TRANSCRIPT: The REAL Reason We’re Lonely, Loveless, Depressed: Alain De Botton

Emotions that can’t be had, lodge themselves in us, and gum up our systems. And I think so much of the work that we need to do on ourselves is to process pain that has not been properly understood, not because anyone’s evil, but because we’ve lacked the resources to do so.

The Paradoxes of Modern Life

STEVEN BARTLETT: You got me thinking about this concept of happiness as you’re speaking, and whether it’s a natural thing for our species to be aiming at, or whether it’s a new, more modern thing that we’ve decided to focus upon. And are we causing ourselves immense distress in this pursuit of this thing that maybe our ancestors didn’t, didn’t ever think about this whole, you know, we think about self actualization, and they were probably thinking about survival and reproduction more.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Look, these all belong to the sort of paradoxes of modern times, modern times have obviously brought us enormous advantages, but they’ve also brought us particular complexities, that I think would be wise to realise. And one of them is the disappearance of religion.

I mean, we are still among the first generations in many parts of the world, to be trying to live good lives without the support of religion. Think of our religion structure, time and human experience in time. As a religious person, you immediately feel the present moment is not as important as 100, 200, 2000 million year history that has come before and that will continue after. The present moment is a speck in time.

And, and there’s a whole narrative of which you’re part of that immediately diminishes you in scale. Now, nowadays, all of us want to be rather large, that we want to be big, big people, we want to make a big impression. But arguably, this is a fast route to mental illness. Because the graceful acceptance of your minuscule position in the cosmos is the gateway to calm and harmony.

And when people say, you know, “I went into this hotel, the person made me feel small.” That’s a bad way of being made to feel small. But there’s a good way of being made to feel small, pick up an ancient text, read words that were written by someone in a foreign tongue 3000 years ago, that’ll make you feel small, go into the desert, notice the age of the rocks inscribed in time inscribed in sand, that’ll put you in your place. Spend time with an animal that has no concern for your status, your sense of importance, your foiled narrative of your own success, all these things that drive modern humans mad.

These are not present in an older kind of religious sphere. And as I say, what religions do is they tell us you’re part of a bigger story. They also tell us many faiths tell us that life and you particular are imperfect. You know, think of Catholicism and its notion of original sin.

Now, lots of bad stuff associated with original sin. I’m not a huge fan of many aspects. But let’s look at the good side, right? What Catholicism tells us is that everybody’s broken.

Everybody is flawed. It’s quite a helpful starting point, right? Because if you think, well, all right, I’m a bit broken, but so is somebody else, so is somebody else. So we’re all doing our best.

That’s the gateway to vulnerability, to friendship, if you like. Lower expectations, but also to connection with others. You know, so often people who become successful, find it really hard to make friends. Why?

Because they associate success with invulnerability. And the more successful they get, the harder it is for them to admit to the real truth about being human, which is that we’re all helpless children, some of the time, at least frightened, helpless children. And it becomes harder to make, to keep up the contact with that, let alone admit that to somebody else. So again, religions handily reduce our expectations and our sense of ourselves.

We are merely flawed humans. There is a perfect world. It doesn’t exist in Beverly Hills. It doesn’t exist in, you know, the fancy parts of Singapore or Sydney. It exists up there in another world. In other words, the human realm is inherently imperfect. Quite a good starting point. I mean, even if you went on a date, right?

Imagine two characters you might go on a date with, right? First one tells you, “Yeah, I’m kind of perfect. And I’m aiming to achieve total perfection.” I think, wow, good for them, but slightly scary.

Next is somebody else who goes, “I’m kind of flawed, but I’m sort of managing my flaws. And I’m interested in how to get to know my flaws and work with them.” Instantly one thinks, hmm, life might be easier around such a person. There’s something about the pursuit of perfection, which makes day-to-day life extremely hard.

And religions slightly by the by ticked that box. They were able to reduce us in our own eyes while raising us in the eyes of, you know, a divine being. And that has helped us to have an easier relationship with ourselves. And the notion also was you cannot perfect this life.

You know, life becomes perfect in another realm. We’ll build Jerusalem somewhere else, not on this earth, in the next world. Again, it takes the pressure off us. We moderns, we modern people, we think the present moment is supremely important.

Now is important. Everything that’s going on right now is supremely important. Doesn’t matter. Remember a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago, now is the only criteria of time.

You are perfectible, right? So if there’s something wrong with you, you’re failing against an ideal of perfection. Again, very, very hard. And that you are made, I mean, the biggest challenge of all, you’re made to be happy, as you suggested, that the true goal of every human is happiness, not fulfillment, not, you know, the realization of a grand scheme, not living for others, your own happiness.

And again, it’s a beautiful idea, but goodness me does it cause problems. Goodness me. You know, think of Emil Durkheim, beginning of the 20th century, French sociologist, writes this book contrasting the differences between ancient societies and modern societies. And he identifies one troubling difference between ancient societies, pre-modern agricultural village-based societies, where religion plays a role, and modern urban technologically driven success-oriented individualistic societies, and that’s the suicide rate.

He realizes in his book “On Suicide”, published in 1900, that modern societies, for all their advantages, leads their members, a share of their members, often the most ambitious of their members, to take their own lives. Why? What’s going on? And this becomes, well, it’s the birth of modern sociology, really.

It becomes a major inquiry into what modern times does to the soul. And I’m deeply fascinated by that. I can’t let that one go. Because what’s this paradox? What’s this paradox of suffering amidst plenty, of regress amidst progress? This fascinates me.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I spoke to the CEO of CALM, Campaign Against Living Miserably, Simon Gunning, and he shared some stats with me about exactly what you’re talking about, about suicide. He said someone dies by suicide in the UK every 90 minutes, 76% are male, there’s 25 attempts for every death.

The Harsh Realities of Modern Individualism

STEVEN BARTLETT: The single biggest cause of death for men under 45 is suicide. The single biggest cause of death for 15 to 49 year olds is suicide. But 19 to 35 year old category are twice as likely to report being in crisis than any other group, and 16 to 24s is the fastest growing group in history to exhibit suicidality. And more recently, there’s a big conversation emerging now around young women and suicidality, which is a fairly recent, unfortunately, exploding trend, this trend of young women now experiencing suicidality.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: And look, people don’t just commit suicide when things are bad. People commit suicide when things are bad. And they think, it’s a delicate point, they think it’s their fault. They cannot disassociate the trouble they feel from an intense sense of responsibility, which then also entails shame.

And what’s going on there? You see, when I say that we live in an individualistic world, what that really means is, we live in a world where people feel that they control their own narratives, that what happens to them is very tightly a reflection of who they are and what they’ve done. And this was not always the case. You see, for long periods of history, people were not necessarily tightly held to the observable outcomes of their lives.

This happened with money, for example. In old English, a poor person was known as an “unfortunate”, right? What is an unfortunate? Let’s unpack that word, unfortunate.

There’s the word “fortuna” in there. What was “fortuna”? For the Romans, Fortuna was the goddess of luck, the goddess of fortune. And the Romans were therefore all the time sacrificing things to the goddess of fortune as a way of saying, “Please, it’s not me, it’s this outside agency.”

Nowadays, this sounds completely weird. I mean, what do we call, in the most individualistic country in the world, United States, what are poor people called? It’s not a nice term, they’re called “losers”, right? You say, “That’s a loser.”

So we’ve gone from “unfortunate” to “loser”. That’s a trajectory of 400 years. What’s happened in that time is a story about who’s responsible for people’s fate. And nowadays, if I said to you, “Things are not going so well for me, I’ve just been sacked, you know, my book hasn’t sold, you know, but it’s not me, I’ve just had a bit of bad luck.”

You, very nice person, but a modern person, so I think you’d be thinking, “Hmm, you must have done something wrong, right?” You’d be thinking, “You must have done something wrong,” because that’s how we think. We don’t allow people the benefit of luck, right? Similarly, if you said to me, “Oh, you know, my podcast is doing brilliantly, we’ve now got 8,000 million, million, billion subscribers, how many you’ve got nowadays?”

And you said, and you said to me, “Oh, it’s just a bit of good luck, right?” I think, “Oh, Steven’s really, you know, he’s very modest, but you know, it’s not true, he’s done something.” We believe that people do things and that that action leads to results or failures. And that’s why people take their own lives, because in extremists, people think there is nothing other than me to explain what happens to me.

