The Pursuit of Unhappiness

The Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky has put it in a nutshell: if you overwhelm a person with luck, he will risk everything for any kind of lapses - if only to be ungrateful. Too many happy days are hard to bear, as the saying goes.

"Nothing is harder to bear than a series of good days." But what is that actually: happiness? Nobody can define it.

A look into the world literature reveals us: Not happiness, but misfortune, disasters, sin and crime interest the audience. What we need is not happiness, but misfortune. "Let's not fool ourselves: what or where would we be without our unhappiness?"

By dealing with other people, everyone can be unhappy. This is well known. The boss is mean, the partner is careless. Alright: The others are always to blame.

But how do so many people manage to become completely unhappy with themselves? How do you make yourself an enemy?

The first golden rule to master this art is to ignore the opinions of others and only follow your own judgment.  "The most important thing about a fixed idea is that it can create its own reality."

Whoever only uses his own convictions as a standard becomes a master in the field of unhappiness. Because he will be constantly disappointed in reality.

The happy man shrugs when he finds reality different than his ideal demands - and arranges himself. The unfortunate rebels on the other hand.

If somebody makes a good suggestion to him, he will reject it for the sole reason that someone has suggested it to him.

Whoever wants to master it in the art of unhappiness, goes one step further: he even rejects the recommendations he makes to himself. As the ancient Romans knew: "Fate leads the willing, the unwilling one gets dragged to his fate."

Supposedly time heals all wounds. As a bad luck candidate, you should not be scared of that. You just have to neatly romanticize the past.

The comparison with the present will thus appear to you as a never-ending source of misery.

You sadly think of a failed relationship? Feel free to believe for yourself, against all reasonable considerations, that the relationship could have been saved!        

It couldn’t - but believe it. At best, you are looking for a new partner who is exactly like the old one.

Or use the sentence that in the past everything was better than mantra. With that, you are guaranteed to have no joy in the present.

Instead, do it like the biblical woman Lot: Look back against all warnings - and freeze to a pillar of salt.

The past is perfect for gaining current misfortune - especially when blaming mistakes of the past for bad habits of today. Are you an alcoholic? Do not be ashamed to demonize your first sip of beer instead of changing your consumption today.

You always find someone or something in the past that you blame: parents, teachers, doctors, God, fate, your genes, and so on. Most important: Do not start believing that you can do something about it now.

A good way to make oneself unhappy with the past is to stick to proven behaviors and not just adapt your behavior to the current situation. If your old strategies are not successful, you have not worked hard enough.

Important: Do not get the idea, there could be other solutions than yours, or you will find the key in the end.

A man wants to hang a picture. He has a nail, but he lacks the hammer. His neighbor has one, and the man decides to ask for it.

Just before he sets off for the neighbor, he is overcome by doubt. He remembers that the neighbor had greeted him so strangely yesterday. Maybe he was in a hurry.

Another possibility, however, is that the neighbor has acted maliciously and has a grudge against him.

He's probably conceited because he owns a hammer. Such people can ruin one’s existence! The man storms to the neighbor, rings and roars in his face: "Keep your hammer!"

What has happened in the mind of the handyman is one of the most glorious possibilities of unhappiness. Just fantasize long enough about what's going on behind your back - and you cannot tell the difference between imagination and reality.

The positive thing about the French pharmacist Émile Coué has already been described: One should simply tirelessly talk about one's own well-being. Of course, that works the other way round too. You can use some learning techniques to condition yourself to see everything like the man with the picture.

Objectively you cannot prove that - but a comparison with reality is not helpful anyway. By the way, if your friends want to dissuade you with all their power from your views, that's just proof that you're right.

A man claps his hands every few seconds. Another asks him why he does that. The man claims to want to scare away elephants with the clapping.

The questioner points out that there are no elephants here and there. Then the bludger: "Well then! Can you see it!

The little story puts it in a nutshell: sometimes the solution can prolong the problem indefinitely. Then, the solution is, so to speak, the problem itself or, through its long-term application, ensures that one expects a problem where actually none is (anymore).

Danger prevention can therefore mean a danger extension. Similarly, the dangers that lurk in everyday life: robberies, car exhaust, falling parts of space probes. Anyone who wants to protect themselves by staying in bed is also not sure. He may lay sore, for example.

Avoiding any danger can lead to compulsive action that is guaranteed to make you unhappy. So never forget the disinfectant if you have to go to a foreign toilet in the middle of a concert and make sure five times that you have really locked the front door.

If your horoscope prophesies that you will have an accident today and you actually get involved in it, then you are confirmed in your belief in the fateful power. But: Would you have had the accident even if you had not known about the prophecy?

Many things happen just because we believe a prediction and then try to stop the course of destiny. Assuming you expect others to whisper about you behind your back, then you will no longer trust anyone and maneuver yourself in isolation.

The prophecy creates its own reality - and you yourself are to blame. The principle also works on a larger scale: the more that is upgraded to protect against war, the higher military spending will be on neighboring countries as well - the war will eventually be unavoidable.

The prophecy of events leads to the event of prophecy.

Communication researcher Gregory Bateson found that each statement has both an object and a relationship level. In communicating with other people, preferably your own partner, this law very easily leads to great unhappiness.

Example: A man receives cornflakes from his wife for breakfast. Luckily, he hates cornflakes but does not want to jeopardize the relationship with his wife with a sentence like "I do not like cornflakes".

He eats it anyhow and decides to explain honestly just before the end of the pack that she should not buy a new pack.

But his wife has long since recognized his "love" for cornflakes and got a new pack. At some point then the chance to be able to correct the misunderstanding is finally gone.

Communication at the object level is easy, but full of pitfalls at the relationship level. Therefore, you should definitely get used to the "illusion of alternatives" as the source of glorious quarrels.

It goes like this: Offer your partner or other loved ones two alternatives. If he chooses one of them, interpret it as if the other one did not please him. In this case your partner cannot behave correctly, so you always have a reason for a fight.

An effective disruptive factor in relationships is to give the partner only two choices and, once he chooses one, to accuse him of not having chosen the other one.

You can do it even better with the "Be spontaneous!" Paradox. Logically, you cannot ask anyone to be spontaneous.

Doing something spontaneously on command is just as impossible as deliberately forgetting something or deliberately sleeping deeper.

The mother, who asks her son he should like his homework more, puts him in an impossible situation. You cannot change your feelings on command. But if the son does not succeed in doing his homework, he will seek the blame on himself.

Love appears to the misfortune aspirant as particularly problematic. For he cannot understand that he is loved or even appreciated by others. He lacks self-esteem to even imagine other people would find him great.

Groucho Marx once said the memorable phrase that he would not join a club that would welcome people like him. Therefore, to the one who cannot love himself, it also seems highly suspicious when others can.

If you love one who does not deserve love, something is wrong with your inner life.

Therefore, such people fall in love best with unattainable movie stars, singers or married people. In this way they are spared the experience that a relationship becomes unattractive in the very moment in which it becomes possible.

Even game theory can be used for partner relations. The game theory is about the correct behavior in so-called zero-sum games (what one wins, loses the other) or non-zero sum games (both players can win and both can lose).

Is a partner relationship now a zero-sum game? Supposedly: If one always wins, the other must always lose. But that's not true: After all, both partners lose if their relationship is hell.

"Why is it so hard for us to see that life is a non-zero-sum game?" If you want to be unhappy, you only have to consider life as a zero-sum game.

On the other hand, those who persistently adhere to the belief in fairness, trust and tolerance cannot be helped by this guide.