The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy (2010) (31 page)

85
Louis Menand, ‘The Devil’s Disciples’,
New Yorker
, 28 July 2003

86
Leo Tolstoy,
War and Peace
, Penguin, 1957

87
For instance, Daniel Nettle,
Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile
, Oxford University Press, 2005

88
Arthur Schopenhauer,
Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays
, Oxford University Press, 1974

89
Nettle, op. cit.

90
D.T. Lykken
 & A
. Tellegen, ‘Happiness is a stochastic phenomenon’,
Psychological Science, 7
, 1996

91
J.B. Handelsman,
New Yorker
, 16 September 1996

92
Steven Rose,
lifelines: life Beyond The Gene
, Vintage, 2005

93
David Blanchflower & Andrew Oswald, ‘Is well-being U-shaped over the life cycle?’,
Social Science & Medicine
, Vol. 66, Issue 8, April 2008

94
Richard Layard,
Happiness: Lessons From a New Science
, Penguin, 2005

95
V. Medvec, S. Madey, T. Gilovich, ‘When less is more: Counterfactual thinking and satisfaction among Olympic medallists’,
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
, 69, 1995

96
Schopenhauer, (1974) op. cit.

97
William Shakespeare,
Henry VIII
, Act 4, Scene 2

98
Aaron Beck,
Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders
, International Universities Press, 1976

99
Albert Ellis and Windy Dryden,
The Practice of Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy
, Springer, 2007

100
ibid.

101
Oliver James,
The Selfish Capitalist: Origins of Affluenza
, Vermilion, 2008

102
Jonah Lehrer,
The Decisive Moment: How the Brain Makes Up Its Mind
, Canongate Books, 2009

103
Nettle, op. cit.

104
Schopenhauer, (1974) op. cit.

105
Damasio, (2004) op. cit.

106
Robert Nozick,
Anarchy, State, and Utopia
, Basic Books, 1974

107
The Times
, 21 August 2007

108
Sigmund Freud,
Civilization and Its Discontents
, Penguin Books, 2002

109
John Armstrong,
Conditions of Love: The Philosophy of Intimacy
, Penguin, 2002

110
Jaspers, op. cit.

111
Christopher Peterson & Martin Seligman,
Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification
, Oxford University Press, 2004

112
There are several examples in Haidt, op. cit.

113
Rainer Maria Rilke,
Briefe an einenjungen Dicbter
, Insel Verlag, 1929

114
Rainer Maria Rilke,
Letters on Life
, Modern Library, 2006

115
Joseph Campbell,
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
, Fontana, 1993

116
ibid.

117
ibid.

118
Matthew 10:34

119
Quoted in Jaspers, op. cit.

120
Franz Kafka,
The Ztirau Aphorisms
, Schocken Books, 2006

121
Franz Kafka,
The Complete Short Stories
, Vintage, 2005

122
Farid Ud-Din Attar,
The Conference of the Birds
, Penguin, 1984

123
To match the twelfth-century Islamic parable of the Simorgh there is this first-century Jewish aphorism from Rabbi Tarphon, also sounding remarkably like Kafka: ‘You are not required to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.’

The existentialist Karl Jaspers: ‘The goal of life cannot be formulated as a state which is attainable and, once attained, perfect. Our states of being are only manifestations of existential striving or failure. It lies in our very nature to be on the way.’

Nietzsche, the father of existentialism, was more succinct: ‘There is no Being, only Becoming.’

Sartre’s version was turgidly abstract: ‘Existence precedes essence.’

The Buddhist version was zestfully concrete: ‘Asked, ‘What is Zen?’ the master said, ‘Walk on.’’

And Proust expressed it in fiction: ‘We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.’

124
Constantine Peter Cavafy,
Poiemata
, Ikaros, 1963

125
’Hi-tech is turning us all into time-wasters’,
Observer
, 20 July 2008

126
Jerald Block, ‘Issues for DSM-V: Internet Addiction’,
The American Journal of Psychiatry
, March 2008

127
’Driver wins £20,000 damages for stress of parking tickets’,
Observer
, 8 February 2009

128
Jean-Paul Sartre,
Being and Nothingness
, Routledge, 2003

129
’Don’t worry, Woody: anxiety is in the genes, study finds’,
Independent
, 11 August 2008

130
’It’s not you, dear, it’s me: the genetic reason why some men are just born to cheat’,
The Times, 2
September 2008

131
John Gray,
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals
, Granta, 2002

132
Antonio Damasio,
Descartes’ Error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain
, Putnam, 1994

133
LeDoux, op. cit.

134
Damasio, (2004) op. cit.

135
ibid.

136
Matt Ridley,
Nature Via Nurture: Genes, Experience and What Makes Us Human
, HarperPerennial, 2004

137
Hilary Rose & Steven Rose (ed.),
Alas Poor Darwin: Arguments against Evolutionary Psychology
, Vintage, 2001

138
Steven Rose,
Lifelines: Life Beyond the Gene
, Vintage, 2005

139
For a full account see Norman Doidge,
The Brain That Changes Itself
Penguin, 2007

140
D.A. Christakis
et al
., ‘Early television exposure and subsequent attentional problems in children’,
Pediatrics
, 113, 2004

141
William Shakespeare,
Hamlet
, Act 3, Scene 4

142
Editorial,
British Medical Journal
, 2 June 2001

143
Quoted in the
Guardian
, 13 December 2001

144
’Asleep at the Wheel’, BBC One documentary, 26 October 2004

145
Muzafer Sherif,
Group Conflict and Co-operation: Their Social Psychology
, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966

