If You Do Not Think for Yourself, Others Will Think for You: How Your Own Thinking Helps Decide Your Happiness and Health

Three in the Morning, Four in the Evening: The Oldest Story about a Thinking Error

In the book of the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, written in the fourth century BC, there is a story that is shorter than any self-help book and wiser than most. A monkey keeper hands out nuts to his animals and announces: three in the morning, four in the evening. The monkeys fly into a rage. The keeper relents: very well, then, four in the morning and three in the evening. The monkeys are delighted.¹

Zhuangzi adds a single dry comment: nothing had changed in name or substance, and yet joy and anger had traded places. Seven nuts before, seven nuts after. What had changed was not the ration but the way the monkeys saw it. To this day, "three in the morning, four in the evening" is a set idiom in Chinese.

One might take the story for an animal fable if it were not performed every day with a human cast. Monday has exactly as many hours as Saturday, and yet for many people it begins on Sunday evening with a sigh. A raise brings joy until one learns that a colleague received a bigger one; nothing has changed about one's own raise, only about how one evaluates it. And whoever sits in a traffic jam wondering why this always happens to him reliably overlooks the fact that, for the cars behind him, he himself is the traffic jam.

In all three cases, the person concerned takes his feeling for a response to reality. In truth, it is a response to a thought about reality. Noticing this difference is hard. Overlooking it costs happiness — and, as will become apparent, measurably costs health as well.

The story of the monkeys does, however, have a second, later version, and it is less comfortable than the first. It is no longer about the monkeys but about the keeper. It will be told further below, in the place where it belongs: where the subject is people who are content because someone else does the counting for them.

This essay follows the idea of the monkey story in six steps, each building on the last. First: what the classical authors actually wrote about the power of thoughts — and what has become of their words on calendar pages. Second: what a new analysis of more than 23,000 recorded thoughts shows about the connection between thinking and happiness, and what it does not show. Third: how thoughts reach into the body, down to hormone levels, blood pressure, and life expectancy. Fourth: why most people notice none of this. Fifth: why many do not even want to notice it — and why some fight anyone who points it out. Sixth: how this contradiction can be resolved and what way out remains.

The essay thus takes up a diagnosis made in this journal in September 2026: that a society which treats more and more relieves its members of responsibility for themselves.² A diagnosis without a way out comes cheap. This essay names the way out. It is uncomfortable, it can be learned, and it bears a name that comes up conspicuously rarely in the debate about mental health: thinking for yourself.

What Marcus Aurelius Really Wrote about Thoughts and Happiness

Hardly any quotation about thinking is as widespread as this one: "The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts." It appears on calendar pages, coffee mugs, and motivational postcards, and it is attributed to the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, who reigned from AD 161 to 180. In August 2026 it even made its way into a scientific paper that will be discussed shortly: its authors place it, in exactly this wording, at the head of their analysis of happiness as a hypothesis.³

The quotation has only one flaw: in this form, it appears nowhere in Marcus Aurelius. It is a free paraphrase, smoothed for household use. What the emperor actually wrote down is more precise and, at the same time, less comfortable:

"Such as your frequent impressions are, such will your cast of mind be; for the soul is dyed by its impressions."

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5.16⁴

The difference from the calendar version is not philological pedantry; it is the heart of the matter. The calendar version promises something: happiness, dependent on the "quality" of one's thoughts, as though they were a product available in grades. The emperor, by contrast, describes a process. The Greek word he uses, baptetai, comes from the dyer's craft. A cloth dipped again and again into the same dye takes on its color until it no longer washes out. It is not the single thought that dyes the soul but the repeated one. This is, almost two millennia before the psychology of learning, a precise statement about how habits of thought arise — and why they are so hard to wash out again.

In two further passages the emperor becomes even clearer. "The world is change, life is opinion," we read in the fourth book.⁵ And a few sections later, in a form any cognitive psychotherapist could sign: "Take away the opinion, and 'I have been harmed' is taken away; take away 'I have been harmed,' and the harm is taken away."⁶ The point is not that there is no harm. The point is that between the event and the suffering it causes stands a judgment — and that this judgment, unlike the event, lies in one's own hands.

Even more revealing than the content is the form. The work known today as the Meditations bears, in the manuscript tradition, the Greek title Ta eis heauton: "To Himself." These are private notes, written down in part during the campaigns on the Danube and not intended for readers. The French historian of philosophy Pierre Hadot has shown that they are spiritual exercises: the emperor wrote down his principles again and again in order to impress them upon himself and to test his own judgments against them.⁷ The most famous self-help book in world literature thus comes from a man who wanted to help no one but himself and who gave no reader a single piece of advice. It is, on closer inspection, the opposite of an advice book: not someone else's head doing the thinking for you, but one's own, examining itself.

Marcus Aurelius shares the fate of the calendar version with other sages. The Buddha, as countless posters proclaim, taught: "We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world." The wording comes from a free, poetic rendering by the American Thomas Byrom, published in 1976.⁸ The first verse of the Dhammapada, from which it derives, is more sober and therefore more interesting: mind precedes all things, mind is their chief, they are made of mind; and whoever speaks or acts with a clouded mind is followed by suffering as the wheel follows the foot of the draft animal.⁹ Here, too: no promise of happiness, but a description of cause and effect.

Even more instructive is a case from the present. The chain "Watch your thoughts, they become words; watch your words, they become actions; watch your actions, they become habits ..." is attributed variously to Laozi, the Talmud, the Buddha, or Gandhi. The American quotation researcher Garson O'Toole has traced it back. The earliest evidence he found comes from an American newspaper of 1977; it names as its author a man called Frank Outlaw, president of a supermarket chain.¹⁰ One understands why humanity prefers to quote Laozi.

Why does all this belong here? Because it demonstrates the subject of this essay in miniature. Julius Caesar recorded the cause in his account of the Gallic War, in an episode he tells with visible relish. A Roman legate sent a supposed deserter to the Gauls, who assured them that the Romans were afraid and on the verge of withdrawing. The Gauls believed him, stormed up the hill toward the Roman camp, and were cut to pieces. Caesar's explanation of their credulity takes six Latin words: people almost always believe what they want to believe.¹¹

Interim summary: The insight that thoughts help decide our happiness is more than two thousand years old and has been formulated independently in several cultures. The first thing people did with this insight is telling: they did not examine it but embellished it, and they preferred to attribute it to a distant sage rather than to a nearby merchant. Whoever recognizes this pattern has already learned the first lesson. The quotations in this essay are therefore documented individually at the end — not out of pedantry, but on principle.