Of course, the reality is much more complicated. I’m not saying that’s the truth, but that is the perceived truth. You know, look, we live in a world that is meritocratic, right? That word “meritocracy” is on everybody’s lips.

If you take politicians, left and right, in the United States, all over the world, everybody wants to create a world that is meritocratic. Some people think we’ve already got that. What does that word mean? I don’t know.

Meritocratic is the concept of meritocracy is a world in which people’s outcomes are dependent on their merit, rather than on who their parents were, some corrupt class in society, the influence of whatever. So, you know, a left wing politician and a right wing politician say, “We want to make a meritocratic world where your kids will go to where they deserve, where if you work hard, you can get there. And, you know, where everyone has a chance to succeed.” You know, you know, that kind of rhetoric.

It’s the rhetoric of modern times. Now, it sounds great. And in many ways, it’s an enormous advance. But again, let’s just focus on the psychological toll of that.

Because if you really believe in a world in which those who get to the top deserve to get to the top, by implication, you are also positing the existence of a world in which those who are at the bottom deserve to be at the bottom. In other words, a meritocratic worldview, turn success and failure from chance to a necessary fate. And that’s why it makes the winners quite hard, potentially quite heartless, because they’re thinking, “Well, I got there on my own, you know, then you thank anybody might not need to pay many taxes, pay taxes, you know, it’s fine.” And similarly, those at the bottom are kind of crushed.

So we’ve created this very complicated ideology, where there’s a hidden toll to living. And this has happened within a couple of generations, hasn’t it? Because I even think about my mother, she’s from, I know, it’s a different country, and there’s different traditions there. But even in my mother’s generation, when she grew up in Africa, if they wanted good fortune, they would take their sheep, their animals, and they’ll take it to the local witch doctor and basically offer a sacrifice.

They’d obviously pray, but they were, they were so in the opinion that their outcomes were determined by a religious God of sorts. And even moving to the UK and starting businesses here, I think she’s moved a little bit away from that thinking to the sort of, as you kind of almost positive, it’s almost like the curse of personal responsibility, or at least the pitfalls of personal responsibility, where she now definitely thinks that her outcomes are correlated to her hard work. And it’s so interesting, I’ve never considered the fact that that could be bad for us on a psychological level.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Sure, because, you know, we know that there are good sides of it, of course we do. And so, you know, I’m really pointing out something that is less often spoken about, because we know the good sides, of course, the world in which people take responsibility can be good. But at what moment does it crush the spirit? And, you know, talking about your mother, and, you know, moving away from an agricultural society, a rural society, to an urban, modern individualistic society. In many parts of the world, in the old world, in the pre-modern world, when people met each other for the first time, they would say, “Where are you from?

Where are your ancestors? Who are your ancestors? Who’s your father? Who’s your mother?”

That was people’s identity. Nowadays, of course, as you know, what’s the first question that anyone asks anyone? “What do you do?” And according to how you answer that question, people are either really pleased to see you, or they kind of gently sideline you and you’re left by the peanuts.

And, you know, no one wants to talk to you. We live in a world, it could sound like an odd word, we live in a world of snobs. Now, the word snob is often associated with some kind of old English interest in like people with castles or, you know, ancient lineage. I don’t mean that.

Snobbery is really just any way of judging a human being, according to one, but only one aspect of their whole identity. Right? So if you meet a clothed snob, and you say, “You know, my, my, my jumpers from, you know, wherever,” they’ll go, “You can’t be a good person, because, you know, you are so under invested in your fashion taste, right? It doesn’t matter how pure your heart is, or how great your poems are, or whatever, you look, you know, your clothes are wrong,” that’s a clothed snob.

Now, the dominant form of snobbery in the modern world is, of course, job snobbery. And that’s why, you know, the opposite of a snob is your mother, your mother, as it were one’s mother, the ideal mother, right? The mother doesn’t care how you performed. She’s maybe fictive, caring about who you are.

But most people do not care who we are, they care how we have performed. And so, you know, we’re often told, “We live in such materialistic societies, the world’s so materialistic, you know, we’re all chasing money.” I don’t think we’re actually chasing money. I think we’re chasing the love and respect that money in our society brings, we have connected the possession of material goods, with the possession of honor and respect.

But you know, if you if you rearrange it a different way, and you said, you know, “You could own a plastic token, and get love and respect, people would always want the plastic tokens.” It’s not, it’s not the material goods we want, it’s the emotional rewards, which actually, you know, sometimes we think people are very greedy, all they’re doing is shopping for more things and buying fancy cars. But the next time you see a guy driving a Ferrari, don’t think, this guy’s a greedy person, you know, he’s so vulgar and greedy. And just think this is somebody with a really intense need for love, right?

Because often, the avid pursuit of material goods is really masking something much more poignant, which is the avid pursuit of love and respect.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It was for my whole my whole life, I, you know, I bought all the Louis Vuitton Range Rover mansion, in that chapter of my life, where I was really trying to prove something to someone or be accepted by someone. And that’s why I got it. And in fact, the more secure I’ve got in myself, the more you’ll see me every day, just wearing all black, no watch, no sports car, and leaning towards utility in the decisions that I make.

That’s so fascinating. And I think that is a journey. You know, what does it want to say, these goods shouldn’t be available to everybody? Of course, they can be available to everybody.

But the question is, is your need for them coming from a wound, or coming from a genuine desire? And when it comes from a wound, it’s a problem, because it’s not going to solve the wound. That’s the problem. Because, you know, the love that you’re going to get, it’s like, it’s like fame.

I always think, you know, a sure sign of being a good parent is that your children have no interest in being famous. Because, you know, fame is trying to satisfy a gap that should ideally be satisfied through more intimate human connections. But we do live in a world which doesn’t have much time for that. And so, both in the sort of economy of fame and the economy of material goods, we’ve created a world where people are hugely incentivized to move away from what they really want, which is to be loved, to be seen, to be heard, and into a kind of vortex of material acquisition.

Modern Misunderstandings of Love

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is love? Let’s, if we’re talking about, let’s talk about romantic love. What is that?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Well, can I just first start by saying we’re a bit confused about it. And so, I can’t give you an immediate answer. But I want to register that not just me, but the whole of the current world is confused about love. And I think we’ve been confused for about 200 years. And let’s, let’s go easy on ourselves here.

Because the way in which we approach love now is a never before approached philosophy. You know, for about the last 250 years, we’ve been loving under the aegis of a philosophy we could call romanticism. And romanticism is a vision of love with very particular assumptions. Let me run through a few of them.

There’s one soulmate for everybody. You’re going to find this soulmate. You’re going to find them through slightly mysterious ways, possibly through almost something almost quasi divine, like you’ll feel pulled, you’ll meet them at the supermarket checkout line, the nightclub, and without even knowing too much about them, you will sense that they’re your destiny. So, you’ll feel impelled towards somebody that you don’t necessarily know too much of, a force will pull you, and you will feel this is the one.

And they will be an angel, literally, a sort of descended being from another world. The romantics were very, very keen on the notion that you didn’t have to know someone too well to understand them, even speaking not very much, the connection will be even deeper. The romantics also thought that love and sex absolutely belong together, and that you couldn’t have a millimeter of disjuncture between the two. Love and sex have sometimes drifted apart in the old world, and that’d be sometimes a problem, but it became a tragedy.

So, adultery moved from a difficulty to a tragedy. That’s why all modern novels and films are all about the tragedy of adultery. So, look, these are some of the difficulties that the modern world has created. We tend to believe nowadays that love is an emotion that we should feel, never a skill that we should learn.

For example, if I said to you, “We should probably study love, we should probably go to a school of love,” that’s not very romantic. Now, every time, every time that someone says, “That’s not very romantic,” that’s normally a sign of a problem. Most things that don’t sound very romantic are a good idea, and most things that are romantic, like marrying in Vegas after you’ve met someone for five minutes, is not so great. Now, what are we getting wrong?

One of the things we’re getting wrong is this whole business of instinct, right? So, we tend to believe that love will pull us instinctively towards marvelous people that will be correct for us. In the old world, people were set up in relationships. “You’ll marry this person because of this reason, you know, that person goes well with my family, blah, blah.”

Now, there’s nothing to do with you, you’re put together with someone. Nowadays, we’re nominally free to choose anyone. Hooray, fantastic. Aren’t we going to make great choices?

