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The Conquest Of Happiness

Bertrand Russell

On his enjoyment of life growing year by year:

“I might almost say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more. This is due partly to having discovered what were the things that I most desired and having gradually acquired many of these things. Partly it is due to having successfully dismissed certain objects of desire - such as the acquisition of indubitable knowledge about something or other - as essentially unattainable. But very largely it is due to a diminishing preoccupation with myself.”
“Like others who had a puritan education, I had the habit of meditating on my sins, follies, and shortcomings. I seemed to myself - no doubt justly - a miserable specimen”
On the dangers of focusing on the self vs external things:

“Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to centre my attention increasingly upon external objects… every external interest inspires some activity which, so long as the interest remains alive, is a complete preventive of ennui. Interest in oneself, on the contrary, leads to no activity of a progressive kind. It may lead to the keeping of a diary, to getting psycho-analysed, or perhaps to becoming a monk. But the monk will not be happy until the routine of the monastery has made him forget his own soul. The happiness which he attributes to religion he could have obtained from becoming a crossing-sweeper.”
On alcoholism etc:

“A man may feel so completely thwarted that he seeks no form of satisfaction, but only distraction and oblivion. He then becomes a devotee of ‘pleasure’. That is to say he seeks to make life bearable by becoming less alive. Drunkenness, for example, is temporary suicide; the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness.”
“Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.”
“To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness.”
On the youthful ennui of the intellectual:

“To all the talented young people who wander about feeling that there is nothing in the world for them to do, I should say: ‘Give up trying to write, and, instead, try not to write. Go out into the world; become a pirate, a king in Borneo, a labourer in Soviet Russia; give yourself an existence in which the satisfaction of elementary physical needs will occupy all your energies.”

Competition

On the lust for power or wealth and its place in happiness:

“Now that is not what the businessman means when he speaks of the ‘struggle for life’. It is an inaccurate phrase which he has picked up in order to give dignity to something essentially trivial. Ask him how many men he has known in his class of life who have died of hunger. Ask him what happened to his friends after they had been ruined. Everybody knows that a businessman who has been ruined is better off so far as material comforts are concerned than a man who has never been rich enough to have the chance of being ruined.”
“What people really mean… by the struggle for life is really the struggle for success. What people fear… is not that they will fail to get their breakfast… but that they will fail to outshine their neighbours.”
On the working life of already rich workaholics: “The working life of this man has the psychology of a hundred-yards race, but as the race upon which he is engaged is one whose only goal is the grave.”
“Success can only be one ingredient in happiness, and is too dearly purchased if all the other ingredients have been sacrificed to obtain it.”
“There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.”
“The emphasis on competition in modern life is connected with a general decay of civilised standards such as must have occurred in Rome after the Augustan age… The trouble arises from the generally received philosophy of life, according to which life is a contest… this view leads to an undue cultivation of the will at the expense of the senses and the intellect.”

Boredom and excitement

“Boredom as a factor in human behaviour… has been one of the great motive powers throughout the historical epoch.”
“I am not prepared to say that drugs can play no good part in life whatsoever. There are moments, for example, when an opiate will be prescribed by a wise physician, and I think these moments more frequent than prohibitionists suppose. But the craving for drugs is certainly something which cannot be left to the unfettered operation of natural impulse.”
“Too much excitement… dulls the palate for every kind of pleasure.”
“A certain power of enduring boredom is therefore essential to a happy life, and is one of the things that ought to be taught to the young.”
“The pleasures of childhood should in the main be such as the child extracts from his environment by means of some effort and inventiveness.”
“Constructive purposes do not easily form themselves in a child’s mind if they are living a life of distractions and dissipations, for in that case their thoughts will always be directed towards the next pleasure rather than towards the distant achievement.”
“Many pleasures, of which we may take gambling as a good example, have in them no element of… contact with Earth… in the instance when they cease, leave one feeling dusty and dissatisfied, hungry for he knows not what.”

