Hello, I'm Darren Brown, and I think we could rethink our concepts of "happiness". I think we're sold an idea that we should be believing in ourselves and setting our goals and thinking positively.
But the reality is that thinking positively can actually have quite a negative effect. "Optimism" as an idea doesn't serve us very well when things go badly.
Seeing bad situations in a positive light and looking for the good — that's okay, that goes back to the Stoics. But when we're feeling like we've failed, that's the problem.
And the problem with optimism is that it just tells us if things don't go right that we've failed, that we haven't believed in ourselves enough, and we should blame ourselves because there's nowhere else to go. And that's fundamentally where it's wrong — you need a system that works for you when things aren't going well, that's the real test of whether something holds up or not.
There was a psychologist called Daniel Kahneman, who came up with this idea of the "experiencing self" and the "remembering self". Like two sort of cells at work within us.
The idea is that, for example, if you are given the choice between going on our roller coaster and having a fun afternoon at a theme park versus looking after a sick relative. Which one's going to make you happier?
The chances are you'd think, "what I'll do, I'm gonna go on the theme park", so you're experiencing self is being catered to by the experience of, you know, happiness and excitement. But your remembering self, which is the other part of you, will look back on the experience looking after your sick relative actually as a more meaningful experience.
So the chances are, you'll take with you more of a sense of happiness and satisfaction from doing that. So we have a terrible understanding what actually fulfills us.
I think an interesting and thought experiment which was given by a stoic, a modern stoic called William Irvin, is imagine that you woke up one day and everybody had disappeared from the world. So they were still buildings and cars and everything, but there were no people, everyone had gone, is just you.
What changes in terms of the sort of things that you require for yourself. You wouldn't bother having a big, great big house to go and even you could live in any house.
