Waking Up

Waking Up: Summary

At sixteen, Sam Harris sat alone on the shore of an alpine lake for three days. It was the climax of a twenty-three-day wilderness program in the mountains of Colorado: fasting, silence, nothing but him and his own thoughts. And do you know what he wrote in his journal? Long lists of the cheeseburgers he was craving. The letters he sent home read as if they were written from a trench, dripping with that much self-pity. He was miserable.

The thing is, some of his companions, who were a decade older than him, experienced that same solitude as one of the turning points of their lives. Harris could not make sense of it. How can anyone's happiness grow when every external pleasure is taken away? Years later he understood where the problem lay: at sixteen, the nature of his own mind did not interest him in the slightest. Only his life interested him. And yet, as he later put it, our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had, and they are all we can offer others.

This book rests on a single bold claim: there is a kind of happiness that does not depend on what happens to you. It does not arrive with the next raise, the perfect vacation, or a new relationship. It is here, now, free of charge, in your mind. Harris is after the answers to three big questions. Why does nothing we acquire make us happy for long? What exactly is this "I" that talks in your head all day? And can spirituality be a serious, examinable thing, free of superstition, that gives even an atheist something real? The answers are uncomfortable, sometimes shocking, but all of them can be tested in the laboratory of your own life.