No. Why don’t we make great choices? Because we’re not free. Why are we not free?

We need to go to a psychotherapist to tell us why we’re not free. We’re not free to love just anyone. We love in tracks laid down for us by our childhoods. Adult love sits on top of tracks and a script laid down for us in childhood.

You might go, “What’s wrong with that? So what?” Well, what’s problematic is that many of us had childhoods in which affection was mixed in with more problematic dynamics, that maybe in order to derive love in childhood, we also had to encounter somebody who was in a rage, someone who was violent, someone who was depressed, someone who put us down, someone who preferred another sibling, whatever it was. And we go into adulthood, and we find that we’re drawn to love stories that feel familiar, because they’re echoing some of childhood dynamics, but they don’t necessarily, for that matter, lead to happiness.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: And, you know, sometimes we have situations where you set up a friend, let’s say, you got a really good friend, and you know another friend, you think those people would really go well together, set them up on a date, and then you call them up afterwards, he says, “How did it go? You know, it must have gone really well.” They say, “I’m not sure, maybe something was lacking a little spark.” What they’re really trying to get at is, they’re not going to put it this way, your friend, this date, did not show me signs that they would make me suffer in the way that I need to suffer in order to feel I’m in love.

In other words, this relationship threatened to be happy. That’s why I had to go away. So we are paradoxical creatures, because our past was not necessarily happy. We’re not necessarily that happy that our future romantic lives should be happy either.

And this is something that, you know, they weren’t thinking about that when love was reinvented 250 years ago.

STEVEN BARTLETT: When people say they have “daddy issues”, and things like this, are you saying then that there’s often truth in that, because they had a early experience with a father figure, a male figure in their life that might have left them or might have, you know, created a anxious attachment style or something. So they then end up pursuing dysfunctional men and relationships, because that’s the suffering that they associate with love.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Sure. I mean, we repeat what we don’t understand. And so long as we’re unaware of the stories that we’ve grown up with, we will enact them in our adult lives. So we’re not compelled to do this forever. But and look, I think a lot of us have a desire to give the stories of our childhood a different ending.

Our father might have been a distant and, you know, mean spirited creature, but also have some good qualities. The dream is to find somebody a bit like that, but to make sure that the story has a good resolution. So it’s not merely a desire to repeat, it’s a desire to repeat and give a better ending. But frequently, you know, we don’t get there.

And I think that look, the thing about psychology is we see all around us people doing so called crazy things, you know, falling in love with people, not gonna make them happy, sabotaging their careers, not able to open up to people. And we think we can step back and go, “Why are they doing that stuff? What’s going on?” Now, one way to look at it, and it’s a kind of compassionate way to look at it.

A lot of the stuff that looks crazy now, once made a lot of sense. It was once probably a really clever thing to do. If you were growing up, let’s say, in an environment in which, let’s say a parent was suicidal, right? A parent was suicidal.

And you shut down your emotions totally, and decided you would never trust anyone. Fantastic. That’s a fantastically clever thing to do when you’re five years old, and you’ve got a suicidal parent, right? Because that will get you through to the next stage of life.

If you open your heart at five, and there’s a parent who’s suicidal, it’ll tear you apart. So good for you. You’re doing something brilliantly clever, right? Or imagine somebody who becomes a clown as a child, because there’s a very sad atmosphere.

And there’s a depression. And all they can have time for is jokes. They’re just a manic joker, right? Brilliant.

What a fantastic thing for a kid to work out that they need to be quite a kind of manic joker. But what happens 10 years later, 20 years later, 30 years later, is that what used to be a fantastic defense against an intolerable situation has turned out to more or less ruin people’s chances. Because the person, you know, with that difficult father will end up never being able to open their heart to anyone, even a very safe person. They won’t even know their heart’s closed.

But they will be acting out the same defensive strategy, or the person who, you know, it was a great idea to be a bit of a joker early on. But now they have no time for anything serious. And their friends feel that they’re a slightly plastic person can never connect with them. That’s a real toll in the adult world.

So, you know, very often, what we need to do is to say thank you to our younger selves for having devised strategies that really were clever. But at the same time, say, thank you. It’s enough. I want to I want to live in a different way.

That was a fantastic strategy, then it may no longer be the right way for me to live now.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was thinking as you were speaking about that, there’s kind of two groups of people, I was bouncing through different people that I know to see how it fit with them. And I identified in my mind that there’s basically two groups of people that the ones that are aware of their cycle, you know, and whether they’ve acted to change it, or they’re just reliving it, you know, and the ones that are totally unaware that they’re in this cycle, and they just think, “Oh, God, my luck,” you know, they say phrases like that, “just my luck.” How does one increase their awareness of their own cycle?

Do you think there’s a way?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Yes. So much that can be done. Let’s imagine the very simplest exercise.

Psychologists have these things called sentence completion tests, where you start with a stub of a question, and then you end it with an ellipsis of dot, dot, dot. And you say to somebody, don’t think too much, just finish the sentence. And typical ones are “men are dot, dot, dot.” “Women are dot, dot, dot.”

“I am dot, dot, dot.” “Life dot, dot, dot.” Now, if you give somebody that sheet of paper, and say to them, don’t think too much, just write it down. All right, amazing things bubble up.

“Men are, you know, authoritarian villains.” Wow, where did that come from? You’re carrying on, you know, “women are, you know, whatever it is,” “life, you know,” “I am, you know, a nobody who deserves to be stamped.” Did you know a minute ago that you have that in you?

Not necessarily. In other words, sometimes you need these little levers to shine a light. Now, the thing that really helps, and I’m not, you know, for your viewers, many therapists, many psychotherapists are not what they should be. But some are great.

If you find yourself with a good psychotherapist, they can also increase your level of self awareness. I think that’s what we’re talking about increasing level of self awareness. And, and the reason is very simple. You know, there’s stuff that we all do.

Let’s imagine, I don’t know, when you’re around a man, you think that person’s judging me, therefore, I’m going to withdraw and not enter into competition with I’m around a woman, I think I’m going to have to, you know, I’m going to be treated badly. Therefore, whatever it is, something from your past is projected onto it. You end up in a therapy room with a man or a woman. And lo and behold, what do you do?

You bring out that thing. And you bring out that thing that you’re doing normally. Except this time, you’re not doing it in the office. You’re not doing it in a relationship, you’re not doing it in a context where people are busy and have got their own stuff going on and doing their own games.

You’re doing it with somebody a trained professional in a quiet room. And they can see like a Petri dish, they can see the stuff that you’re doing. And so suddenly, you’ll be saying to your therapist, “I know you hate me.” And the therapist will be going.

“I really don’t think so. But I’m interested that you have that conviction that you do.” Or someone will be going to the therapist, “I need to look after you. I think you’re quite tired.

And I really, you know, you’ve been doing such great work, I feel I want to look after you.” Maybe you’d be doing that all your life. And the therapist will be going, “You don’t need to look after me. But was there someone in your past that you needed to look after?

And that made you feel guilty? And that has meant that every time you’re with somebody, you feel that their needs are more important than your needs.” And there’s a chance, therefore, to see more clearly than ever before, outside of the kind of hubbub of relationships or office life, the kind of stories that you’re projecting onto reality to your huge cost.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I’m now aware of my cycle that originates from my childhood. The next step is doing something about it. How do I overpower that sort of hardwired urge to repeat the cycle that comes from my childhood?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Well, look, Steven, let’s not minimize. That’s already an enormous achievement.

You know what I mean? I mean, if you’re there, that you have a handle on, look, we don’t need people to be perfect, right? We don’t need people at best. We need people to know how they’re imperfect and that they can have a chance to warn us of their imperfections in good time before they’ve done too much damage.

There’s an enormous difference. I mean, again, take the dating idea. Let’s imagine, you know, I often say, don’t do this to me because we’re not on a date. But a great question to ask somebody on a date is “how are you mad?”

“How are you mad, right?” If the person says, “I’m not mad, I’m completely sane,” run away because, you know, everybody has folly inside them. And we’re approaching a measure of everyday tolerable sanity when we put some flags in the areas of our madness. So total sanity is not a possibility for any human being.

But the awareness of where the insanity lies and a little bit of warning and prompt apology, you know, after an incident goes a huge long way. You know, people often say, “I’m looking for a partner with a good sense of humor.” No one needs jokes. It’s not about jokes.

