Almost every self-help book seems to be about how to be happy, how to be empowered, how to be in a fabulous relationship, how to make a million… in other words, how to be anything other than the inevitably suffering beings that most of us are (at least at some point in our lives!) Taking the exact opposite tack, award-winning author, filmmaker, and self-made millionaire William Arntz has chosen the surprising and frequently comical approach to self-help by teaching people how to suffer.

We all experience suffering, so why fight it? Better to embrace it, understand it and learn to walk the path in harmony. Better to understand the steps we take to arrive at suffering than to pretend they are not there. Perhaps, in the recognition of those steps, we might stand a chance of escaping. From the Suffering Cycle and how to construct your very own Sufferometer to the nature of earthly duality, which guarantees suffering.

The book reveals the things we all do that create earthly angst and misery (no matter how much money we make or how amazing our love life is) – all of it set forth with sly, tongue-in-cheek humour that takes the sting, if not the truth, out of Will’s suffering formula.