Transcript: How to Rewrite Your Negative Thoughts – Alain de Botton on Modern Wisdom

You know, this changes your sense. You think, “well of course I can do something because look at those not that impressive people who I once saw around the kitchen.”

So a lot about self-esteem is thinking “how do I stack up next to other people?” Is the world shaped by gods? Or broadly speaking by people like you and I. I know we’re in a religious place and you must be seeming godly to the audience, but the good thing is you’re not. And I think that’s one of the good things about modern technology is that it’s helped to show the world that those, because it’s given a very granular close-up sense of people in so-called positions of power, authority. And that’s helped to kind of imaginatively level the imaginative playing field in a way.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So you feel closer to them.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: You feel closer to them, you see that they’re humans too. And that can be inspiring.

The Yogurt Lid Moment

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There was an incident that a friend had when recording a podcast, which I needed a name for, and we’ve come to call it a “yogurt lid moment.” So he was sitting down to record with a very famous author, and he’s idolized this guy for a very long time, you know, titan of literature, setting down. His camera team are all setting everything up, and he’s in the guest’s house, and the guest says, “would you mind if I went and got a yogurt?” And he’s like, “well, it’s your house, your yogurt. Please continue.”

The guest walks away, goes to the fridge and opens it up, gets yogurt out, sits down opposite my friend. Everyone’s still pottering around, and my friend sat opposite this guy that he’d revered for decades. You know, just saw as this sort of untouchable demigod, watched him look at the yogurt, take the lid off, put it up to his face, and then lick the lid of the yogurt. And he said, at that moment, the veils fell from my eyes, and I saw him as the fallible human. And it’s that yogurt lid moment, this sort of weird mortal trip.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Think of the way that we’re introduced to life, really. You know, we start off very small, and we’re surrounded by very large people who seem to know how to do extraordinary things. You know, they can throw a ball over a tree, they can speak a foreign language, they can do very complicated math. And we are tiny. And it takes such a long time to think, “actually, these gods, these colossi, are just human.”

So the number one sort of class differentiator is childhood, as it were, because we all start in this very subordinate class, which is the child, and we then look up to the adult. I mean, think of those times when, I don’t know if you had this, but you’re at school and then it’s the weekend, and you go to the shops, and suddenly you see the French teacher in the aisles of the shop, and you think, “what’s that person doing there? You know, there’s Mr. Gregory, he’s buying cereal.” And you think that guy is just, you know, it comes back to your yogurt point. It’s that guy’s human.

And we’re always catching up with that idea. X or Y is human. And isn’t it interesting that very basic thought is still always a bit of a surprise. We’re always on the back foot with that insight.

The Asymmetry of Self-Knowledge

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why is that related to self-esteem? Why is self-esteem not contained within our own system?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Well, Chris, because we’ve got this very unfortunate thing that we know ourselves from the inside and we know other people only from what they choose to tell us. And so we’ve got this massive imbalance of data and we are so weird to ourselves and so embarrassing and so flawed. Anyone with a modicum of self-awareness is going to have, if they’re honest, should have a slightly hard time tolerating themselves.

Because the stuff that goes on in our minds, the stuff that goes on in our minds is, you know, if it was published, I mean, we’d all be excommunicated immediately. That’s not a sign necessarily that we’re so degenerate. It’s just a sign that we’re having still a very hard time admitting what it is to be human at an interpersonal level.

We’re still, despite all these ways we have of sharing data, it’s still a sort of surprise. I mean, you know what it’s like in a relationship or a close friendship when, you know, late at night you’re able to go to your new pal. You’re able to go, “you know, do you ever have that thing when…” And they go, “yeah, yeah, yeah, that thing. And no one’s ever mentioned it?” You know, there’s still a societal silence. And then the intimacy that grows from being able to say “we’re a bit weird.”

Now, the truth is we’re a bit weird like everybody else, but there is still an imbalance of knowledge and a sense. I mean, you know that thing where kids say things like, “my family’s so weird. Other people’s families are so normal. You know, I went to Billy’s family, you know, his mum’s really normal. Why are you so weird?” And then of course, in time, you realize, Billy’s family’s not normal. You just don’t know them.

Everyone Is Weird Up Close

You know, we don’t know other people as well as we know ourselves. And so we tend to think that those close to us are a bit more mad than anybody else. We go, “you know, my mum, she’s really mad.” Or “my ex are really mad.” I mean, this goes on in the dating world, relationship world, where, you know, men will go, “women so crazy. You know, women are really crazy.” And then, you know, in a female camp, women are going, “oh, men, they’re just really…” And you want to go, “look, guys, it’s everybody.”

It’s not men, it’s not women, it’s not the young, it’s not the oldest, it’s everybody close up. It’s just that we often have the privilege of not knowing people close up enough. And therefore we still retain illusions. You get this in travel, right? People go, “oh, the Greeks, well they’re really, they’re better than us, you know, we’ve got all these tools.” Or “the Americans, they have a certain whatever.” And then of course once you’re inside that society, you go, “nah, it’s the same everywhere.” But anyway, we’ve got to have illusions and bless us.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So the closer that people get to you, the more you see their flaws. But unfortunately no one is ever going to be as close to you as you are. And you have this huge asymmetry, a million to one, of the bit rate of data that you’re able to see of yourself. And the vacillations, the self-doubt as you ping pong back and forth.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Should I go?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I don’t know if I should go and buy that. I don’t know if I should get that pair of shoes. I should get that pair. I’m not going to get that pair of shoes. No, I might do. And you go to sleep and you think, “I spent last night staying awake wondering about whether or not I was going to buy a pair of shoes. I’m insane. I mean, I must be committed,” not knowing that that is the sort of thought that even you wouldn’t tell your spouse. “I didn’t sleep well last night.” “Why?” “I was thinking about this pair of shoes.” It’s so mundane and boring that you don’t even share that sort of thing.

The Need for Others

ALAIN DE BOTTON: The other thing is from the inside, it’s very hard to know who you are. And one of the interesting things is how people go a bit mad when they spent too long alone. If you spend a long time alone, you sort of, you don’t know, certain thoughts go a little too far. And one of the great things about company, you know, why do we need other people? Just to be able to kind of hold us slightly in check in small ways and large. They kind of go, “no, that thought is getting a little too extreme.” Whatever. They define us.

But also the other thing that people help us to do, other people is give us a compact sense of who we are that eludes us. So I see you and I go, “there’s Chris now.” When you’re all alone, you don’t think you’re Chris, you just think, “I’m consciousness in the universe. I’m just, you know, I’m just a giant net that’s capturing thoughts and impressions.” You don’t know that you have a name, a beginning, a middle or an end. And when we’re in company, people go, “oh, you’re that guy who does this.” Or, you know, you’ve… So other people’s caricatured vision of us is actually quite helpful to us because you think, “oh, you know, I’m that relatively simple soul that other people…”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Unifies us, gives us a sense of story.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Yeah. And also because, you know, if I look at you, you look unified, you know, got two eyes, a nose, a mouth, you know, you’re relatively compact. But inside you, turmoil, any of that. It’s a vast, shapeless landscape.

Imposter Syndrome as Honesty

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is this, is self-esteem related to imposter syndrome? I think imposter syndrome was already something that I was seeing a lot of, and now I’m seeing more about increasingly this sense that the world expects something of me that maybe I’ve even actually done previously, but I’m scared about whether or not I’m going to be able to deliver it.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Look, I think it’s, I know imposter syndrome causes people problems, but I’m reassured if somebody suffers from imposter syndrome, it’s a sign of honesty. It’s a sign of self-awareness. Of course it has its extreme versions, which, you know, causes people a lot of pain. But if someone is aware that they might be a charlatan or might be putting off a confidence trick, that’s honesty. That’s great. That’s a starting point.

You know, it’s just like somebody who knows they might be evil is a good person. You know, evil people don’t worry they might be evil. So it’s, you know, you’re likely to be authentic and genuine if sometimes you think, “am I a fake?” That’s a good sign.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s a good starting point in the same way as identifying that you’re a bad driver is a good starting point for not driving fast 100%. But it doesn’t necessarily make you better on the roads. So where do we go to? Where is becoming a better driver? Okay, my imposter syndrome. Thank you, Alain. You’ve told me that I’m not so up my own a that I can’t see my own flaws. Hooray. What about starting to work through that? What about starting to get a better sense of our own capacities and capabilities?

Finding Your Talents Through Experience

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Look, a lot of it is bouncing against the world and testing yourself against reality. It’s very hard to know your talents until you’ve had a go at something. And I think we all have this sense sometimes that some things come more easily to us than to others.

