Book 830: 10% Happier – Dan Harris

I honestly had zero expectations going into this book. During the pandemic my employer provided us free access to the 10% Happier app which I took advantage of and have used sporadically (really need to get better at that). I enjoyed both Harris and Joseph Goldstein’s insights on mediation in the various getting started sessions and was curios if there was more out there.

I vaguely knew Harris had written a book, but it was never an OMG I have to read this type book, but when it randomly came across my screen one day I requested it from the library and saved it for a vacation read.

The book acts as a sort of self-help/memoir/debunking amalgamation when it comes to Harris’ personal journey to meditation. What I wasn’t expecting was the candor or the humor Harris brought to the book.

It was a little embarrassing to be reading a self-help writer and thinking, This guy gets me. But it was in this moment, lying in bed late at night, that I first realized that the voice in my head—the running commentary that had dominated my field of consciousness since I could remember—was kind of an asshole. (Loc. 1,040)

By candor I mean he legit talked about his drug problems, his worries about aging, and was very open about his skepticism of meditation in general. Unlike some people (looking at you The Self-Love Experiment with your vague references to a deep dark past), Harris talked about not only what it was like to go through the problems but also what it was like when he was planning to publish the book to discuss them with his boss and his family. Frankly, it was refreshing to read something so open and honest.

The humor throughout the book was a bit subtler. There were moments of word play and scenes that just couldn’t be real (they were and there’s video proof of many of them) and legit had me laughing or thinking WTF is going on in this guy’s life.

When I opened my eyes, I had an entirely different attitude about meditation. I didn’t like it, per se, but I now respected it. This was not just some hippie time-passing technique, like Ultimate Frisbee or making God’s Eyes. It was a rigorous brain exercise: rep after rep of trying to tame the runaway train of the mind. The repeated attempt to bring the compulsive thought machine to heel was like holding a live fish in your hands. Wrestling your mind to the ground, repeatedly hauling your attention back to the breath in the face of the inner onslaught required genuine grit. This was a badass endeavor. (Loc. 1,695, emphasis mine)

Like you’d be reading a perfectly normal sentence and then something absurd was just thrown in and it worked. There are plenty of others in the additional quotes, but this one just made me laugh because he really leaned into the stereotypes and yet came away with a whole new worldview.

Harris’ critique of self-help books and discussion about the history, including shout outs to Think and Grow Rich and The Power of Positive Thinking neither of which I’ve ever read, and then the debunking/questioning of the billion-dollar industry  (that number might be made up I can’t remember the exact figure) while providing actual steps to learn to meditate and improve your life made it worth reading the book.

And don’t get me started on his crazy vocabulary. I’m not sure if he used a thesaurus or if someone edited it and made a lot of suggestions, but this one totally caught me off guard:

The show matched my catholic interests. (Loc. 1,801)

Who knew that catholic could be anything other than Catholic. I legit read the sentence twice and was like wait, wtf that’s not a thing, but it actually is according to dictionary.com. Like legit, who knew!?

The traditionalists did not appreciate the irony of capitalists and marines embracing a practice with a history of disdaining violence and accumulation of wealth. They worried that mindfulness would simply create better baby killers and robber barons. They pointed derisively to the proliferation of books such as Mindfulness for Dummies, The Mindful Investor, and The Joy of Mindful Sex. Critics had a term for this phenomenon: ‘McMindfulness.’ There was something important being overlooked, they argued, in the mainstreaming of meditation—a central plank in the Buddhist platform: compassion. (Loc. 2,933)

I’d be very interested in reading a follow up to the book in the next couple of years to hear how his practice has evolved over the last decade. Harris spent a lot of time looking into the metaphysical and religious aspects of meditation, but ultimately found that you didn’t need any of those pieces. They were interesting and you could absolutely look to Buddhism and their ancient practice, but they were just a different packaging than what today’s corporate culture (see above quote) was using.

Recommendation: I found this to be a fascinating accompaniment to the 10% Happier app. It was an enjoyable read and Harris takes you on a journey from pretty much outright disdain to questioning skepticism to ardent believer in the power of mediation/mindfulness, but without all the religious mumbo jumbo. I found his candor and humor really added to the book, unlike many self-help books I’ve read in the past.

Opening Line: “According to the Nielsen ratings data, 5.019 million people saw me lose my mind.”

