Illusionist Derren Brown explores ideas of happiness at The Hawth

He will be visiting The Hawth, Crawley, on Friday, October 21, to talk about his latest book, HAPPY.

Derren draws on two millennia of philosophy to help answer the questions: What does being happy actually mean? And how might we enjoy more of it?

Since ancient times, philosophers have thought about happiness and formulated all sorts of different theories for how we might live a considered life. Derren takes us on a journey from classical Greece to the present day.

“I think a lot of the modern ideas around the notion of happiness are actually quite self-defeating. We are told to believe that there is this thing called ‘happiness’, that it is something that we are somehow entitled to and that it is something we can work towards and set as our goal, and that if we don’t achieve happiness, we have somehow failed somewhere down the line. I think that’s actually a pretty unhelpful model.

“A lot of the book – and what I will be talking about – goes back to much older conception of happiness before the Christian era hijacked the whole question of happiness. Their way of seeing things made it all much more obvious and was much more conducive to reality, and that is to see happiness as what was left once you remove anxiety.

“I have got a very aching tooth at the moment. The rest of my body is fine, but all I notice is my tooth. But when I am free from that disturbance, I will have happiness.”