sarutobi's review against another edition
4.0
Be wary, you might find yourself back on the road to misery.
magnetareggblackhole's review against another edition
5.0
Fantastic.
Engaging, funny, deep, powerful. Cute conceit, really great content. Its breadth means you'll almost certainly find some passages that really resonate.
Engaging, funny, deep, powerful. Cute conceit, really great content. Its breadth means you'll almost certainly find some passages that really resonate.
doc2022's review
5.0
According to the author, "How To Be Miserable" (hereby shortened to HTBM) is not really a book aimed at truly depressed people. Instead, it's aimed far more at the general populace. After reading it, I agree that pretty much everybody should read this book. It should be translated in as many languages as possible and be read by as many people as possible, young and old. But while I read it, the following thought never escaped my mind:
"This book is made for people who are engulfed in flame."
And by that I don't mean people who are doing so splendidly in life that they feel awesome (being "on fire"). I mean it in the sense of people who are being torn apart, their very mind being consumed by something they can't immediately explain. Something gnaws, a tiny voice in their brain tells them that something is off, that things used to be more fun, and everything should be fine. This last thought makes them feel even more miserable because society has indirectly disallowed people to feel sad or asking life questions in any way. For example: they may have a house, a job, a boy- or girlfriend, lots of material possessions and much more, yet they feel miserable. The best among us don't sit there and let it happen like a robot: they search for the cause, but most are grasping at straws, and the lack of a clear voice of wisdom in their lives doesn't help. No voice, no hand on your shoulder, no closure. In real life, HQ isn't sending reinforcements. HTBM serves as a voice.
The book can give plain good advice / wisdom from a common sense-perspective, stuff that would come from the mouth of a man who has traveled a lot in his life. The book can be quite funny and it made me laugh really, really hard at points. You laugh because you find yourself in the pages of the book so much that it might as well star you as the main character. By laughing you are already allowing yourself to laugh at your own imperfection. Sometimes it goes deeper into subjects such as human communication, how the brain works when you don't get what you want, and you may or may not agree with the advice given in these chapters - some tips depend on the situation and can be impossible to put into practice in reality. I guess that's the Achilles' Heel of every self help book? Lastly, but most importantly, it gives you some straight-up brutal facts of life - and for people like me, these chapters can hit like a train.
I should preface that before I read this book I was really fed up and frustrated with the "self-help" genre in any form. The name of the genre alone, and the works it spawns irk me tremendously: tens of thousands of blogs, lists, books, YouTube videos tell you what you've been missing all along!!!
(while not reducing global unhappiness by one bit)
Something that I notice constantly when delving into this subject is that the one thing the creators of these are absolutely amazing at is talking with the delusion that they are some kind of authority on the human mind. The lists themselves are usually titled in the vein of "10 things you absolutely must do every day to be happy!", "5 ways you can tell he is totally into you!" or the worst of these: “Why everything is going to be okay!”. Seriously, my eye has developed an involuntary twitch from seeing that "why"-word at the start of each title. This often meaningless content is filled with vague instructions on the exact things you must do or see or feel to achieve what you want (usually happiness or contentment), and the advice never stops smelling faintly like bullshit. “Be mindful.” would be one of the bulletpoints on most of these articles, and goes on to explain that to be mindful “you have to live in the present” which to me is like calmly telling a burning man to stop, drop and roll. Can I have the rest of the manual, jackass? You constantly have the feeling that the tips are very contextual, and that you are reading a novel with 70% of the pages missing. This is one of the pitfalls HTBM often avoids. While, yes, some chapters (out of the 40) have advice that sounds strangely trite, I cannot deny that the majority of them are paramount for creating your foundation to happiness.
Perhaps the people that make these little lists on the internet mean well but the subject of (un)happiness is not a trivial matter, and they forget that they are writing something that people actively search for. I'm going to go out on a limb here and claim that nobody seriously googles advice on life when they are actively happy, and when they read the wrong advice they WILL feel even worse afterward. A meaningless piece of text is made, some asshole has gotten a writing exercise / assignment out of the way and any person who doesn't have much life experience or who's driven in a corner in a point in their life is screwed even harder by their stupidity. If you don't know how to do something well, don't do it in the first place. The "just do it"-generation we live in can be very toxic if it's forced.