What 23,338 Thoughts Reveal about Happiness

The paper in which Marcus Aurelius appears as a hypothesis is by Shanshan Zhang of Wuhan University and Zhou Fang and Joshua Tasoff of Claremont Graduate University in California. It bears the plain title "What do people think about?" and appeared in August 2026 on the platform SSRN.³

Because this platform matters for understanding the findings, a brief explanation is in order. SSRN, formerly the "Social Science Research Network," is a freely accessible repository on which researchers publish their work at an early stage in order to put it up for discussion and make it available quickly; since 2016 it has belonged to the scientific publisher Elsevier.¹² What appears there is, as a rule, a preprint: the paper has not yet undergone review by independent experts in the field, known as peer review. That is no blemish - many important papers first appear this way - but it is a reason to read the results with the same caution one brings to a draft.

The method is as simple as it is revealing. Through a commercial online survey platform, the researchers recruited 258 adult Americans between the ages of 19 and 71, women and men in roughly equal numbers. For two weeks, an app on their phones pinged them eight times a day at random moments, asking which thought was most prominently on their minds just then. The participants wrote it down in their own words, indicated where it had come from and what they were doing, and rated their momentary happiness on a scale from minus five to plus five. Psychology calls this procedure experience sampling: people are not asked after the fact how they are doing in general - a question on which memory kindly makes improvements - but in the midst of life, before they can prepare an answer. The result was 23,338 recorded thoughts.

What moves humanity at its core can, according to this analysis, be summed up in three words: fatigue, work, food. Almost one thought in five concerned one's own body, above all exhaustion; one in six concerned work; one in seven, food. Together these three topics account for half of all thoughts. Ask what people want, and in almost half of the cases it is something to eat or drink, preferably coffee. Ask what they need, and rest comes first: a nap, sleep.³ Thoughts of sex turned up a grand total of eleven times in the entire data set. The authors consider this an understatement, presumably out of embarrassment, and one will not contradict them. It is probably the only finding of the study for which the participants thought about their thoughts before writing them down.

Another finding deserves a moment's pause. The researchers also analyzed what the participants' aversion was directed at. Among the personal objects of hatred, first place goes not to life, not to the former partner, but to "myself." Man, it turns out, is his own favorite enemy. One need not be a psychotherapist to suspect that this finding has something to do with happiness.

The real finding concerns the question Marcus Aurelius raised. Using statistical models, the authors tested how well the participants' momentary happiness could be predicted: by their life circumstances, such as age, sex, education, income, and marital status; by what they were doing at the moment; and by what they were thinking at the moment. In the most comprehensive model, all these characteristics together explain a good quarter of the fluctuations in happiness. Of this explained share, more than half is accounted for by thoughts — more than by life circumstances and activities combined.³ In plain terms: whether someone was happy at a given moment depended, statistically, more on what he was thinking than on what he was doing, how much he earned, or whether he was married.

This becomes particularly clear with intrusive thoughts, those that force themselves upon a person against his will. They made up a good fifth of all thoughts. Overall, by their own account, the participants had chosen only a little more than half of their thoughts themselves; the rest had simply happened to them, through mind-wandering, through memory, or indeed through intrusion. The authors calculate that halving intrusive thoughts would go along with a gain in happiness comparable to that of an income increase of about 23 percent. Their comment is remarkably dry: "Maybe Marcus Aurelius was onto something."³

Finally, the researchers sorted their participants into four groups according to their thought patterns: the Worriers, the Domestic, the Bodily, and the Work-Hard Play-Hard group. The last group had the highest income and was also the happiest. The Bodily group, by contrast, had the highest share of intrusive thoughts, at 28 percent. Among the words most characteristic of their mental world were "stuffy," "ache," "headache" — and "therapist."³ Nothing can be concluded from this about psychotherapists. It merely shows in what neighborhood the thought of them resides.

As seductive as these figures are, their limits must be stated just as clearly, and the authors do so themselves. First, they show correlations, not causes: it is just as conceivable that happy people have pleasanter thoughts as that pleasanter thoughts make people happy. Second, the participants come from the United States and thus from that minority of humanity which research describes with the acronym WEIRD: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. Third, roughly a quarter of the prompts went unanswered, and what participants wrote down is what they were willing to write down. Fourth, as noted, the paper has not yet been peer-reviewed.

On its own, the finding would therefore stand on shaky legs. But it does not stand alone. As early as 2010, the Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert had published a related, peer-reviewed study of about 2,250 adults in the journal Science, which has been widely cited ever since. Their result: participants' minds wandered away from what they were doing almost half the time, and in those moments they were less happy. What people were thinking predicted their happiness better than what they were doing; and the temporal sequence of the measurements suggested that mind-wandering was generally the cause of unhappiness and not merely its consequence. The paper closes with a formulation that belongs in every textbook: "A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind."¹³

Two more recent, peer-reviewed studies point in the same direction and refine the picture. In 2025, a research team had participants free-associate and used a computational-linguistic method to measure how close their spontaneous thoughts came to particular concepts. Those who were happier thought more often, spontaneously, of friends; of money they thought no more often than others. The finding, from a sample of 210 young adults from the United States and Great Britain, was confirmed in a second sample of 350 participants in South Korea.¹⁴ And in 2026, the psychologists Fereidouni and Robinson placed a total of 334 young adults in a quiet room and had them first merely observe their thoughts and then report them. Happier people thought more often about relationships, about goals, and about the good things in their lives; but they did not think any less often about themselves, about problems, or about uncertainties.¹⁵ Happiness, it seems, consists less in getting rid of unpleasant thoughts than in giving the others enough room.

Interim summary: The data support Marcus Aurelius but do not prove him right. They show that thoughts and happiness are closely linked, more closely than happiness and income, and that a considerable share of our thoughts happens to us rather than being chosen by us. Whether thoughts cause happiness cannot be settled by surveys alone. For that one needs experiments in which people are deliberately made to think something different, followed by a measurement of what happens. Such experiments exist. They come, however, not from happiness research but from medicine, and their results are more tangible than many would like.

