Happy

Part One: Beginnings 1. Once Upon a Time 2. The Problem With Being Positive - Believe in yourself, blame yourself - Doesn't it work? - Goal-setting - The diagonal 3. Wanting Part Two: Solutions 4. The Considered Life - Two selves - Regaining authorship - The roots of self-enquiry 5. A (Very) Brief History of Happiness - Socrates and Plato - Aristotle - The Epicureans and Stoics - Christianity - Aristotle reborn - The Renaissance - The Enlightenment - The Romantics - Marxism - Nietzsche - Freud - Today 6. The Stoic Building Blocks - The foundation of Epicurus - Stoic virtue - Your judgements 7. Relinquishing Control - Relationships and other areas of control - Partly in control - Indifferents - The Stoics and fate - Amor fati 8. Applying Stoic Methods - An entirely practical philosophy - Start talking to yourself - Don't add to first impressions - Do I have a problem right now? - Rational meditation - Third-person perspective - Finding time 9. Anger and Hurt - Causes of anger - Some good reasons to avoid anger - Seven ways of removing anger - Empathy and connectedness 10. Fame - Can't complain - Being famous - Being rich - Being loved - Madness and media - The secret magical formula for success Part Three: Happy Endings 11. Debra 12. After Death - The soul - Why we can't talk of an afterlife 13. Fearing Death - You won't be there when it happens - You've already been there - Death as deprivation - A circle without a circumference - Freud's flower - Eating the dead 14. How to Die Well - It's your death - Regrets 15. Living Now - Past, present and future - Getting old - A good-enough death - Rethinking the afterlife 16. And in the End 17. And Now List of Books Cited Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Index