The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to Be Happy (2010)

by Michael Foley

  96Schopenhauer, (1974) op. cit.

  97William Shakespeare, Henry VIII, Act 4, Scene 2

  98Aaron Beck, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders, International Universities Press, 1976

  99Albert Ellis and Windy Dryden, The Practice of Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy, Springer, 2007

  100ibid.

  101Oliver James, The Selfish Capitalist: Origins of Affluenza, Vermilion, 2008

  102Jonah Lehrer, The Decisive Moment: How the Brain Makes Up Its Mind, Canongate Books, 2009

  103Nettle, op. cit.

  104Schopenhauer, (1974) op. cit.

  105Damasio, (2004) op. cit.

  106Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Basic Books, 1974

  107The Times, 21 August 2007

  108Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, Penguin Books, 2002

  109John Armstrong, Conditions of Love: The Philosophy of Intimacy, Penguin, 2002

  110Jaspers, op. cit.

  111Christopher Peterson & Martin Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification, Oxford University Press, 2004

  112There are several examples in Haidt, op. cit.

  113Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe an einenjungen Dicbter, Insel Verlag, 1929

  114Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life, Modern Library, 2006

  115Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Fontana, 1993

  116ibid.

  117ibid.

  118Matthew 10:34

  119Quoted in Jaspers, op. cit.

  120Franz Kafka, The Ztirau Aphorisms, Schocken Books, 2006

  121Franz Kafka, The Complete Short Stories, Vintage, 2005

  122Farid Ud-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds, Penguin, 1984

  123To match the twelfth-century Islamic parable of the Simorgh there is this first-century Jewish aphorism from Rabbi Tarphon, also sounding remarkably like Kafka: ‘You are not required to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.’

  The existentialist Karl Jaspers: ‘The goal of life cannot be formulated as a state which is attainable and, once attained, perfect. Our states of being are only manifestations of existential striving or failure. It lies in our very nature to be on the way.’

  Nietzsche, the father of existentialism, was more succinct: ‘There is no Being, only Becoming.’

  Sartre’s version was turgidly abstract: ‘Existence precedes essence.’

  The Buddhist version was zestfully concrete: ‘Asked, ‘What is Zen?’ the master said, ‘Walk on.’’

  And Proust expressed it in fiction: ‘We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.’

  124 Constantine Peter Cavafy, Poiemata, Ikaros, 1963

  125’Hi-tech is turning us all into time-wasters’, Observer, 20 July 2008

  126Jerald Block, ‘Issues for DSM-V: Internet Addiction’, The American Journal of Psychiatry, March 2008

  127’Driver wins £20,000 damages for stress of parking tickets’, Observer, 8 February 2009

  128Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Routledge, 2003

  129’Don’t worry, Woody: anxiety is in the genes, study finds’, Independent, 11 August 2008

  130’It’s not you, dear, it’s me: the genetic reason why some men are just born to cheat’, The Times, 2 September 2008

  131John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, Granta, 2002

  132Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, reason, and the human brain, Putnam, 1994

  133LeDoux, op. cit.

  134Damasio, (2004) op. cit.

  135ibid.

  136Matt Ridley, Nature Via Nurture: Genes, Experience and What Makes Us Human, HarperPerennial, 2004

  137Hilary Rose & Steven Rose (ed.), Alas Poor Darwin: Arguments against Evolutionary Psychology, Vintage, 2001

  138Steven Rose, Lifelines: Life Beyond the Gene, Vintage, 2005

  139For a full account see Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself Penguin, 2007

  140D.A. Christakis et al ., ‘Early television exposure and subsequent attentional problems in children’, Pediatrics, 113, 2004

  141William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 4

  142Editorial, British Medical Journal, 2 June 2001

  143Quoted in the Guardian, 13 December 2001

  144’Asleep at the Wheel’, BBC One documentary, 26 October 2004

  145Muzafer Sherif, Group Conflict and Co-operation: Their Social Psychology, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966

  146Don DeLillo, White Noise, Viking, 1984

  147E. J. Langer & J. Rodin, ‘The effects of choice and enhanced personal responsibility for the aged: A field experiment in an institutional setting’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34, 1976

  148S.E.R. Asch, ‘Studies of Independence and Conformity: A Minority of one Against a Unanimous Majority’, Scientific American, November 1955

  149G.S. Berns, J. Chappelow, C.F. Zin, G. Pagnoni, M.E. Martin-Skurski, and J. Richards, ‘Neurobiological Correlates of Social Conformity and Independence During Mental Rotation’, Biological Psychiatry, 5, August 2005

  150T. Blass, Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999

  151Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, Rider, 2007

  152Flaubert, op. cit.