Fatigue

“Worry could be prevented by a better philosophy of life and a little more mental discipline… Men take their business worries to bed with them, and in the hours of the night, when they should be gaining fresh strength, they are going over and over again in their minds problems about which at the moment they can do nothing. Thinking about them, not in a way to produce a sound line of conduct on the morrow, but in that half-insane way that characterises the troubled meditations of insomnia.”
“It is amazing how much happiness and efficiency can be increased by the cultivation of an orderly mind, which thinks about a matter adequately at the right time rather than inadequately at all times.”
“Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile.”
On nerves before public speaking: “I taught myself to feel that it did not matter whether I spoke well or ill, the universe would remain much the same in either case… Our doings are not so important as we naturally suppose; our successes and failures do not after all matter very much.”
Russell views emotional fatigue as the most important kind to address. Workaholism is symptomatic of some sort of emotional distress:

“One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important, and that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster. If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important. The nervous breakdown which appears to be produced by the work is, in fact, in every case that I have ever known of personally, produced by some emotional trouble from which the patient attempts to escape by means of his work. He is loath to give up his work because, if he does so, he will no longer have anything to distract him from the thoughts of his misfortune, whatever it may be. Of course, the trouble may be fear of bankruptcy, and in that case his work is directly connected with his worry, but even then worry is likely to lead him to work so long that his judgement becomes clouded and bankruptcy comes sooner than if he worked less.”
On worries:

“Worry is a form of fear, and all forms of fear produce fatigue… Every kind of fear grows worse by not being looked at… when you find yourself inclined to brood on anything, no matter what, the best plan always is to think about it even more than you naturally would, until at last its morbid fascination is worn off.”
“I have found, for example, that if I have to write upon some rather difficult topic the best plan is to think about it with very great intensity - the greatest intensity of which I am capable - for a few hours or days, and at the end of that time give orders, so to speak, that the work is to proceed underground. After some months I return consciously to the topic and find that the work has been done… I used to spend the intervening months worrying because I was making no progress; I arrived at the solution none the sooner for this worry.”
“The pleasures which are easiest to obtain and most superficially attractive are mostly of a sort to wear out the nerves.”

Envy

“Envy is one of the most universal and deep-seated of human passions.”
“Instead of deriving pleasure from what he has, he derives pain from what others have. If he can, he deprives others of their advantages, which to him is as desirable as it would be to secure the same advantages himself. If this passion is allowed to run riot it becomes fatal to all excellence.”
“Whoever wishes to increase human happiness must wish to increase admiration and diminish envy.”
“Merely to realise the causes of one’s own envious feelings it to take a long step towards curing them. The habit of thinking in terms of comparisons is a fatal one.”
“Envy… is one form of a vice, partly moral, partly intellectual, which consists in seeing things never in themselves, but only in their relations.”
“What is more enviable than happiness?”
“The man who has double my salary is doubtless tortured by the thought that someone else in turn has twice as much as he has, and so it goes on. If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon. But Napoleon envied Caesar… you cannot, therefore, get away from envy by means of success alone.”
“Unnecessary modesty has a great deal to do with envy… Modest people need a great deal of reassuring, and often do not dare to attempt tasks which they are quite capable of performing.”
An analogy of modest peacocks:

“A modest peacock could establish the principle that peacocks with especially fine tails are almost always wicked, and that the wise ruler in the peacock kingdom would seek out the humble bird with only a few draggled tail feathers. Having got this principle accepted, he would get all the finest birds put to death, and the end a really splendid tail will become only a dim memory of the past. Such is the victory of envy masquerading as morality“.
“The instability of social status in the modern world, and the equalitarian doctrine of democracy and socialism, have greatly extended the range of envy… this is an evil which must be endured in order to arrive at a more just social system. As soon as inequalities are thought about rationally they are seen to be unjust unless they rest upon some superiority of merit. And as soon as they are seen to be unjust, there is no remedy for the resulting envy except the removal of the injustice. Our age is therefore one in which envy plays a peculiarly large part… The kind of justice to be expected as a result of envy is likely to be the worst possible kind, namely that which consists rather in diminishing the pleasures of the fortunate than increasing those of the unfortunate.”
“The essentials of happiness are simple, so simple that sophisticated people cannot bring themselves to admit what it is they really lack.”
In light of social media today:

