Book-It '10! Book #54

[alivemagdolene]

The Fifty Books Challenge, year two! This was a library request.



Title: Happy at Last: The Thinking Person's Guide to Finding Joy by Richard O'Connor


Details: Copyright 2008, St. Martin's Press

Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "From the bestselling author of Undoing Depression – a groundbreaking program to get happy and stay happy!

Do you want to live the happiest, most satisfying life possible? Does happiness feel like an elusive goal? According to the most recent developments in psychology and science, the brain can be trained to be more receptive to happiness, because staying happy doesn’t come naturally. Nor does our society make it easy.

In Happy at Last, psychotherapist Richard O’Connor offers new thinking about how we attain and maintain happiness, and he shows us that it doesn’t necessarily have to come at a high cost or in a big package. Rather, we can be in command of our happiness by learning to control how our minds work so that we can identify and savor the hidden positive aspects of everyday life. To do this, O’Connor provides us with a set of skills that will help us re-wire our brains to allow ourselves more joy.

Filled with practical advice and exercises, Happy at Last is a step-by-step guide that will help you achieve

• The core skills that we need to feel happy and fulfilled in today’s world.

• Strategies for increasing happiness, reducing unnecessary misery, and experiencing greater satisfaction.

• Techniques for keeping sadness at bay and stress from getting in the way of enjoying life.

This is not glib pop psychology but rather the best current science has to offer, put into an accessible and absorbing book. Richard O’Connor makes it possible to be, finally, happy at last!"


Why I Wanted to Read It: I greatly enjoyed O'Connor's Undoing Depression and when I found he'd written more, I expected this to be an extension of that work.


How I Liked It: I entered this book with the assumption that it was about coping with Depression. It isn't. Or at least, it isn't about so much the mental illness.

O'Connor devotes the first half of the book to sweeping generalizations about society and pop culture in a frequently contradictory and factually suspect manner.
He assures us of how nature has designed our brains (overlooking, say, evolution, innate mental illness, and the fact that most anthropologists now agree that homosexuality is a evolutionary tact against overpopulation) with the same tired (not to mention heterosexist and sexist) and vague rants against society going against what we're "designed" for and choking on our excess.

“Human males tend to be attracted to younger women with perky breasts and tight skin; women tend to be attracted to men with power and status. Those are the traits associated with evolutionary success for humans. So men are programmed to seek power and status, women are programmed to worry about their physical appearance.” (pgs 47 & 48)

While it's always a tricky bit of feminism to claim what is and isn't instinctual, I think it's fairly safe to say that O'Connor is vastly oversimplifying (as well as employing aforementioned heterosexism).

O'Connor calls back to the "good ol' days" which of course never really existed: he insists his grandparents' generation was happier, and wiser.

“I think back to my grandparents, born around the turn of the last century. They knew, and I'll bet your grandparents knew also, that life was not supposed to be easy, that happiness was a matter of attitude. My grandfathers were factory workers who were grateful to have jobs that provided for their families. My grandmothers worked from dawn to dusk: I can remember wringers on washing machines and hanging the clothes on the line, making pies from scratch, putting up preserves, My grandparents knew how to enjoy themselves, but they didn't expect to be enjoying themselves all the time.” (pg 49)

While O'Connor certainly has a point about the increasing pervasiveness of advertising within a century, particularly increasing the stimulation of false wants, he's also overlooking a vast variety of maladies to which there was no treatment offered (sexism, racism, homophobia, and so on are certainly social maladies) which also affected the cultural landscape. To say nothing of the fact that cultural critics of that time opined that their worlds were saturated with advertising and it was the older generation that was more protected.

While O'Connor finds some accurate footing with the rise of suburbia post war as well as the effects of the Industrial Revolution, he still is not without dismissing even thousands of years of human history.

“Life for the average family three hundred years ago wasn't so different from that of a family three thousand, or even thirty thousand, year earlier. Things were predictable and preordained.” (pg 32)

Colonialism, war, revolution, social class, and cultural environment all appear to have no impact for O'Connor.

It wasn't until the Industrial Revolution that he suggests society really changed and thus brought us to our current state (so how does that fit in with his theory of his grandparents' wiser, more healthier time?).

He nails an important social shift with the aforementioned development of the suburbs post war.

“Suburban living, the American dream, turns out to destroy the American family. Suburban sprawl leaves everyone dependent on automobile travel, adds to obesity and health problems, and leads to isolation. If you chart the trend in frequent visiting with neighbors over the past forty years, you'll see that it's a straight line down into isolation. Why borrow a cup of sugar from a neighbor, risking an actual interaction with someone you might have to talk to, when you can drive down to the "convenience" store? Another result of suburban life is that parents don't have neighbors or grandparents to help them with parenting. When it used to be that the whole community was involved in child rearing, now there is no community. The task falls solely on parents and professionals, who seem to be more and more at odds. ” (pg 32)

While he paints with some very broad strokes, he does make some accurate points about shifts in the cultural landscape.

