Instructions on how to be unhappy

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Instructions for Unhappiness is a non-fiction book published by the Austrian psychologist Paul Watzlawick in 1983.

background

With this book, Watzlawick designed a radical counterpart to the - especially in the USA - widespread advice literature and shows how you can make your life unbearable. The background to the book is based on the findings of the Palo Alto School , of which Watzlawick was one of the founders.

The Piper-Verlag writes in its preliminary remark to this book:

"Every reader should find something of himself in this book - namely his own way of making everyday life unbearable and the trivial enormous."

contents

introduction

At the beginning of his book provides Watzlawick a quote from the Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky , which shows what is he:

“What can one expect from a person [...]? Cover him with all earthly goods, sink him in happiness up to his ears, up to his head, so that only bubbles rise to the surface of happiness as well as to the water level, give him a pecuniary livelihood that he has nothing else to do All that is left to do is sleep, eat gingerbread and ensure the continued existence of humanity - so he, this same person, will play a trick on you on the spot out of sheer ingratitude, simply out of contempt. He will even risk the gingerbread and perhaps wish for the most pernicious nonsense, the most uneconomical nonsense, only to add his own ominous fantastic element to all this positive reasonableness. Especially his fantastic ideas, his banal stupidity he will want to keep ... "

- Fyodor Michailowitsch Dostojewski : in: Notes from the cellar hole

Popular wisdom comes to a similar conclusion when it claims that nothing is harder to endure than a series of good days. But the question of what happiness actually is remains unanswered. Terentius Varro had no fewer than 289 views on what happiness is. The great creations of world literature consist of misfortune and tragedy. In Dante's Divine Comedy , the inferno is more brilliant than his Paradiso ; " Faust I moves to tears, Faust II to yawn".

But the animals are not doing any better either: In the zoo, they are protected from hunger, danger and disease and become neurotics.

Above all, one thing: be true to yourself ...

This golden word comes from Polonius, Hamlet's chamberlain .

Four games with the past

The glorification of the past ("everything used to be better"): A simple way to spoil life is to idealize past events and get angry with the present. The author proves this with anecdotes and edifying stories.

Mrs. Lot

The story of Mrs. Lot is in the Old Testament: “The angel says to Lot and his relatives: Save yourself, your life counts. Don't look behind you, don't stop anywhere. [...] But his wife looked back and became a pillar of salt. "

One “advantage” of clinging to the past is that you have less time or attention for the present and dealing with it. Also in the past there is no tension due to uncertainty - you know how “it” turned out (see also escape from reality ).

The fateful glass of beer

In his film The Fatal Glass of Beer ( The fatal glass of beer ) shows WC Fields the inexorable decline of a young man who can not resist the temptation to drink his first glass of beer.

The lost key or "more of the same"

A drunk man is looking for his key under a street lamp. A policeman helps him find it. When the policeman, after a long search, asks whether the man is sure that he has lost the key here, he replies: "No, not here, but back there - but it's much too dark there."

Russians and Americans

The joke question of what the difference between a Russian and an American is from the anthropologist Margaret Mead . The American tends to fake a headache in order to evade a social obligation; the Russian, on the other hand, must actually have a headache.

The story with the hammer

One of the best-known examples from the book is The Story of the Hammer . It works like this:

A man wants to hang a picture. He has the nail, but not the hammer. The neighbor has one. So our man decides to go over and borrow him. But then he has a doubt: what if the neighbor doesn't want to lend him the hammer? Yesterday he greeted him only so fleetingly. Maybe he was in a hurry. But maybe the hurry was just a pretense and he has something against him. And what? He didn't do anything to him; he imagines something. If someone wanted to borrow a tool from him, he would give it to him immediately. And why not his neighbor? How can you turn such a simple favor to someone else? People like that guy poison your life. And then the neighbor thinks he is dependent on him. Just because he has a hammer. But that's really enough for him now. And so he storms over, rings the bell, the neighbor opens, but before he can say "Good morning", our man yells at him: "Keep your hammer, you bully!"