Closing Line: “I had one more thought. Ironically, it was the exact same thought I had had more than a decade prior, at the beginning of this odyssey, on the top of that mountain in Afghanistan when I was shot at for the first time: I hope we’re rolling on this.” (Not whited out as this is a work of nonfiction.)

Additional Quotes from 10% Happier
“Meditation suffers from a towering PR problem, largely because its most prominent proponents talk as if they have a perpetual pan flute accompaniment. If you can get past the cultural baggage, though, what you’ll find is that meditation is simply exercise for your brain. It’s a proven technique for preventing the voice in your head from leading you around by the nose. To be clear, it’s not a miracle cure. It won’t make you taller or better-looking, nor will it magically solve all of your problems. You should disregard the fancy books and the famous gurus promising immediate enlightenment. In my experience, meditation makes you 10% happier. That’s an absurdly unscientific estimate, of course. But still, not a bad return on investment.” (Loc. 100)

“The great blessing of being a journalist is that you get to witness world events—to interface with the players, to experience the smells and tastes of it all. The great curse, though, is that, as I’d learned on 9/11, you come to see these events, at least in part, through the lens of self-interest. Did I get to go? Did I perform well? This psychology was not discussed much in all the autobiographies of legendary journalists that I’d read, but it was nonetheless real.” (Loc. 396)

“On a few occasions, pot had made me so intensely paranoid that I felt like I was incarcerated in an inner Mordor. I figured harder drugs had the potential to be even worse.” (Loc. 439)

“My private view was quite harsh, and rooted in a blend of apathy and ignorance. I thought organized religion was bunk, and that all believers—whether jazzed on Jesus or jihad—must be, to some extent, cognitively impaired.” (Loc. 586)

“Make the present moment your friend rather than your enemy. Because many people live habitually as if the present moment were an obstacle that they need to overcome in order to get to the next moment. And imagine living your whole life like that, where always this moment is never quite right, not good enough because you need to get to the next one. That is continuous stress.” (Loc. 1,189)

“He struck me as the Golden Arches or Nike Swoosh of spirituality—a globally recognized icon next to whom celebrities could pose when they wanted to signal ‘depth.'” (Loc. 1,226)

“The route to true happiness, he argued, was to achieve a visceral understanding of impermanence, which would take you off the emotional roller coaster and allow you to see your dramas and desires through a wider lens. Waking up to the reality of our situation allows you to, as the Buddhists say, ‘let go,’ to drop your ‘attachments.’ As one Buddhist writer put it, the key is to recognize the ‘wisdom of insecurity.'” (Loc. 1,524)

“In a nutshell, mindfulness is the ability to recognize what is happening in your mind right now—anger, jealousy, sadness, the pain of a stubbed toe, whatever—without getting carried away by it.” (Loc. 1,739)

“She nailed the method for applying mindfulness in acute situations, albeit with a somewhat dopey acronym: RAIN.
R: recognize
A: allow
I: investigate
N: non-identification” (Loc. 1,886)

“The final step—“non-identification”—meant seeing that just because I was feeling angry or jealous or fearful, that did not render me a permanently angry or jealous person. These were just passing states of mind.” (Loc. 1,897)

“What mindfulness does is create some space in your head so you can, as the Buddhists say, ‘respond’ rather than simply ‘react.'” (Loc. 1,930)

“We live so much of our lives pushed forward by these ‘if only’ thoughts, and yet the itch remains. The pursuit of happiness becomes the source of our unhappiness.” (Loc. 2,738)

“Don’t be nice for the sake of it, he was saying. Do it because it would redound to your own benefit, that it would make you feel good by eroding the edges of the ego. Yoked to self-interest, the compassion thing suddenly became something I could relate to—maybe even something I could do.” (Loc. 2,993)

“You can no more disconnect from the universe and its inhabitants than a wave can extricate itself from the ocean. I couldn’t imagine myself conquering these bedrock feelings of separation, but the effort seemed worthwhile.” (Loc. 3,034)

“Striving is fine, as long as it’s tempered by the realization that, in an entropic universe, the final outcome is out of your control. If you don’t waste your energy on variables you cannot influence, you can focus much more effectively on those you can. When you are wisely ambitious, you do everything you can to succeed, but you are not attached to the outcome—so that if you fail, you will be maximally resilient, able to get up, dust yourself off, and get back in the fray. That, to use a loaded term, is enlightened self-interest.” (Loc. 3,368)