You know, I don’t know how great tennis players start, but they must have a sense, oh, I was able to hit that ball and that worked quite well, or a great writer is able to think, I was able to pull off quite a nice little sentence there. And that’s the beginning of a kind of growing confidence. You need that kind of start.

And, you know, I think a good life doesn’t require you to do everything. It requires you to do the things that you feel you’re capable of and that you’re especially good at. It’s no humiliation for me that I can’t play tennis, for example, if somebody goes, you know, you’re terrible, because I don’t sense a talent. But I do sense talent in that tiny area of assembling words. That’s the area, you know. But maths I can’t do, you know, architecture I can’t really do. So many things I can’t do. So it’s about finding those little sweet spots.

The Archaeology of Self-Discovery

And one of the great puzzles in life is how do people find their vocation? How do people find their core identity, their talents? And I sometimes think of it as, it’s like you’re passing a metal detector over the ground and very occasionally something will let off a little beep, a beep of intensity, of interest, of heightened thoughtfulness. And you think, there’s a fragment here below the ground of my true self.

Now, my true self was shattered, or it came in disassembled form, it’s buried, it’s scattered over a vast area. And the task of life is to recreate it from hints. And I think that, you know, one of the great challenges, I mean, I think one of the big, big challenges and it happens to every young person, is what should I do with my life? It’s one of these central questions, a philosophy in a way, because unless you’re a very rare person, you will have to assemble a vision of your future.

It’s not going to come ready made and there won’t be a voice from the sky going, “you are an accountant” or “you are a downhill skier.” It’s going to be something you have to assemble and you’ll assemble it in bits. You’ll have to recreate the original statue of you that was shattered a long time ago and that lies across a vast area. So like an archaeologist of the self, you have to build that up and you have to build it up out of those little beeps of interest.

Using Envy as a Guide

And I think a good thing there is envy. People speak very, very low and embarrassed way about envy. You know, you’re not supposed to feel envious. I think very often when you feel a beep of envy, it’s because there’s a fragment of your true ambition and your true self in the life of another person. And rather than going, oh, I must run away from it, go, no, this is a clue. What is there that you are envious of?

And often envy is a very inaccurate emotion. We envy the whole of someone when actually it tends to be a part of them that we want. And so we go, I’m envious of that singer, actor, business person. You want to go, hang on, hang on. It won’t be the whole thing. Drill into it what really is core here, and you might realize it’s actually not their fame, their money, it’s that they work with their hands or it’s that they live in a log cabin somewhere, far away from other people or whatever it is.

So the best thing to do with envy is to see it as a guide for your own ambition, not a sign of your innate jealousy and inadequacy. It’s a clue.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I always think about envy as the only one of the seven deadly sins that doesn’t feel good.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Remind me of the other seven deadly sins. Gluttony.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Gluttony. Sloth.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Sloth doesn’t feel good.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You don’t think sloth feels good? Have you not spent a good Sunday afternoon watching some horrible TV show on the show?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: But think of the self disgust that sloth often brings, right? You know you’re lying on the sofa and you know that you’re scrolling Instagram and you know that your better self is being eroded. And so there’s guilty sloth, good sloth and guilty sloth.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah, interesting. The imposter syndrome thing, I think when it gets turned up too high, especially with low self esteem, can turn into this sort of very loud, critical inner voice, this sort of self hatred thing.

Handling Criticism and Self-Forgiveness

I wonder whether there’s better ways, given that we’re already quite critical of ourselves. Everybody is. How do you come to think about handling external criticism? You’re an adult now, you’re a big boy. Maybe this is in your professional life. Maybe it’s a personal comment on the way that you showed up at dinner. And yet, at least in my experience, there are very few people who are psychologically healthy and still able to cope with criticism about something they care about in a way that doesn’t really hurt. So how do you think about dealing with criticism?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Look, I think one of the most galling things is criticism when it’s warranted, when you have actually made a mistake. And you know, one of the most awful things about being human is that you’re constantly hurting others. You know, we are constantly hurting others in small ways and large, often through stupidity, exhaustion, narrow mindedness.

And then if we’re moral people, and most of us are, it then hurts. It hurts that we have hurt someone. How do we move on from that? How do we not sink into a hole? How can we live to see another day? We need to forgive ourselves for the sake of ourselves and those who depend on us.

And this is where, broadly speaking, friendship comes in. You know, we need trusted others in whom we can confide. And we’re sitting in this religious space. Confession has a long history. We need to be able to confess to a loving audience that can say, “I know that you have done bad, but your heart is good,” you know, and that’s a complex maneuver.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Of the mind and also something difficult to do in solitude or solo. While the other people can’t do it.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Solo, we can’t do it solo. I think this is, you know, one of the reasons why solitude is very challenging. Because we simply cannot bring to ourselves the self compassion that we need to keep going. And, you know, we are social creatures. If we began well in childhood, someone will have looked at us through the eyes of love.

And to look at someone through the eyes of love is to see that though they may have done ill, they mean well. And it sounds simple, but it’s, you know, all of life is in there. And of course then to be able to pull off that maneuver for other people, I mean, you know, it’s no coincidence that the great religions all circle this. They all circle this business of confession, forgiveness, charity to others.

I don’t mean financial charity though, you know, that has a role, but it’s really charity of spirit. It’s something we desperately need, are very bad at. And yet without it, society soon gums up.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: We can’t go on and we can’t provide it to ourselves. Which is why it’s so important. You need to be told that it’s important for you to do it to other people because there’s this odd sort of co-philanthropy that’s occurring. I am going to pay into the pot and you are going to pay into the pot and everybody’s going to withdraw from the pot. It’s this sort of the council tax, I suppose, of human goodness.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Yeah, that’s beautiful. And you know, many of us are lonely. I mean, this is one of the great secrets of life, that we don’t have enough of these people. We’re surrounded by people, but how many of us, how many of those are really the people who in the middle of the night, at crisis moment is going to be able to deliver that kind of broadly, we could call it reassurance, a confessional ear and a sense of that we are worthy of forgiveness?

The Challenge of Male Friendship

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Do you think this is a challenge that particularly men face? This having someone that is a sympathetic ear, the troubles of being tied up in your fragile male ego, male friendships and male support seems to be a tough thing. Tough needle to thread.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: It’s a really tough needle to thread. I think that being a man comes with all sorts of challenges, but one of them is that masculinity is presented as a kind of achievement. You know how boys taunt each other in the school playground and they’ll go, “you’re a girl,” as though there’s a kind of slippery slope. The top of the slope is manhood and at the bottom is girlhood. And if you’re not careful, you’ll become a girl again, as it were.

There’s a sort of sense of when you were a baby, and that’s the other taunt, baby. When you were a baby, you were in the feminine camp, and then through effort, you became a man. But that achievement is precarious. So men are always feeling the precarity of their identity. And that’s a very unstable business.

Look, I think the best men are those who’ve been broken by life and have pulled through, have come out the other end.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Because they’ve been forced by circumstances to drop the illusion of their strength and power. They’ve known that they couldn’t keep that going. They’ve hit rock bottom and they’ve had to reach out and say, “I can’t cope. I am in infantile position. You know, help me.”

I mean, men become rather glorious when that’s happened to them, because that’s when there’s true humanity, sympathy. But some men, they never get there. You know, it’s posture, posture, posture. It’s defensive posture all the way. And I can spot them a mile away. The men who’ve been broken.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How do you? What do they look like?

Recognizing Emotional Capacity in Others

ALAIN DE BOTTON: You just sense that there’s a modesty. Deep down, there’s a modesty, and you just feel, I think people give off, I often notice it, a sense of how much you could tell them and how much they’d be able to bear.

Often it’s picked up in little things. You know, people say, “how was your weekend? Is it great? Was it good?” You go, oh, wow. That person really needs my weekend to have gone well, because they don’t have much space. My weekend to have gone badly.

Someone goes, “how’s your weekend?” There’s space in that. There’s space in that. You feel the space. They’re like, oh, I might have been crying on the bathroom floor. That could happen. I might have wanted to take my life on Saturday. But Sunday things cheered up, you know, there’s room for the extremity of what it is to be human. And those are the people you want to watch out for.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I read an article a couple of weeks ago talking about how lots of men say there needs to be more room for men to open up about their emotions. We should have that in the real world. And when the rubber meets the road personally for them, a lot of the time guys still struggle to receive weakness and vulnerability from other men.