The beans in hand

A man is tormented by the ghost of his late wife who pretends to know everything. When, on the advice of a Zen master, he picks up beans and asks them the number of beans, the spook ends.

The frightened elephants

A man claps his hands every ten seconds. When asked about the reason for this behavior, he explains: “To scare away the elephants.” When asked that there are no elephants here, he replies: “Well, well! You see? ”Watzlawick wanted to point out that the consistent attempt to avoid a problem actually leads to perpetuation.

Self-fulfilling prophecies

The assumption that others are secretly making fun of you leads to the fact that the prophecy is fulfilled over time by paying more attention to suspicious signs (“ self-fulfilling prophecy ”).

A warning is given before arriving

By George Bernard Shaw , the famous aphorism comes: "In life there are two tragedies. One is the non-fulfillment of a heart's desire. The other is its fulfillment. "

When you arrive at your destination, there is also the risk of cat complaint .

If you really loved me, you would love to eat garlic

Another good source of personal unhappiness is partnership misunderstandings.

Suppose a woman asks her husband whether he likes the soup cooked according to the new recipe, but he thinks the soup is awful, but does not want to offend his wife. If he now says: "Tastes interesting", the chances are minimal that his wife will understand him correctly.

Or a mother gives her son two sports shirts. When he puts on one of the two, she looks at him sadly and says: "You don't like the other one?"

"Be spontaneous!"

The so-called “Be spontaneous!” Paradox is a paradox corresponding to all formal logic requirements, because it is impossible to do something spontaneously on command or to deliberately forget something (see double bond theory in Gregory Bateson ).

Something is wrong with those who love me

Groucho Marx once said: "It would never occur to me to join a club that would be willing to accept someone like me as a member."

The dilemma looks like this: “I don't respect myself, I can't respect anyone who respects me. I can only respect someone who doesn't respect me. "

Let man be noble, helpful and good

In order to develop doubts about the selflessness (= altruism ) of one's willingness to help , one only needs to ask oneself what ulterior motives one has. That could have been an act of showing off or to force the other to be grateful.

Those crazy foreigners

One of the basic rules of male flirting in Italy is that if I am alone with a woman for more than five minutes and don't touch her, she'll think I'm a homosexual. Now, however, women are much more open-minded, and behaving in a masculine and passionate manner is only safe as long as the partner adopts the correct complementary attitude and rejects it in a motherly and kindly manner.

Life as a game

The aphorism that life is a game comes from the American religious philosopher Alan Watts , whose rule number 1 is: "This is not a game, this is dead serious."

At this point, Watzlawick explains the difference between zero-sum and non-zero- sum games . In zero-sum games, one player's loss is the other's gain. In non-zero-sum games, however, both (or all) players can win ( win-win ) or lose. In the event of a strike, both "players", the management and the workforce, usually lose.

effect

Watzlawick's book, the title of which looked like a parody of the advisory literature, developed into a cult book , with more than a million copies sold in Germany alone. The book was published in English in 1983. It also appeared in Italian, French and Spanish.

Paradoxically, the “anti-advisor” can also prove to be a real advisor: if a reader tries hard to avoid the mistakes listed in the book, he or she may well succeed in leading a less unhappy life.

literature

reception

  • Ben-Alexander Bohnke: Are we making ourselves miserable? Why being unhappy is not to blame - an alternative to Watzlawick. Specialized bookstore for psychology, Eschborn near Frankfurt am Main 1985, ISBN 3-88074-167-0 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The situation is hopeless, but not serious: (the pursuit of unhappiness). WW Norton, New York 1983, ISBN 0-393-31021-3 .
  2. ↑ Istruzioni per rendersi infelici Feltrinelli, Milano 1998, ISBN 88-07-81452-8 .
  3. ↑ Faites vous-même votre malheur. Ed. du Seuil, Paris 2009, ISBN 978-2-7578-1574-8 .
  4. ↑ El Arte de amargarse la vida. Herder, Barcelona 2003, ISBN 84-254-2330-9 .