“That close-knit social support we were meant to have probably insulated us from depression; it certainly insulated us from loneliness. But since the 1950s, the neighborhood has been slowly dying. Average hours worked and time spent commuting have greatly increased-- and now both spouses are doing it. So membership in churches, civic organizations, bowling leagues, PTAs-- you name it-- has been steadily declining. Golf clubs are in trouble because people don't have time for golf anymore. All of which means we have fewer opportunities or means to define ourselves-- we are only workers, not workers and Rotarians and Presbyterians and members of the bridge club. So we have less identity to fall back on if there is trouble at work.” (pg 35)

Now his point has become overshadowed by his increasing generalizations. And hey, remember the grandparents, toiling away from dawn until dusk? When exactly did they find time to express themselves the way O'Connor envisions we all once did? Speaking of expression, he overlooks a monumental change: technology. The internet, for all who accuse it of helping to foster isolation and even mental illness (of various stripes), has had vast, monumental effects on journalism, communication, and just about every other facet of our lives.

Generally, O'Connor displays an obnoxious kind of Boomer hubris not limited to assuming the reader is exactly like him: a well-employed, heterosexual, upper-middle class Boomer struggling with the effects of capitalism. For all his talk about "McJobs" (a term I find personally offensive) when he discusses the ills of capitalism in our country, when it comes time for the personal exercises, he asks questions that assume the reader is in a decently-paying position with the automatic assumption of benefits like health insurance, sick time, vacation pay, comp time, and so on.

The second half of the book is geared more towards action. Unfortunately, O'Connor peppers it with so many buzzwords it's hard to take seriously (or decipher). The most useful generally comes from other books which if he doesn't quote directly, he alludes to, which gives the general impression that you won't find anything in this book that you can't find better elsewhere.

This book reads like the same self-help books of the '70s (interestingly, O'Connor puts "self-help books" on a dismissive tone of the unnecessary and frivolous) aged into a bitter, old version of itself, complaining about society (re: youth) today and yearning for the good old days (hint: they never existed) with some swiped material from better sources to try and balance out the rants.

For someone who advocates against excess and praises "Buy Nothing Day", O'Connor has created a book the market can do without.


Notable: A number of personal-to-the-author themes run along in this book, almost Onionstyle. O'Connor mentions numerous times about how stressful writing this book is and how, well, unfun. Generally, he tries to balance it out as a lesson in hard work paying off in the long run (or something) but after the fifth complaint, you do wonder if his editor didn't leave some kind of note. He concludes the book with

“Now if you'll excuse me, it's August in Connecticut. I'm going to go weed my garden, play with the dogs, and pay attention to my wife.” (pg 266)

Who's more relieved at finishing the book, one wonders: the author or the reader?

Also slightly creepy is his constant mention in the first half of the book about what men are "geared" to look for, the frequent temptation men have to have affairs (under the sexual excess section), and the appeal of younger women. Mr. O'Connor, is there something you'd like to get off your chest?


In describing happiness as simple pleasures, O'Connor notes the following:

“Happiness is smaller than we think. It's here in the sun with the dog, or listening to Mozart or the Beatles, or watching Jon Stewart.” (pg 53)

I'm fairly sure Jon would skewer O'Connor (although he tends to be gentler on the non-political authors) for his hypocrisy, hopefully pointing out his apparent contempt and ill regard for self-help books while writing a self-help book and thus suffering from a major (wait for it) irony deficiency.

Comments

[rehime.livejournal.com]

I don't why the section on "the good old days" reminds of I Am America's Gil Honeycomb. "Over 100 million people died of influenza! Whoopee! Break out the party hats!"

I can tell this was such an obnoxious read, and that's surprising, because I remember you recommending "Undoing Depression" to me.

Generally, O'Connor displays an obnoxious kind of Boomer hubris not limited to assuming the reader is exactly like him: a well-employed, heterosexual, upper-middle class Boomer struggling with the effects of capitalism. For all his talk about "McJobs"

McJobs? Really? I love how some sniff at the people who carry their purchases, cook their food, and clean up after them. "Oh, darling, that worker drone makes me so... unhappy!"

This is not glib pop psychology

Right.

[alivemagdolene.livejournal.com]

I think "McJobs" extends to ALL food service (waiters/busboys/bartenders) and ALL retail, too. Isn't it nice to whimsically dismiss entire professions that way? :^\

I'm almost fearful that this book leaves smudges on Undoing Depression, but I figure that was written long enough ago that he could've turned into a fully fledged douche and been a helpful teacher when he wrote that.