So they’re saying I want the world to be able to accept my vulnerability whilst not really being that comfortable with accepting it from other people. Myself, I don’t think that there’s many asymmetries and women have got it bad in some ways and men have got it bad in others. But I think this is a particular asymmetry that men deal with more that I think women are good at doing the nurturing thing, especially to other women.

I think that men are bad at doing the nurturing thing generally, especially to other men. And there are already enough challenges of men opening up to women. Oh, how am I going to be seen? My fragile masculinity will be shattered. Maybe she’ll tell her friends or maybe it’s my partner, she won’t be attracted to me anymore.

And I just think that was, I’d never seen it put that way previously that guys want to be able to be vulnerable and yet when they see other male vulnerability, it makes them very, very uncomfortable. They’ll quote, tweet it online, mocking it, or they won’t reach out in the way that’s needed.

And a couple of the reasons that were put forward are, well, maybe it highlights why you might be weak too. This is somebody being vulnerable. And that throws into sharp contrast the fact that hey, guess what, you’ve got vulnerabilities as well.

Another part of this, a little bit of an evolutionary psychology explanation that we have coalitions. We would go out hunting and a guy that’s not that strong and stoic might not be a great coalitional partner. What if we get to the end of the hunt and he can’t be bothered to turn around and go back? Many, many other reasons.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: But yeah, I…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Think that’s an angle that guys, especially guys who want to be integrated to transcend and include in Wilburian language, you should take a good look in the mirror in not just being able to talk about your emotions, but in paying into the pot, right? Not just withdrawing from the taxes, but also, hey, I’m going to be here and I’m going to be here even to people maybe that, I don’t know, this random guy on the Internet as opposed to saying, hahaha, this person’s going…

This person was really hurting. And f* if I was hurting, I’d probably want someone to be there for me, so maybe I should try and do the same for them despite not knowing them.

The Psychology of Bullying

ALAIN DE BOTTON: I’m thinking of bullying. It’s a strange word and it’s an embarrassing word, but it exists. The impulse to bully the weak. What is it? I mean, anyone who’s been through school, which is everybody, knows about it, right?

You see somebody who’s, the typical target for bullying is somebody in a school whose life seems softer, more indulged than yours. They still seem stuck in a way at a privileged level. Their mother bakes some biscuits or packs their teddy bear in their school bag or whatever it is, and you think, hang on a minute. I’ve had to be tough. I’ve had to grow up, I’ve had to, I’ve not been indulged.

And I’m going to punish in another person, not just the weakness, but the privilege, the emotional privilege that I see that they get to. They get to walk around thinking that it’s okay to be a bit weak and a bit soft. Well, that’s not okay for me. So I resent this privilege and I’m going to make sure that their life gets a bit miserable and that’s how you end up bullying.

And parents bully their children. I mean, it’s just a great taboo, but they do. It’s a real challenge for a parent to see somebody having a life that’s softer than the one they had. And there’s a real impulse to say, hang on, I resent you for your privilege. Not financial, emotional privilege. Why do you get to be indulged in a way I wasn’t? It’s very hard to bear that asymmetry.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How do people overcome that? Let’s say that you are a parent and you did grow up in a household that was perhaps not as emotionally forgiving as it should have been. You didn’t feel quite as supported.

And I imagine this is a really complex emotion to feel, which my favorite ones. I grew up in a household that didn’t have room for my emotions. I did a lot of self work in order to be able to understand that and then try and wipe that slime off me so that I can give a better life to my kids.

My kids come along, they start to have this better life. And somehow in seeing the better life that I designed and tried to overcome in order to be able to make happen, resentment has now come in. And now I feel shame at my resentment and I feel bitterness at my shame about my resentment and anxiety about my bitterness about my shame about my resentment.

And it’s this infinite regress of emotions that you made happen in a positive way. Congratulations. Hooray. You overcame this. You were a circuit breaker in this sort of weird serial of string lights. And you feel bad about it.

The Tragedy of Being Human

ALAIN DE BOTTON: I mean, I’m laughing, right, because this is where we’re hitting kind of the tragedy of being human, which is you try so hard to get it right and you’re trying to get this right and something else goes wrong. And we do need a warm, rich laughter. This is not merely the icing on the cake. It is one of the great solutions.

I mean, we’re juggling here with the incompatibilities of raising children. It’s maddening. You avoid one problem, you set off another one. I think that, yes. So look, I think we do so much work on ourselves and still we’re at square one.

There’s an old Jewish saying, “Man thinks, God laughs.” In other words, we’re thinking that we can master something. We can master a problem. It’s so difficult. But I want to talk about, I want to think about sadism because we’re talking about bullying.

It’s really weird word, sadism. What is that? Maybe it’s a sex kink or it’s something that really weird people, all of us, carry a sadistic impulse, I want to say impulse, in other words, an impulse to turn our own suffering into a desire to punish or give suffering to another person. It always comes from pain in ourselves and we want to pass it on.

And you see, low level, low level, minuscule, very hard to observe sadism in daily life in all sorts of areas. You see, in relationships, people are sadistic to their partners. I mean, if there were angels, they would be weeping as they looked at human nature and what are we doing to ourselves and to each other?

But there’s an economy of suffering. All meanness is inherited. All impulse to be mean is coming down the generations from somebody else. And we keep playing pass the parcel with our suffering. We go, oh, look, I’ve got some suffering. Oh, do you want some? Because I’m just, it’s going to make me feel better.

And that’s how we end up, that guy stole my foot. I’m going to take their eye. Oh, that person hacked off my left finger. Well, I’ll chop off their ear and then, I take a side of their skull and on and on and on it goes.

Fame as a Marker of Childhood Wounds

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I remember you saying a marker of good parenting is that your children don’t have any wish to be famous.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Yes, there might be a few exceptions to that rule, but I think an outsized desire to shine in the eyes of strangers, to be known by people you don’t know, is a sign of pathology, I believe. And we’re sitting here, you and I…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: In front of lots of cameras, in…

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Front of lots of, lots of strangers. So something’s gone wrong for us. I mean, and it’s so basic. I don’t know enough about your childhood. I know a bit about mine. You will have felt invisible. I mean, why become a little bit more visible than everybody else if you don’t carry within you a deep sense of having been invisible and unheard?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is there not a natural pull for that? Generally that’s kind of written into the source code of humans. Oh, I suppose, actually, yes there is. And it’s everybody else and the fact that you are an outlier within that suggests that you are different. Right, okay, I’ve answered my own question, thank you.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Yeah, so I think there’s a compensatory business going on and I think the ability to have a so called ordinary life is a massive achievement. It’s, if we can put it this way, an exceptional achievement.

It’s like comedians. People who have an outsized need to make others laugh are almost always children who were facing something not funny at all that they needed to find a way through. They learned to make jokes because there was something pretty sad around that they learned to manage.

And in all of these, when dealing with those people or those sort of people are listening now, the response should always be what? How did the way in which I grew up figure as a solution to a problem that I was facing? And therefore could I now, at whatever age you’re at, cut myself some slack and try something else?

I needed to laugh in order to be tolerated. What would it mean to be serious? I needed to be famous in order to survive. What would it mean to think about obscurity? Or indeed, I needed to be painfully modest and always underperform in order not to spark jealousy. What happens if I tried something different?

These are the major sort of breakpoints, turning points in a life when you think the things I needed to do to get me through childhood are now hampering my possibilities in adulthood. The situations that required that behavior are no longer in existence. What happens if I tried something different? But in order to do that, you have to see the pattern that you were set by your childhood.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Marc Maron, comedian, says, “The monster I created to protect the child inside of me is difficult to manage.”

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Beautiful. Love it.

Status Anxiety and the Need to Be Seen

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Status anxiety kind of related to that, this need to be seen. Look at me. Hello, I’m here. I mentioned before because we are recording in a church or an old church at the moment that just by chance you might have decided to wear your flowing robes today. Unfortunately not.

But that need, that desire, look at me, look at how special I am. Look at how impressive I am. Status anxiety is going to be there. I think no matter how enlightened you are. I want to feel like I’m needed by the people and respected and admired by people I admire. That’s a pretty big one.

Is there a good way to deal with, is there a healthy way to sort of deal with status and status anxiety?

The Role of Religion in Feeling Known and Valued

ALAIN DE BOTTON: It’s funny you mentioned churches. I mean, the really helpful thing about religions is that they tend to tell their believers that someone really knows them and really cares about them and is looking at them. And if you think about the impulse to be rich and famous and esteemed, it’s really a desire that gets soaked up by religions.

