosis of what makes us unhappy. Today we want to switch and go to the positive side of it: what is it that actually makes us happy? And for Russell this is something he calls zest, which is the engagement with the world. You see this is very Aristotelian, because Aristotle has the same idea: it is our engagement with the world that makes us happy and our practicing, our virtues which gives us this phronesis – this ability to know how to employ our virtues optimally. And this is what makes us beneficial to ourselves and to others.

And if if any of this doesn't make sense then please feel free to go back and listen to the past episodes.

And for Russell, zest is the following. I will read it to you:

“The secret of happiness,” he says, “is this: let your interests be as wide as possible and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.”

The last one – the reactions be friendly rather than hostile – I think this we can visualize, you know, best by thinking of the character of Scrooge, right, in the “Christmas Carol” where you have this man who is always hostile towards everything and this is exactly what robs him of enjoyment. So his life becomes bad as a consequence of this attitude and it only turns around, it only becomes good, when he finally gives up this attitude and he engages with the world in a positive way.

I always also like to bring as an example this movie – “Groundhog Day,” this day where Bill Murray is caught in doing the same thing again and again and again forever until he finally gets out of it by an act of divine intervention, you could say. And why does this divine intervention come about? Because at some point he has given up all his negative attitude towards the world and he has become an entirely positive and helpful person. And this is what Russell also wants us to do.

“The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as possible,” Russel writes. So why should our interests be as wide as possible? Because Russell thinks one of the reasons we are unhappy is that we are concentrating too much on ourselves. And if you have friends who are prone to anxiety or depression you perhaps know this: the depressive person is very much closed in themselves, looking only at their own problems and unable to engage with something outside. Whatever is outside is boring, whatever is outside is irrelevant, and only their own pain is what counts. I’m not saying that this is a way to treat clinical anxiety, but for many of us we don't need such treatment. Our anxiety is of the everyday sort which can easily be turned around perhaps by a mental switch like that.

Russell writes: “We are all prone to the malady of the introvert, who with the manifold spectacle of the world spread out before him, turns away and gazes only upon the emptiness within. But let us not imagine that there is anything grand about the introvert's unhappiness.”

So there are all these things outside that are so interesting: There is mathematics and logic and science, and for some of us it might be poetry or good books, and for others it might be traveling and seeing new places or for others it might be enjoying dishes that you cook or somebody else cooks that are interesting and exciting. Or it might be playing the guitar. There are all these different areas of human activity and in all of them there is something exciting and you just have to find the thing that resonates most with you and your interests. But it cannot be that there is nothing in the world that excites you. Something will be there for you and feeling anxiety and boredom and negative thoughts comes from not engaging with these things.

So Russell recommends really going out, finding something that's outside of yourself, that is important – not to focus on yourself, but to forget yourself.

I also have children. I can observe this very well in my children. Whenever they are in a bad mood it's because they're focusing on themselves. When you are outside of yourself, when you're doing something where children are, you know, either playing or making some craft or, you know, playing with a computer or or programming something or whatever they're doing – writing something, painting something – then they are occupied and they are happy and they are in a state of bliss. It's only when they leave this thing and become conscious of their own thoughts again that they tend to fall into unhappiness. Thinking about ourselves tends to emphasize our problems to us – at least this is what Russell thinks.

“Genuine zest,” Russell says, “is part of the natural makeup of human beings, except in so far as it has been destroyed by unfortunate circumstances. Loss of zest in civilized society is very largely due to the restrictions upon liberty which are essential to our way of life. At every moment of life the civilized man is hedged about by restrictions of impulse: if he happens to feel cheerful he must not sing or dance in the street; while if he happens to feel sad he must not sit on the pavement and weep, for fear of obstructing pedestrian traffic.”

So it is, you know, all the things in the world that limit us, all these rules of behavior that make it impossible for us to express our feelings, and therefore over time we tend to suppress these feelings and we tend to be – in a way you could say using a Marxist word – alienated from ourselves.

For the moment, let us stop here to not make is too long and try to perhaps think where in your life you have possibilities of engaging with something outside of yourself – something that is not at all related to yourself. You know, is there – is there some area of interest that you can cultivate, some hobby where you can go perhaps together with others to some class, some afternoon meeting with similarly minded people and then just for an hour or to completely engage with this thing like a child, completely forgetting your own life and just fully engaging with something that is outside of yourself. And then if you try this perhaps you will see that this might be a way of improving your happiness by repeating this experience in the long run. Have a look if it works.

Thank you, and see you next time!