The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

256 pages

English language

Published Dec. 1, 2012 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

ISBN:: 978-1-4299-4760-2

(1 review)

A witty, fascinating, and counterintuitive read that turns decades of self-help advice on its head and forces us to rethink completely our attitudes toward failure, uncertainty, and death.

The Antidote is a series of journeys among people who share a single, surprising way of thinking about life. What they have in common is a hunch about human psychology: that it's our constant effort to eliminate the negative that causes us to feel so anxious, insecure, and unhappy. And that there is an alternative "negative path" to happiness and success that involves embracing the things we spend our lives trying to avoid. It is a subversive, galvanizing message, which turns out to have a long and distinguished philosophical lineage ranging from ancient Roman Stoic philosophers to Buddhists.

Oliver Burkeman talks to life coaches paid to make their clients' lives a living hell, and to maverick security experts such as Bruce Schneier, …

A witty, fascinating, and counterintuitive read that turns decades of self-help advice on its head and forces us to rethink completely our attitudes toward failure, uncertainty, and death.

The Antidote is a series of journeys among people who share a single, surprising way of thinking about life. What they have in common is a hunch about human psychology: that it's our constant effort to eliminate the negative that causes us to feel so anxious, insecure, and unhappy. And that there is an alternative "negative path" to happiness and success that involves embracing the things we spend our lives trying to avoid. It is a subversive, galvanizing message, which turns out to have a long and distinguished philosophical lineage ranging from ancient Roman Stoic philosophers to Buddhists.

Oliver Burkeman talks to life coaches paid to make their clients' lives a living hell, and to maverick security experts such as Bruce Schneier, who contends that the changes we've made to airport and aircraft security since the 9/11 attacks have actually made us less safe. And then there are the "backwards" business gurus, who suggest not having any goals at all and not planning for a company's future.

Burkeman's new book is a witty, fascinating, and counterintuitive read that turns decades of self-help advice on its head and forces us to rethink completely our attitudes toward failure, uncertainty, and death.

2 editions

mark reviewed The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman

A Surprisingly Uncynical - and Delicious - Antidote to Poisonous Positive Thinking

5 stars

Starting with the subtitle, "The Antidote" positions itself against "positive thinking" - the sort of mind-over-matter faith in the future that pretty much every other self-help book espouses, a doctrine that author Burkeman neatly and thoroughly dismantles with copious endnotes. But there's no lazy cynicism here, in a search for happiness via unconventional and counterintuitive ways, and a surprising amount of, well, positivity. From Seneca and the Stoics to memento mori's and a shrine to Saint Death, Burkeman guides the reader on a whistle-stop tour of philosophies that reorient our ideas about happiness, success or even the self. I absolutely devoured it - it's also, in parts, very funny! - and think it might become an annual read, or at least a great starting point on further reading.

Subjects

Happiness
Self-actualization (psychology)