The Four Agreements, by Don Miguel Ruiz
A super-bestseller saying you should change your beliefs about the world and live more happily, I guess?
As a general thing, this is in a category of books that I don't really know what to do with. They advocate adopting particular beliefs, in this case:
- Be Impeccable With Your Word,
- Don't Take Anything Personally,
- Don't Make Assumptions,
- Always Do Your Best.
each of which seem perfectly pleasant and productive if you can do them, but with no acknowledgement of why it's so hard for people to do them, what the tradeoffs or constraints might be which lead to people not generally doing them, or any practical instruction on how to manage to do them.
And a part of me is inevitably annoyed with such books, feeling like it's all empty and hollow and trivial and pointless. But another part of me thinks... well, maybe reading such a book and just wanting to be a more at-peace person can make you 1% more at-peace, and all you had to do was spending some time reading a book, so maybe this is all just fine?
But anyway, let me complain about things. First, the "just assert we should do things that are clearly very hard in practice" thing. E.g. "Always do your best" -- I mean, sure!, I'd love to. "Date someone who you don't need to change." That would be great!, but if I met someone obviously perfect for me (and vice versa) I'd just be dating them right?, the difficult thing is deciding which compromises are/aren't worth making.
Then there's the inconsistent standards I feel these books always hold you (the reader) and everyone else in the world to. ~Don't be angry at your parents, even if they abused you~ says this book, because ~they could not have done any differently~. But you, the reader, can change your own life and how you treat people just by wanting to. Maybe there's a way to square these two beliefs, but I don't get it? So many of these books I think are masking a claim that's effectively "nobody else ever had free will, except the readers of this book, who can change the course of their life just by trying." What???
I actually have mixed feelings about how much people can change just by changing their beliefs. On some level it is true that "all" you need to do to be happy is be happy. "Nothing is ever good or bad but thinking makes it so." I suspect there's a vast spectrum both in terms of how happy people are as a baseline and also how much they are able to change their happiness-level just by trying (that is, how much they're able to try and how much trying changes the outcome).
Recently I have been trying to be happier and I think for me it's possible, that just by complaining less and Adopting A Positive Outlook I can improve my day-to-day experience? That I'm one of the people whose life is often unnecessarily bad, just because I have chosen over the years to adopt various negative mindsets that make me unhappy even while my actual life-conditions are really extraordinarily good? But having said all that.... there are days when I just feel down, and wonder if happiness can only be borrowed and paid over time, and where it feels like a certainty that my happiness levels are biologically determined and that the only thing that changes is the self-congratulatory narratives I tell myself each time I happen to be on an upswing.
What else? Ruiz does that thing people do of saying ~children are always happy, be like a child~, to which I say: not true! I recently had an experience which felt a lot like being a child again and it was a combination of 1) wonder and joy and discovery and attentiveness unlike anything I experience in my ordinary adult life, and 2) deep aloneness and inability to connect and overwhelming distance unlike anything I experience in my ordinary adult life, and I believe both of these things were deeply true in my own actual-childhood, and I suspect in other people's too.
Finally: something I've been thinking about lately is how we can more-easily change ourselves and our beliefs by coming in "sideways" -- basically, I think head-on attempts are usually met by instantly-hiked-up defences, such that change is often more possible through things that come in from a weird angle or in an unexpected way. And I thought an interesting example of this was the way this book calls these life-beliefs "agreements" -- I think that's a way of going around the brain's resistance to changing its beliefs. What is an "agreement"? As best I can tell, it's just a belief, but I suspect that something about it being 1) a familiar, friendly word 2) being used in a different way to its normal meaning, somehow helps it get around a mental block?
p.s. Oliver Burkeman writes:
One of the uncomfortable lessons I've learned from years loitering in the world of personal development is that you've got to lean into the cringe. In other words, if some technique or piece of advice makes you squirm with embarrassment, and you'd never be seen dead reading a book on such a corny/emotional/"New Agey" topic… well, that's probably a sign that you need it. It has touched something vulnerable in you, and the cringe reaction is your instinctive attempt at defence.
I believe that some variant of this is sometimes true, but not sure when it is and isn't.