It’s really about modesty, about oneself. Somebody who’s able to go, “I think, I mean, take the other thing. If you meet somebody who thinks they’re easy to live with, run away. No one’s easy to live with.

And someone who thinks they’re easy to live with is really trouble.” So somebody could put up the hand go, “You know what? Yeah, I’m pretty tricky to live with.” Great.

That person is safer, not necessarily totally safe, but they’re safer, because they’ve started on the road to self-awareness. And so ultimately, the best we can do in this world is self-awareness, prompt apologies when we slip up.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. And a genuine intention to make progress, I guess.

Is that important as well? So like me being aware that I have certain habits in my relationship is one thing. But then I think my partner would like to know that some of the destructive cycles I might have, I’m working on them. I’m at least trying to make forward motion.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Yeah, totally. I mean, I think one of the most destructive ideas in the modern world is the idea that true love means accepting somebody for who they are, in all of their, you know, all of their good and bad sides. It’s a lovely dream. And you know, sometimes when you hear of breakups, they’ll go, you know, “My ex, you know, they just didn’t accept me for who I was.”

And everyone will go, “Oh, yes, God, what a terrible person, you know, how, you know, politely, one wants to go, hang on a minute, do any of us really deserve to be loved for the whole of who we are?” Is that really a fair expectation? Or isn’t, as you suggest, isn’t it fair to suppose that all of us are works in progress? And that, you know, there is nothing contrary to the spirit of love, in a desire to improve.

The ancient Greeks have this right, you know, for the ancient Greeks, Plato saw love as a classroom, beautiful idea, love is a classroom in which two people in a spirit of generosity, and kindness, I mean, we’re not talking about shouting here, we’re talking about generosity and kindness, two people endeavor to help each other to become the best version of themselves, of each other, right? That love is geared towards progress and working on yourself. That sounds very odd nowadays. And if you went around saying, “I’ve read some Plato, and he’s kind of guiding me towards the idea of love as a classroom.

So therefore, I’m going to give you a 40 minute lecture on some of your flaws. And then I’d like you to give me a 40 minute lecture on some of my flaws.” This will be considered, ding, ding, ding, unromantic, right? That’s not very romantic, is it?

Doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea. As I say, love is a skill to be learned, not just an emotion to be felt. And some of that means that we might need to go back to school.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve been thinking more recently that most relationships, the success of most relationship comes down to this idea of like how good you are at conflict resolution.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because I’ve had a previous relationship where we both can take the blame per se, we were just not good at conflict resolution. And then I’ve had a more recent relationship where we’re very, we seem to be much better, not perfect, but much better at conflict resolution. And it makes all the difference. But I think, you know, it’s not, if you were bad at conflict resolution, it’s not just your fault.

It’s partly the way our society works.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Come back to the idea of romanticism, right? Romanticism gives us this extraordinary idea that love is something that should be felt and communicated without words, right? So the most romantic people think, the most romantic sentence that often people will say is, “I met this person and we didn’t even need to speak.

We just felt on the same page.” Everyone goes, “Oh, how romantic, ding, ding, danger.” Because it’s, well, this leads to a catastrophic outbreak of sulking, right? What is sulking?

What is a sulk? A sulk is a fascinating pattern of behavior where you get very angry with someone because they have not understood you without, even though you haven’t said anything, they’ve not understood you and you get offended because you think, because you’re a romantic person, you think they can’t possibly love me because true love means understanding somebody, you know, intuitively, wordlessly, and therefore I’m not going to speak. And so, you know, you come back from a party with your partner and they say to you, “Is anything wrong, darling?” And you go, “Of course there is,” but you’re not going to tell them.

And then they start saying, “Come on, you can tell me what’s wrong.” And the sulking person goes, “No.” And this can go on and on and on. I mean, you know, we’ve all been at it sometimes, you know, you go home, you go straight upstairs, you go to the bathroom, you shut the door.

And then your partner’s knocking at the door, “Please, darling, just tell me what’s wrong.” And you go from behind the door, “No.” And the reason is that you’re a romantic and you believe that your partner should have miraculous, almost alien capacities to look through the bathroom door into your gnarled and wounded soul to understand what the upset is. But of course, they can’t because they’re just human.

It takes us a long time to realize that other humans are not mind readers. You know, one of the first things you always ask is, “Have I told them this?” I know I’m upset, but did I tell them this? And so often the answer is not quite because we’re romantics.

And so we have to do that really. I mean, you know, we can accept it’s really boring. We’ve got to use words. We’ve got to painfully stack up words and go, “The reason that I’m getting a little tetchy is because.”

And you’ve got to explain yourself. It’s not very romantic, but that is normally a sign. It’s a good idea.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So honestly, I’ve struggled at times to be completely honest in my relationships when I felt like the honesty might hurt them. So can we have true love and total honesty?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: I believe that the wish to tell someone absolutely everything is both beautiful and ultimately utopian in a problematic way. Because we, all of us, have within us ambivalences, doubts, unfaithful thoughts, etc. And it isn’t the work of love to rub your partner constantly up against the most troubling, disturbed sides of your psyche.

Now, we’re not talking, this is not an advocacy for sort of total mendacity and lies, but it is an advertisement for editing. You know, we should hope that we don’t meet the fullest version of each other all the time. You know, I know it sounds romantic, but sometimes it’s, you know, as parents know, is it that great as a parent to tell your child absolutely everything about what’s going through you? Well, sometimes, you know, is there a role for saying, “I’m just going to edit myself, not in the name of subterfuge, or deceit, but in the name of love, that love could be compatible with an editing of certain aspects of your reality.”

The Rise of Sexless Relationships

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the areas where a lot of editing happens is in the bedroom, in relationships, in sex, in sexless relationships. I was looking through some statistics earlier on, because I know that you’ve talked quite extensively on relationships and sex and sexless relationships. I found this stat that says a 2022 study by Relate, a UK-based counselling network, found that 26% of people in relationships were having sex less than 10 times per year, and 8% were having no sex at all. This is a stark rise from 2018, where the numbers were quite significantly lower than that.

It seems like as a society, we’re getting increasingly sexless.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Yeah, so the question is, where’s the problem? Is the problem in the body? Or is the problem in the mind?

Now, being the kind of guy I am, I’m going to shift this to the mind. I’m sure sometimes there are bodily issues, and they deserve attention too. But if I can talk about the mind, why is it that sex is easier at the beginning than in a long term relationship? One of the leading answers is anger.

It’s not very easy to have sex or want sex with someone that you’re angry with. And in many relationships, there’s a lot of stored anger that neither party knows is there. And that anger has come from micro incidents of disappointment. Someone didn’t quite call when they said they would.

Someone didn’t laugh when they might have done. Someone didn’t show generosity when it might have been required. And these things get stored up. And the result of too much of this is that you don’t want someone going anywhere near you, because you’re because you’re furious, you’re essentially furious.

But in the way of these things, you don’t know you are, you don’t know you’re furious. Again, you know, the mind is not obvious to itself. So, you know, if you want to have more sex, don’t just invest in candles and fancy linen. A quite useful thing to do is to go and have dinner with your partner and say to them, “We’re both going to ask each other how we’ve annoyed each other, because we have annoyed each other, not because we’re evil people, but because we’re human.”

And we’re in a relationship and no relationship survives more than an hour without a buildup of frustration. And the more we can let that frustration at the dinner table, the more it won’t, you know, create a blockage in a bedroom. And so the chance to discharge frustration, and, you know, often the reason why we don’t tell our partners, what our frustrations are, is that they sound ridiculous. It’s like, “Well, hang on, you’re upset with me, because I use the word ‘really’ in what you thought placed too much emphasis on the ‘why’ when I was speaking to your mother.

Are you crazy, right?” You are laying yourself open to your partner pointing to you going, “Are you crazy?” But I think that we’re all in love, very small children, at least a small part of us is. And as we know, small children get upset about really weird, tiny things, you know, you’ll move a button, and they start wailing, and you go, “What’s happened?

You move the button,” and you go, “Why does that matter?” But for them, it matters, or, you know, pencil has slightly changed direction. So we should learn, we should remember what it felt like to be a child. And we should acknowledge that there remains even an adult who’s very competent in all sorts of areas, a small child, who is liable to be getting very upset about small things, triggered, triggered.

