52 pages • 1 hour read
Brianna Wiest101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think
Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Embrace Pain to Experience Happiness
Throughout the book, Wiest states this idea in every imaginable way. She introduces the idea early on, dedicates the idea to its own essays, and lists some form of this in every list of things to do and the opposite in every list of things not to do. In her first essay, Wiest introduces the idea that human instinct is to seek whatever is comfortable, regardless of whether it is good or bad. If a person only seeks what is comfortable, they will only repeat situations and emotions that they have already experienced, regardless of whether they were good or bad.
In Essay 10, “Breaking Your ‘Upper Limit,’” Wiest discusses how people hold themselves back from real happiness and proposes the idea that the path to happiness is just a shift in mindset. Most people fear real happiness for various reasons, one of them being that real happiness comes alongside fear and pain. Instead of feeling every emotion, people push the difficult ones away and sprint toward an eternal happiness that does not exist. Wiest explains this by saying, “You are not cheating your way around pain. You’re actively pursuing more and more of it” (54). Not only is fear necessary for growth, but denying fear its rightful space also creates even more pain. The pursuit of happiness with no difficult feelings actually pushes the idea of real happiness further and further away. Developing this theme in Essay 100, “Stop Chasing Happiness,” Wiest summarizes her ideas surrounding happiness and its relation to pain. First, she reiterates, there is no such thing as perpetual happiness. The idea of perpetual happiness is just more comfortable than the truth, which is that “to avoid pain is to avoid happiness” (438). She also ties the idea of chasing happiness to the culture of consumerism in the Western world: an acquisitional approach that encourages people to buy things, want more, and always think that happiness is something that is one step away rather than with them always.
Wiest discusses the pain of disliking someone else, which she argues is just the pain of disliking oneself: that which they “cannot see or are resisting” in themselves (74). She urges her reader to view all emotions as information. In this way, pain becomes a valuable insight into personal needs, leading to solutions. It is information that can be used to know what is missing in one’s own life. As she writes in the title of Essay 23, “Everything Is Here to Help You” (124). The only thing missing in most people’s pursuit of happiness is a shift in mindset. She suggests that if a person can find the purpose or opportunity for growth in their pain, then the suffering will shrink. “Unbearable suffering awaits us all,” she writes, and the only difference between people is the way they experience it (126).
To Change Anything, Change Yourself
One of the main ideas that Wiest explores in this book is that in order to change anything, one must first change themselves. This theme is evident even in the title of the book. If a person picks up a book called 101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think, they likely want to change something in their lives. The thing that needs changing is different for everyone, but it does not matter because the way to change it is consistent: the self. Wiest writes simply that “the way to change your life is to change the way you think.” She goes on to say, “[T]he way to change the way you think is to change what you read” (73). With this baseline belief, she prepares her readers that they should be ready to change their minds in order to benefit from her book. The theme of changing oneself is central to the book’s self-help purpose in giving the reader a sense of purpose and control over their own feelings and thoughts.
Wiest begins the book with an essay that breaks down the importance of interrogating one’s assumptions in order to give themselves a chance to change their minds. She repeats this concept in many different ways, including using the idea that everything one feels is a reflection of oneself. If this is true, then to change what one feels, they must change themselves. The same is true about the desire to change the world. She says, “The world is not as it is, it is as we are” (86), to emphasize the idea that anything one sees in the world is a projection.
Wiest provides evidence that the world is changing as a result of minds changing, citing the growth in popularity of social justice, positive psychology, yoga, meditation, and critical thinking. One essay lists “Everyday Signs the World Is Experiencing a Shift in Consciousness” (344). Each number provides evidence that exemplifies the idea that a shift in mindset comes before any other change. These are not numbers or statistics but shifts in mindsets of mass populations. The book presents these as evidence of the power of mental flexibility. When Wiest writes that people must let go of the expectation that “[their] thoughts will change themselves when [their] circumstances change” (79), she is expressing the same idea in different terms here: that the mind must change, or the circumstances never will. On some level, this theme represents her belief in the power of the human mind to create its own reality. Reiterating this idea, she then adds, “Your mind creates; it is not created” (80). By giving the mind the active voice, she recognizes its ability to change. Then using the passive voice, she makes clear that the mind’s role is not passive. The mind is doing the action, giving the individual control and agency.
Looking for Happiness in Daily Life
Wiest frequently discusses the contrast between narratives and reality, thinking and living, and the image versus the experience. She consistently emphasizes the idea that the former in all of these pairs will never provide happiness. The book relates these ideas to gratitude, mindfulness, living in the present, and an appreciation of things that are everyday, simple, and easy to overlook. In “Things You Need to Know About Yourself Before You’ll Have the Life You Want,” Wiest challenges the concept of wanting a certain sort of life. She asks the reader several questions in order to guide them toward living in the present, asking, “What do you want to do every day?” (196). She goes on to say that people “rarely consider the nitty-gritty daily practice that is required for a peaceful, meaningful existence” (196). She believes that in order to achieve the happiness they want, people must make it a daily practice, not a daily pursuit. Later, she explores this idea in “The Importance of Stillness: Why It’s Imperative to Make Time to Do Nothing,” where she reminds the reader that a daily practice of doing nothing can help people achieve happiness (246).
In “Be Where Your Feet Are: Mantras That Will Remind You That Your Life Is Happening in This Moment,” Wiest provides 15 mantras for the reader, emphasizing the significance of the mundane present moment. These mantras rely on the theory of “grounding” (techniques that create calm and connectedness by concentrating on the tangible present). They reiterate the idea that each moment is the only one that matters and the only moment over which anyone has control. One of these is “The only way to be extraordinary depends on what I do with the ordinary” (137), also emphasizing the idea that the ordinary creates the extraordinary. Using all of these different avenues, Wiest urges the reader to search only in the present moment for happiness because nothing else is real.
Wiest’s emphasis on the mundane also extends to the body as a tangible, everyday object that is often taken for granted. In “The Parts of You That Aren’t ‘I,’” Wiest notes that people are “more invested in how [they]’re perceived than who [they] are” and notes that many people want others to love them forever rather than love them every day (44). In this essay, she asks the reader to consider what might be left after they remove all of their organs, touching on the idea that people identify with their bodies to avoid the question of what is real. She argues that people focus more on the idea of things than the actual things, which is not grounded in everyday life. Communicating the same idea, she also states, “[M]ake sure you’re living more than you’re thinking about living” (107).
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By Brianna Wiest