Religions are saying, everybody, you know, in Christianity, every hair on your head is numbered. In other words, someone’s really looking at you. Someone knows you in the way that a parent, a good parent, knows a child.

You know, the great thing about early childhood in a good and loving family is that child is a superstar. You know, they come in, they sing a song, everyone claps, they’re happy. You know, in the morning, it’s like the little prince has arrived, the princess is doing a pirouette.

That doesn’t make a child entitled. Entitlement comes from deprivation. The ability to absorb an ordinary life comes from early emotional privilege. If the child is able to be the center of the universe in the early years, they will be able to accept, without too much psychological damage, a subsidiary position in adult life.

The need to be always at the center and always important is a compensation. It’s not a sign of health. And therefore a good childhood is connected up with the ability to give your child that charge of specialness so that then they can go on to do that much more important thing, which is to be ordinary, to accept ordinariness, which is a massive challenge. And all of us are, in the end, ultimately ordinary, and that’s okay.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And to not feel shame.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: And not feel shame. Yeah. And to accept that there are limits on your power. You will need to die. You will accept your finitude.

The Shame of Simple Pleasures

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I wrote a little essay about shame I wanted to read to you, if that’s okay. So I’ve been thinking about the shame of simple pleasures. This is a quote from a friend: “I have not yet grown wise enough to deeply enjoy simple things.”

We are all terrible accountants of our own joy. Most of us only accept deposits when the transaction is sufficiently large. The day we get married, the night we play the main stage at Glastonbury, the moment the business sells for $100 million. Anything less and the entry doesn’t even make the ledger.

We treat small pleasures like counterfeit currency. Oh, that thing made your day. That small moment made your week. How feeble, how desperate, how limited your life must be to be thrilled by something so unimpressive. You must not have a lot going on.

We roll our eyes at the tiny events that others get excited at, as though joy must be proportionate to scale. And yet life is made up of little things exactly like this. Not once in a while, but always. Your life is constructed out of moments so small they wouldn’t even register as an event on anyone’s calendar.

So why can’t something small be something great? Well, sometimes I feel things more deeply than I should do, including the shame at feeling things more deeply than I should do. Also including the shame of being delighted by little things more than I think I should, as if taking pleasure in something tiny reveals the smallness of my life.

But perhaps that’s exactly backward. Maybe the true richness of a life is how much joy you can harvest from the smallest possible patch of soil. And here’s the payoff: when you lower the threshold for joy, you don’t just get more of it, you get it now.

Who is truly the more impressive person? The one who requires a huge cathedral of bullshit fanfare and galactic accomplishments in order to get the slightest flicker of pleasure, like some masochist at a sex party demanding car batteries get clamped onto his nipples before he can even get started? Or the person who can do it with a good coffee and a fresh breeze?

How We’re Easily Led in Our Sense of What Matters

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Love it. I mean, Chris, it makes me think that we’re incredibly easily led in our sense of what matters in life. We’re really bad judges, independent judges of significance.

So if somebody says, you know, that artwork on the wall that’s really expensive, that’s really famous, that used to belong to a king or a queen, we think, oh, it’s marvelous. And if we don’t know who the painter was, who the artist was or what it is, we think, oh, that can’t be any good.

So it’s almost comedic, isn’t it, how supine and dumb we are in deciding for ourselves what matters. So, you know, you do get this in culture. If a book wins a prize, everybody decides that book’s amazing. Before it won the prize, everybody thought it was boring. And, you know, the book hasn’t changed.

I often think about this in terms, I’m a great fan of flying. I love flying. And I wouldn’t have…

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I wouldn’t have guessed that about you.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Love it. And I love the technology. I love the, you know, all those things, the beauty, aesthetics. Anyway, I’m always struck by the way in which flying has nowadays very low prestige in the world compared, let’s say, to art.

So if you say to somebody, “I’m going to a gallery and I’m going to look at some pictures,” everyone goes, “Oh, that’s very, you know, it’s a noble thing to do.” “I’m going to take a flight, and on the flight, I’m going to open the window and I’m going to look at the clouds and I’m going to really delight in them. And I’m thinking, oh, my goodness, this is better than any painting by Leonardo or Poussin or whatever. This is just striking, right?”

People would think you’re making a big deal of it. “Shut that window, I’m trying to watch a film.” So it’s not that prestigious to look out the window. And that’s just a tiny example of how bad we are at finding significance by ourselves.

True Creativity and Independent Arbiters of Significance

I think this is true creativity. True creativity is when you have a sense that your pleasure could be legitimate wherever it lies. So if you happen to like pebbles, go for it. You know, that’s going to be your pleasure. Or if you like the way that sunlight hits, you know, a window blind or concrete, that’s going to be the thing for you.

And I think small children have it more naturally. That’s what makes small children delightful to adults. You know how it is if you take a small child to a park, it’s hilarious. You can’t even get to the swings because they will have stopped. The child will have stopped, maybe by a wall or they’ll have noticed, you know, a piece of chewing gum in a rock.

And you think, “Enough looking at it, whatever,” and you go, “Come on, let’s go to the swing.” And they don’t want to go to the swing because they’ve discovered a tuft of grass growing out of a concrete ledge or whatever it is. They are independent arbiters of significance.

By fifteen, they’re like, “Well, what did Drake like? Or what, you know, what’s X telling me?”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: They’ve outsourced their sense of taste.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Exactly. And that’s so tedious. I mean, bless them, everybody does it. But ideally, by the time you get to full maturity, you become a bit weirder once more. And that’s what makes certain adults really delightful. They go, “Doesn’t matter what everybody thinks. For me, I’m liking this thing.”

The Courage to Define Pleasure for Yourself

I sometimes think about it in terms of entertaining. I don’t know how much entertaining you do. When people say, “I’m going to have a dinner party, I’m going to invite some friends for dinner,” they get into such a mess, thinking, “How am I going to organize this dinner? Oh, I must have a starter. And maybe it’s a melon or maybe it’s, I don’t know, prawns or something. And then I think, well, I must have this thing called a main course, which might be chicken or something. And then, oh, I got a dessert.”

And they’re just, you know, they’re overflowing with anxiety. And if you said to them, “What do you actually enjoy, you know, if it’s suppertime, what?” And they might go, “Well, I like opening, you know, a can of tuna, putting it on the table, getting some hummus, dipping that, putting my feet up.”

And you thought, “Okay, why don’t you just do that with your mates? Why don’t you just drop the pretense, have the courage to think what’s touching me might touch another person.” And your dinner party is going to be a lot more fun.

This is ultimately, of course, what great artists do. Great artists have a sense that what’s fun for them, what’s meaningful for them, will probably be meaningful for other people. Even though right now there’s quite a lot of silence about that area.

So they’re kind of, they’ve got a faith, we started talking about self-esteem, they’ve got a faith that the things that turn them on are likely to turn other people on as well. And that’s a beautiful confidence. And that’s what leads to great art. Great art is really the courage to define the pleasure for yourself.

Lovely quote from Emerson. He says, “In the minds of geniuses we find our own neglected thoughts.” In the minds of geniuses, we find our own neglected thoughts. In other words, geniuses, so-called geniuses, don’t have thoughts that are completely different from those of other people.

What they do is they take the thoughts that we all have and they give them the significance they deserve, some of them, some of those thoughts. And so that’s why when you pick up a really great book, often you think, “Wow, I’ve always thought that, but I’ve never known how to say it.”

And really what we mean is I’ve never had the courage to give that thought its due because I’m lacking self-esteem.

Boneheaded Self-Belief vs. Gentle Self-Acceptance

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There is a really sort of wonderful blend between boneheaded self-belief, which is kind of rebellious, it feels a bit spiky, sort of a, not that, and a much more sort of warm, cozy sensation, which is I like what I like and I like myself for liking it. Does that make sense? There is this, the rejection of entropy outside and this sort of containment of structure inside.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: And immediately I’m thinking about the background that would have made the second version possible. I’m imagining a parent who says, “Do that thing that you like doing. That’s fine. You know, you can be slightly weird and we don’t think that’s weird here. You can just pursue your own pleasure in a non-brittle way.”

You know, as you say, it’s a gentle acknowledgment of your individuality.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: We are in a place that’s got some pretty wonderful…

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Stained glass art? Does that class as art?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’d imagine.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Let’s play it really loose with the concept of art. Art is anything that, you know, excites us, it seems beautiful.

