Lord
Russell, have you always been happy?
I was not born happy. As a child, my favorite hymn
was, ‘Weary of earth and laden with sins.’ In adolescence, I
hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which,
however, I was restrained by the desire to know more about
mathematics.
Some
would say if we contemplate all the problems of the world today,
it’s foolish to be happy.
The wise man is as happy as circumstances permit
and if he finds the contemplation of the universe painful beyond a
point, he will contemplate something else instead.
I am persuaded that those who quite sincerely
attribute their sorrows to their views about the universe are
putting the cart before the horse: the truth is that they are
unhappy for some reason of which they are not aware, and this
unhappiness leads them to dwell upon the less agreeable
characteristics of the world in which they live.
But
the struggle for life can be quite stressful, can't it?
What people mean by the struggle for life is really
the struggle for success. What people fear when they engage in the
struggle is not that they will fail to get their breakfast next
morning, but that they will fail to outshine the neighbours.
It is very singular how little men seem to realise
that they are not caught in the grip of a mechanism from which there
is no escape, but that the treadmill is one upon which they remain
merely because they have not noticed that it fails to take them up
to a higher level.
So long as he not only desires success, but is
wholeheartedly persuaded that it is a man’s duty to pursue
success, and that a man who does not do so is a poor creature, so
long his life will remain too concentrated and too anxious to be
happy.
So
you feel that competition is a large part of the problem?
The emphasis upon competition in modern life is
connected with a general decay of civilised standards such as must
have occurred in Rome after the Augustan age. Men and women appear
to have become incapable of enjoying the more intellectual
pleasures. The art of general conversation, the knowledge of good
literature--who in our age cares for anything so leisurely?
Some American students took me walking in the
spring through a wood on the borders of their campus; it was filled
with exquisite wild flowers, but not one of my guides knew the name
of even one of them. What use would such knowledge be? It could not
add to anybody’s income.
The cure for this lies in admitting the part of
sane and quiet enjoyment in a balanced ideal of life.
What
do you recommend for people who worry too much?
A great many worries can be diminished by realising
that unimportance of the matter which is causing anxiety.
I have done in my time a considerable amount of
public speaking; at first every audience terrified me, and
nervousness made me speak very badly; I dreaded the ordeal so much
that I always hoped I might break my leg before I had to make the
speech, and when it was over I was exhausted from the nervous
strain. Gradually I taught myself to feel that it did not matter
whether or not I spoke well or ill, the universe would remain much
the same in either case. I found that the less I cared whether I
spoke well or badly, the less badly I spoke, and gradually the
nervous strain diminished almost to vanishing point.
A great deal of nervous fatigue can be dealt with
in this way. One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdown is
the belief that one’s work is terribly important and that to take
a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster. If I were a medical
man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his
work important.
What
are other causes of unhappiness?
Next to worry probably one of the most potent
causes of unhappiness is envy, one of the most universal and
deep-seated of human passions. Have you ever been so imprudent as to
praise an artist to another artist? A politician to another
politician in the same party? An Egyptologist to another
Egyptologist? If you have, it is a hundred to one that you will have
produced an explosion of envy.
If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon. But
Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I
daresay, envied Hercules, who never existed. You cannot, therefore,
get away from envy by means of success alone.
What
cure is there for envy?
Merely to realise the causes of one’s envy is to
take a long step towards curing them. When anything pleasant occurs
it should be enjoyed to the full, without stopping to think that it
is not so pleasant as something else that may possibly be happening
to someone else.
There
are some people who feel that life seems to be especially difficult
for them—they are under-appreciated, for example. What do you say
to these people?
For them, I suggest four general maxims. The first:
remember that your motives are not always as altruistic as they seem
to yourself. There is a certain kind of philanthropist who is always
doing good to people against their will, and is amazed and horrified
that they display no gratitude. ‘Doing good’ to people generally
consists in depriving them of some pleasure: drink, or gambling, or
idleness, or what not. In this case there is an element of envy of
those who are in a position to do commit sins from which we have to
abstain if we are to retain the respect of our friends.
The second maxim: don’t over-estimate your own
merits. The playwright whose plays never succeed should consider
calmly the hypothesis that they are bad plays; he should not reject
this out of hand as obviously untenable. To recognise that your
merit is not so great as you had hoped may be more painful for a
moment, but it is a pain which has an end, beyond which a happy life
again becomes possible.
Our third maxim is not to expect too much of
others. In all your dealings with other people it is important and
not always easy to remember that they see life from their own angle.
The fourth maxim is that other people spend less
time thinking about you than you do yourself. It is possible to see
in all kinds of actions a reference to oneself which does not, in
fact, exist.
You
believe that we worry too much about what other people will think?
Yes, my belief is that fear of public opinion, like
every other form of fear, is oppressive and stunts growth. It is
difficult to achieve any kind of greatness while a fear of this kind
remains strong. It is essential to happiness that our way of living
should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental
tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbors, or even
our relations.
