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    High on Low: Harnessing the Power of Unhappiness (Winner of the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Award for Self Help)
    High on Low: Harnessing the Power of Unhappiness (Winner of the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Award for Self Help)
    High on Low: Harnessing the Power of Unhappiness (Winner of the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Award for Self Help)
    Ebook66 pages54 minutes

    High on Low: Harnessing the Power of Unhappiness (Winner of the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Award for Self Help)

    By Wilhelm Schmid

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Winner of the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Award for Self Help & Finalist for the 2015 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Self Help. Is not being happy really so bad? In HIGH ON LOW: HARNESSING THE POWER OF UNHAPPINESS, bestselling author Wilhelm Schmid persuasively argues that far from preventing us from living a full and successful life, being unhappy - be it in terms of discontent, melancholy, sadness, or depressive mood - is an inherent part of a well-rounded, active, and creative life. Rather than attempting to treat unhappiness as an unwelcome interloper on our perpetual quest for happiness, we should, Schmid suggests, draw on and harness the very power of not being happy.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUpper West Side Philosophers, Inc.
    Release dateAug 8, 2014
    ISBN9781935830276
    High on Low: Harnessing the Power of Unhappiness (Winner of the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Award for Self Help)
    Author

    Wilhelm Schmid

    Bestselling author, Wilhelm Schmid is the most significant and popular contemporary German moral philosopher. In his many books on topics such as 'happiness', 'love', the 'meaning of life', and 'balanced living' - to name only a few - he has been endeavoring to create a philosophy of the art of living for our time. He lives in Berlin, Germany, and travels around the world giving lectures and workshops on the philosophy of the art of living. He has been awarded the German Prize for Outstanding Services in Conveying Philosophy to the Public (2012), and the Swiss Prize for his philosophical contribution to the Art of Living (2013).

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    • 4/5
      High on Low: Harnessing the Power of Unhappiness is difficult to easily categorize; and that may prove its ultimate strength, even though it presents somewhat of a marketing challenge.It's of diminutive stature (less than a pocket-sized paperback in height), it toes the line between philosophy, spirituality, and self-help guide, and it posits a surprising thought: does the definition of living a full, successful life mean never (or seldom) being unhappy? Wilhelm Schmid offers the perspective that discontent, sadness and depression are actually an important part of leading a well-rounded, active life - and that unhappiness should not be 'treated away' so much as accepted as part of this process.In the ongoing search for chronic happiness, have we forgotten the underlying benefits of sadness? This little book covers the gray areas between melancholy and depression, finding meaning in a sense of place where one is unhappy, and pinpointing the real values in life.Unhappiness holds its own strengths in powers not to be found in an ongoing state of contentment, and this book shows how to recognize and accept these positive points.Without the bad, there can be no adequate recognition of what is truly good: this and the idea that melancholy actually brings with it its own form of strength makes High on Low an unusual perspective recommended for any who would understand the formula of real psychological and spiritual success and its many underlying influences.

    Book preview

    High on Low - Wilhelm Schmid

    Wilhelm Schmid

    HIGH ON LOW

    Harnessing the Power of Unhappiness

    Translated by Karen Leeder

    Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc.

    New York • 2014

    ***

    ~ Philosophical Thinking is Yoga for the Mind® ~

    Published by Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc.

    P. O. Box 250645, New York, NY 10025, USA

    www.westside-philosophers.com / www.yogaforthemind.us

    Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc. provides a publication venue for original philosophical thinking steeped in lived life, in line with our motto: philosophical living & lived philosophy.

    Smashwords Edition

    978-1-935830-27-6

    Copyright © 2014 by Stephen Grant

    Cover Photograph Copyright © 2013 Kathrin Stengel

    This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. For all inquiries concerning permission to reuse material from any of our titles, please contact the publisher in writing, or contact the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, USA (www.copyright.com).

    Yoga for the Mind©

    The colophon is a registered trademark of Upper West Side Philosophers, Inc.

    This book is also available in print:

    Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

    Schmid, Wilhelm, 1953-

    [Unglücklich sein. English]

    High on low : harnessing the power of unhappiness / translated from the German by Karen Leeder.

    pages cm. -- (Subway line ; No. 8)

    Originally published as Unglücklich sein.

    ISBN 978-1-935830-28-3 (alk. paper)

    1. Happiness. 2. Well-being. 3. Melancholy. I.Leeder, Karen J. II. Title.

    BF575.H27S3613 2014

    152.4'2--dc23

    2013032345

    ***

    Contents

    Foreword

    1. If Happiness Doesn’t Find Me

    2. Does Happiness Always Make Us Happy?

    3. Farewell to Perpetual Contentment

    4. The Fullness of Life Consists in More than the Positive

    5. Being Depressed: Melancholia

    6. Depression: The Illness

    7. Living on the Edge of the Abyss

    8. A Guide to Living with Unhappiness

    9. Melancholy as a Transcendental Ability

    10. The Dawning of the Age of Melancholy

    About the Author and Translator

    Also Available from UWSP

    ***

    Foreword

    Today is just not my day! If you can say that you’re in luck. For many people it lasts much longer than a single day. They have to live day in day out with misfortune, through no fault of their own. This is made worse by the fact that we live in an age where we are made to feel we should be happy all the time. It is broadcast from the billboards: Happiness! Ads proclaim: How to be happy! Brochures promise us: Even more happiness! You can even book it at the travel agent: Happiness guaranteed! The newspapers run with titles like Get switched on to happiness one week, only to ask the next, Why aren’t we getting happier?

    To avoid any potential misunderstanding: It is of course a symptom of progress that we can concern ourselves with happiness rather than survival or fulfilling our duties. But what happens when happiness itself becomes a duty? The hype about happiness has itself acquired a normative meaning; it reinforces a new norm for the individual: You must be happy or else your life isn’t worth living. If you happen to be unhappy, you begin to wonder whether you are missing something, to question whether you are cut out for happiness at all. Clearly, you have failed. Everyone else seems to succeed at it; or at least to work hard at giving that impression. Envy consumes the unhappy. If the worldwide happiness industry is to be believed, they will never join the ranks of the happy who inhabit the planet.

    The tyranny of happiness threatens to squeeze out any room for unhappiness. Anyone who dares to challenge the absolute power of happiness in our day-to-day lives will be faced with an uphill struggle. There is no doubt that obsessive pessimism is a pain. But ostentatious optimism is no laughing matter either. The unhappy are browbeaten to the point where they no longer dare to talk about how they are feeling, or even think about it, as that would be to indulge in negative thinking, whereas they feel they are duty-bound to see everything in a positive light.

    What are the causes of these hysterical outbreaks of happiness? One is certainly the flight into happiness. As we feel external pressures impinging on us more and more, we seek all the more urgently to find happiness within: Am I happy? Why everyone else and not me?

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