How to Become Better at Appreciating Art

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You often talk about art in a lot of your books. You have images of different paintings, of different sculptures, stuff like that. How can people become better at appreciating art? They’re white belts at looking at a gallery and they want to have a better appreciation of it. They feel like there’s something that they’re missing. They don’t understand, they don’t know the story of where this painter came from and where they were at at that point in life.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Well, one thought is people tend to think in order to be a decent person who likes art, I’ve got to like everything. I’ve got to go into a museum and I’ve got to just delight in everything.

Think about it in music. People are much saner when it comes to music than when it comes to visual arts. People are really hung up on the visual arts. And I always say, take your cue from music. You know, when you like something musically and you don’t care that there’s loads and loads of other stuff that doesn’t touch you, you don’t mind. You like what you like. You make your own playlist.

So make your own playlist of the art that touches you. And it might be 3% of the art that’s produced by the world. And it might be not any of the famous names. The famous names are on the whole chosen by all sorts of bizarre ways. And find your own way to things that delight you. Be, you know, have the courage.

Also, when walking through a museum, you can’t eat it all at once. I mean, these museums are bizarre. They’re like archives of everything that’s happened over a thousand years. And you’re supposed to kind of spend an afternoon and like it all. It’s just, we can’t absorb it. We can’t metabolize it.

And so I always think, you know, go to a museum. If you find two things that you’d like to ideally nick and put in your house, let’s get going. Be very personal.

People are really normal in the museum gift shop. You know, when they get to the museum gift shop, they’re like, “Right, what postcard shall I buy?” Then they’re thinking, “That’s the way to love art.” It’s like, “What card should I send my granny?” That’s the beginning of art appreciation. Because it’s like, “What do I like? What might they like?” Go for it. All the rest is nonsense.

The Origins and Purpose of Art

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You don’t need to get caught up too much. I wonder what the difference is between music. I completely agree. I’m very unequivocating about the stuff that I like in music. And yet when I go and if I imagine myself sitting in front of a painting, I’d sort of furtively be looking to either side to work out, oh, this seemed very melancholy. This must be a melancholy. I must be somber. But this will be. That’s the way to do it. And I wonder what it is about the medium that makes it a little bit more difficult, a little bit more hard to define your own tastes.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: There’s an ancient Greek myth about the origins of painting. There was apparently a shepherd boy who was in love with a shepherd girl. And the shepherd girl was going to go away. And that night, on their last night together, they were in a cave. And there was a shadow on the cave wall of the shepherd girl. And the shepherd boy took up a piece of chalk and traced the outline of the shepherd girl’s form. And that’s supposed to be—there are lots of paintings of this—the origin of art.

In other words, the impulse to make art comes when something precious is going to vanish. And art could be thought of as a bucket in which you preserve something valuable. And we need art because we can’t hold it all in our own fingers. We can’t absorb it all. And so we outsource it to something that can stabilize it and hold it for us.

That’s the impulse to take a picture. You know when you go to a beautiful place and you go, I like it. There’s always a fear of loss. And you think, I’m going to lose it, so I must take a picture of it. Same thing goes on in art. And so the art that you love is almost always that. The art that contains within it a bit of your true home, your true happiness that is in danger of slipping away.

And it’s going to be different for everybody. I think one of the most interesting questions is why are you touched by the art that touches you? And it tends to be because that art captures something that the person doesn’t have enough of a secure hold on and they need to preserve it.

So for example, I love calm art. You know, I love beautiful empty spaces, linearity, dignity of form. I love it. Is my life like that? Nah, that’s not where I live. I live in chaos. But I love that because that’s my true home. But I’m not there often enough, so it’s a memento. It’s saying, come back to this place. That’s where you need to be in order to be your true self.

The Challenge of Sitting With Yourself

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You mentioned chaos there. Do you think that humans have always been plagued by the need to keep themselves busy? Or is this hustle and grind culture as much of a modern phenomenon as YouTube essays would have us believe?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: I think it’s very hard to sit with yourself because there’s panic about what you might discover. You know, one of the fascinating things is why are we so easily distracted? Why can’t we sit with our thoughts? The reason is that there’s so much about our thoughts that is mixed up with sadness, regret, fear. And it takes courage. It literally takes courage. Which is why the best places to think are often those where there’s a little bit of distraction and a possibility.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: For introspection, have you got any places that you do that yourself?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Trains. Trains. I mean we think we invented railways to go from London to Manchester or New York to Philadelphia. We didn’t. We invented them as places to think. Because in a half empty carriage, what better place than to get to know not the destination but yourself? You’re looking out of the window and there’s enough distraction from the telegraph poles going by or the birds overhead. There’s enough to kind of take your imagination, you know, to kind of tether the more anxious sides of you.

But there’s also enough encouragement to keep going and keep making discoveries. It’s really hard to think when thinking is all you’re meant to do. And if you want to terrify somebody, put them in a blank room and give them a sheet of paper and go write out who you are and what you’re really concerned about. You know, that’s panic inducing.

Why do our best thoughts come to us in the shower? You’re not supposed to be thinking in the shower. You’re just, your mind is let loose from an agenda. That’s when the good thought comes through. Good thoughts are charged with anxiety. Thinking is an anxious process and so we need to give ourselves a little bit of comfort.

That’s why people often like to work in a cafe. It’s like the reason is there’s a lot of bustle around. That bustle’s absorbing the nervous energy and allows sometimes a good thought to come through.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think much better if I have a pen in my hands. And from 18 years of full time education, you know, just sitting in lectures and class and twirling a pen through my fingers. You’re right, it blows off just that additional bit. For me, my favorite place for thinking is doing the washing up dishes.

The Satisfaction of Immediate Results

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Because you’re not supposed to be doing the thinking. And also dishes are so amazing because you go from real mess to real tidiness in three and a half seconds. It’s so quick. And the problem with the modern world is that so many of the things we want to do take so long.

And you know, the great thing about pre-industrial world is that we used to be able to achieve things within a handy time scale. You know, you ran a bakery and in the morning you had the flour and you put it together and the yeast and then it had risen and then you sell it and then, you know, on and on it goes and in a 24 hour cycle you’ve gone through the whole thing.

Nowadays most people work in organizations of a thousand, 2,000 people. They’re working on projects that will take years to come to fruition. I sometimes think, why do people love sports? Again, sports take place within a concentrated time period. You know, football match is 90 minutes. Within 90 minutes there will be an objective, a goal, a victory, defeat. It’s manageable.

Most of us have lives in which the pitch is 8,000 kilometers long, the game takes 20 years, there’s 25 balls, there’s 18 goal posts. You don’t know what’s going on. You lose the thread of your own life and of the game that you’re meant to be playing. Which is why so many of us have crises where we think, hang on a minute, what am I supposed to be doing? Because we’re within complex organizations that deny us that clarity of the earlier pre-industrial world.

Understanding Existential Crises

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What is an existential crisis, in your opinion?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: I mean, it’s a word that sometimes people reach when they feel that the building blocks of their life have ceased to make sense. That for all sorts of reasons, the place they find themselves in no longer feels like it makes sense anymore. You might have a sense of, why am I in this relationship, why am I in this job, why do I live in the country I live in?

And existential crises are good things. We should have them. They are positive things. They often happen on Sunday evening. Sunday evening is that moment in the week when there’s a gap to question, why am I me? What’s this assumption that I have about what I should be doing?

And to regularly submit yourself to a complete existential audit, as it were, to go, could I be someone totally different? Is it all gone wrong? That’s a sign that you’re a questioning person. Don’t get me wrong. It’s terrifying. It’s terrifying to feel that most of what we’re doing is slightly arbitrary.

There is no necessity. We tell ourselves, well, I have to do this and I have to be here. And you know, the existential insight is, no, you don’t. We’re all completely free. We could be doing other things. The necessity is one that we’re putting on ourselves. But that’s dizzying. I mean, that’s existential vertigo. And we think, oh my God, I’ve got so much possibility that I don’t know where to start.

Landing Your Fleeting Thoughts

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And going back to the busyness, the hustle and grind, when the base level of noise is very loud, it’s very hard to hear those more subtle whispers of fleeting thoughts as my therapist talks about. Pay attention to fleeting thoughts. But fleeting thoughts easily get drowned out if you’ve got a ton of really loud, fast moving ones like, oh, I must get that project finished before tomorrow. And I have all of these emails to do and it’s very busy. I must get. The gym’s going to be hard because there’s roadworks on the street outside of my house.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: I love the idea of fleeting thoughts. What do we mean? We mean thoughts that are on the outer perimeter of consciousness that have some clue as to what we should be doing next in all sorts of areas.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Part of that metal detector again.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Yeah, they’re carrying hints, suggestions, but they’re hard to reach because again, they’re to do with learning. And we don’t like learning. Learning’s really difficult because it throws into question how we are, how we’ve been doing things.

