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Growing Up: HAPPINESS & drug abuse
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Guys I just had an amazing idea. If you are reading this. You. Yes you. Could you please reply to me with the name of someone who you admire? E.g. Ronald McDonald, always tried his best. Or whatever. I'm not going to do anything with the information other than read it and it won't be published anywhere so no need to be embarrassed if it's someone slightly obscure. & I will tell you why next week! Moving on... I have now finished 14 books this year (including audiobooks that were 80% listened to, so not so impressive). Currently reading: The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell and wow I don't think I have ever underlined a book so much in my life. I'm 107/175 pages in but there are already so many lines I wanted to share, so that's what's happening. First up. Who is he and what's the book about: Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. He is widely considered one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. And he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950. Cool. (I learnt this from ChatGPT who then said sorry it was lying and he didn't win it in 1950. It was George Bernard Shaw. I then asked why it gave me the wrong information and it said sorry again, no he did win in 1950. I then asked about George Bernard Shaw and it said actually that was 1925... who knows what to believe these days!!! But really Russell did win a Nobel Prize in 1950 "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought" (I checked their website)). This book was written in 1930 and I guess is like an OG popular philosophy book (read: self help... but decades before self help was a thing). And wow it could have been written today. So bizarre how some things clearly don't change... Here are some of my favourite lines: ON BEING MISERABLE What is the use in making everybody rich if the rich themselves are miserable? A man may feel so completely thwarted that he seeks no form of satisfaction, but only distraction and oblivion. He then becomes a devotee of ‘pleasure’. That is to say he seeks to make life bearable by becoming less alive. Drunkenness, for example, is temporary suicide; the happiness that it brings is merely negative, a momentary cessation of unhappiness. ON COMPARISON 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 their neighbours. The child who finds a brother or sister preferred before himself acquires the habit of envy, and when he goes out into the world looks for injustices of which he is the victim, perceives them at once if they occur, and imagines them if they do not. The man who has double my salary is doubtless tortured by the thought that someone else in turn has twice as much as he has, and so it goes on. If you desire glory, you may envy Napoleon. But Napoleon envied Caesar, Caesar envied Alexander, and Alexander, I daresay, envied Hercules, who never existed. ON PUBLIC OPINION Don't expect others to take as much interest in you as you do yourself... don't imagine that most people give enough thought to you to have any special desire to persecute you. Public opinion is always more tyrannical towards those who obviously fear it than towards those who feel indifferent to it. One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways. 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, and it is impossible to acquire that freedom of spirit in which true happiness consists, for 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 neighbours, or even our relations. (Re. the media going after people) The best way to increase toleration is to multiply the number of individuals who enjoy real happiness and do not therefore find their chief pleasure in the infliction of pain upon their fellow men.
Finally a fun (and not so fun) fact about Bertrand:
Okay that's all for now! This week on Growing Up with Delia Burgess This episode was insane. I learnt so much. How does someone get to the point of stealing at knifepoint to feed their amphetamine addiction? Of course it all begins in childhood. Absent father, bullied for being different, learns how to fight, gets in with the wrong crowd. Goes from drinking to pills to injecting. Kai tells me about the first time he injected. What it felt like. How he sacrificed everything to chase that feeling. I got to ask lots of naive questions. Why amphetamines not heroin? Where did the drugs come from? And then the recovery journey. Upward from the rock bottom. Did time in prison help (no... lots of drugs there). What the physical withdrawals were like, how people are clean for 12 years, have one moment of weakness and end up ODing. Etc. So so fascinating and amazing to connect with someone on the other side of the world in this way (I recorded this from Aus while Kai was in Finland.) Enjoy xx delia Previous editions here. Forwarded this and want to subscribe? Click here. |
Hi! I'm Delia Burgess
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