But because they’re an adult, this is the problem. We, we think an adult can’t possibly be having such childish reactions. Again, we need to just cast aside our fears of shame, and say, “You know what, yes, an adult can get very upset about tiny things. An adult probably is upset about tiny things.”

And we’re doing ourselves an honor when we can dare to reveal this to our partner, and they can do likewise.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So if I’m, if I’m someone listening to this now, and I’m in a relationship where I don’t think, because it’s interesting, even when I say “I don’t think I’m having enough sex”, the idea of how much sex is enough sex has probably come from movies, which is a bit of a trap as well, right. But if I’m in a relationship, and we are in a sexist relationship, by whatever definition, solution one you presented there is try and resolve the anger, the underlying contempt. Are there anything else that you think is effective ways of solving for that?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Look, I think we I think one useful thing to do is to go, “Why does sex matter? What is this thing called sex? Why? Why does it matter?”

And when people get very upset, I think the answer tends to be that sex is a symbol of something very poignant and very delicate, which is “my partner loves me”. And the reason why it becomes such an acute issue is that they cannot hold on to the idea that the partner might love them and might not want sex. This is psychologically impossible. Now, it is important to say, it is possible, it is possible that your partner both loves you, and doesn’t want to have sex.

There could be other reasons they’re feeling unwell. So and then we can ask ourselves, “What does sex really aim at?” Sex aims at intimacy, you know, even will say they, you know, in people’s polite language, “They became intimate,” which means they have sex. So what we know about sex is that the really exciting thing about sex is not the sex bit, it’s the intimate bit. It’s the idea that someone is without their guard. You know, most of the time we approach other people with our guards on. And in this very rare and unusual thing we do, we meet another human being in a vulnerable state. And this is such a relief from the normal limitations of life.

And there are other ways of doing this. You know, sex is not the only way of doing it. So by understanding better what sex is, we can also have a chance to get some of what we get in sex in things that are not sex, if that makes sense.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I had Tracy Cox on the podcast and she said something to me which really stuck with me because I hadn’t noticed it until she said it, which is this idea I believe she called “otherness”, which is when your partner almost becomes like a family member, or you start seeing them as like a sibling because they are in their sweatpants around you.

And she made the claim, which I think I’ve read in your books as well, that in many respects, that’s the very opposite of the spice that makes sex so appealing in those early days when it’s new and novel and risky, you know? And so she kind of alluded to the fact that love and sex were actually set on two different ends of a pole.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Right, and again, to come back to my theme, what does a romantic say? A romantic, romanticism tells us sex and love belong entirely together.

But I think what you’re saying and what many of your viewers will know is that the relationship is trickier. And again, let’s not torture ourselves about this. Let’s get curious and then let’s communicate about this. And I think that, look, a growing child has a paradox to deal with.

And this is what Freud famously, doesn’t matter what you think of Freud, very useful observation really, that the child experiences love. In the first instance, at the beginning of life, we all experience love at the hands of people who, if everything’s gone right, we will have no sexual connection with, right? So given the debt that adult love owes to childhood, that sets us up with a problem when we as adults start to fall in love with people and start to build up relationships, which is that the more we get cozy with someone, the more we feel like we did a little bit with our parents when things were really cozy, which is oddly why people like going to hotels. Why do people like going to hotels?

To revive a relationship. It’s because the furniture doesn’t remember you. The curtains don’t remember you. You’re allowed to be, for a chosen moment, somebody without history.

And it’s the history that is making intimacy hard because that history, while it’s knitting you together and making you emotionally close, is also rendering sexual freedom problematic.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I think it’s just, we need to go very easy on ourselves for the fact that this happens. And- What do we do about it though? Do I need to book a lot of hotel rooms?

Do I need to spend a lot of time away from my partner?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: I noticed even that you’re laughing, you’re smiling as you say that. And I think that’s partly the clue. When we come up against the hardest conundrums in life, having the tolerance of a sense of humor, a shared sense of humor.

If a couple can turn the sexual challenges from a tragedy into something closer to a comedy, it’s an enormous achievement. Think of teasing, right? There are sides of couples that they find really, really hard. Isn’t it wonderful when a couple learns, with affection, to tease one another.

They go, “Ah, Steven, there’s that thing that you do,” it gives you a little nickname, calls you whatever it is, a little affectionate nickname. That’s a wonderful moment because it means that irritation has been sublimated into tender, compassionate understanding for why someone is as difficult as they are. So the best thing we can do with our irritations with our partners is to be able to tease our way out of them. And we may need to do this in troublesome areas like sex.

It’s an enormous achievement if your partner can call you, can go from thinking that you are an idiot to smiling at you and thinking, you’re a lovable idiot, right? We’re all, in the end of the day, a lovable idiot. We don’t need to believe in God, but if God was watching us from up there on the space station, we are all eight billion lovable idiots. And once we can have that sort of compassionate relationship to ourselves, that’s the beginning of a big bit of the solution.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I often think, you know, I’ve been in my relationship now for a couple of years. I think, how do I stop my partner getting bored of me? Will there ever come a day? Sometimes it does cross my mind.

Like, is she just gonna get like bored of me? And also, you know, vice versa. You think of being with someone for like 40, 50, 60 years. I’m sure some people listening have been with their partners for multi-decades.

Is there a risk of us getting bored of our partner and then seeking the sort of, you know, the novelty in affairs? And how do we prevent that?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Okay, well, look, here’s one suggestion. The thing that becomes very boring in all relationships is when people cease to listen to each other.

Now, when you say the word listen, you kind of think, “Oh, yeah, yeah, I know what that means.” Hang on, let’s complicate this issue a little bit, usefully. You know, most of us have never been listened to properly. It’s not something that normally we know how to do.

We know how to speak. You know, there are lessons in how to become a good public speaker. Not very many lessons in how to become a good listener, right? They’re not telling us something.

So what is it to listen? Imagine a situation where someone says something to you, and rather than you jumping in going, “Oh, that reminds me of, you know, something happened with my auntie,” or “That reminds me of,” or, you know, somebody to give advice and go, “The thing that you need to remember is one, two, three, four,” right, which is normally what we do when people speak. It’s to simply hold back, and therapists are good at doing this, and simply do what they call reflexive listening. So, you know, you say to somebody, “I’m really annoyed I’ve had such a difficult day at work.

This happened, that happened, that happened,” and then you simply repeat back to them using slightly different words the essence of what they said, and you say, “I’m hearing that life’s quite difficult for you at the moment at work, and that you, you know, coming out of pressure from your boss,” and the person, you know, it’ll be, try it, because the person will immediately feel, “I’m being heard,” and then they will have, they’ll feel more, they understand more about themselves. You know, why is it that in the company of some people, we feel really interesting and have lots to say, and in the company of others, we kind of feel a bit bored. We don’t have anything to say. We’re the same people.

It’s because we feel, we intuit that we’re in the presence of a listener, and the best way to listen is literally to not give advice, not give anecdotes, but repeat back to somebody what they’ve said in slightly different words, and I mean, you know, parents, bless them. I’ve been a parent. We’ve all been parents. Many of us have been parents.

Parents are often quite bad at listening to their children. They think they’re listening. I was in a holiday resort a few months ago, and there was this kid, little kid, must have been three or four, and it was having a bad day. It was really screaming, and the parent, the mother, might have been the mother, someone, was saying, “What’s wrong?”

And the kid was saying, “I hate it here. The whole place smells. It’s a poo, and I want to be back home at kindergarten,” and the caregiver said, “Don’t be so silly, darling. We’re on holiday.

Holidays are fun, and what’s more, this hotel has cost a lot of money,” and you want to go, “Okay, I get it.” This woman was trying to help. She was trying to, you know, calm down this distressed child. Was she listening?

Not really, because basically what the kid was saying is, “I’m having a really bad day. Everything feels absolutely disastrous. Help me, ah,” right, and we all have a version of those days, and we don’t want to be told, “Come on, you’re living in really wonderful times. The sun is shining.

You know, there’s lots to celebrate.” We want someone to go, “I hear things are bad for you. I’m hearing things are bad for you. I’m hearing you’re not coping very well, and you’re pretty sad,” and if you do that, don’t rush them.