When Thought Enters the Body: Placebo, Nocebo, and a Milkshake

Two technical terms are indispensable for what follows. Medicine uses the term placebo effect for an improvement brought about by a patient's positive expectations, and nocebo effect for a deterioration or side effect arising from negative expectations. According to the current state of research, both are mediated by expectations, that is, by thoughts about what will happen.¹⁶ Placebo and nocebo are, in other words, the points at which thinking meddles in medicine's business — in both directions.

The Most Comfortable Diet in the History of Science

In 2007, the Harvard psychologists Alia Crum and Ellen Langer studied 84 room attendants from seven American hotels. These women spend their working days with beds, vacuum cleaners, and stairs, that is, with a physical workload that any fitness trainer would recognize as a workout. Even so, they rated their own physical activity as low. The researchers therefore told the women in four of the hotels that their work was good exercise and met the Surgeon General's recommendations for an active lifestyle; the women in the other three hotels received no such information. Four weeks later, the informed women had lost almost two pounds on average, their systolic blood pressure had fallen by about ten points, and their body fat percentage, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index had also improved — even though, by their own account, they had neither worked more nor eaten differently.¹⁷

The most comfortable diet in the history of science thus consists of telling people that they are already exercising. Even so, one should not overrate it. It was not the women who were randomized but the hotels; the claim that behavior did not change rests solely on the participants' own reports; a later replication with the cleaning staff of an American university failed to confirm the effect;¹⁸ and in 2024 the statistical analysis was criticized on fundamental grounds.¹⁹ What remains is a hint, not a proof — but a hint pointing in the same direction as those that follow.

One Milkshake, Two Labels

In 2011, Crum followed up with colleagues at Yale University. Forty-six young adults drank the same 380-calorie milkshake on two occasions a week apart. Once the label said it was an "indulgent" drink with 620 calories, the other time a "sensible" one with 140. The researchers measured the hormone ghrelin, which is produced in the stomach and signals hunger to the brain; after a meal, its level falls. After the supposedly lavish shake, ghrelin showed, in the authors' words, a "dramatically steeper decline" than after the supposedly lean one.²⁰ The same shake, two labels, two hormone curves: the stomach had read what was on the bottle. This finding, too, comes from a small laboratory study and has not been directly replicated; as a pointer to a mechanism, it is nonetheless revealing.

The Side Effect That Arises in the Head

The strongest example comes from cardiology, and methodologically it is hard to fault. Statins are drugs that lower cholesterol; many patients stop taking them because of muscle pain and other complaints. A team at Imperial College London invited sixty patients who had done exactly that. Each received twelve identical-looking monthly containers: four with the statin, four with an outwardly identical dummy pill, four empty, in randomized order. Every day the patients recorded their symptoms on a scale from 0 to 100. The result: in the months without tablets, average symptom intensity was 8; on the dummy pill, 15.4; on the statin, 16.3. Roughly ninety percent of the symptoms that occurred on the statin also occurred on the sugar pill. Six months after the trial, half of the participants were taking the statin again.²¹

The finding deserves a formulation one can remember: the side effect was printed on the package insert, and the package insert was printed in the head. The muscle pains were real; nobody imagined them. But for the most part they arose not from the active ingredient, but from the expectation attached to it.

Can a Belief Cost Years of Life?

The psychologist Becca Levy of Yale University followed the fates of 660 people from the state of Ohio who were fifty or older at the start of the study and had at that time rated statements about their own aging, such as the statement that one becomes less useful with age. Over a period of up to 23 years, it was recorded who died and when. Those who viewed their own aging more positively lived 7.5 years longer, and the association persisted after age, sex, socioeconomic status, loneliness, and physical functioning had been taken into account.²²

A second, larger study suggests an even more bitter punch line. In 2012, researchers at the University of Wisconsin analyzed data from 28,753 American adults who had been asked in 1998 how much stress they experienced and whether they believed that stress harmed their health; deaths were then recorded through 2006. Those who experienced a lot of stress and were convinced that it harmed their health a great deal had a 43 percent higher risk of premature death. Those who reported just as much stress but did not consider it harmful to their health had no demonstrably increased risk.²³ Put pointedly, but not falsely: what seems dangerous is not stress alone, but also the thought that it is dangerous.

As early as 1988, Christopher Peterson, Martin Seligman, and George Vaillant had shown that the way 99 Harvard graduates explained failures at the age of 25 predicted their health decades later. Those who habitually explained bad events as permanent, all-encompassing, and of their own making - psychology speaks of a pessimistic explanatory style - were in poorer health between the ages of 45 and 60, even when their state of health at 25 was taken into account.²⁴

How a thought gets into the body at all is described by a hypothesis that the Dutch psychologist Jos Brosschot formulated in 2006 with American colleagues: the perseverative cognition hypothesis. The technical term refers to the persistent continuation of thinking about something stressful, that is, rumination and worry. In the long run, the reasoning goes, it is not so much the stressful event itself that does harm, but the fact that the mind holds on to it: the physical stress response, which would subside after an annoyance, is prolonged by continued thinking.²⁵ A meta-analysis, that is, a statistical synthesis of many individual studies, arrived in 2016 at a result consistent with this hypothesis: rumination and worry go along with higher blood pressure, a higher heart rate, and more cortisol, the body's most important stress hormone.²⁶ The annoyance lasts five minutes, the brooding over it a whole evening — and the body pays for the whole evening.

Honesty is required here, because nonsense flourishes in precisely this field. The studies by Levy, Keller, and Peterson are observational studies. They show that belief and mortality are related, not necessarily that the belief is the cause: someone who is already ill may think worse of his aging or his stress for that very reason. And there are findings that every miracle faith in the power of positive thinking must take into account. A study of 1,093 patients with head and neck cancer found no association between emotional well-being and survival time.²⁷ Thoughts do not cure cancer. Whoever claims otherwise is trading in hope. And whoever persuades a sick person that he is to blame for his illness because he thought the wrong way commits a thinking error and a cruelty at the same time.

