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Oliver BurkemanUnited States

Oliver Burkeman is a feature writer for The Guardian news-paper. He is a winner of the Foreign Press Association’s Young Journalist of the Year award, and has been shortlisted for the Orwell Prize. He writes a popular weekly column on psychology, This Column Will Change Your Life. He also blogs a for Guardian US and writes a monthly column for Psychologies magazine. He has reported from London, Washington and New York.

The Author

Bibliography

The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking (Cannongate Books, 2012)HELP! How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done (Cannongate Books, 2011)

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The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking (Cannongate Books, 2012)

For a civilisation so fixated on achieving happi-ness, we seem remarkably incompetent at the task. Self-help books don’t seem to work. Few of the many advantages of modern life seem capable of lifting our collective mood. Wealth – even if you can get it – doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness. Romance, family life and work often seem to bring as much stress as joy. We can’t even agree on what ‘happiness’ means. So are we engaged in a futile pursuit? Or are

we just going about it in exactly the wrong way? What if it’s our constant efforts to feel happy that are making us miserable?

In this fascinating new book, Oliver Burkeman introduces us to an unusual collection of people – experimental psychologists and Buddhists, terrorism experts, spiritual teachers, business consultants, philosophers – who share a single, surprising way of thinking about life. They argue that ‘positive thinking’ and re-lentless optimism aren’t the solution, but part of the problem. And that there is an alternative, ‘negative path’ to happiness and success that involves embracing failure, pessimism, insecurity and uncertainty – those things we spend our lives trying to avoid. Thought-provoking, counter-intuitive and ultimately uplifting, The Antidote is a celebration of the power of negative thinking.

Ressources

Oliver Burkeman’s website:http://www.oliverburkeman.com

This Column Will Change Your Life:http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/series/thiscolumnwill-changeyourlife

Reclaiming the Streets: Public Space and Quality of Life in New YorkSaturday October 13th 2012 / The Guardian US

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HELP! How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done (Cannongate Books, 2011)

How do you solve the pro-blem of human happiness? It’s a subject that has occu-pied some of the greatest philosophers of all time, from Aristotle (in his Nicomachean Ethics) to Paul McKenna (in his Change Your Life In Seven Days: The World’s Leading Hypnotist Shows You How). But

how do we sort the good ideas from the terrible ones? Over the past few years, Oliver Burke-man has travelled to some of the strangest out-posts of the ‘happiness industry’ in an attempt to find out. In Help!, the first collection of his popular Guardian Weekend magazine columns, Burkeman presents his findings. It’s a witty and thought-provoking exploration that punctures many of self-help’s most popular myths, while also offering clear-headed, practical and often counterintuitive advice on a range of subjects, from stress, procrastination and insomnia to wealth, laughter, time management and creati-vity. It doesn’t claim to have solved the problem of human happiness. But it might just bring us one step closer.