Beyond Happy due 10 April 2025
Due 10 April 2025
There will be a wide variety of stuff on this blog but most of the content will revolve around my first book for a popular audience - Beyond Happy. It will be published by Bedford Square in April 2025 and should be available in all bookstores and online in paperback and audiobook formats. I’ve been working on it for at least 15 years, personally and professionally. While there are hundreds of books on this topic, including several books with very similar titles, I am confident that there is nothing like Beyond Happy in existence. It is the most comprehensive guide to wellbeing ever assembled, taking in insights from every discipline of the social sciences, theology, philosophy, folk wisdom, literature, and my personal experiences. I’ll drop the table of contents below, and then highlight some of the unique contributions of the book.
Introduction
PART I: A Pleasant Life
1. Disposition
a. Happy but dissatisfied
b. Learning to love the treadmill
c. Money and time
d. Do NOT hack yourself to perfection
e. The examined life
f. Tranquillity
g. Wellbeing stocks
2. Character
a. Fallibilism
b. Self-improvement by negation
c. Self-serving biases
d. Pretentiousness
e. Radical honesty
f. Generosity
g. Gregariousness
3. Emotion
a. Sleep, exercise, diet, and mood
b. Epicureanism
c. The economics of happiness
d. Hedonic psychology
e. Gratitude
f. Stoicism
g. Mindfulness
PART II: A Fulfilling Life
4. Self-Actualisation
a. Self-discrepancy theory
b. Affective signals
c. Self-determination theory
d. The coalescence of being
e. Multiple selves
f. Social feedback
g. Becoming who you are
5. The Inner Empire
a. Basic psychological needs
b. Authenticity
c. I origins
d. 80 000 hours
e. Let the magic happen
f. Living well on autopilot
g. Zest and flow
6. Better Together
a. Helped, heard, or hugged?
b. Love
c. Fraternity
d. Care
e. Karmic culture
f. Priests
g. Solidarity
PART III: A Valuable Life
7. Nihilism
a. Nausea
b. Anguish
c. Seriousness
d. Tragedy
e. Faith and tradition
f. Reason
g. The biological soul
8. The Free Spirit
a. Embrace ambiguity
b. Integrity
c. Mundane moral heroism
d. My coalescence
e. Living with relativism
f. The politics of relativism
g. Bowling with Trump
9. Metamodernity
a. Modernism
b. Postmodernism
c. Metamodernism
d. Everything, everywhere, all at once
e. Healing not coping
f. Visions of the future
g. Telling new stories
Conclusion
There are a half dozen powerful ideas in each section, many of which I don’t think have been written down anywhere else. To whet your appetite, one idea from each chapter…
1.
Happiness is always just out of reach by evolutionary design - you’re stuck on a ‘hedonic treadmill’. As such, if you make happiness your goal, you’ll never get there. The vision of retirement as tranquillity promoted by materialism is a myth. Strict Buddhism, among other doctrines, teaches instead that you should get off the treadmill. All desire is suffering. I instead advocate for making the treadmill of life a place you want to be - a dynamic, stimulating experience that is by turns pleasant, fulfilling, and valuable, rather than something that makes you ‘happy’.
2.
Character is critical to wellbeing, but the character traits that are typically promoted by our culture are the ones that are good for capitalism, not good for you. Rather than cultivating productivity, self-optimisation, generic beauty, or standardised skills, we should instead prioritise integrity, openness, generosity, and truthfulness. These are the sort of traits that grant you a personality, relationships, and a vivifying life.
3.
Emotions are information. Happiness is not a goal, but it is a guide to what activities, people, and values might suit you. The same is true for grief, anxiety, guilt, boredom, and the other ‘negative’ emotions. The same is even more true for exhaustion, exhilaration, a sense of achievement, relief, and the other forms of affect through which our motivational system communicates with us. Beyond Happy teaches you how to listen to and learn from you emotions so that you can steer yourself towards a life that suit you.
4.
Discovering and creating the life that is best for you is a process of self-actualisation – the subject of most early psychotherapists including Jung, Rogers, and Maslow. Beyond Happy provides a detailed and actionable guide to self-actualisation that can be adapted to suit any person. This model - the coalescence of being - is my main call to academic fame. It is an amalgam of pieces from across branches of psychology and philosophy that don’t speak to each other and as such could never give rise to this guide.
5.
Science and philosophy are, however, broadly insufficient toolkits for achieving wellbeing because they are narrowly focused on reason. Wellbeing requires a harmony between reason, emotion, intuition, and the body - what William Blake mythologised as the four Zoas and what Ian McGilchrist calls the Ways to Truth. This book explains how to achieve harmony between these zoas, and what that harmony feels like, namely zest and flow.
6.
Wellbeing is not individual; it is something we do together. To my mind, this is the principle blind spot of the self-help genre, especially the self-improvement gurus like Huberman. To be well you need to think a lot about others, not just yourself. You need to learn emotional intelligence, be capable and worthy of love, ready and willing to care for others and ask for care yourself, and be committed to your community not just your ego.
7.
The most underappreciated foundation for wellbeing is values. They are what our lives and communities are organised around. Often they are shallow, as in materialism. Increasingly they are non-existent. We live in a nihilistic age. Life feels devoid of purpose, our cultures are incapable of enchanting the world, and our politics lacks moral seriousness. Many of the texts on nihilism that might help you understand these issues are impenetrable. This book makes the concept accessible without missing any of its depth.
8.
Overcoming nihilism is extremely hard, speaking from personal experience. It requires developing your own moral compass, one that harmonises your emotions, motivations, and reasons. You can then navigate your way out of the abyss. Beyond Happy explains how to develop this compass and how to use it given contemporary social circumstances.
9.
Nihilism afflicts our society even more than it afflicts us individuals. We don’t know what we’re about. Governments focus strictly on economic policy and similar issues, as they should, but there are no cultural institutions around which we can organise to produce collective goals, life affirming rituals, and meaningful collective celebrations. Much of this malaise is hangover over from postmodernism and the assault it conducted on notions of truth, value, and meaning. But postmodernism was basically right, so trying to ‘go back’, as Jordan Peterson and many other commentators advocate, is a dead end. Overcoming nihilism as a society requires us to move forward into metamodernity – a new cultural mode characterised by kindness, earnestness, and sincerity.
I’ll be posting more tidbits inspired by the content of Beyond Happy here, on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@markfabian_educ), TikTock, BlueSky (https://bsky.app/profile/markfabian.bsky.social), and Instagram from April onwards, so please subscribe and stay tuned. Everything will be free except the book itself. In the meantime, I hope this little introduction has made you curious enough to add the book to your preorder list (https://www.amazon.com.au/Beyond-Happy-Mark-Fabian-ebook/dp/B0DMFM9KKT).