Nor is this insight new. Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius: "There are more things that frighten us than things that oppress us, and we suffer more often in imagination than in reality."²⁸ And in the Book of Sirach, a Jewish wisdom text from the second century BC, Luther's translation contains an admonition that Becca Levy could have chosen as her motto: "Do not make yourself sad, and do not torment yourself with your own thoughts. For a cheerful heart is a man's life, and his joy is his long life."²⁹

Interim summary: The body listens to what the head tells it — not to everything and not omnipotently, but measurably: in hormone levels, in the perception of pain, possibly in life expectancy. And all these findings have one thing in common, which is what matters in what follows: those affected did not notice it. The room attendants did not know why they were losing weight. The statin patients were convinced that the drug was causing their pain. None of them would have said: that was my thought.

Why We Do Not Notice Our Own Thinking

The reason is simple and consequential: a thought does not appear as a thought. It appears as a perception. Someone who is not greeted by his boss in the morning and thinks "He considers me incompetent" does not first experience a thought and then a feeling. He experiences a slight, and he is convinced that the missing greeting caused it. That between the greeting and the slight there stood an interpretation which could just as well have read "He has a toothache" or "He didn't see me" does not occur to him — precisely because this interpretation ran so quickly and so automatically that he took it for reality itself.

Epictetus, who was born a slave and died one of the most influential philosophers of antiquity, captured this mechanism in a formula that has not been improved upon in almost two thousand years: "It is not things themselves that disturb people, but their judgments and opinions about things."³⁰ Michel de Montaigne used it in 1580 as the title of one of his essays: that the taste of good and evil depends in large part on the opinion we have of them.³¹ Shakespeare put it into Hamlet's mouth: "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."³²

The most elegant punch line comes from John Milton. In his 1667 epic Paradise Lost, he has Satan proclaim after his fall from heaven: "The mind is its own place, and in it self / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n." It is probably the finest formulation of the cognitive insight in the English language, and it comes, of all people, from the devil. Three books later, the same Satan laments: "Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell."³³ He had fully understood the theory and still failed in practice. That makes him the archetype of a phenomenon that fills entire bookshelves today: the person who knows everything about the power of thoughts and does nothing with it.

Modern psychology has developed its own terminology for the mechanism, and in doing so it has explicitly invoked the Stoics. The American psychologist Albert Ellis described it in his ABC model: A stands for the activating event, B for the beliefs about this event, C for the emotional and behavioral consequences.³⁴ What matters is the sequence that common sense overlooks: it is not A that causes C, but B. Ellis himself wrote in 1962 that this principle had been discovered by the Stoics and best formulated by Epictetus.³⁵

The American psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck - not to be confused with the sociologist Ulrich Beck, who will be discussed further below - coined the term automatic thoughts: thoughts at the fringe of awareness that occur spontaneously and rapidly and represent an immediate interpretation of the situation at hand.³⁶ Beck, too, located the philosophical roots of his approach in the Stoics, who regarded not events themselves but people's conceptions of them as the key to their emotional distress.³⁷

The social psychologists Lee Ross and Andrew Ward captured the fundamental problem in a concept that fits here like a key in a lock: naive realism. It refers to the conviction that one sees the world as it is — and to the resulting assumption that anyone who sees it differently is uninformed, irrational, or biased.³⁸ The naive realist does not take his interpretation for an interpretation. That is why he cannot examine it. One does not examine what one takes to be a fact.

From this, however, follows the good news of this essay, and it is almost 350 years old. In 1677 Baruch de Spinoza wrote in his Ethics: "An affect which is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it."³⁹ That is, in the language of the seventeenth century, the mechanism by which cognitive psychotherapy works. A thought recognized as a thought loses the appearance of being reality. And a thinking error, once seen through, cannot be unseen. Whoever has once seen that his "He considers me incompetent" was a guess and not a perception cannot forget it again — any more than one can marvel again at a magic trick one has seen through.

Switzerland, incidentally, carried this insight into medicine once before, long before Ellis and Beck were born. The Neuchâtel physician Paul Dubois (1848–1918), from 1902 associate professor of neuropathology in Bern, treated nervous disorders with a method he called persuasion, "therapy through conviction": a reasoned conversation in which the patient was meant to recognize the errors in his own thinking.^40,41 Dubois openly invoked the ancient philosophers. "If we eliminate from ancient writings a few allusions that gave them local colour," he wrote, "we shall find the ideas of Socrates, Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius absolutely modern and applicable to our times."⁴² In 1962 Ellis named him among those who had already formulated comparable ideas.³⁵ His biographer calls him a "forgotten pioneer of psychotherapy."⁴³ So Bern already had cognitive psychotherapy once. It was forgotten — and replaced by less efficient methods that allow for longer billing.

Interim summary: Our own thinking goes unnoticed because it disguises itself as perception and feeling. Therein lies its power, and therein lies at the same time the possibility of breaking it: a thought that has become visible as a thought loses the appearance of reality. Logically, then, anyone who hears of all this ought to be eager to learn how to examine his own thoughts. The opposite is the case.

Rather Die Than Think

The most brutal diagnosis of human thinking is found not in a treatise on morality but in an introduction to physics. In 1925 Bertrand Russell published The ABC of Relativity, a book for the general reader on Einstein's theory of relativity, which had to talk its readers out of a number of supposedly self-evident notions about space and time. Russell explained why this is so difficult with a candor whose clarity can hardly be surpassed:

"We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices. The opposite view involves some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think — in fact, they do so."

Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity, 1925⁴⁴

Russell had already formulated the thought in 1916, at that time still as an observation: "Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth — more than ruin, more even than death."⁴⁵ Nine years later, the observation had become a reckoning. In light of what was said above about beliefs and life expectancy, it sounds less like a bon mot than like a hypothesis that is no laughing matter.

A Diagnosis That Did Not Survive Its Author

The passage has an afterlife that confirms Russell more thoroughly than any experiment. In the American edition of 1925 it appears on page 166.⁴⁴ In the editions published after Russell's death in 1970, one looks for it in vain. The passage stating that most people would rather die than think has died.

There are two conceivable explanations for its disappearance, and neither does posterity credit. The first: the truth about unloved thinking seemed too brutal to impose on readers any longer. The second, more harmless one: the remark was considered a digression that had no place in a book about physics. The first explanation confirms Russell directly. The second confirms him by way of a small detour: to strip an introduction to the theory of relativity of the one reminder that understanding it demands an effort of thought most people shun is to take away the reader's operating instructions and leave him the device. This is called a revision. A more fitting term would be a private funeral, family only.