And to be able—I mean, there should be classes on this, you know, how to land your fleeting thoughts. Plato had this idea that thinking was like an aviary in which birds are flying around all the time. And the philosophical challenge is to land those birds and be able to study them. But most of the time they’re whizzing in and out. And so they’re not just fleeting thoughts, they’re racing thoughts.

And to be able to still things enough, I sometimes think a very basic exercise: to lie down in bed and ask yourself, what am I really feeling? What’s really going on? I know what’s supposedly going on, but what am I feeling behind the feeling? What’s the feeling behind the feeling?

And to be able to make that hierarchy of the surface and the depths and to realize that there’s likely to be something going on in the depths all the time, that’s a bit different. An anxiety, a sadness, a worry, a desire for tenderness, whatever it is.

If you can be somebody who gives space to the fleeting thoughts, you’re going to become a much richer human being. And remember the old adage, we can only go so far with other people as we’ve gone with ourselves. We can only be interesting to other people insofar as we’ve paid attention to the more neglected bits of ourselves.

And one of the weirder bits of social life is some people make you feel quite boring and other people make you feel really interesting. Isn’t that a weird thing? Why is that? The people who make you feel boring are people who haven’t opened many doors in themselves. And you pick it up instantly.

And so therefore, when they go, what was your weekend like? You go, I don’t know. Because suddenly you realize there’s nothing that I could say that’s meaningful about my weekend that they would understand because they haven’t gone into those more interesting bits. Whereas if somebody’s giving off that vibe of I’ve opened many doors in myself, well, I have so much to say to them.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I feel safe in doing the same.

The Art of Making Others Feel Interesting

ALAIN DE BOTTON: But also you’ll feel understood. I mean, let’s take podcasting. Why are some people good podcasters? Why can some people get stuff out of people and other people can’t? And it’s fascinating. We’ve become used in the modern world to very high quality podcasts, because the people who have famous podcasts are generally those who can really do it.

But why can they do it? Is it because they can ask good questions? Nah, it’s not that. It’s because they’ve gone far in themselves. The interlocutor feels it, and then they go deep in themselves.

So the reason I’m babbling with you and I could have tons to say to you is because I know, and I don’t know intellectually, I just know in a sensory way that you’ve gone very far in all sorts of ways. And I think I could tell this guy anything and he’d go, yeah. And that gives you encouragement.

So that fascinating distinction, someone who makes you feel interesting and someone who makes you feel boring, it’s the other person that’s doing the work. Even though they may be hardly saying anything. It’s in the eyes, it’s in the twitch of the mouth. It’s all there.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I adore that idea. I took inspiration from that video of yours and coined “inverse charisma.” Some people are interesting, some people make us feel interesting. And a lot of the time, especially young guys, they want their stories to be electric and their aura to be magnetic and they walk into a room and for everybody to feel impressed.

But when I thought about the sort of people that I liked spending my time around the most, it wasn’t necessarily the ones that were the most impressive. I might walk into a room and I’d be very happy to see them, but nobody else might notice. And I would try my very best to sit next to them at dinner because I knew that that would be the most sort of fruitful ground.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Have you ever heard that story about Jenny Jerome, Winston Churchill’s mother?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So she went, she was a little bit of a starlet type, socialite person, and she got to go for dinner with Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone on consecutive nights separately. And she said, when I finished dinner with Disraeli, I felt like he was the smartest man in all of England. When she finished dinner with William Gladstone, she said, I left that dinner feeling like I was the smartest woman. And some people are interesting. Some people make you feel interesting.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: But, you know, it’s really important to say, this is not flattery when someone makes you feel interesting. It’s not that they’re flattering. You go, oh, that’s amazing. It’s not that they genuinely unleash an interest which is actually in you. You know what I mean? It’s not a contrivance.

People are interesting, but they need an audience to release that interest. It’s not mere flattery. It’s opening doors in the other person on the basis that you’ve opened doors in yourself.

The Danger of Intellectualizing Emotions

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’m interested in the temptation to intellectualize emotions. You know, you were talking before, ask the sort of why beneath the why and getting below the neck, as it’s known in embodiment. Okay, fantastic. We have this very developed, who is that philosopher that talked about, being a philosopher is like being a mouse with a huge oversized ear on its back?

You know, you have this one particular thing that you’ve grown to monstrous size. And anybody that is smart can do the work, but doing the work is just turning feelings into theories. And I wonder, I’m interested in this temptation of how to overcome intellectualizing emotions as opposed to actually sitting and feeling them.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: What’s wrong with intellectualizing? Intellectualizing gets a bad name because at some point it ceases to have an accurate relationship to reality. So in other words, your theory has left behind, you know, the facts. Your map is no longer mapping the territory accurately. That’s what’s wrong with it.

There’s nothing wrong with having a map, but there’s something very wrong with having a misguided map. And I think when we say intellectualizing is bad, it’s when it gives us a rather rigid description of the territory which no longer sees the actual full complexity of the terrain it’s aiming, it’s purporting to represent.

And so what do we need to do? We need to constantly check our maps against the territory. In other words, we need to think, okay, I’ve got this nice, neat theory. Maybe I need to blow it up because it’s liable to have grown a bit stale. I need to, you know, head out back into the world and assume I know nothing, blow up my theory in order to build a better one.

So it’s not about abandoning. I think, you know, humans are naturally theory makers. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s something wrong with clinging to outdated theory.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: If you hold it too tightly, that’s an issue. I’ve got this visual in my mind, the difference between a way marker, which is being planted to give you an idea of the terrain, and a tether to which you are attached. Oh, I can’t move from this thing anymore.

This made sense five years ago when I first left university, and that explained where I was at, and it gave the chaos in the world a sense of order. I understood where I was going and what was happening. Oh, if that no longer has accurate explanatory depth, I need to come up with a new theory. And that’s scary. I have to start all over again. You tell me I have to start all over again.

The Wisdom of Starting Over

ALAIN DE BOTTON: I think we regularly have to start all over again. And I think, you know that old adage, Socrates was asked why he was so wise, and he was said that he was so wise because he knew that he wasn’t wise. In other words, ignorance, a capacity to acknowledge one’s ignorance is at the root cause of sophisticated thinking, that you should be returning to a kind of basic ignorance.

Remember the story of Picasso who went to an art school in old age, and he looked at some children scribbling and doing drawings, and he said, you know, when I was their age, I could paint like Raphael, and now I’m learning again how to paint like them. That’s really a story about giving up the old map and allowing oneself to be ignorant again.

And I think that’s a true gift we give to ourselves when we allow ourselves to say, you know what? I don’t know very much at all. I mean, people often say to me, they must say this to you. You know, people say to me, oh, you must know so much about, you know, love or death or this or that. You know, spend all the time thinking.

And I rush to tell them I literally don’t know anything. And I’m not, this is not false modesty. It’s a genuine sense that, you know, with every passing day, I know less. And, you know, it’s not even wisdom. It’s just comedic, really.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: With every passing day, I know less. I love that. Yeah, this, the other thing to consider there is that almost everyone’s body of work is a thinly veiled autobiography. You are looking to the person who has put the most time into this. Why do you think I put the most time into this? Because I see me as most efficient in precisely all of the different areas that I am focusing on.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: 100%. Exactly. So someone who’s, you know, providing a guide to goodness probably finds goodness really hard. Somebody who’s really interested in wisdom is really in touch with the chaos in them and in the world. You wouldn’t do it otherwise. You’re right. It’s a compensatory activity and so be it.

So we should never look to, you know, our gurus to actually be, you know, sometimes we go, oh, you know, I thought they’d be wise. And then I, you know, I saw them cursing at the airport and said, you know, what a fool they are. You want to go? Of course they did that. No, you know, they’re so invested in maintaining a sort of adult poise. Of course they’re going to have a fragile hold on it. They wouldn’t bother otherwise. And that’s okay. That’s absolutely fine.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think I mentioned this to you last time, but I think it’s one of the reasons why your work in particular, Oliver Berkman, who wrote “4,000 Weeks,” this very sanguine look at human nature. It’s got a distinctively British quality to it, which I love. This sort of doesn’t get too big for its boots. It’s kind of got a Carry on Camping sort of signature to it.