  153Gloria Mark et al.. ‘‘Constant, Constant, Multi-tasking Craziness’: Managing Multiple Working Spheres’, Proceedings of CHI, 2004

  154J.Rubinstein et al ., ‘Executive Control of Cognitive Processes in Task Switching’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, August 2001

  155Rene Marois et al ., ‘Isolation of a Central Bottleneck of Information Processing with Time-resolved FMRI’, Neuron, December 2006

  156Jonathan Sharpies and Martin Westwell, ‘The impact of interruptions from communications technologies upon the ability of an individual to concentrate upon a task’, Institute for the Future of the Mind, 2007

  157A. Newberg et al ., ‘The measurement of regional cerebral blood flow during the complex cognitive task of meditation: a preliminary SPECT study’, Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 106, 2001; and O. Flanagan, ‘The Colour of Happiness’, New Scientist, 178, 2003

  158Meister Eckhart, Die Deutschen und Lateinischen Werke, Verlag, 1936

  159Spinoza, Ethics, Oxford University Press, 2000

  160Albert Ellis, The Myth of Self-Esteem, Prometheus Books, 2005

  161R. F. Baumeister et al ., ‘Exploding the Self-Esteem Myth’, Scientific American, 292, January 2005

  162Oliver James, Affluenza, Vermilion, 2007

  163Carol S. Dweck et al, ‘Praise for Intelligence Can Undermine Children’s Motivation and Performance’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 1998

  164William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 5, Scene 1

  165D. Kahneman et al., Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, Russell Sage, 1999

  166Bly, op. cit.

  167’Out of the Ether, Creating the Persona of Celebrity’, The NewYork Times in the Observer, 4 November 2007

  168Rilke, (1929) op. cit.

  169T. S. Eliot, ‘Ash Wednesday’ in Collected Poems, Faber, 1974

  170Quoted in Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Harvest, 1981

  171Charles Wright, Negative Blue: Selected Later Poems, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000

  172Jules Laforgue, Selected Writings of Jules Laforgue, Greenwood, 1972

  173Reported in ‘A Little Less Conversation’, Guardian, 11 October 2008

  174Juan Ramon Jimenez, The Complete Perfectionist, Doubleday, 1997

  175’Hard to eat oranges are losing a-peel’, Metro, 3 June 2008

  176’To Think or Not to Think, Ponder the Pensive French’, The New York Times in the Observer, 29 September 2007

>   177Pierre Bayard, How to talk About Books You Haven’t Read, Granta, 2008

  178Mascaro, op. cit.

  179Ecclesiastes 7:6

  180Wheen, op. cit.

  181Gray, op. cit.

  182ibid.

  183ibid.

  184Arendt, (2001) op. cit.

  185Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, Joseph, 1988

  186Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, HarperCollins, 2004

  187Ben R. Newell, ‘Think, Blink or Sleep on it? The impact of modes of thought on complex decision making’, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, forthcoming paper

  188Chuang Tzu, The Inner Chapters, Counterpoint, 1998

  189Arendt, (2001) op. cit.

  190ibid.

  191Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, Dent, 1949

  192Anthony Storr, Solitude, Flamingo, 1989

  193Jonah Lehrer, ‘The Eureka Hunt – why do good ideas come to us when they do?’, New Yorker, 28 July 2008

  194Spinoza, Ethics, Heron, 1980

  195Arendt, (2001) op. cit.

  196Kierkegaard, (1951) op. cit.

  197Quoted in Andrew Smith, Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth, Bloomsbury, 2005

  198R. Kubey et al ., ‘Television addiction is no mere metaphor’, Scientific American, February 2003

  199Richard E. Nisbett, The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why, Free Press, 2003

  200Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt and Harry Zohn, Illuminations, Vintage, 1999

  201ibid.

  202Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Chatto & Windus, 1981

  203James Joyce, Ulysses, The Bodley Head, 1960

  204William Shakespeare, Henry IV: Part II, Act 5, Scene 5

  205Quoted in Caleb Crain, ‘Twilight of the Books’, New Yorker, 24 December 2007

  206Marcel Proust, Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays, Penguin, 1988

  207Jonah Lehrer, Proust was a Neuroscientist, Houghton Mifflin, 2007

  208Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Icon, 2008

  209Carl Landhuis et al ., ‘Does Childhood Viewing lead to Attention

  Problems in Adolescence? Results from a Longitudinal Study’, Pediatrics, 120, 3 September 2007

  210Heather A. Lindstrom et al ., ‘The relationships between television viewing in midlife and the development of Alzheimer’s Disease in a case-control study’, Brain and Cognition, 58, 2 July 2005

  211Flaubert, op. cit.

  212For details see Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing In The Streets: A History of Collective Joy, Granta, 2007

  213Quoted by Peter Avery in the Introduction to The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam, Penguin, 1981

  214Jelaluddin Rumi, The Essential Rumi, HarperCollins, 1995

  215Spinoza, (1966) op. cit.

  216Susan Greenfield, ID: The Quest for Meaning in the 21st Century, Hodder & Stoughton, 2008

  217Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight, Hodder & Stoughton, 2008

  218ibid.