Don’t give advice. Don’t give, you know, you will get a great response back. We can put money on it, listening.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What are the other core components then? Because I really want to close off this topic on love and sexless relationships. What would you say are the core components or the core habits of two people who have a really successful, long-term, enduring sexual and romantic relationship? If we just focus on the sex side of things first, what are those core habits? So I guess communication’s one that’s come through quite loudly.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: I start a little bit further upstream. I go like, overall, what do these guys need to do? And I think overall, they both need to acknowledge that they are frail, fragile, slightly crazy people because, not because they are them, but because they’re human, and there’s no other option for a human being than to be slightly crazy. And nevertheless, against that background, they’re attempting to do their best, right?

So that the combination of an acknowledgement of their fallible nature mixed in with a dedication to trying to understand it through broadly therapeutic means. So this is a very crucial thing. The other absolutely crucial thing is an acknowledgement that a lot of what people will be getting up to in relationships will have nothing to do with the person in front of you, that you will be importing from different periods of your life, scenarios and assumptions that owe nothing to the here and now and owe quite a lot to mom, dad, caregivers, and other scenarios. And the capacity to acknowledge that with grace, to say, “Okay, I’m sorry, I’m getting confused about who’s in front of me, right?

I’m importing into this situation an energy that doesn’t belong there.” We all do this. The whole basis of attachment theory, let’s remind ourselves, is that your attachment style is governed by your first attachment, the attachment that you had with a parental figure. And therefore, you will be, let’s say, insecurely preoccupied, attached to somebody, not because they deserve that quality of attachment, because your early caregiver did.

That’s what they mandated through their own behavior. But your partner, maybe someone completely different, is someone completely different. So if I can put it this way, getting on top of your projections, we project wildly as human beings, and being able to have at least a sense that the person in front of you may not be entirely who you think they are, and that reality in the here and now may be slightly more innocent. And I think, you know, you owe it to yourself.

It’s, look, it’s so boring. I’m sorry, Steven, I’m sorry to your listeners. You have to get on top of your childhood. It’s so boring to be told this, to be 30, 40, 50, 60, and to be told that you have to get on top of your childhood.

I mean, my goodness, this is not a nostalgia fest. The only reason is so you can put the damn thing to bed and never have to think about it again, but it’s gonna be rattling around unless you have done so. And I think it’s so, look, think of language. All of us, when we were kids, we were put in an environment where without us doing anything, we learned an entire language with syntax, grammar, a complicated vocabulary, et cetera.

And this happened while we were doing handstands in the garden, drawing buttercups in the kitchen, et cetera. We absorbed an entire language and we had no idea. The same thing was going on emotionally. We learned an emotional language, not a language about grammar and vocabulary, but a language about trust, a language about self-esteem, a language about who we are, a language about what will happen to us when we trust someone, a language about whether it’s safe to go with someone, to be ourselves, et cetera.

We learned that whole language and we have no idea we learned it, just that we have no idea we ever learned our language of birth. It just happened, but it’s inside us, no less than the grammatical language. And what we have to do, and it’s just as difficult as learning in adulthood, you know how difficult it is. Imagine if I said, “You learn Finnish now, now you’re going to learn Finnish, or next week we’re going to go off and we’re going to learn, you know, I don’t know, Korean.”

Right? You’d be like, “In a week? Well, it’s going to take a long time, isn’t it? We’re going to have to do this for a long time.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: You know, I’d say there’s two things I’d reply for you, Toby, to learn Finnish. First one is, “God, that’s going to, this is what I think, that’s going to take forever.” And the second one is, “What’s the point?” But I’d also say, let’s say we’re not trying to learn Finnish, we’re trying to learn trust.

Let’s say we’re not trying to learn Korean, we’re trying to learn the lesson of vulnerability, safe vulnerability, right? These are very valuable lessons, very valuable lessons that we need in our relationships. I say that because I point at the childhood patterns that you’re talking about. And I think one of the reasons why people don’t open up that closet and do the work there is because they don’t realize that that is the puppet master dictating their career relationships and everything in between.

So I think step one is like, them understanding the impact that that childhood narrative is having today.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Yeah. And then also realizing, you know, this is where language can be a useful metaphor, is about time. Because sometimes people say, “Okay, so I understand, I saw her, listened to podcasts, great, great guy.

Steven, you know, really gets on top of it. Listened to many of his podcasts. Problem is, after three podcasts, I’m not healed.” And you want to go, “Look, how many lessons of Finnish or Korean did you do?

Or three? Are you fluent? Ah, not quite. I might need another 150, right?”

So in other words-

STEVEN BARTLETT: You need 150 more.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Well, in other words, we need to take it slowly and we need to repeat these things. You know, we were talking about religion earlier. One of the things about religions is they understand that our minds are like siths.

You know, take Islam. Islam wants us to remember their God. Three, four, five times a day. In many religions, you’re on your knees constantly because they know, these religions know that it goes in one ear, it goes out the other.

It comes, you know, that we’re not very good at holding on to even the truths that we are most attached to. And I think part of the problem with the modern world is we tend to think, “I’ll just listen to that idea once. I’ll just read an interesting book. Said something to me once, and now I’m going to change my life.”

You want to go, “No, no. You know, again, think of the holy books. How many times are you supposed to read the Bible, the Koran, the Buddhist texts, every day?” Because we’re not very good at holding on, even to the things on which our lives depend.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there a risk, though, in this sort of healing culture where we’re all just healing forever, and we’re all kind of like broken and trying to recover from our early years where someone snatched candy out of our hands or something?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: I read an article a couple of weeks ago, and it said there was a bit of a risk to this long-term, ongoing healing mentality that we’re. Look, I sense your frustration, and I share it. It would be so nice if we could just get on with life without having to bother with all this stuff.

I understand. But I think, Steven, the thing you have to bear in mind is we are no longer merely trying to survive. We’re trying to thrive, right? The age of survival is behind us.

You know, we’re not just looking to reach the age of 30 and then collapsing to bed and thinking, you know, it’s been fantastic life. I’ve not been butchered by an enemy, right? We want to reach 80, 85, and we want not just survival. We want fulfillment.

And if we want that, we’re going to have to pay attention to things that previous generations didn’t. Again, let me use another metaphor, right? For most of human history, people, here I am drinking a glass of water, right? People didn’t pay much attention to water.

If it looked like there wasn’t anything actively floating in it like a frog or something, they think it’s clean water, right? They just gulp it back. And through such nonchalance, if I can put it that way, millions of people died, okay? And then towards the end of the 19th century, at about the very same time that Sigmund Freud in Vienna was getting going, helping us to think about certain things in the psyche, various people got very interested in water supply.

And all the main cities, Paris, London, New York, got a complete overhaul of their water supplies because it was suddenly discovered that microscopic organisms could kill hundreds of thousands of people. In a glass of water that looked completely clear, you might have enough to kill a city, right? And this is deeply perplexing. You think, “Hang on a minute, just a glass of water must be fine.”

And I don’t wanna be hard on you, but in that tone of like, “Really? Can we be bothered with that old childhood stuff? Why don’t you just get on with it?” You wanna go, unfortunately, we have to take care because there are macrobiotic organisms, as it were, in our lives that are gumming up our capacities for fulfillment.

And it’s not necessarily they’re gonna kill us, but they will hamper our capacity to exploit our full potential. And after all, this is what this podcast is about, this is what many people are concerned about, and it’s going to require work.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Can we ever truly heal from those things? Or will they always be there in the back room just exerting less power over us?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Look, wonderful German philosopher Schopenhauer, he says that the goal of life is to turn tears into knowledge. Wonderful progress. Tears, what are you gonna do with those? They just end up in your pillow.

They might end up being things you can learn from. So I think the best we can do is to learn to turn so many of the troubles that afflict us. No life is without affliction. But that moment when we go, “You know what?

I’ve learned something from this torment. This was a total nightmare, but I’ve pulled out of it something about myself, about human nature, about psychology.” Then we’re really learning. Then we’re really on the path to a good life because a good life is not a problematic free life.

It’s a life in which we’ve found a way of learning from our inevitable pains.

STEVEN BARTLETT: “You will never find the right person.” I read that sentence and that sounded a little bit negative. I think I read it in your book.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: “You will never find the right person.” Well, I was teasing gently our old friends, the romantics, who tell us that of course we will find the right person. And the belief in the right person has led to more rage, more disappointment, more frustration than any other. You know, if you tell people “You will find the right person,” if you build up a model of what it will mean to find the right person, you will be dooming people to disappointment.

