Widening your impersonal interests

Russell reverses the usual advice: against unhappiness he recommends not shrinking your desires but widening them. The more interests a person has that are not about herself — a trade, a science, a garden, a cause, a game — the more the failures that strike are cushioned, because they never reach the whole of her at once. The target is not the inner life but brooding over oneself, which shuts you inside an object too small and too familiar. The habit consists in deliberately cultivating two or three such interests, before you need them.