  219For instance, A. Newberg et ai, ‘The measurement of regional cerebral blood flow during the complex cognitive task of meditation: a preliminary SPECT study’, Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 106, 2001; and O. Flanagan, ‘The Colour of Happiness’, New Scientist, 178, 2003

  220Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Classic Work on How to Achieve Happiness, Rider, 2002

  221Daisetz Taitaro Suzuki & Erich Fromm, Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, Souvenir Press, 1974

  222Nietzsche, (1885) op. cit.

  223ibid.

  224Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, Cambridge University Press, 1992

  225Nietzsche, (1885) op. cit.

  226Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Modern Library, 1968

  227Quoted in Suzuki & Fromm, op. cit.

  228Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, Modern Library, 2000

  229William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 3, Scene 2

  230ibid.

  231Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960

  232’As Office Attitudes Shift, Love Blossoms in Cubicles’, The New York Times in the Observer, 25 November 2007

  233Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine, Granta, 1989

  234ibid.

  235Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End, Viking, 2007

  236ibid.

  237Adrian Gostick and Scott Christopher, The Levity Effect: Why It Pays to Lighten Up, John Wiley, 2008

  238Stephen C. Lundin et al., Fish! A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results, Hodder & Stoughton, 2001

  239’On Anger’ in Seneca, Dialogues and Letters, Penguin, 1997

  240Frederick Herzberg, The Motivation to Work, John Wiley, 1959

  241Edward L. Deci & Richard M. Ryan, Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behaviour, Plenum Press, 1985

  242E. Deci et al ., ‘A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation’, Psychological Bulletin, 125, 1999

  243Matthew 6:25

  244Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich, The Bodley Head, 1971

  245Wim Meeus and Quinten A.W. Raaijmakers, ‘Obedience in Modern Society: The Utrecht Studies’, fournal of Social Issues, 51, 1995

  246Fromm, (1960) op. cit.

  247Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, Faber & Faber, 1964

  248Jeffry Simpson et al ., ‘The Association between Romantic Love and Marriage’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 12, 1986

  249Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving, George Allen & Unwin, 1957

  250Stendhal, De L’Amour, Gamier Freres, 1959

  251ibid.

  252Helen Fisher, Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love, Holt, 2004

  253D. Marazziti et al, ‘Alteration of the platelet serotonin transporter in romantic love’, Psychological Medicine, 29, 1999

  254Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard, Collins Harvill, 1960

  255In Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories, Penguin, 2008

  256Avner Offer, The Challenge of Affluence: Self-control and Well-being in the United States and Britain Since 1950, Oxford University Press, 2006

  257Rilke, (2006) op. cit.

  258Fromm, (1957) op. cit.

  259Quoted in James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science, Penguin, 1989

  260John Milton, Paradise Lost, Wordsworth, 1994

  261Rush W. Dozier, Why We Hate: Understanding, Curbing and Eliminating Hate in Ourselves and Our World, Contemporary Books, 2002

  262Alex Comfort, The Joy of Sex, Quartet Books, 1972

  263Alex Comfort & Susan Quilliam, The New Joy of Sex, Mitchell Beazley, 2008

  264B. Whipple et al., The G Spot and Other Discoveries about Human Sexuality, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1982

  265Macdonald, op. cit.

  266David Levy, Love and Sex with Robots: The Evolution of Human-Robot Relationships, Duckworth, 2008

  267D. Read et al, ‘Diversification Bias: Explaining the Discrepancy in Variety Seeking Between Combined and Separated Choices’, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1, 1995

  268Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, Carcanet Press, 1989

  269Blanchflower & Oswald, op. cit.

  270’The Body May Age, But Romance Stays Fresh’, The New York Times in the Observer, 25 November 2007

  271Douwe Draaisma, Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older: How Memory Shapes Our Past, Cambridge University Press, 2004

  272’A Rise in Midlife Suicides Confounds Researchers’, The New York Times in the Observer, 2 March 2008

  273L. Carstensen & J.A. Michels, ‘At the Intersection of Emotion and Cognition’, Psychological Science, 14, 2005

  274Howard S. Friedman, ‘Psychosocial and Behavioural Predictors of Longevity’, American Psychologist, February 1995

  275George E. Vaillant, Aging Well: Surprising Guideposts to a Happier L
ife from the Landmark Harvard Study of Adult Development, Little, Brown & Co., 2002

  276H. Van Praag et al ., ‘Functional neurogenesis in the adult hippocampus’, Nature, 415, 2002

  277William Shakespeare, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Act 5, Scene 4

  278Rilke, (2006) op. cit.

  279E. M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born, Quartet Books, 1993

  280Sigmund Freud, The Complete Psychological Works, Hogarth Press, 1970

  281Homer, The Odyssey, William Heinemann, 1962

  282Quoted in Jaspers, op. cit.

  283Aurelius, op. cit.

  284Quoted in John Updike, Due Considerations, Hamish Hamilton, 2007

  285Quoted in John Richardson, Late Picasso, Tate Gallery, 1988

  286ibid.

  287ibid.

  288ibid.

  289Quoted in Whitney Balliett, Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz, St. Martin’s Press, 2000

  290William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, Act 5, Scene 1

  291Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories, Wordsworth, 2004