The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [12]
Perceiving that worry and regret do us harm is a nice first step, but it does not, on its own, stop anyone from worrying or regretting. Montaigne wrote, “My life has been filled with terrible misfortune; most of which never happened.” Spinoza wrote, “Repentance is not a virtue, that is, it does not arise from reason. Rather, he who repents what he did is twice miserable.”2 What these philosophers say is right, but is not the only thing that is right—which is to say, it is, in part, wrong. But this is how graceful-life philosophies, and many religions, try to change sad people into happy ones—by the repetition of well-formulated insights. Reading, thinking about, and even writing about the refusal to feel guilty is the therapy. The idea produces moments of relief from one’s chagrin and opens up more ideas than it shuts down. Note that this method is not personal to you. The supposition is that we are all similarly plagued by jealousy, shame, and misapprehensions of our worth and that we can all use the same insights to heal ourselves.
The second big know yourself is Freud’s. It is not entirely different from what Socrates and Plato were talking about, but it is different. Humanity was in a novel place in Freud’s time. In the nineteenth century, having lit up the jungle with electric lights, we noticed that the violent chiefs, toothy women, and wild animals had relocated into the darkness in our heads. Law and asphalt had left them no place else. The hallmark of modern life is that the world is no longer a tug-of-war between various gods and people and animals. Now it is a tug-of-war between the gods, people, and animals inside each human being’s mind: wolves and snakes, castrating father figures, and cannibal mothers. The work of Carl Jung, Freud’s disciple and later disputant, illuminated parallels between our distressed modern minds and a set of timeless, powerful archetypes.
If the human world is not run by gods, it is run by human beings. If whenever you meet friends you are late, and keep them waiting and annoyed, you may not enjoy the experience, but what keeps you doing it is not a problem with your clocks or your transportation. Someone made you feel some way about being on time; perhaps you were forced to be too responsible too young, or perhaps you were humiliated to be left waiting and vowed to avoid it. If you can figure out why you feel better about yourself if you are late for meetings, you will likely be freer to change the behavior. Would that it were always so simple, but the great masters promise only measured miracles. The important realization is that the forces that “purposefully” stick out a foot and make you stumble are not demons out there in the world, but rather demons of your own mind, and there is a rhyme and reason to them. Don’t supplicate, investigate.
Why are human minds so firmly affected by childhood experiences? I believe it is a part of what we call instinct when we see it in the animal world. Consider the lot of the young tiger. He has only a few perilous enemies to learn about, and his mother’s horrified reaction to each one—the cobra, for example—sears into the tiger’s mind. Think of some time when you were a child and your parents shocked and humiliated