Questions     Ideas     Skills

The central ideas in a nutshell

We all want to live happily and we all have different ideas about how to do it. But we know that whatever precautions we take and however fortunate we are, there will be bad times as well as good. If we want to live as happily as we can it would be great to remain serene in the face of all that happens to us, or at least recover our serenity or peace of mind as quickly as we can when we lose it.

Living happily is in fact only secondarily about our circumstances and what happens to us. It’s more about our inner lives, about how events and people affect us, about our own emotions, beliefs, thoughts, desires etc. But when we start to look at our inner lives we see that our thoughts, impulses and inner responses follow patterns or habits. These habits are the key to how happily we can live. If we change the habits we change our take on the world and everything in it and if we do this systematically we can move our inner lives in the direction of greater serenity and inner peace whatever happens to us.

Something very like this appears as a major theme of many if not most religions. But of course it appears there in the context of faith, including belief in supernatural beings. Here it is a simple consequence of the universal desire to live happily, a consequence of taking happiness seriously and doing something about it. Practice is the key as with any kind of skill and belief is not the issue. But this process has so much in common with spiritual practice undertaken for religious ends that it is fair to call it a form of spirituality – a spirituality for sceptics. It can be made the basis of a principled, ethical way of life which transcends materialism.

A habit deliberately cultivated is a skill, so the key to happiness on this view is the practice of inner skills. What skills should we practice?

The Lost Art of Being Happy