Book Review: "Happy" by Derren Brown

I've only recently finished this and honestly, I was surprised. I've read books by Derren Brown in the past but none were like this one and it definitely made me realise that perhaps I was wrong to put it off for so long. It's June 2025 and I've been thinking about this book for a while. I mean I did finish reading it a couple of days before writing this review and I was wondering where I stood on the whole thing. I can confirm that I did very much enjoy it, however for the topic it was about, sometimes it did feel like the author was dragging out some of the points beyond where they needed to be. Let's take a look...

Derren Brown basically shows us why there is a key difference between happiness as an emotion and happiness as a state of being and why we should probably want the latter rather than the first. He looks at the way we tell our own stories and how we can change those stories to suit our own vision of ourselves. Most likely, when something goes wrong, we tend to believe we are bad people undeserving of anything and yet, when something goes right, we still cannot get out of the one thing wrong.

I'm not going to lie, this is pretty surface layer stuff but it's nice to be reminded at the beginning of a book that is going to go into some more depth about this later on. According to Derren Brown, the way we tell ourselves the stories rather than what the stories are about is the most important key to interpreting our own happiness. This is something that Brown even admits is true in the way Alain de Botton looks at happiness, by taking it back to its roots in humanity rather than having dry analytical statistics for it.

Derren Brown offers us a walkthrough of what every major philosophical era thought about the concept of happiness - and how many of the philosophers though having different ideas about what it is, all seem to believe it must come from external ideals of gratitude and helpfulness rather than material items. I enjoy the way he breaks this down and shows it to us one by one rather than just telling us that it's his opinion on happiness that matters. It feels more real this way.

He definitely enjoyed telling us that 'positive thinking' in self-help books is basically a scam. He goes through the way in which 'positive thinking' is basically the equivalent of telling a depressed person 'not to be depressed' and expecting the depression to go away. It takes very little into account of the individual differences between people. The thing I probably found most important though again is the dissection of 'positive thinking' as a scam rather than simply saying it and then moving on from the point. Yes, it probably makes some of the points rather long-winded but it does make sure the reader is on the same level as the author before he moves on.

I like the way he discusses narratives the most though. He iterates that usually, when people become successful the story is honed to go one of two ways, the first way is that they overwhelmingly focus on the negatives, painting themselves to be a rags-to-riches story when that is really not the case, or they leave out the negative stuff and attribute a lot of their success to 'mindset' and 'positive thinking'. The latter seems to be very popular in our modern times with the rise of the 'self-help-bro' (e.g: Steven Bartlett and to some extent, Bryan Johnson - I think we all dislike the latter to a certain degree). Do I think 'mindset' is a thing? Probably. But you really can't attribute everything to mindset. For example: I am trying the 'positive thinking' stuff myself and a lot of the time it does seem impossible. But on the days where it is possible it works for perhaps 40% of all the damage in my psyche.

Of course it has to be Christopher Isherwood because where would we be without him? If you want some way to look intrinsically at mental health strifes then I recommend reading a Christopher Isherwood novel; A Single Man is definitely a good one but my recommendation would be The Memorial because of its analysis of social decay. On top of this you've got the novels of Richard Yates as well, I'll stop talking about authors you can read now and go back to the review...

That quotation by TS Eliot really hit me hard (and it was actually here where I remembered the scene about my professor holding up the TS Eliot book in my competition submission: And She Said to Mr Sandman...) as I am one of those who can usually not understand reality. The ability to 'engage with our deep stories' is something and yet, I find myself disagreeing with this point a little because it suggests that things that allow us to calm down are intrinsically bad for us. I'm not going to lie, there's a fine line between things that calm us down and things that are bad for us I know, but I don't think someone playing on a PlayStation is doing something that is bad for them.

Though the mechanisms to engage are explained very well, it is perhaps wrong to assume that everyone wants to. Some people are just coasting through life and honestly, I wish I could be one of those people instead of a chronic overthinker. Let's have a quick example: I always ask if I have permission to take a shower in an apartment...where I live...when other people are staying over. Why? To make sure if anyone requires use of the bathroom that they can go before me. I spend three or four minutes in the shower on average. I am a mess.

All in all, I think Derren Brown does a great job of taking us through the philosophies of happiness and making sure we understand where he's coming from. Again, some points are a little askew and some are dragged on a little long but, altogether it makes for a wonderful book about the humanity of happiness and why we need it. It is highly recommended.