Instead of a typical self-help book that promises happiness, Watzlawick writes a "manual of unhappiness". Using caustic humor and irony, he describes the mechanisms by which people complicate our lives, create problems out of nothing, and manage to remain unhappy.
The book is based on the idea that many of us are "professionals" at tormenting ourselves by adopting specific behaviors such as:
Obsession with the past.
Creating self-fulfilling prophecies (I believe something will go wrong, so I act in a way that ultimately makes it go wrong).
Denial of reality.