Bookshelf Addition: Happy by Derren Brown

🎨 Impressions Before I finally decided to read this book, it had been on my list for many years. It first entered my radar when it was recommended by Ali Abdaal, the productivity YouTuber. I heard about it a few more times in different contexts and now felt like it was time. It’s a long book with way over 500 pages, which made me hesitate. Apparently, in the UK the author Derren Brown is a household name who had a few successful television shows to his name. He started out as a performance magician but his shows were mostly about social experiments, as far as I understood. He has an unusual approach to thinking about the human psyche, for that reason. He’s coming from that background and then decided to make Happiness the topic of his book, which I thought was an interesting new angle. I have read many of the popular and traditional books about happiness because the topic seemed to me to have been on many people’s minds in recent years. The book begins strongly with him retelling a…