No Desires, No Happiness

The book “No Wishes, No Happiness” is a landmark autobiographical story by Nobel laureate Peter Handke, written in the 1970s. Its main idea is that a person cannot live without some meaningful goal; a pointless, soulless existence is against human nature; awareness confined to a circle of monotonous everyday actions prevents a person from grasping the wider world and finding their place among other people—so they end up lonely in an indifferent society of “universal well-being.”