Russell's diagnosis is nevertheless quoted to this day, in collections of quotations and in lectures, usually without a source and often in a toned-down version. In the course of transmission, Russell's "most people" has frequently become "many people," as if the number of non-thinkers had been revised downward after the fact. Only those who open an old edition still know the original, that is, those who take the trouble to go to a library and look it up. Whoever shies away from this effort easily takes the passage for a mere attribution — and so the deletion of a diagnosis about not thinking is completed precisely by those who do not look things up. One may ask what it says about the esteem in which thinking is held when a finding that a philosopher drew from decades of observing people disappears from his work and hardly anyone notices. Russell gave the answer in 1925. One need only look it up.

That Russell was not exaggerating was shown in 2014 by an experiment whose result one has to read twice to believe. In eleven studies, the social psychologist Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia asked people to sit alone in a bare room for six to fifteen minutes, without a phone, without reading material, with nothing but their thoughts. Most found this unpleasant. In one of the studies, participants had previously experienced a mild electric shock and declared that they would pay money not to have to experience it again. Then they were left alone with their thoughts — and with a button that let them give themselves such a shock. Twelve of eighteen men and six of twenty-four women pressed it at least once. One participant managed 190 shocks in a quarter of an hour.⁴⁶

Blaise Pascal had noted as early as around 1660 that all of humanity's misfortune comes from a single cause: that people cannot stay quietly in a room.⁴⁷ He was right, but too optimistic. He did not foresee that one day the room would be fitted with a button for electric shocks and that two-thirds of the men would prefer it to a quarter of an hour with themselves.

Psychology has a sober explanation for this aversion, and it is less flattering than any of Russell's truths. Thinking is work. The brain treats it like any effort: it avoids it wherever it can. As early as 1984, Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor therefore described human beings as cognitive misers who economize on their mental energy wherever a shortcut presents itself.⁴⁸ Daniel Kahneman speaks of a "law of least effort": when there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people eventually gravitate to the least demanding one.⁴⁹ And experiments show that people who are allowed to choose between a mentally demanding and an undemanding task prefer the undemanding one, even when everything else is equal.⁵⁰ People do not dislike thinking because they are stupid. They dislike it because they are thrifty. Unfortunately, they economize in the wrong place.

The sharpest diagnosis of this thrift is, however, older than all of psychology. Immanuel Kant made it in 1784 in his answer to the question "What is Enlightenment?" His famous opening formula, that enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity, is often quoted. Less often quoted is the reason Kant gives for why the immaturity is self-incurred: the cause lies "not in a lack of understanding, but in a lack of resolve and courage."⁵¹ And then follows a passage one should read twice, once with the eyes of 1784 and once with those of today:

"Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a portion of mankind, after nature has long since released them from alien guidance (naturaliter maiorennes), nevertheless gladly remain immature for life; and why it is so easy for others to set themselves up as their guardians. It is so comfortable to be immature. If I have a book that has understanding for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a physician who judges my diet for me, and so on, then I need not trouble myself at all. I have no need to think, if only I can pay; others will readily take over the tiresome business for me."

Immanuel Kant, Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung? (An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?), 1784⁵¹

The book that has understanding for me is called a self-help book today, and it fills entire sections of every bookstore. The physician who judges my diet for me is an app that counts my steps. Who has a conscience for us today is harder to say; there is no shortage of applicants. And the clause "if only I can pay" has grown into an insurance model in which I no longer even pay myself. The self-help market is, moreover, the only branch of industry that lives off the ineffectiveness of its products: had the first happiness guide delivered what it promised, it would have been the last.

In 1851 Arthur Schopenhauer described the consequences of reading with someone else's head. Whoever reads a great deal, almost the whole day long, gradually loses the ability to think for himself, "like one who always rides and in the end forgets how to walk." And he adds: "This, however, is the case with very many scholars: they have read themselves stupid."⁵² The audience of self-help literature has since successfully imitated the scholars in this process, and without the detour through scholarship.

In an interview in September 2026, the psychiatrist Manfred Lütz attributed this diagnosis to the sociologist Ulrich Beck: self-help literature, he said, cuts a swath of devastation through the country because it creates the impression that people are no longer competent to manage their own lives.⁵³ No corresponding passage in Beck's work could be located for this article. What can be documented, by contrast, is that Kant made the same diagnosis in 1784. And what can be documented is what happens when one applies it to the present. This journal put it into a single formulation in August 2025: "Mental health is not a service rendered by the health care system — it is a service that the person who thinks for himself renders to himself."⁵⁴ Professional associations respond to criticism of this kind with disciplinary measures rather than on the merits, because they are protecting their business model.^2,55 As long as an idea belongs to a classic, it can be quoted without consequences. Apply it to the present, and the reaction changes.

Interim summary: People avoid thinking for three reasons that reinforce one another. It is strenuous, and human beings economize on effort. It is unpleasant, for whoever is alone with his thoughts encounters them. And it seems superfluous as long as someone else takes it over. Up to this point, the non-thinker is merely comfortable. He becomes discomfiting only at the next step: when he defends his comfort.

The Happy Slaves

In 1880 the Austrian writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach published an aphorism that follows comfort into its most dangerous stage:

"Happy slaves are the bitterest enemies of freedom."

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Aphorismen (Aphorisms), 1880⁵⁶

At first glance this is a paradox. Why, of all people, should the contented fight freedom instead of indifferently ignoring it? The answer lies in the logic of the situation. For the unhappy slave, freedom is a hope. For the happy one, it is a threat: it would give him back the responsibility he has handed over, and with it the effort he spares himself. Whoever is free is therefore more to him than someone who thinks differently. He is a living objection to the conviction on which his contentment depends: that there is no other way.

Social psychology described this mechanism in 1957 under the name cognitive dissonance. Leon Festinger used the term for the unpleasant state of tension that arises when two beliefs contradict each other, such as "I could take my life into my own hands" and "I let others arrange it for me."⁵⁷ Often people resolve this tension not by changing their behavior but by devaluing the disturbing belief — and with it the person who embodies it. The free man disturbs the happy slave not by what he does, but by what he proves.

