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13-Minute Book Summary: “Happy,” by Derren Brown
If you had planned the greatest vacation you could possibly imagine, but you were informed that you would forget everything immediately upon your return, would you even go?
Isn’t it the memories that we create in the process of living that make everything worthwhile? I mean, at the end of our lives, what do we have left?
In Happy, one of the best happiness books I’ve ever read, Derren Brown points out that the “experiencing” self is different from the “remembering” self, a psychological fact supported by research conducted by the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and others.
What this means is that we’d all be far better served by stuffing our lives with the very best memories possible, than trying to fit in as much temporary pleasure as we can. The pleasure will fade, but the happy memories will make us happy forever.
There’s just so much to this book, and it took me completely by surprise. It was digitally pushed into my hands by a friend who demanded that I read it at once, and, because this friend had never steered me wrong before, I looked past the fact that the book was written by a…