The American Dream vs. European Tragedy

ALAIN DE BOTTON: I mean, look, bless the Americans. But the problem with America is that it was started by people who thought you could build Jerusalem on this earth, that you literally could build a city on the hill here and there. Whereas, you know, European culture was a tragic culture which essentially saw thought of human beings as inherently flawed, the playthings of the gods, and unable to master the show until maybe the next life, but definitely not this one.

Which immediately creates a comedic modesty around the gap between your aspirations and your reality. And so growing up in Britain, I mean, Britain doesn’t do many things well, but one of the things it really does well is a kind of melancholy, dark humor. I mean, this is the home of the Smiths. This is the home of Monty Pythons.

You know, these people are latching onto the fact that life is absurd, dark, and that the most sophisticated response is a kind of rich, somber, hilarious laughter. And, you know, the reason why America has changed the planet so radically is that it’s made up of people who think that such a thing is possible and you don’t have to wait till the next world. You do it right here and now with some tools and you go to Silicon Valley and off you go.

And it’s wonderful. It’s created, you know, wonders of the world. However, psychically, my goodness, the toll has been enormous, enormous, because it forces everybody in that society to measure themselves against an ideal, which is so punishing. So, you know, the secret sorrows of the American heart is a volume without end. It’s a very big volume because this is a society that puts its people under unbelievable psychic stress.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Because of blue sky thinking you can do all of these things. I wonder whether it’s one of the reasons why victimhood culture and its sort of modern incantation hasn’t quite caught on in the UK in maybe the same way as it’s often sort of the finger is pointed at. Because if you’re a child and you’re told you can be whatever you want to be, the sky, the sky is not even the limit. You can go beyond that and go further. Literally. South African living in America is the guy that’s going, trying to go past the moon to go and do this thing.

The Paradox of Meritocracy

ALAIN DE BOTTON: It’s the paradox of meritocracy, isn’t it? You know, we hear a lot about this idea of trying to build a society where everybody gets to where they merit to be. And it’s a wonderful idea, beautiful idea. But if you really think that you can create a society where everyone deserves to be where they are, my goodness, you’re going to have a problem explaining why you failed in that society.

Because not only is success merited, but so is failure, which is why failure is so crushing. If you really believe in meritocracy, in certain European countries, in sort of tragic idea, no one thinks it’s a meritocracy. Everyone thinks the whole system is random, it’s rigged.

The ancient Greeks were obsessed by the idea of the arbitrary nature of fate, because the gods are in control of human destiny, not humans. Humans can’t control their destiny. But in the modern American view, of course you control your destiny and you are responsible. Which is why the American word for someone who hasn’t succeeded is a loser.

The loser is somebody who’s played a game which had fair rules and they’ve messed up, and therefore they deserve no pity and they just deserve to be called a loser. Which is why the more meritocratic the system is, the more psychological pressure there is, the more impasse there is to kill yourself if you don’t succeed.

I mean, suicide rates skyrocket, the more people believe that individual destiny reflects the essence of who you are. And suicide rates fall when the explanatory factor is thought to lie outside the individual.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Whereas the ancients would call those losers unfortunates.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: 100%. Lady Fortuna. And I mean the Greeks, I mean, if you read any Greek history, folk tales, etc., the ancient Greeks are obsessed by the notion of the gods are pulling us like marionettes all the time.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Lady Fortune is the one with the wheel.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Well, the tiller. The tiller.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, I thought it was a set of scales. Is it not? Scales that balance out different…

ALAIN DE BOTTON: I mean, it’s also a tiller, you know, like a ship, and able to control destinies and often a cornucopia as well, holding lots of goods. So if Fortuna is in good mood, she’ll chuck you lots of lovely stuff. And she’s a bad mood. She’ll just, you know, adjust the tiller and off you go to your desk.

Managing Expectations in Relationships

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Who was the Stoic philosopher that had his legs broken and then was incarcerated?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Is that Epictetus? That was Boethius, okay?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I seem to remember a story from him where he was imprisoned and loads of things went wrong. And he was sort of in his 50s, and he wasn’t able to see his family and all of this stuff. And one of his friends came to him and was lamenting the fact, look at how much has gone wrong. He must be so despondent.

He said, well, look at the first 50 years of my life. Look how blessed Lady Fortuna had sort of come and, you know, I guess the scale or the cornucopia sort of run a little bit dry. Had a great crack at it for the first, however many five decades.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: I mean, the Stoics were fascinating in that they had academic discussions about if a wise person—how should a wise person look at having two legs and losing one leg? It’s like, how many legs do you need in order to be happy?

And the sort of position that you would get to after lots and lots of study of Stoic thought is the wise man appreciates having two legs, but can cope with having only one. And that’s really sort of the essence of stoicism. You want to have two legs, it’s okay to want two legs, but it’s also, you will know how to cope with only one leg. That’s years and years of Stoic study.

Learning to Be Hopeful

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You mentioned last time about the virtue of pessimism, sort of melancholy, a great British tradition. And I wonder how you think about people learning to be a little bit more hopeful, sort of the opposite side of that, because, yes, we definitely do have—what was the thing that they said in Harry Potter? Mischief managed. They said to make the Marauder’s Map go away.

Melancholy managed. I feel like we’ve got melancholy well managed. However, the other side to Fortuna—how can people learn to be a little bit more hopeful?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Look, I love that very simple question: if you knew you couldn’t fail, what would you want to do? So it’s such a big question, but such a useful one. It has this elemental simplicity to it. But, you know, if you knew you could not fail, what would you want to do?

Because people don’t even allow themselves to play. You know, if we think about what play is, play is doing something without fearing consequences. You know, let’s just do this as a game. Children know how to play because they’re not so scared of consequences, so they’ll just give it a shot.

And a good adult life does require us to rediscover that freedom of playing. And the way in which we do it is we think if everything went wrong, or, you know, if everything went wrong, it would still be okay. And what about the idea of thinking this could go right, there couldn’t be any massive consequences? So rediscovering play around your ambition is really important.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Is that lowering the stakes in a way?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Yeah. And of course, pessimism has a role to play. There’s a lovely quote from Montaigne: “Kings and philosophers shit, and so do ladies.” Now, what he was trying to say there is, you know, CEOs are—he also has another quote. He goes, “On the highest throne in the world, we’re seated still upon our asses.”

He loves to use this sort of pungent French language in which he’s basically saying, stop being so intimidated by people in power. They sit on the toilet every day like you do. So, you know, a lot of people have that secret toilet-based confidence. It’s like feeling really intimidated.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Toilet confidence.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Know that your hero, heroine is only a few hours, minutes away from going off to defecate and use that as an anchor point to relativize their status in relation to you.

The Price of Success

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, the sort of—Jason Poggin’s got this great idea where he says all of your heroes are full of shit. Your heroes aren’t gods, they’re just regular people who got good at one thing by sacrificing literally everything else. And you don’t get to see that.

Probably one of the most fascinating questions that’s captivated me since starting the show is what is the price that people pay in order to be someone that others admire? What are the externalities that are on?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: I don’t look at it like that because I think that people tend to achieve what they need to achieve. They’re not going, “Well, I could have, you know, this sort of life or that sort of life, but I’ll choose to, you know, try and win Wimbledon or go to the moon.” I think they’re driven. It’s not a choice and it’s a compulsion. And we can feel sorry for that compulsion, but also appreciate that it is a slightly neurotic overcompensation.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Should you look at successful people with more pity than envy in that regard?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Sure. I mean, you know, somebody with an outsized need for anything—always think, what’s the opposite of that? What? You know, a very funny person, they’re really afraid of seriousness. A very wealthy person, they’ve got a really complicated relationship to a modest income, et cetera, et cetera.

So, yes, there is a massive overcompensation which speaks of lack. Ultimately, it’s a lack. Think how poor you must feel in order to make that much money. Think how deprived you must feel inside in order to need that level of status, in order to be thought so special by millions of strangers. How much you must despise yourself.

And we know this. Every single biography teaches us this. We know this about the lives of everyone who’s done an outsized thing in one area. We know there’s a relationship with the undersized opposite.

The Problem with Online Dating

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Speaking of being special to strangers, why do you think online dating is so miserable reliably for most people?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Look, I think the problem with online dating is that it teaches us that the main problem with love is finding the right person. And of course, it’s one of the issues that we need to locate a candidate who broadly fits certain criteria. But that’s probably a lot easier than we tend to think.