This is where the second version of the monkey story belongs. It appears in the book Liezi, a Daoist collection whose transmitted form was probably compiled around AD 300. There the monkey keeper is no longer a supporting player but the main character. He loves his monkeys, keeps a whole troop of them, and even cuts his own family's rations to feed them. Then provisions run short, and he must limit the nuts. Fearing that the monkeys might rebel, he resorts to the familiar trick: first three in the morning and four in the evening, then, after the expected uproar, four in the morning and three in the evening. The monkeys throw themselves to the ground with joy. And then the text draws a conclusion that is missing in Zhuangzi:

"Thus the sage snares the multitude of fools with his cleverness, as the monkey keeper snared the monkeys with his. Name and substance remained intact — and yet he made them rejoice and rage."

Liezi, chapter 2⁵⁸

Note what happens here. The monkeys have not been cheated, at least not out of a single nut. They are content, and sincerely so. Precisely for that reason they are completely in the hands of the one who does the counting for them. The Chinese character the text uses for "snare" originally denotes a bamboo cage. Ebner-Eschenbach's happy slaves are the monkeys of the Liezi: they have never seen their cage, because it is built of their own contentment.

How far this readiness can go is recorded by Tacitus in an example that can hardly be surpassed for black humor. The emperor Tiberius, certainly no friend of freedom, is said to have exclaimed in Greek whenever he left the Senate: "O men, ready for slavery!"⁵⁹ One has to picture the situation: even for a Tiberius, the servility of his Senate was too much.

The modern form of the happy slave wears no chains, and precisely therein lies its stability. Goethe described it in 1809 in Elective Affinities: "No one is more a slave than he who thinks himself free without being so."⁶⁰ The happy slave of the present sings with conviction, in the words of the old German folk song, that thoughts are free. He is right, only not in the way he means: his thoughts are free — above all, free of any examination. He has not lost his mind. He has put it into foster care.

What happens to the one who makes the cages visible was predicted by Plato in the most famous allegory in the history of philosophy. The prisoners in his cave see nothing but shadows on the wall their whole lives and take them for reality. One is freed, sees the light, and returns to lead the others out. But they, according to Plato, would kill the one who tried to release them and lead them up, if they could lay hands on him.⁶¹ Plato did not write this as fantasy. He wrote it after Athens had sentenced his teacher Socrates to death, a man who relentlessly compelled his fellow citizens to examine their convictions and who was charged for it with impiety and corrupting the young. Before the court, Socrates had defended the principle that sealed his death sentence: the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.⁶² Russell's truth thus has a long prehistory. People would not only rather die than think. Sometimes they would also rather kill.

Fyodor Dostoevsky gave this logic its consummate literary form in the legend of the Grand Inquisitor. The Inquisitor reproaches the returned Christ for having burdened human beings with a freedom they cannot bear; in the end, he says, they will lay their freedom at the feet of those who feed them and beg to be ruled.⁶³

Interim summary: With this, the tension at the heart of this essay has reached its peak. One's own thinking helps decide happiness and health. Most people avoid it. Some defend their non-thinking against anyone who reminds them of it. And many of them are, by their own account, content. So why should anyone think?

The objection is an obvious one, and it is often made with a wink: surely the happiest are those who do not think at all. It has venerable ancestors. In Luther's translation of Ecclesiastes we read: "For where there is much wisdom, there is much grief; and he who learns much must suffer much."⁶⁴ And in 1747 the English poet Thomas Gray closed his ode on Eton College with the observation: "where ignorance is bliss, / 'Tis folly to be wise."⁶⁵ The objection deserves a serious answer. It turns out to be devastating.

Are Non-Thinkers the Happiest? Four Errors in a Comfortable Objection

The objection contains four errors, and each one alone is enough to bring it down.

First Error: The Non-Thinker Does Not Exist

The objection presupposes that one can choose between thinking and not thinking. There is no such choice. In two weeks, 258 people recorded more than 23,000 thoughts, and those were only the ones they happened to be thinking when their phones caught them. Thinking never stops. The participants had chosen only a little more than half of these thoughts themselves; the rest had simply happened to them.³ The choice, then, is not between thinking and not thinking, but between examined and unexamined thinking. The so-called non-thinker does not have fewer thoughts than others. He merely has none that he has examined. His thoughts are made for him by habit, fear, advertising, the latest talk show, and the latest self-help book — and he takes them for his own.

In a 2016 interview, the Munich brain researcher Ernst Pöppel estimated how many people this applies to: "I estimate that only about ten percent of people think for themselves and take their lives into their own hands." He himself added that one has to be very careful with figures here, since the proportion cannot be measured exactly; but he suspected that there had always been something like a 90/10 rule. He saw the cause less in trust in the competence of others than in inertia, which is "probably somehow part of human nature." At the same time, among many of the young people he worked with as a university professor, he observed a growing unease: they experienced being constantly confronted with what others think and say as a form of outside control. And on health he said: "Not thinking is indeed a health risk factor. Not only exercise but also thinking is a form of preventive health care."⁶⁶ If you do not think for yourself, others will think for you — by Pöppel's cautious estimate, that applies to nine out of ten people.

"Human beings have no choice about whether they think. Their only choice is whether they examine what they think. Whoever does not examine does not think less; he is being thought. And whoever has others thinking for him is also at their disposal."

Second Error: The Happy Slave's Happiness Is Borrowed

Recall why the monkey keeper in the Liezi resorted to his trick: because his provisions were running out. The monkeys' contentment depended not on themselves but on his pantry. That is the structure of all borrowed happiness. Epictetus described it in the opening sentences of his Handbook: some things are within our power, others are not. Within our power are our judgments, our desires, and our aversions; not within our power are body, property, reputation, and office. Whoever confuses the one with the other and builds his happiness on what is not within his power will, according to Epictetus, be hindered, grieved, and disturbed.⁶⁷

The happy slave has built his happiness entirely on what is not within his power: on the favor of the one who thinks for him. As long as the pantry is full, he notices nothing. He notices it in the first crisis — an illness, a loss, a fear that cannot be counseled away. Then the thinker has a tool. The happy slave has a long ordeal.

Epictetus, who had himself been born a slave, also knew that outward emancipation changes nothing about this condition. In his Discourses he describes a slave who wishes for nothing more fervently than freedom; scarcely freed, he looks for patrons whom he must flatter and falls into a dependence more oppressive than the first.⁶⁸ Whoever does not think and judge for himself merely changes masters.