I first came into contact with this book from CGP Grey's adaption of it. It's a great video, and it serves as a very good demo of what to expect in the book itself. The video doesn't literally give seven tips ripped straight from the book... rather, it takes the witty mentality and snippets of lessons of the book, trims out as much fat as possible while keeping the runtime short. The video draws more attention on what you could do right now to change, while the book goes far more into detail on other, more complex stuff and why we feel the impulse to do things that contribute to our unhappiness. MANY of these were very eye-opening for me, to the point where I want to encourage people to purchase the book to discover these themselves. It is amazing how much we sabotage ourselves due to the way we think and fantasize. Expect many moments where you read the title of the chapter and say: "Oh boy, here we go." to yourself. I did a rough counting of how many of the pitfalls applied to myself, and I must admit that I have my work cut out: at least 28 out of 40 ways to unhappiness apply to me. I'm not going to or strive to remove ALL of them, but I am going to reread this book immediately after this review and many times over and make an honest attempt to catalog and eliminate the worst of these.
"How to be miserable" is not a magic trick. Magic does not exist. The author doesn't go: "Poof!" and makes your problems go away. However, in my personal experience I know that my spirits were lifted after every reading session, simply due to funny way the book was written, the wisdom included in it, and the knowledge that I wasn't alone in my thinking, and that pretty much everything of what makes me lackadaisical is already well catalogued by smart individuals (at least one individual), meaning that it is understood. It never punishes you for reading it - by which I mean, you never feel as awful as you were before when you put it down to have a break or when you're going to sleep. The message is always hopeful, always progressive, always clear. It doesn't see your current status as an end point, or even a stumbling block. It fully admits that life is messy and that tragedy is unavoidable. From the moment we first open our eyes in this world we are treated to an onslaught of constant bullshit, told to behave like Person A, a moment later being chastised for not acting like Person B, being frowned upon for not acting like the herd you should obviously follow. The realization that this is the case comes many decades later for most people. For people like myself this dawned on me uncomfortably quickly, and it left me yearning for answers for over half a decade, but there are ways to fight it and evolve ourselves. You are not stupid. Low mood, negative thinking, even depression: it's all so very human. It's perhaps the only proof of our humanity.
Suggestions:
I would absolutely love it if the author created another book (as a follow-up) that further expanded on the concepts introduced in HTBM. Perhaps the author could include interviews from his patients, so that they could have a direct hand in creating the book, and, perhaps, their stories could directly or indirectly teach us more on the pitfalls of unhappiness and how to counter negative thinking.
I would also appreciate an alternative version of the audiobook with the voice of the author himself, as his voice seems far more pleasant to listen to.
Randy, if you're reading this: I am one of the lost boys.
"This book is made for people who are engulfed in flame."
And by that I don't mean people who are doing so splendidly in life that they feel awesome (being "on fire"). I mean it in the sense of people who are being torn apart, their very mind being consumed by something they can't immediately explain. Something gnaws, a tiny voice in their brain tells them that something is off, that things used to be more fun, and everything should be fine. This last thought makes them feel even more miserable because society has indirectly disallowed people to feel sad or asking life questions in any way. For example: they may have a house, a job, a boy- or girlfriend, lots of material possessions and much more, yet they feel miserable. The best among us don't sit there and let it happen like a robot: they search for the cause, but most are grasping at straws, and the lack of a clear voice of wisdom in their lives doesn't help. No voice, no hand on your shoulder, no closure. In real life, HQ isn't sending reinforcements. HTBM serves as a voice.
The book can give plain good advice / wisdom from a common sense-perspective, stuff that would come from the mouth of a man who has traveled a lot in his life. The book can be quite funny and it made me laugh really, really hard at points. You laugh because you find yourself in the pages of the book so much that it might as well star you as the main character. By laughing you are already allowing yourself to laugh at your own imperfection. Sometimes it goes deeper into subjects such as human communication, how the brain works when you don't get what you want, and you may or may not agree with the advice given in these chapters - some tips depend on the situation and can be impossible to put into practice in reality. I guess that's the Achilles' Heel of every self help book? Lastly, but most importantly, it gives you some straight-up brutal facts of life - and for people like me, these chapters can hit like a train.
I should preface that before I read this book I was really fed up and frustrated with the "self-help" genre in any form. The name of the genre alone, and the works it spawns irk me tremendously: tens of thousands of blogs, lists, books, YouTube videos tell you what you've been missing all along!!!
(while not reducing global unhappiness by one bit)
Something that I notice constantly when delving into this subject is that the one thing the creators of these are absolutely amazing at is talking with the delusion that they are some kind of authority on the human mind. The lists themselves are usually titled in the vein of "10 things you absolutely must do every day to be happy!", "5 ways you can tell he is totally into you!" or the worst of these: “Why everything is going to be okay!”. Seriously, my eye has developed an involuntary twitch from seeing that "why"-word at the start of each title. This often meaningless content is filled with vague instructions on the exact things you must do or see or feel to achieve what you want (usually happiness or contentment), and the advice never stops smelling faintly like bullshit. “Be mindful.” would be one of the bulletpoints on most of these articles, and goes on to explain that to be mindful “you have to live in the present” which to me is like calmly telling a burning man to stop, drop and roll. Can I have the rest of the manual, jackass? You constantly have the feeling that the tips are very contextual, and that you are reading a novel with 70% of the pages missing. This is one of the pitfalls HTBM often avoids. While, yes, some chapters (out of the 40) have advice that sounds strangely trite, I cannot deny that the majority of them are paramount for creating your foundation to happiness.