“In old days people only envied their neighbours, because they knew little about anyone else. Now through education and the Press they know much in an abstract way about large classes of mankind of whom no single individual is among their acquaintance.”
On way propaganda promoting hatred is more successful than that promoting friendly feeling:

“The reason is clearly that the human heart as modern civilisation has made it is more prone to hatred than to friendship. And it is prone to hatred because it is dissatisfied, because it feels deeply, perhaps even unconsciously, that it has somehow missed the meaning of life, that perhaps others, but not we ourselves, have secured the good things which nature offers man’s enjoyment. The positive sum of pleasures in a modern man’s life is undoubtedly greater than was to be found in more primitive communities, but the consciousness of what might be has increased even more.”

Persecution mania

“Nobody should expect to perfect, or be unduly troubled by the fact that he is not… persecution mania is always rooted in a too exaggerated conception of our own merits.”
On people’s reactions to not getting the acclaim they deserve:

“The reason, of course, is highly creditable to myself:I have refused to kow-tow to the great ones of the theatrical world; I have not flattered the critics; my plays contain home truths which are unbearable to those whom they hit. And so my transcendent merit languishes unrecognised.”
On thinking your injustice is somehow remarkable and evidence of a wider interesting phenomenon:

“The thing that has touched them has made… more impression upon them than the much larger number of matters of which they have had no direct experience. This gives them a wrong sense of proportion, and causes them to attach undue importance to facts which are perhaps exceptional rather than typical.”
“Another not uncommon victim of persecution mania is a certain type of philanthropist who is always doing good to people against their will, and is amazed and horrified that they display no gratitude.”
Four maxims for avoiding persecution mania:

“The first is: remember that your motives are not always as altruistic as they seem to yourself. The second is: don’t overestimate your own merits. The third is: don’t expect others to take as much interest in you as you do yourself. And the fourth is: don’t imagine that most people give enough thought to you to have any special desire to persecute you.”
“There is a test, perhaps not infallible, if you suspect that you are a genius while your friends suspect that you are not: do you produce because you feel an urgent compulsion to express certain ideas or feelings, or are you actuated by the desire for applause?”
On expecting things from others: “altruism contrary to reason occurs when the loss to the altruist is greater than the gain to the egotist.”
“No person should be expected to distort the main lines of their life for the sake of another individual.”

Fear of public opinion

“Very few people can be happy unless on the whole their way of life and their outlook on the world is approved by those with whom they have social relations, and more especially by those with whom they live. It is a peculiarity of modern communities that they are divided into sets which differ profoundly in their morals and in their beliefs. This state of affairs began with the Reformation, or perhaps one should say with the Renaissance, and has grown more pronounced ever since.”
“Conventional people are roused to fury by departures from convention, largely because they regard such departures as criticism of themselves. They will pardon much unconventionality , in someone with enough jollity and friendliness to make it clear, even to the stupidest, that they are not engaged in criticising them.”
On doing a job your parents don’t approve of:

“Young people are ill-advised if they yield to the pressure of the old in any vital matter. Suppose you are young and wish to go on the stage and your parents oppose your wish… they may of course be right in thinking that the stage is not the career for you. If this is the case, you will soon discover it from theatrical people, and there will still be plenty of time to adopt a different career.”
“Professional opinion should always be treated with respect by beginners.”
“I think that in general, apart from expert opinion, there is too much respect paid to the opinions of others… One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways… There is, of course, no point in deliberately flouting public opinion; this is still to be under its domination, though in a topsy-turvy way. But to be genuinely indifferent to it is both a strength and a source of happiness.”
Russell writes that because we can get around quicker, we are no longer so bound to neighbours and local acquaintances and by extension, their opinions. It’s easier to find people we get along with. Whilst fear of neighbourly opinion has diminished fear of public denouncement had increased with the rise of newspapers. Imagine what he’d think now with social media and cancel culture!:

“The fear of what newspapers say. This is quite as terrifying as anything connected with mediaeval witch-hunts… there is increasing danger in this novel form of social persecution… whatever may be thought of the great principle of the freedom of the Press, I think the line will have to be drawn more sharply than it is by the existing libel laws, and anything will have to be forbidden that makes life intolerable for innocent individuals, even if they should happen to have done or said things which, published maliciously, can cause them to become unpopular. The only ultimate cure for this evil is, however, an increase of toleration on the part of the public. The best way to increase toleration is to multiply the number of individuals who enjoy real happiness and do not therefore find their chief pleasure in the infliction of pain upon their fellows.”

Is happiness still possible?

On the merits of having low expectations and so being surprised to the upside:

“It is therefore wise to be not unduly conceited, though also not too modest to be enterprising.”
“Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young men and women of the West results from the combination of comfort with powerlessness. Powerlessness makes people feel that nothing is worth doing, and comfort makes the painfulness of this feeling just endurable.”
Russell sees that people absorbed by their work are generally happy and that increased mechanisation had led to some boring repetitive jobs that decreased a worker’s ability to get professional satisfaction. His view on machine production:

“The ultimate goal of machine production is a system in which everything uninteresting is done by machines, and human beings are reserved for the work involving variety and initiative.”
Russell values simple pleasures such as collecting things, gardening, etc. “Any pleasure that does no harm to other people is to be valued.”
“Fundamental happiness depends more than anything else upon what may be called a friendly interest in persons and things.”
Expanding on friendly interest in persons:

“A friendly interest in persons is a form of affectionateness, but not the form which is grasping and possessive and seeking always an emphatic response. This latter form is very frequently a source of unhappiness. The kind that makes for happiness is the kind that likes to observe people and finds pleasure in their individual traits, that wishes to afford scope for the interests and pleasures of those with whom it is brought into contact without desiring to acquire power over them or to secure their enthusiastic admiration. The person whose attitude towards others is genuinely of this kind will be a source of happiness and a recipient of reciprocal kindness. His relations with others, whether slight or serious, will satisfy both his interests and his affections; he will not be soured by ingratitude, since he will seldom suffer it and will not notice when he does. The same idiosyncrasies which would get on another man’s nerves to the point of exasperation will be to him a source of gentle amusement.”
“A sense of duty is useful in work, but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked, not to be endured with patient resignation.”
“The secret of happiness 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.”

Zest

“Disenchantment is to me a malady… to be cured as soon as possible, not to be regarded as a higher form of wisdom.”
This section can be boiled down to “The more things one is interested in, the more opportunities of happiness one has, and the less one is at the mercy of fate.” He gives the example of two people, one likes strawberries, the other doesn’t:

“in what respect is the latter superior? There is no abstract and impersonal proof either that strawberries are good or that they are not good. To the man who likes them they are good; to the man who dislikes them they are not. But the man who likes them has a pleasure which the other does not have; to that extent his life is more enjoyable and he is better adapted to the world in which both must live. What is true in this trivial instance is equally true in more important matters.”
“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.”
“Some people will travel through many countries, going always to the best hotels, eating exactly the same food as they would eat at home, meeting the same idle rich whom they would meet at home, conversing on the same topics upon which they converse at their own dinner table. When they return, their only feeling is one of relief as having done with the boredom of expensive locomotion.”
Zest can be overdone: “The man who likes chess sufficiently to look forward throughout his working day to the game that he will play in the evening is fortunate, but the man who gives up work in order to play chess all day has lost the virtue of moderation.”