"The happy slave's happiness is borrowed. The lender can call it in at any time — and he will when the nuts run out, if not sooner."

Third Error: Only Those Who Know Both Sides Can Compare

The claim that non-thinkers are the happiest is a comparison. Only someone who knows both sides can make a comparison. In 1863 John Stuart Mill turned this into an argument that ranks among the sharpest in the history of philosophy:

"It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides."

John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, 1863⁶⁹

The logical point is relentless. The contented non-thinker's testimony about his superior happiness is inadmissible, not because he is lying, but because as a witness he can speak for only one side. He has never known a life taken into his own hands and decided for himself, so he is in no position to declare it the worse one. Whoever knows both states, by contrast - and anyone who has ever seen through a tormenting thought as a thinking error knows both - as a rule has no wish to go back. The cage door opens only from the inside. Those who have once been outside have rarely asked to be let back in.

Fourth Error: Contentment Is Not Health

The objection measures happiness in the moment. The bill for unexamined thinking, however, arrives later and elsewhere: in the body, as the findings on nocebo, stress, and aging suggest; in dependence on experts whose interpretations one can no longer examine; and in the creeping conviction that one is not responsible for one's own inner life at all. The happy slave lives on credit. He pays the interest in the form of complaints whose cause he does not know, and he carries them to experts who hand him a diagnosis but do not give him back his thinking. Here the circle closes, back to the title of this essay. A common German saying has it that whoever does not act will be treated ("Wer nicht handelt, wird behandelt") — others dispose of him. Applied to thinking, it holds literally: if you do not think for yourself, others will think for you.

Interim summary: The comfortable objection does not survive examination. The non-thinker does not exist; there is only the unexamined thinker. His happiness is borrowed, his testimony one-sided, and his bill comes due later. That leaves a legitimate question familiar to anyone who has ever lain awake at night: if thinking is so salutary, why does it so often feel so bad? The answer: because when most people say "thinking," they mean two things that have little to do with thinking.

What Thinking Is Not: Rumination and Positive Thinking

The first misunderstanding is rumination. The American psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema described it as repetitively and passively focusing on the signs of one's own distress and on their possible causes and consequences, that is, as a process that intensifies and prolongs depressed mood and anxiety.⁷⁰ Rumination feels like thinking because the mind is at work. But it is working in circles. Again and again the ruminator asks the same question, "Why is this happening to me, of all people?" And he asks it in a way that admits no answer. He examines nothing; he repeats. Whoever believes he thinks too much usually thinks too little — but does so nonstop.

Two and a half millennia ago, Confucius captured the difference in twelve characters: "Learning without thinking is futile; thinking without learning is dangerous."⁷¹ Rumination is thinking without learning. It takes in no new information, tests nothing against reality, and for precisely that reason it is dangerous. How much this circling can feed a depression, and how the circle can be broken, is set out in this journal in an article on the contrast between thinking and pills.⁷²

The second misunderstanding is positive thinking. Its forefather is the French pharmacist Émile Coué, who in the 1920s advised his followers to recite the formula twenty times every morning and evening: "Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better."⁷³ The formula has outlived generations of self-help books. It has fared less well with research. In 2009 the Canadian psychologist Joanne Wood had participants repeat the self-statement "I'm a lovable person." Among people with high self-esteem, mood rose slightly. Among those with low self-esteem, that is, the very people for whom such formulas are invented, it got worse.⁷⁴ The formula apparently reminded them above all of how little they believed it.

The psychologist Gabriele Oettingen, who conducts her research in New York and Hamburg, has shown that positive fantasies about an ideal future sap the energy one would need to bring it about,⁷⁵ and that people who fantasize especially rosily about their future today are more likely to develop depressive symptoms later.⁷⁶ That is Caesar's finding in clinical form: people gladly believe what they wish for — and pay for it later.

Cognitive psychotherapy is therefore the opposite of positive thinking, although it is often confused with it. Positive thinking asks: Does this thought feel good? Cognitive psychotherapy asks: Is this thought true? Kant set the standard in 1786: "Thinking for oneself means seeking the supreme touchstone of truth within oneself (that is, in one's own reason)."⁷⁷ The touchstone is truth, not comfort. A thought that feels good and is false acts like a sedative with side effects. A thought that is true may not calm you at once. But it holds.

Four Small Tests of Thinking for Everyday Use

What examining looks like can be shown with four thoughts almost everyone knows — and that we may laugh at once we have seen them from the outside.

"Everyone saw it." Anyone who walks into a room with a stain on his shirt is convinced that everyone present is staring at it. The American psychologist Thomas Gilovich put this conviction to the test. He had students wear a T-shirt bearing the likeness of the pop singer Barry Manilow, which their peers regarded as decidedly embarrassing, and sent them into a room full of fellow students. The wearers estimated that about half of those present had noticed the T-shirt. In fact, it was just under a quarter.⁷⁸ Psychology calls this the spotlight effect: we believe ourselves more brightly lit than we are. The truth is humbling and consoling at once. The others are busy with their own stains.

"If it isn't perfect, it's worthless." This thought knows only two grades, the best and the worst. The test is simple: Which things in your life are perfect? None. Which are worthless? None, either. The thought thus describes a world in which the thinker has never lived a single day. The technical term for this is dichotomous thinking: thinking in two categories where reality knows gradations.

"I can't bear it." This thought is a favorite of people who have already borne the thing in question dozens of times: the line at the checkout, the father-in-law, the presentation to senior management. Looked at closely, it is a claim about the future that one's own past refutes. It turns "unpleasant" into "unbearable." Whoever replaces it with the accurate thought, "This is unpleasant, and I have borne it many times before," loses nothing but an exaggeration.

"He shouldn't have done that." This thought turns every deviation from one's own expectations into an affront: the late arrival, the reply that never comes, the tone of a message. It rests on the silent demand that reality conform to one's own ideas — the very tendency Russell described as universally human. The test is unpleasant but short: Where is it written that others must behave as I expect? Nowhere. "I would have wished it otherwise" becomes an affront only through the unspoken "He should have," and the affront not infrequently becomes a rupture. A surprising number of encounters founder not on what happens but on this one word. Psychology likes to speak of narcissistic vulnerability in people who are especially quick to take offense; more useful than the label is the insight that behind every affront stands a "should" that can be examined — in others as in oneself.³⁴

None of these four tests requires a doctorate. Each requires only that, for a moment, one look at the thought instead of believing it. That is precisely the ability that can be learned — and that, like any ability, withers when one leaves it to others.