Perhaps the people that make these little lists on the internet mean well but the subject of (un)happiness is not a trivial matter, and they forget that they are writing something that people actively search for. I'm going to go out on a limb here and claim that nobody seriously googles advice on life when they are actively happy, and when they read the wrong advice they WILL feel even worse afterward. A meaningless piece of text is made, some asshole has gotten a writing exercise / assignment out of the way and any person who doesn't have much life experience or who's driven in a corner in a point in their life is screwed even harder by their stupidity. If you don't know how to do something well, don't do it in the first place. The "just do it"-generation we live in can be very toxic if it's forced.
I first came into contact with this book from CGP Grey's adaption of it. It's a great video, and it serves as a very good demo of what to expect in the book itself. The video doesn't literally give seven tips ripped straight from the book... rather, it takes the witty mentality and snippets of lessons of the book, trims out as much fat as possible while keeping the runtime short. The video draws more attention on what you could do right now to change, while the book goes far more into detail on other, more complex stuff and why we feel the impulse to do things that contribute to our unhappiness. MANY of these were very eye-opening for me, to the point where I want to encourage people to purchase the book to discover these themselves. It is amazing how much we sabotage ourselves due to the way we think and fantasize. Expect many moments where you read the title of the chapter and say: "Oh boy, here we go." to yourself. I did a rough counting of how many of the pitfalls applied to myself, and I must admit that I have my work cut out: at least 28 out of 40 ways to unhappiness apply to me. I'm not going to or strive to remove ALL of them, but I am going to reread this book immediately after this review and many times over and make an honest attempt to catalog and eliminate the worst of these.
"How to be miserable" is not a magic trick. Magic does not exist. The author doesn't go: "Poof!" and makes your problems go away. However, in my personal experience I know that my spirits were lifted after every reading session, simply due to funny way the book was written, the wisdom included in it, and the knowledge that I wasn't alone in my thinking, and that pretty much everything of what makes me lackadaisical is already well catalogued by smart individuals (at least one individual), meaning that it is understood. It never punishes you for reading it - by which I mean, you never feel as awful as you were before when you put it down to have a break or when you're going to sleep. The message is always hopeful, always progressive, always clear. It doesn't see your current status as an end point, or even a stumbling block. It fully admits that life is messy and that tragedy is unavoidable. From the moment we first open our eyes in this world we are treated to an onslaught of constant bullshit, told to behave like Person A, a moment later being chastised for not acting like Person B, being frowned upon for not acting like the herd you should obviously follow. The realization that this is the case comes many decades later for most people. For people like myself this dawned on me uncomfortably quickly, and it left me yearning for answers for over half a decade, but there are ways to fight it and evolve ourselves. You are not stupid. Low mood, negative thinking, even depression: it's all so very human. It's perhaps the only proof of our humanity.
Suggestions:
I would absolutely love it if the author created another book (as a follow-up) that further expanded on the concepts introduced in HTBM. Perhaps the author could include interviews from his patients, so that they could have a direct hand in creating the book, and, perhaps, their stories could directly or indirectly teach us more on the pitfalls of unhappiness and how to counter negative thinking.
I would also appreciate an alternative version of the audiobook with the voice of the author himself, as his voice seems far more pleasant to listen to.
Randy, if you're reading this: I am one of the lost boys.
kbelcher1992's review
5.0
I really enjoyed this book. It was a very tongue in cheek book about how to be miserable. It was fascinating to read through the chapters and see how I was actually participating in one or more of the strategy and then to see how other chapters described friends or family. I enjoyed that the author instead look at how to be happy in a society that is obsessed with happiness and focuses in the other direction. Overall a great book that I would recommend to nearly everyone.
giorgiareadsbooks's review
3.0
3.5/5
I liked this book... it's a different kind of self-help... as the title suggests, it's all about being miserable. And it's so fun to read, because it's so true and everybody does things in their lives that make them miserable. Maybe sometimes we just need to except it.
Recommend it for a fun/light read.
I liked this book... it's a different kind of self-help... as the title suggests, it's all about being miserable. And it's so fun to read, because it's so true and everybody does things in their lives that make them miserable. Maybe sometimes we just need to except it.
Recommend it for a fun/light read.