Quick Review: The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking
It starts well, pointing out the problems with the pursuit of happiness in itself and with this cult of positivity in particular, including the fact that it’s an industry but mainly that it doesn’t, and can’t, work, and in fact usually has the opposite effect. After all, happiness is the difference between reality and expectations, so raising expectations to extreme levels can only hurt, while focusing on meeting those expectations and on what can go right instead of thinking of what can go wrong and accepting limits is more likely to lead to great failure, and not of a kind that one can learn from. And then it understandably moves on to Stoicism, doing a good job of presenting its virtues, though it also presents the aspects that I’ll always reject, such as accepting reality as it is and agreeing with the proponents of positive thought in saying that what matters is how you view what happens. And while I’ll definitely always reject the non-attachment that the part about Buddhism focuses on, I rationally recognize its value and that it had to be stressed in this context.
Past that point, however, the author mostly rambles, presenting some discussions or a few examples. There are still valid points, but they tend to become rather few and far between, with a fair amount of bullshit and obvious flaws in the reasoning taking their place. For example, he somehow misidentifies discipline and structure as being the same as non-attachment, says that it’s difficult to identify problems affecting you in the present, or seems to conveniently forget that difference between reality and expectations when pointing out the happiness of those living insecure lives and mentions but then quickly dismisses the impact of religious, magical thinking. And admitting that nothing particularly bad happened to him rather negates his credentials, though he at least states that this negative path is a toolkit to mix and match and adopt pieces from, not to be taken as a whole or seen as a guide or any sort of guarantee… Which may, in itself, put it above the “competition”.
Rating: 3/5