Affection

Affection is important for happiness, but be careful how you acquire it!:

“The man, therefore, who endeavours to purchase affection by benevolent actions becomes disillusioned by experience of human ingratitude. It never occurs to him that the affection which he is trying to buy is of far more value than the material benefits which he offers as its price, and yet the feeling that this is so is at the basis of his actions.”
“Many people when they fall in love look for a little haven of refuge from the world, where they can be sure of being admired when they are not admirable, and praised when they are not praiseworthy.”
“Fear for others is only a shade better than fear for ourselves. Moreover it is very often a camouflage for possessiveness. It is hoped that by rousing their fears a more complete empire over them can be obtained.”
On types of affection:

“If you are sailing in a ship on a fine day along a beautiful coast, you admire the coast and feel a pleasure in it. This pleasure is derived entirely from looking outward, and has nothing to do with any desperate need of your own. If, on the other hand, your ship is wrecked and you swim towards the coast, you acquire for it a new kind of love: it represents security against the waves, and its beauty or ugliness becomes an unimportant matter. The better sort of affection corresponds to the feeling of the man whose ship is secure, the less excellent sort corresponds to that of the shipwrecked swimmer. The first of these is only possible in so far as a man feels safe… the latter kind is caused by the feeling of insecurity… this is self-centred, since the loved person is valued for services rendered, not for intrinsic qualities.”

Family

Russell viewed the family as a great source of happiness, but that achieving a family had become increasingly hard in the 20th Century. He took the declining birthrates in advanced economies as evidence of this:

“It is clear that a civilisation which has this characteristic is unstable; unless it can be induced to reproduce its numbers, it must sooner or later die out and give place to some other civilisation in which the urge towards parenthood has retained enough strength to prevent the population from declining.”
On the friction between parents and children:

“It is desirable that the child should learn to be independent in as many ways as possible, which is unpleasant to the power impulse in a parent… If you feed an infant who is already capable of feeding himself, you are putting love of power before the child’s welfare. If you make him too vividly aware of dangers, you are probably actuated by a desire to keep him dependent upon you. If you give him demonstrative affection to which you expect a response, you are probably endeavouring to grapple him to you by means of his emotions. In a thousand ways, great and small, the possessive impulse of parents will lead them astray, unless they are very watchful or very pure in heart.

Modern parents, aware of these dangers, sometimes lose confidence in handling their children, and become therefore even less able to be of use to them than if they permitted themselves spontaneous mistakes, for nothing causes so much worry in a child’s mind as lack of certainty and self-confidence on the part of an adult. Better than being careful, therefore, is to be pure in heart. The parent who genuinely desires the child’s welfare more than his or her power over the child will not need textbooks on psychoanalysis… this demands on the part of the parent from the first a respect for the personality of the child - a respect which must be not merely a matter of principle… but something deeply felt.” 75. “Whenever society demands of a mother sacrifices to her child which go beyond reason, the mother, if she is not unusually saintly, will expect from her child compensations exceeding those she has a right to expect. The mother who is conventionally called self-sacrificing is, in a great majority of cases, exceptionally selfish towards her children, for, important as parenthood is an element in life, it is not satisfying if it is treated as the whole of life, and the unsatisfied parent is likely to be an emotionally grasping parent.”

Work

“An excess of work is always very painful. I think, however, that, provided work is not excessive in amount, even the dullest work is to most people less painful than idleness.”
On work’s advantages:

“it fills a good many hours of the day without the need of deciding what one shall do. Most people, when they are left free to fill their own time according to their own choice are at a loss to think of anything sufficiently pleasant to be worth doing. And whatever they decide on, they are troubled by the feeling that something else would have been pleasanter. To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilisation, and at present very few people have reached this level. Moreover, the exercise of choice is in itself tiresome. Except to people with unusual initiative it is positively agreeable to be told what to do at each hour of the day, provided the orders are not too unpleasant. Most of the idle rich suffer unspeakable boredom as the price of their freedom from drudgery.”
“Consistent purpose is not enough to make life happy, but it is an almost indispensable condition of a happy life. And consistent purpose embodies itself mainly in work.”
“Everyone who has acquired some unusual skill enjoys exercising it until it has become a matter of course, or until they can no longer improve themselves.”
“All skilled work can be pleasurable, provided the skill required is either variable or capable of indefinite improvement.”
This bit has improved thanks to services like Substack:

“One of the causes of unhappiness among intellectuals in the present day is that so many of them, especially those whose skill is literary, find no opportunity for the independent exercise of their talents, but have to hire themselves out to rich corporations directed by Philistines, who insist upon their producing what they themselves regard as pernicious nonsense. If you were to inquire among journalists either in England or America whether they believed in the policy of the newspaper for which they worked, you would find, I believe, that only a small minority do so; the rest, for the sake of a livelihood, prostitute their skill to purposes which they believe to be harmful. Such work cannot bring any real satisfaction, and in the course of reconciling himself to the doing of it a man has to make himself so cynical that he can no longer derive wholehearted satisfaction from anything whatever.”

