"I think I can turn to living with animals, they're so serene and self-sufficient.
I stood and observed them for a long, long time.
They don't cry out for their situation,
They don't sleep at night and weep for their sins,
They don't talk about their duty to God and give me a headache,
There is not a single disobedient, not a deranged possessor,
Neither one kneels to the other, nor to the ancestors of a thousand years,
There is no one on the whole earth who is high or depressed.
—Walter Whitman"
In this materially rich society, our happiness seems increasingly difficult to find. I still remember when I was a child, a simple card game console can bring an afternoon of happiness, a Hong Kong martial arts film can be turned over and watched many times, a certain food eaten in childhood, and when I eat it again when I am an adult, I can never find the happiness in my memory.
Especially when you enter the workplace after adulthood, you feel that life seems to have reached the end, the daily opening of your eyes is just for the sake of daily boring and boring survival, the friendship between colleagues is only to cover up the cruelty of competition, the closest people may also betray you, never know when the accident will come... What is the point of being alive?
I believe that some people may have more complicated thoughts, more pessimistic, more disappointed and hostile to the world, so more and more people will obviously have a rich life but still depressed and want to die, such examples around us are numerous.
I also belong to one of this negative army, so one day when I saw this "Russell on Happiness" I would want to open it without hesitation, believing in the master is better than believing in the chicken soup of the soul, in the past, my attitude towards chicken soup has always been rejected, those writers always say some rhetoric, make your blood boil, as if the whole world has stepped on the feet, when closing the book, only to find that some methods and examples in life are not always magical, after all, happiness may have the same reason, Unfortunately, it is all kinds of things...
For Russell's initial impression, or the high school teacher in the PPT showed Russell's Chinese notes, at that time felt very magical, a foreigner, can write more beautiful Than some Chinese of Chinese characters is really enviable, and later learned that he can really be called a polymath, mathematics, philosophy, logic, proficient in many Chinese words. One day, I brushed a short video such as "Russell's Advice for the Future of Mankind" and felt the greatness of knowledge and wisdom.
Books about "happiness" written by a mathematician and logician seem more convincing, after all, the answers obtained through rigorous logic and philosophy are much more credible than the truths told in stories.
The original book is divided into two parts: the cause of unhappiness and the cause of happiness. The book was published in 1930, but it did not feel that it was outdated and outdated, and the reasoning derived from rigorous logic was undoubtedly more convincing.
The various parts of the book start from the various emotions and situations of human beings, such as jealousy, suspicion, guilt, work, love, family, etc., based on the capitalist era, the author's rich vision of traveling to various countries and observations of human beings, profound and complex knowledge is applied in the analysis of happiness, in the ever-changing river of history to find many immutable truths: whether ancient or modern, no matter how complex human beings have become, the animality and sociality of human beings are difficult to change. Thus the troubles of the past correspond to the present, and the methods of the past naturally apply to the modern.
In the book, Russell does not give our ideal solution, but analyzes all kinds of emotions and various situations, in short, we cannot indulge in the past, we cannot let shortcomings develop arbitrarily, we cannot only care about some small profits and lose our concern for the future and for the whole of mankind.
As Russell himself said in the book, "This book is not for knowledgeable people, nor is it for people who just want to discuss practical problems." There is no deep philosophy in the book, nor is there profound knowledge. I'm just piecing together some ideas that come from common sense. The method I suggest to my readers has been confirmed by my experience and observation, and every time I follow it, I reap more joy. ”