Interim summary: Thinking in the sense of this essay is neither rumination nor self-persuasion. It is testing one's own thoughts against reality, the way a bookkeeper checks an invoice: not by asking whether he likes it, but by asking whether it adds up. This can be learned. The question is how.

Learning to Think for Yourself: The Way Out No One Can Take for You

At this point a circle closes that began with Marcus Aurelius. The emperor wrote down his thoughts in order to be able to examine them. Whoever writes down a thought sees it from the outside for the first time: it is no longer the pair of glasses through which one views the world, but an object one can view. That is the core of what cognitive psychotherapy⁷⁹ accomplishes. It teaches people to recognize their own thoughts as thoughts, to examine them for their truth, and to replace the pathogenic ones among them, the thinking errors, with accurate ones. It is no accident that this work can also be done in writing,⁸⁰ in the very form the emperor chose for himself.

There is a distinction to be observed here that the profession likes to blur. Cognitive psychotherapy is not the same as cognitive behavioral therapy, even though the two names are often mentioned in the same breath. Behavior therapy starts from behavior and trains it under guidance. Cognitive psychotherapy starts from thinking alone. It eliminates the thinking errors that produce the suffering and thereby enables people to practice new behavior on their own, as the result of their changed thinking. Behavior follows thinking, not the other way around. The difference resembles that between a judgment and its enforcement: whoever has a wrongful judgment set aside does not also have to challenge every single enforcement measure. Readers who want to study the difference in detail will find it set out at length here.⁸¹

That this path is effective is not a matter of faith. In 1994, in what was then the most comprehensive evaluation of psychotherapy research, the Bern psychotherapy researcher Klaus Grawe came to the conclusion that cognitive psychotherapy "is on average highly significantly more effective than psychoanalytic therapy and person-centered psychotherapy."^82,83 And the path is short, for a reason that follows from everything said so far. A relationship takes time; an insight does not. Because a thinking error, once seen through, cannot be unseen, the insight does not have to be nurtured over years. It only has to be truly gained once. A relapse after successful cognitive psychotherapy is therefore plausible only where the suffering yields a gain that outweighs freedom, such as a disability pension. Then, however, one is once again dealing with a happy slave. Why the demonstrably most effective form of psychotherapy nevertheless helps the fewest people has been explained separately in this journal.⁸⁴

For whom is this path meant? Not for everyone, and that is not a limitation but the resolution of the contradiction this essay is about. No one can be forced to think. Whoever tried would be setting himself up as the very guardian Kant described, and would at best get a person who now simply believes a new master. Freedom imposed is no freedom. Kant knew this and therefore placed his hopes in something else: "That a public should enlighten itself, however, is more possible; indeed, if only it is left its freedom, it is almost inevitable."⁵¹ Ernst Pöppel drew the same conclusion from his estimate: "We need a renaissance of the Enlightenment — in Immanuel Kant's sense."⁶⁶

Around 1548, not yet twenty years old, the French jurist Étienne de La Boétie applied the same insight to politics in his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. Every tyrant, he wrote, has only the power that the ruled grant him. Becoming free requires no struggle, only a resolution: "Resolve to serve no more, and you are free."⁸⁵ Applied to thinking, this means that the liberation of the happy slave begins not with a treatment but with a decision — with the first thought he does not believe but examines. That is exactly what Kant meant when he located the cause of immaturity not in a lack of understanding but in a lack of resolve and courage.

Whoever has made this decision can learn to examine, alone or with guidance. Cognitive psychotherapy is expressly addressed to people who want to think for themselves. It is not addressed to all the others, nor does it try to talk them into it. The door is open. Everyone has to walk through it himself.

What Is Not Being Claimed Here

Three clarifications, because an essay on the power of thoughts is easily read in a direction in which it does not point.

First, it is not being claimed that illnesses arise from faulty thinking or that the sick are to blame for their condition. Genes, infections, accidents, poverty, and old age exist, and no thought abolishes them. What is being claimed is that thoughts have a measurable share in how people experience stress, how their bodies respond to expectations, and how they cope with illness. That is less than a promise of salvation and more than most people care to admit.

Second, it is not being claimed that the studies cited prove the power of thoughts in every individual case. The study from Wuhan and Claremont is a preprint that has not yet been peer-reviewed, the work on aging and stress consists of observational studies, and individual experiments such as the one with the milkshake are small and have not been directly replicated. What is robust is the overall picture, not every single finding — and this overall picture agrees with what thinkers from three cultures observed independently of one another over two and a half millennia.

Third, it is not being claimed that people who do not want to think are worse people. What is described is a mechanism, not a group of people. Everyone, myself included, is in some area or other a contented monkey who lets someone else count his nuts. The question is not whether one is, but whether one knows it.

Who Counts the Nuts?

Back to the monkeys. Zhuangzi did not tell his story in order to make fun of animals. He told it to describe the sage, who is not moved by the back-and-forth of such judgments and rests in balance within himself.¹ The difference between the monkey and the sage does not lie in the number of nuts. Both get seven. The difference lies in who does the counting.

Marcus Aurelius noted that the soul takes on the color of its thoughts. The studies of this century add that it passes this color on to the body as well: to hormones, to blood pressure, and possibly to the number of years one lives. The question that remains is one that none of the classics could answer for the reader, and no self-help book ever will: who holds the brush.

In 1784 Kant recorded the formula with which the immature person spares himself the trouble of thinking: "I have no need to think, if only I can pay." Two hundred and forty-two years later, the counter-account can be drawn up. You can buy books that have understanding for you, experts who interpret for you, and insurance that pays for both. What you acquire this way, however, is not someone else's thinking, only its result. The consequences you bear yourself: in your mind, in your body, in your freedom.

"Thinking can be delegated; its consequences cannot. Whoever does not think for himself pays twice: once to whoever thinks for him, and once with his own health."

Most people, Bertrand Russell wrote in 1925, would sooner die than think⁴⁴ — an observation that has since disappeared from his book, though not from reality. For everyone else, there is an alternative. It is strenuous, it can be learned, and it begins with a single decision: to count the next nuts yourself.

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