Book Review: Why Your Life Sucks – and What You Can Do About It
Alan Cohen’s message in Why Your Life Sucks-and What You Can Do About It can best be summed up as “life is what you make it.”
The author begins with the personal anecdote of a friend who had it all, and yet who still decided to end his own life. This happened to a respected coworker when Cohen was in his early 20s, and it began his search to define happiness and success in life. In Your Life, he shares his observations and lessons in a friendly and conversational style that makes for fast and easy reading.
The book is full of practical advice and easy-to-understand explanations of how and why the advice works to promote happiness and success. He uses helpful analogies and qualifications where necessary. One qualification is, not surprisingly, an explanation of the term “sucks.” The author explains that “‘Sucks’ used to be a dirty word, but now we hear it everywhere. You can say it on television, in school, and read it in movie reviews. The word is brilliantly descriptive! When something sucks, it saps your energy and undermines the quality of your life. It makes you feel smaller and wish you hadn’t participated. It sabotages your joy and you walk away feeling crummy.” He goes on to explain that when your life sucks, you can’t disregard it, because you’re in it. You must address it and change it if you want to make it stop sucking, and you must do this for yourself. No one and no thing can do this for you.
There are many wonderful analogies in Cohen’s book. A particularly good one is his comparison between holding someone in judgement and holding yourself prisoner. Just as a prison guard must be in prison with the prisoner, so too, in order to continue thinking someone is behaving wrongly, or has wronged you, you must expend your time, resources, and thought on that event or action continually. And while you maintain a holding pattern of focusing on the wrong-doing or wrong-doer, you are not able to engage in self-improving, self-affirming, or self-motivating activities and thoughts. While you judge, you make the choice to hold yourself in a negative world full of negative focus.
Similarly, Cohen points out that we sometimes hold ourselves prisoner not from judging others, but from focusing on the negative events and aspects of ourselves. Recent media attention has been focused on Dr. Richard Wiseman’s research on luck and what it means to be lucky. He has tested subjects to try to determine who is lucky and what exactly it means to call someone “lucky.” One of his findings deals specifically with focus and interpretation and how that affects whether or not a person considers him/herself to be lucky. As an example, two people might have an accident that leaves them partially paralyzed. The unlucky person will view this as a negative event that negatively affects his/her life. However, a lucky person seems to have the ability to wake up paralyzed and still consider him/herself fortunate-fortunate, for example, to have survived such a tremendous trauma at all. Only the individual can control his/her interpretation of an event as having a positive or negative impact.
The realization that each of us has this power is the first step to understanding the high level of control we can exercise in our own lives. But even though we can control our reactions to all events, we cannot control all events. And Cohen addresses this as well. He points out that if our happiness and success are our priorities, we will work consciously to foster them. Any person or situation that compromises our happiness or success, will be consciously avoided. If we feel that the people and situations with which we surround ourselves do not foster consistent, positive direction, Cohen has some pertinent thoughts, “Drama is a choice. It is not forced upon us by fate; it is an experience we generate.”
He provides examples of how people promote or avoid drama or negativity, and of why some people feel rewarded by drama and negativity. And he explains why some people are drawn to create or involve themselves in drama and dramatic situations. At one point he makes the observation that people with high drama thresholds seem to have a lot of drama in their lives-always; people with low drama thresholds have little or none-always. This is because it isn’t about the amount of drama that surrounds them, it is about the amount of drama they are actually fostering and with which they are consistently surrounding themselves. Changing the environmental factors affecting highly dramatic people will not reduce or increase their level of life drama-because they always will return to their drama comfort level.
Cohen points out that when you avoid drama and negativity, make light of your troubles, and stop worrying about other people, life will flow effortlessly toward good health, happiness, and success. If you feel as though this is not happening for you, then Cohen’s book offers some sound explanations about what you are probably doing to sabotage yourself, and why you are motivated to do so.
Cohen also issues loud and clear warnings about relying on others and on things to generate our happiness. He uses the illustration of plastic surgery-now a common procedure in our society. Cohen points out that one might contend that “looking good helps you feel better about yourself.” But he replies that “the real test of self-love is to feel good no matter how you look.”
There are certainly a number of other helpful messages and suggestions in Cohen’s book to make it worth reading if you feel you are not living up to your full life’s potential. And if you prefer a lighter, more casual tone, and a greater focus on the personal rather than the professional, you might actually enjoy Cohen over Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
There are only two warnings for readers of “Your Life”:
1. There is a tendency in all of us to hear what we want to hear rather than what is being said. Cohen goes to great lengths to qualify his statements so that there is little room for misinterpretation. Cohen’s message, like every other self-help message, will only have an affect on your life if you are honest with yourself about how people and things are affecting you, and about acknowledging your part in the events of your own life. For example, one could read the section about changing one’s attitude (to be more positive) toward a person or event, and then decide to stay in an unhealthy relationship by creating a better attitude toward it. One could only accomplish this skewing of Cohen’s message, however, by filtering out Cohen’s further statements regarding the need to avoid people and things that drain our ability to be positive. His message is a whole and should not be used in part to maintain a life that “sucks” in any way.
2. The author’s free-spirited style and personality sometimes lead down paths where the reader must exercise either a very open mind or be able to disregard some ideas and still appreciate the good points of the book. Cohen appears to support some highly intangible concepts, such as subconsciously knowing the future and a rather amorphously defined god. But if you are able to either accept these ideas, or disregard them and still enjoy the more practical messages, you will have no problem reading, enjoying, and learning from Cohen’s work.