146
Don DeLillo,
White Noise
, Viking, 1984

147
E. J. Langer & J. Rodin, ‘The effects of choice and enhanced personal responsibility for the aged: A field experiment in an institutional setting’,
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
, 34, 1976

148
S.E.R. Asch, ‘Studies of Independence and Conformity: A Minority of one Against a Unanimous Majority’,
Scientific American
, November 1955

149
G.S. Berns, J. Chappelow, C.F. Zin, G. Pagnoni, M.E. Martin-Skurski, and J. Richards, ‘Neurobiological Correlates of Social Conformity and Independence During Mental Rotation’,
Biological Psychiatry
, 5, August 2005

150
T. Blass,
Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm
, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999

151
Philip Zimbardo,
The Lucifer Effect
, Rider, 2007

152
Flaubert, op. cit.

153
Gloria Mark
et al
.. ‘‘Constant, Constant, Multi-tasking Craziness’: Managing Multiple Working Spheres’,
Proceedings of CHI
, 2004

154
J.Rubinstein
et al
., ‘Executive Control of Cognitive Processes in Task Switching’,
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance
, August 2001

155
Rene Marois
et al
., ‘Isolation of a Central Bottleneck of Information Processing with Time-resolved FMRI’,
Neuron
, December 2006

156
Jonathan Sharpies and Martin Westwell, ‘The impact of interruptions from communications technologies upon the ability of an individual to concentrate upon a task’,
Institute for the Future of the Mind
, 2007

157
A. Newberg
et al
., ‘The measurement of regional cerebral blood flow during the complex cognitive task of meditation: a preliminary SPECT study’,
Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging
, 106, 2001; and O. Flanagan, ‘The Colour of Happiness’,
New Scientist
, 178, 2003

158
Meister Eckhart,
Die Deutschen und Lateinischen Werke
, Verlag, 1936

159
Spinoza,
Ethics
, Oxford University Press, 2000

160
Albert Ellis,
The Myth of Self-Esteem
, Prometheus Books, 2005

161
R. F. Baumeister
et al
., ‘Exploding the Self-Esteem Myth’,
Scientific American
, 292, January 2005

162
Oliver James,
Affluenza
, Vermilion, 2007

163
Carol S. Dweck et al, ‘Praise for Intelligence Can Undermine Children’s Motivation and Performance’,
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
, 75, 1998

164
William Shakespeare,
As You Like It
, Act 5, Scene 1

165
D. Kahneman
et al., Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology
, Russell Sage, 1999

166
Bly, op. cit.

167
’Out of the Ether, Creating the Persona of Celebrity’,
The NewYork Times
in the
Observer
, 4 November 2007

168
Rilke, (1929) op. cit.

169
T. S. Eliot, ‘Ash Wednesday’ in
Collected Poems
, Faber, 1974

170
Quoted in Hannah Arendt,
The Life of the Mind
, Harvest, 1981

171
Charles Wright,
Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems
, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000

172
Jules Laforgue,
Selected Writings of Jules Laforgue
, Greenwood, 1972

173
Reported in ‘A Little Less Conversation’,
Guardian
, 11 October 2008

174
Juan Ramon Jimenez,
The Complete Perfectionist
, Doubleday, 1997

175
’Hard to eat oranges are losing a-peel’,
Metro
, 3 June 2008

176
’To Think or Not to Think, Ponder the Pensive French’,
The New York Times
in the
Observer
, 29 September 2007

177
Pierre Bayard,
How to talk About Books You Haven’t Read
, Granta, 2008

178
Mascaro, op. cit.

179
Ecclesiastes 7:6

180
Wheen, op. cit.

181
Gray, op. cit.

182
ibid.

183
ibid.

184
Arendt, (2001) op. cit.

185
Primo Levi,
The Drowned and the Saved
, Joseph, 1988

186
Barry Schwartz,
The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less
, HarperCollins, 2004

187
Ben R. Newell, ‘Think, Blink or Sleep on it? The impact of modes of thought on complex decision making’,
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
, forthcoming paper

188
Chuang Tzu,
The Inner Chapters
, Counterpoint, 1998

189
Arendt, (2001) op. cit.

190
ibid.

191
Aristotle,
The Nicomachean Ethics
, Dent, 1949

192
Anthony Storr,
Solitude
, Flamingo, 1989

193
Jonah Lehrer, ‘The Eureka Hunt – why do good ideas come to us when they do?’,
New Yorker
, 28 July 2008

194
Spinoza,
Ethics
, Heron, 1980

195
Arendt, (2001) op. cit.

196
Kierkegaard, (1951) op. cit.

197
Quoted in Andrew Smith,
Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth
, Bloomsbury, 2005

198
R. Kubey
et al
., ‘Television addiction is no mere metaphor’,
Scientific American
, February 2003

199
Richard E. Nisbett,
The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why
, Free Press, 2003

200
Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt and Harry Zohn,
Illuminations
, Vintage, 1999

201
ibid.

202
Marcel Proust,
Remembrance of Things Past
, Chatto & Windus, 1981

203
James Joyce,
Ulysses
, The Bodley Head, 1960

204
William Shakespeare,
Henry IV: Part II
, Act 5, Scene 5

205
Quoted in Caleb Crain, ‘Twilight of the Books’,
New Yorker, 24
December 2007

206
Marcel Proust,
Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays
, Penguin, 1988

207
Jonah Lehrer,
Proust was a Neuroscientist
, Houghton Mifflin, 2007