If, for example, they meet somebody who’s really good, in many ways, very, very good, but they’ve had an argument with them. Well, “I’m not supposed to argue with somebody that the right person was supposed to be blissful.” So I’m teasing really the concept of rightness. Rightness can include a lot of wrongness.

And that’s why, you know, wonderful English psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott, who came up with this phrase, a “good enough” applies to parenthood. He argued that no child needs a perfect parent. Indeed, quite dangerous to have a perfect parent because you never leave home. Quite good to have a parent who causes you a few frustration.

It’ll get you out there. But he argued, no one needs a perfect parent. No one needs a perfect lover. They need a good enough parent, a good enough lover.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think that people that are in relationships, romantic relationships, should spend time apart? Do you think that’s healthy for the stuff we’ve talked about with sex listeners and stuff? Because I think I tend to get more excited about sex with my partner when she’s been away for a while. And there’s a real novelty to it.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Yes, look, I think one of the things that distance can do is to remind you that there is no preordained reason why someone should be with you. I mean, it’s one of the most miraculous things that anyone should choose to be with anyone. Because anyone is a quite complicated proposition. And some of the mystery of that can kind of, achieve its necessary force after a period away.

Look, it’s like being very ill. Imagine being ill for a while. You’ve not been in the world for a while. Suddenly you’re feeling better.

You go out into the world, you go to the park. And suddenly, “Oh my God, there’s this thing called a tree. It’s amazing. It’s got leaves. There are some bugs crawling all over it. There’s something called grass. There’s a brick wall.” You are suddenly like a three-year-old full of appreciation and wonder.

And one of the great challenges of life is how to keep being people who have wonder in their life. Because habit swallows everything up. “Oh yeah, tree, yeah, I know what those are. I know what a tree’s like.”

That’s why we need art. You know, for example, I mean, what’s the point of art? Small topic, let’s bite that one off too. What’s the point of art?

Well, one of the things that happens when you go to one of these places called galleries or museums is, they’re full of paintings by people who look at the world as though they’ve never seen it before. Maybe it’s their wife or husband. They look at their wife or husband as though they’ve never seen them before. And lo and behold, quite an amazing thing.

Wow, it’s kind of amazing. It’s full of tenderness and beauty and compassion and interest. Wow, I could like this person. They look at a tree.

They look at a cloud. They look at the grass. And you know, we are, part of what makes children, small children, so fascinating but also frustrating is you suggest a walk to the park. It takes them an hour and a half to go to the park.

Why? Because everything’s interesting. What have we done with those layers of interest that we also used to possess? We think we know what’s going on, but we don’t.

And one of the wonderful things that children can remind us is the foreignness, the true foreignness of a world that we feel we know, we feel we’ve seen, but we haven’t actually looked at.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You say on page 75 of that book that the solution to long-term sexual stagnation is to learn to see our lover as if we had never laid eyes on him or her before. Feels so natural though that through this process of sort of habituation, everything in our lives becomes less, yields less joy than it once did. And I often fight with that because as things get financially more, if you get more financially free in life, you’re able to experience the nice restaurants and the nice things and the nice holidays and the nice planes, all those kinds of things.

But with that, the awe and the surprise escapes you.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Absolutely, and I think we need to work at it. The Buddhists were onto this. The wonderful Buddhist scroll from the Middle Ages, medieval scroll, “Six Persimmons”.

You know, persimmon are kind of fruit. It’s got a bit like an apple. And it’s just six persimmons on a canvas, beautiful rendition. And the idea is that the Buddhist sage is meant to look at those six persimmons for an hour.

The true one could keep going for even a day, right? Just six persimmons, right? You might go, “Hang on a minute, can I change the channel please? Can I look at something else?”

The capacity to stare intensely at something and draw benefit from it is absolutely something that we lose as especially as life gets more dizzying. The thing to bear in mind is life can ever only be so exciting. It’s not by more stimulation that you ever, if your senses are wrecked, if you’re unable to draw benefit from one lemon, having a thousand lemons or a sports car isn’t gonna make you more of an appreciator. The goal is to learn to appreciate more of what we’ve already seen.

And that is, you know, we talk about gym and exercises and workouts. It’s something we need to do. I mean, it’s literally learning to see and to appreciate is a skill. And you can dial it up or dial it down.

And as I say, one of the good things about works of art is there are records of careful looking by people. They might not be looking at things you’re looking at, but it’s less about what you’re looking at that it’s a method of looking that you can learn from.

STEVEN BARTLETT: “A Therapeutic Journey, Lessons from the School of Life”, the Sunday Times bestselling author of the School of Life. I’ve seen this book everywhere.

I walk into bookshops all the time and I just wish my book had the prominence. And they should.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: It does.

STEVEN BARTLETT: No, I was in a book of foils the other day and I think you’ve got some signed copies in there.

I picked up one, yeah. Why did you write a book called “A Therapeutic Journey”? Because I have to say, you have written lots and lots, a bit too much. A lot of books.

I mean, this is not even half of them.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: No. There’s about 70 of them. This book, “A Therapeutic Journey”, it’s really following the arc of what one could call mental breakdown or a mental crisis from the moment of its inception, the moment it strikes us, through to the moment of recovery.

And then I go to lots of byways and lots of digressions, but essentially it’s saying, how can we keep our minds safe? How can we help them to heal? What can we do when we are in a mental crisis? It’s written in a tone, I hope, of sympathy, of kindness, and also trying to give people a sense of what’s happening to me.

Because very often, when there is a breakdown, we don’t know what on earth’s going on. Yesterday we were happy-go-lucky. Now we can’t get out of bed. Yesterday we were able to hold it together.

Now everything that comes out of our mouth makes no sense. So I think that it’s supposed to be a companion through what might be some of our loneliest hours.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why do we need this book right now, do you think, in society?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: I think because, look, I hope that people will think, “Hmm, okay, this is written from a place of somebody who probably gets what they’re saying, what I’m feeling.”

I think we need companions through things that probably feel very personal, but are actually, this is the good news, very general. But I think, you know, at The School of Life, we see so many people who are going through these things. And the thing that each one thinks is, “I’m alone.” And the best thing you can say to people is say, “No, you’re not.”

And the reason they think they’re alone is that, you know, it’s a paradox of human beings. We only know people from what they choose to tell us, but we know our own minds from introspection. And so there’s a massive sort of cognitive gap between self-knowledge and knowledge of others. And in that gap, shame develops, right?

And there’s so much shame around mental illness because it’s still, as we know, so rarely spoken about. And so the book aims to rehabilitate, to educate, and to comfort.

STEVEN BARTLETT: This is a book about getting unwell, imagining that we have let everyone down and losing direction and hope. It’s also a book about redemption, about regaining the thread, rediscovering meaning, and finding a way back to connection, warmth, and joy.

What are the ways in which we’re unwell increasingly?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Well, you know, it’s very hard. When your mind is operating well, you almost don’t notice what it’s doing because it’s doing so many things to keep you feeling, you know, we even have that word “normal”, right? “How do you feel?”

“I feel normal.” You know, that’s my baseline. That’s just how I am. It’s the result of what we call it gifts because when those gifts are taken away, goodness me, do you notice, right? So for example, there’s something in our mind, in a well-functioning mind, that more or less keeps us on our side, right? There will be so many reasons for all of us to despair of who we are. You know, “Why would I be on my side? I’ve made mistakes.

I’m not perfect,” et cetera. But most of us, you know, on a good day, Steven will go, “Look, I’m not perfect, but you know, I’m okay. I can keep going.” When you’re mentally unwell, that faculty breaks down, and suddenly you can’t abide your own self.

You can’t forgive yourself. You know, there are people who are unwell who will say “17 years ago, I said something to someone and I can’t forgive myself.” And you want to go, “That’s 17 years ago. It’s okay.”

And they can’t let it go. That’s what illness is. Illness is not being able to let go of an argument against yourself because you’ve turned into your own worst enemy. The other thing that people manage to do in a healthy mind is bracket things so that not all the things that could be in your mind are active in your mind at any point, right?

So you’re able to sequence thoughts. So you think, you know, “Well, you know, I’ve got this to do. I’m interviewing this guy now. Tomorrow I’ll be in New York.