Impersonal interests

“One of the sources of unhappiness, fatigue, and nervous strain is inability to be interested in anything that is not of practical importance in one’s own life.”
“What is restful about external interests is the fact that they do not call for any action. Making decisions and exercising volition are very fatiguing, especially if they have to be done hurriedly and without the help of the subconscious. People who feel that they must ‘sleep on it’ before coming to an important decision are profoundly right. But it is not only in sleep that the subconscious mental processes can work. They can work also while the conscious mind is occupied elsewhere. The person who can forget their work when it is over and not remember it until it begins again next day is likely to do their work far better than they who worry about it throughout the intervening hours. And it is very much easier to forget work at the times when it ought to be forgotten if one has many interests other than one’s work than it is if one does not.”
On distracting the mind when under pressure:

“The man who does nothing to distract his mind and allows his trouble to acquire a complete empire over him is acting unwisely and making himself less fit to cope with his troubles the moment for action arrives.”
On facing blows: “To be defeated by one loss or even by several is not something to be admired as a proof of sensibility, but something to be deplored as a failure in vitality.”

Effort and resignation

“Truth… is not always interesting, and many things are believed because they are interesting; although, in fact, there is little other evidence in their favour.” Russell opens this chapter which talks about the merits of striking a balance between effort and acceptance of the status-quo.
“Some people are unable to bear with patience even those minor troubles which make up, if we permit them to do so, a very large part of life. They are furious when they miss a train, transported with rage if their dinner is badly cooked, sunk in despair if the chimney smokes, and vowing vengeance against the whole industrial order when their clothes fail to return from the sanitary steam laundry. The energy that such people waste on trivial troubles would be sufficient, if more wisely directed, to make and unmake empires.”
“Worry and fret and irritation are emotions which serve no purpose.”
On the importance of not deceiving yourself about the importance of your work:

“Those who can only do their work when upheld by self-deception had better first take a course in learning to endure the truth before continuing their career, since sooner or later the need of being sustained by myths will cause their work to become harmful.”

The happy person

“The passions which shut us up in ourselves constitute one of the worst kinds of prisons… In all these our desires are centred upon ourselves: there is no genuine interest in the outer world, but only a concern lest it should in some way injure us or fail to feed our ego.”
“The happy life is to an extraordinary extent the same as the good life. Professional moralists have made too much of self-denial, and in so doing have put the emphasis in the wrong place. Conscious self-denial leaves a man self-absorbed and vividly aware of what he has sacrificed; in consequence it fails often of its immediate object and almost always of its ultimate purpose. What is needed is not self-denial, but that kind of direction of interest outward which will lead spontaneously and naturally to the same acts that a person absorbed in the pursuit of his own virtue could only perform by means of conscious self-denial. I have written in this book as a hedonist, that is to say, as one who regards happiness as the good, but the acts to be recommended from the point of view of the hedonist are on the whole the same as those to be recommended by the sane moralist.”
“The ideally virtuous man, if we had got rid of asceticism, would be the man who permits the enjoyment of good things whenever there is no evil consequence to outweigh the enjoyment. Take again the question of lying. I do not deny that there is a great deal too much lying in the world, and that we should all be the too much better for an increase of truthfulness, but I do deny… that lying is in no circumstances justified. I once in the course of a country walk saw a tired fox at the last stages of exhaustion still forcing himself to run. A few minutes afterwards I saw the hunt. They asked me if I had seen the fox, and I said I had. They asked me which way he had gone, and I lied to them. I do not think I should have been a better man if I had told the truth.”