The real challenge is how do you get on with another human being? And that’s not spoken of within dating culture. What dating culture tells us is if there’s a conflict or a problem, it’s that you’re not with the so-called right person. Rather than accepting everybody you’re likely to find is really problematic.

So as soon as you found a more or less okay candidate, do the real work, which is learning how to live with them. But we, the emphasis is constantly thrown on that other thing, which is just finding the next shiny object. So it’s a massive distractor of effort. It teaches us to place the effort in the wrong place.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, turning the microscope around, turning it from a telescope that’s searching to a microscope that’s looking at us. Okay, well, how can you make yourself and this other person into something that’s a better unit as opposed to just getting rid of them and moving on to the next?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: And there’s a, you know, there’s a tremendous ingratitude. I mean, people will say, you know, “I’ve swiped through 800 profiles today.” And you think what you’ve just sort of executed, as it were, 800—800 people are not good for you. That can’t be true. It isn’t true.

There’s likely to be lots of people in that cohort that were of value, but we’re encouraged to look through such a narrow lens at value that we end up discarding. And that leaves, I think, a kind of moral hangover or sickness because we know we’ve done something a bit disreputable.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, what’s that? Judge ye not, lest ye be judged. You have done a lot of judging, so you think this is probably happening to me too.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Yeah. And so it’s an, it’s ultimately an unkind world. It’s, you know, it’s not a world that anybody particular is responsible for. Most of us are innocents on this treadmill. But undoubtedly I think it leads to moral confusion.

Love and Managing Disappointment

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I wonder whether when it comes to a relationship and not seeing our partner as the sole source of everything that we need in this life, I wonder whether love is more about managing disappointment than it is about chasing joy in that way.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Look, the thing is that we can either have the expectations we have or we can have lower ones. If we’re going to stick with the expectations we have around relationships, boy, oh boy, do we need to do the work. And this is the problem of our society. We have these sky-high expectations, but a serious reluctance to work at it.

It’s like, you know, “I want my partner to be, you know, my ideal co-partner, chauffeur, soul mate, sex partner, blah, blah, blah. All these things have to register on all these fronts. And the sole work I’m going to do is, you know, once in a while, listen to an Esther Perel podcast and I’m going to think it’s going to swing it.” Or if that.

And you think, hang on a minute. If this was the flute and you wanted to get good at the flute, you’d be practicing three hours a day. So I think there doesn’t have to be anything wrong with the expectations we have. Some people go, “Oh, you know, we’ve got overly high expectations.” Fine, let’s have really high expectations of relationships. Why not? But then do the work. And that means hours and hours, daily hours of practice, which involves a lot of learning and a lot of giving it a go.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That wonderful line from you: “Compatibility is an achievement of love. It shouldn’t be its precondition.” Again, this is something which can be built over time as opposed to the entry price that needs to be paid before it starts.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Exactly. And it really helps, of course, if the whole culture is supporting us, if the culture is patient, if the culture tells us, “Okay, you’ve had a huge argument, what happens next?”

Currently we think, “Oh, we break up because we’ve had a, we’ve got a moment of incompatibility,” rather than “This is a massive learning moment. Let’s go back to school on this. Let’s really study this.”

And, you know, we were talking earlier, we’re very suggestible creatures. We pick up our cues about the work we should do according to societal nudges. And currently, society is not particularly nudging us to work at some of those rough points in dialogues with others.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What is the subtext? What are the whispers of what society is saying about relationships at the moment?

The Problem with Red Flag Culture

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Do you think it’s basically telling us that if there’s a problem, it’s that we found somebody with red flags? They may be a narcissist, they could be borderline, they could be emotionally unintelligent, etc. And therefore in the bin, they should go in the bin.

I mean, the problem with this red flag language, it’s all very well, but if you’re going to put everyone in the bin who’s a red flag, well, good luck to you. You’re not going to have many friends. I mean, there’s a lot of red flags around in everybody, including you. So you and me, and it gets exciting when we go, okay, I own up to the red flags. Can we do something about it?

When two people meet each other and go, I know I’m desperately flawed, can we help each other? I mean, the enemy of relationships is self-righteousness. The enemy is defensiveness. The enemy is people go, well, I feel like this. And you need to acknowledge that. And this is the way it is. These are my boundaries and give way, give way. And I’ve been submissive too long and this is the way it is now.

You want to go, okay, all right, maybe, but can we meet halfway? Can we somehow find a way of having a dialogue that acknowledges we’re both in a bit of a muddle here, both likely to be carrying all sorts of difficulties? That kind of modesty is a saving grace. I mean, when that modesty kicks in, the angels are singing because they know that a relationship is going to be safe.

The Cost of Throwing Away Relationships

My goodness, we waste relationships. People, I meet people all the time, they go, well, I was together with someone for eight years and then we were squabbling, so I ended it. Or I was with someone for seven years and you think, my goodness, all those shared jokes, all those investments, all that faith, and then you chuck it all in the sea and you begin again. And you might do this seven times in a lifetime. How exhausting it is.

Now, I’m not, it’s not a plea for everyone to stay together at all costs. Obviously there are relationships you need to exit. But there’s serious grounds for questioning the way certain of these relationships end. You think, couldn’t there have been a little more patience, a little more forbearance, a little more of an understanding that what you were meeting here was not an incompatibility in one person, but the scale of human confusion that you’re likely to meet up anywhere?

Rather than thinking you’ve met one particularly corrupt human being, it’s like, well, you’ve just met another typical human and you go off and meet another one and in seven years you’ll be back to the same place.

Neutralizing Arguments

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Are there any questions or statements or framings that you have found to be particularly neutralizing? You’re in the midst of the back and forth. This is the argument. Maybe it is the seven year point that you’re deep into. Are there any ways of beginning a conversation or interjecting into one of those disagreements that you have found to be particularly fruitful in bringing the energy down in the room?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Of course, I mean, everybody knows these, but it’s worth repeating because we do forget, especially at moments of crisis. If you make the other person feel heard, that even though their reality is not yours, doesn’t need to be that you have the wherewithal and the patience to acknowledge, they thought you were insulting them. They read it as an insult.

Now you can immediately go, no, no, it’s not an insult. It wasn’t. You can carry on. Good luck to you. You can argue this in court, but you’re not going to get anywhere. So try another tack. Acknowledge. Okay, I’m hearing that you’re really insulted. You can then go on to go, I didn’t mean to, this is why, but acknowledge it first.

And then also when you’re asserting your point of view, don’t frame it as universal. Frame it as coming from you. “I feel from my point of view, I’m thinking that,” not, “you’re an idiot.” But in this area, I feel, softening language, maybe, perhaps. The world can be saved by a few more maybes and perhapses. They’re wonderful words. Perhaps this or I might not, I will, or I am, I might, I may.

The Art of Diplomacy in Relationships

Softening diplomatic language goes a long way. That word diplomat or diplomacy, we tend to think of it as a job for specialists. People who work in the Foreign Office, in the State Department, et cetera. A diplomat is somebody who’s an expert at breaking difficult news into something that another person’s going to be able to digest.

And we all need to be diplomats. Whatever our jobs, we all need to be diplomats. We all need to be able to have that capacity to take difficult information and get it across to another person. And so often we think that the truth is going to liberate people. If you just tell someone the truth, they’ll go, wow, well, then I accept it. No, no, no. You’ve got to get around their defenses, their fears, their sense of threatened righteousness, etc.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That doesn’t mean being manipulative or overly flattering or obfuscating or something.

Understanding Fear in Arguments

ALAIN DE BOTTON: It means being alive to people’s panic. Whenever there’s an argument, there’s two frightened people in the room and it’s all very well, you hyping up the tension and just asserting how right you are, but really what you need to do is to take care of your own fear and the other person’s fear. There’s two scared people. All arguments are about fear.

And if you can drop down the level and go, we’re not really arguing about the teacup, are we? We’re not really arguing about, we’re arguing about two people’s fears. If you can drop down to that fear and identify what that fear is, literally ask yourself, middle of an argument, what am I really scared of? And ask the other person and also reveal it.

And often it’s very simple. I’m scared you don’t love me. I’m scared that if I stay around here, I’m going to be humiliated and maltreated. If you can say that to another person, first of all, it shifts the template. Suddenly we’re not arguing about the stain on the floor. We’re arguing about somebody who’s a vulnerable child. Great. Really good starting point. Then we can take that vulnerable child. Give them a hug.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Alain, you’re fantastic. I adored our conversation last year. I’ve adored this one as well. I can’t wait to sit down with you again. I don’t have anything else to say.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Thank you so much.

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