There’s also a thing with my granny, and there’s also a thing with a friend,” et cetera. But those thoughts are sequenced. You’re able to line them up in a coherent order. When health breaks down, all of these things come at all angles.

There’s no order anymore. There’s no hierarchy. So something that happened 10 years ago is expressing something that’s happening right now. Something that’s deeply urgent collides with something that, you know, by rational means is not that urgent, but it seems as urgent.

And so everything coherent breaks down. You can no longer order things. There are voices that start coming in, not friendly voices. All of us have voices in our minds.

Not necessarily, you know, I’m not talking about psychotic voices, but there are voices, voices of encouragement often. “You can keep going. Just, you know, do it. Or it’s okay.

You could dare to take that risk.” Often kindly voices that we’ve incorporated from kind people around us. When mental health breaks down, we can only hear the worst voices. The voices that are telling us, “You don’t deserve to be here.

You made a mistake and we don’t want you here anymore. Better thing would be if you didn’t exist.” Those voices and those voices don’t let up. And then we’re in trouble.

And we need to raise the white flag because things are not well. And sometimes we keep going. We’re so good at keeping going that it’s terrible. Half the problem is that we keep going so well.

You know, we’re half dead before we realize there’s a problem, right? And so the ability to go, “Hang on, hang on. I can’t take it anymore.” That is the beginning of knowing how to get help.

Because when the mind is in trouble, what it most needs is another mind. It’s like calibration, right? When you’ve lost the correct calibration, you need somebody else to go, you know, when you go, “Everyone hates me and it’s all terrible and nothing I’ve done is of any value.” Just have another mind that says, “Okay, I know how you feel.

Let’s think about this. Is that really who you are, who that is?” And then, you know, gradually with love. And let’s remember, people always get mentally unwell because of love.

I don’t mean romantic relationships, but all mental unwellness stems somewhere. If you scroll back, there’s always a deficit of love. Always. There’s always an experience of cruelty in some way that breaks the mind.

And when people get well, there is also always an experience of love that heals. And it could be love, you know, not a romantic love, love from a friend, love from a therapist, love from professionals, but it’s essentially an act of love. An act of love saves us, redeems us. So the problem and often the antidote is love, or at least the cause and the antidote is often love.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yes, imaginatively understood, not merely romantic love in its broadest sense. And, you know, because mental breakdown is often emerges from a buildup of cruelty, an unbearable cruelty, which makes life unbearable for the person. And they then have to, you know, project it outwards. I mean, when illness becomes very severe and you have a psychosis, you know, what can happen is that people become obsessed with the idea that everyone is against them.

The CIA is against them. Other people are plotting against them. Really what this is an outgrowth of is an unbearable inner negativity that hasn’t found any way of being handled. You use the word “resilience” in this book.

And I think the word “resilience” is often misunderstood because we think of resilience as like “toughen up” and, you know, “take it.” What is your definition of resilience? And why is that such a prominent word in this book?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Look, I think true resilience should be compatible with things that don’t look resilient at all. Things that look very desperate, very humble, very broken indeed. So yes, I mean, I, like you, am suspicious of the use of that word “resilience” as really just meaning a kind of stoic bouncing back from all problems immediately. I think it means a generous understanding of how much madness has a legitimate claim on even a healthy life. Towards the end of the book, I have a little thing I riff on about the seasons.

Some of it is understanding that this is normal. This is part of the natural cycle, not railing against it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Some of what… What does that help? Kind of saying that it’s normal.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Well, sometimes when people have mental troubles, they will have ups and downs, right? And some of those people can box themselves in and they’ll go, “I suffered, now I’m better again. You know, I’m better.”

And the advice is always, “Hmm, careful, careful.” That belief that you’re better, the rigid belief, the past is behind me, the darkness is behind me, that can itself start to seem like a problem because it means that you’ll be intolerant towards any regression. And regression belongs to progress, just like dark days belong to good seasons. You know, we need some of that.

And the natural world has a wonderful way, if we’re attuned to it, of telling us about cycles. Really, what we’re talking about is cyclicality. Darkness is followed by light. Autumn is followed by winter, is followed by spring.

The mind has its own seasons. And the more we can accept the legitimacy of those seasons, the less we’ll rail against some of the necessary sliding into darkness, which for many of us is simply going to be unavoidable.

STEVEN BARTLETT: If someone chooses to pick up this book and they get to the final page, what do you hope they’d learnt or taken away from them by getting to the end of this book?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: A real sympathy for the complexity of their minds, a real understanding that it’s not easy being human, that there is nothing indulgent about working on oneself, as you put it, that this is a boring but also very necessary task. Some tools in there about how to do it, from the very practical to the more theoretical. There’s a practical book about how you can work on the most broken bits of yourself. And find a kind of equilibrium. But it’s also very deliberately a warm book.

It’s a book of comfort. And I think that’s something that we often miss. We can get a little too intellectual in this topic, thinking that people who are in trouble, mentally and just psychologically, that all they need is some ideas. Get some ideas.

And yeah, sure, we need ideas. But you know what we also need is warmth, kindness, friendship, in a way. Now, if you say, “Well, how could a book be a friend?” Well, you know, many of my best friends are books, let me tell you.

And I think it’s absolutely in the remit of a book to act as a friend and to say to you very simply, “You are not alone.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: You said earlier that a good conversationalist, a good friend, a good romantic partner is someone that makes you feel heard and understood. And I think that’s exactly what you achieve in this book. It is a very difficult thing to do because books can often feel quite exclusive, especially when the author is as smart as you are.

But this book does a wonderful job of first and foremost, making you realize that the thing you’re going through and the way that you are isn’t evidence of your inadequacy. It’s actually evidence that you are perfectly human and that you are like everybody else. And through that lens, you can offer support and some very practical tips about how to, you know, endure or rise from the situation that we all find ourselves in in the different seasons of life that you described. And that’s why it’s such an important book.

And that’s why it’s done so tremendously well and it’s being passed around by so many people. Alan, thank you so much for your time today. And thank you for all your wisdom. You’re a remarkable talker.

I was learning, I was watching you and I was just thinking, fucking hell, you know. You’ve got a wonderful way to hold people with the way that you articulate yourself that is so unbelievably powerful. And speaking and the art of speaking is such a important, incredible talent to have. And you have that in such a wondrous way.

It’s so soothing and engaging and intelligent. And there’s a real poetry to the way that you frame things, which I think is just a superpower that I would love to have more of.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: You do, Steven, you do.

STEVEN BARTLETT: No, but not like you have it though. It was wonderful just to learn from the way that you speak. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question to the next guest, not knowing who they’re leaving it for. And the question that’s been left for you is, ah, interesting. What was the last thought to keep you awake at night?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: The last thought to keep me awake at night? Well, last night I was quite worried about coming here. So I was kept up. But I’m often kept up.

I do. Why? I sleep in quite a fragile way. And I think that one of the ways of thinking about it is that there are thoughts that happen in the middle of the night that can’t happen at any other time.

That there are actually some quite important thoughts. Often they’re to do with things that you didn’t even know you were concerned about, but the night teaches you. There is the school of night, you know. And I used to be very, very impatient, insomniac.

So I used to wake up and think, “Oh my goodness, I can’t believe that I’m still awake. How annoying.” Now I’m thinking, maybe there’s something to learn here. Maybe my mind’s trying to teach me something.

And it might not be anything totally earth shattering. It might not sound earth shattering, but it might just be, something might just be like, “Oh, I really love this thing,” or “I think I should really steer away from that,” or “This is really beautiful,” or whatever it is. Something, a kind of acknowledgement of the night. And so I’ve become a better, not a better sleeper, but something perhaps even more important, a better insomniac.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Hmm. Why are you nervous, staying up, about coming here? We’re all friendly people.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: I know you are. I think, you know, we’ve spoken a lot about expectation, haven’t we? And, you know, if your podcast had one listener, and we were just going down to the pub, that’d be so lovely. If you called me up and said, “Alan, we’re cancelling the show. So we’re just going to go to the pub.”

I would have slept like a baby.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, you certainly exceeded all my expectations. And it’s a real honour and a privilege that you chose to come. So thank you so much for that.

And your wisdom, I’m sure, has impacted countless people, not just for the last couple of decades, but even in this conversation, that I guess you’ll never get to see. So on behalf of them, thank you so much.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Thanks, Steven.

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