The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking
Oliver Burkeman
2012, 236 pages
Nonfiction
Oliver Burkeman’s The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking is a handbook for what the English Romantic poet John Keats called “negative capability,” or living with “uncertainties, mysteries, (and) doubts” without feeling miserable. Burkeman neatly explains why positive psychology often backfires and what philosophy and psychology have to say about the “negative path to happiness.”
From Stoicism to Eckhart Tolle, Buddhist non-attachment to the Museum of Failure, Burkeman explores a range of ideas and practices. In the tradition of other recent “immersion journalists” (like A. J. Jacobs), Burkeman actually visits his subjects when possible and tries the practices he writes about.
For example, he takes a week long silent retreat at the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts, recreates psychologist Albert Ellis’s “subway-station exercise” on the London Underground, and visits a cemetery in a Mexican village to experience The Day of the Dead. In the final chapter he offers “an interim status report” explaining how these experiences and approaches are working in his own life.
Highly recommended for fans of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided, which offers a history of positive psychology in America and its impact on our economy and culture, readers who enjoy immersion journalism, and those skeptical of the recent spate of “happiness literature.”
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