The Backwards Law

Definition

The "law of reversed effort," or "backwards law," holds that trying hard to secure a positive state — happiness, security, certainty — is often precisely what produces its opposite. Burkeman frames this as a "negative path" to happiness: instead of chasing positive feelings and eliminating uncertainty, insecurity, failure, and sadness, real stability comes from turning toward those things and learning to tolerate them.

In the Book

Burkeman opens with Alan Watts's formulation, quoted as the book's epigraph: "when you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float... insecurity is the result of trying to be secure." He grounds this first in a scene at "Get Motivated!," a Texas motivational seminar where guru Robert Schuller urges 15,000 attendees to "cut the word impossible out of your life" — only for Burkeman to learn, months later, that Schuller's own glass-walled megachurch had filed for bankruptcy. From there he argues that the "negative path" is not a single doctrine but a family of approaches — Stoic premeditation of evils, Buddhist non-attachment, memento mori, embracing failure — unified by the same backwards logic: efforts to eliminate the negative are what cause the negative to persist. He is explicit that this isn't contrarianism for its own sake ("you won't do yourself any favours by walking into the path of oncoming buses") but a counterweight to a culture that treats optimism as the only route to happiness.

Why It Matters

The backwards law reframes failure not as evidence you tried the wrong tactic, but as evidence the whole strategy of direct pursuit was self-undermining. It applies wherever a system's attempt to force an outcome amplifies the very problem it's fighting — anxious reassurance-seeking that deepens anxiety, a team chasing a morale metric that tanks morale, a person gripping a relationship so tightly it drives the other person away. Recognizing the pattern suggests a different move: stop attacking the symptom directly and change your relationship to it instead.