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mind submission as a fast way to achieve it. Philosophers and authors of wisdom literature are easily differentiated from self-help gurus in that they are too wise to offer much optimism or certainty, and they thus risk losing clients. The guru stays cheerful; know him by his grin. And the narcissism! Narcissism is such a tough problem that the foundational spiritual idea of the entire eastern hemisphere of our planet is that, should you ever overcome your narcissism, so great would be the event that you would pop out of existence in an ecstasy of happiness. That is what nirvana is: the final realization that the self is not what it seems to be. Not only should we not coddle the self and coo at it, nursing its little embarrassments and beaming when it gets its way; we should not even tolerate its existence. We must set upon it, dissolve it, pull it into little strings. Nirvana sounds like an optimistic concept, but when you get up close—that is, when you study the masters—there is a distinct flavor of sour charm. This is a term I needed to invent for this book; it means a kind of cheerful world-weariness—not the sad and tender feeling of bittersweet, but a wry, disappointed geniality. The twentieth-century Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa wrote: “The attainment of enlightenment from ego’s point of view is extreme death, the death of the self, the death of me and mine, the death of the watcher. It is the ultimate and final disappointment.” Sour charm.

Most opinion and knowledge is not going to make you happy, and certainly very little of it is both significant and true. Montaigne says we believe whatever they believed in the place where we grew up. That’s it. There are no real cultural opinions, just local assumptions. He says we cling to these as to a rock in a storm and wonders just what it is we think will happen if we let go. How much can you despise someone for believing something you would believe if only you had been raised there? Yet if we visit a bunch of these rocks and start to notice something in common among them, the common theme seems worth noting. Despite their many opinions about what we should do with our lives once we get our happiness under control, the philosophers, the wisdom writers, and the self-help leaders all say the same thing about what we should do to get to happiness. That is why self-help leaders can indeed help many smart people, and why even the wisest of us might find an insight among the sugary encouragements and tough love. There are four doctrines found in all happiness theory from wisdom literature, philosophy, psychology, and self-help. They are:

Know yourself.

Control your desires.

Take what’s yours.

Remember death.

This is the core, classic wisdom about happiness. It is very difficult to follow any of these doctrines, and when you do make progress in any one of them, that very progress brings new problems. For instance: coming to know yourself can make you vulnerable, controlling your desires can make you passionless, taking what’s yours gives you tremendous responsibility, and remembering death can make you too detached to be of full use to yourself and the people around you. That is why it is good to find a guide; that way, you do not get stranded in these classic errors. Despite their risks, these are the magic formulas, and, to an important degree, they work. This section will speak to each of these in turn: how they work, how to work them, and why it is not appropriate to be unbrokenly optimistic about any of it.

Great happiness philosophers all address the four doctrines (self-knowledge, self-control, self-realization, and awareness of death), but they diverge on what else to do with life. There is a busy crowd of suggestions. Ecclesiastes suggests we be devoted to our spouse and to some project of our own making; Plato suggests we follow the pursuit of truth and tend to the health of the community; Epicurus suggests friendship, sex, food, and wine; self-help suggests goals of relaxation and prosperity; much psychology suggests productive labor and a reproductive