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- [00:00]
Chris Williamson
Orlando Botton, welcome to the show.
- [00:02]
Alain de Botton
Thank you so much.
- [00:03]
Chris Williamson
Where do bad inner voices come from?
- [00:06]
Alain de Botton
Well, the way I like to think about it is that an inner voice is always an outer voice that got internalized. You know, we're very porous people. The way in which we're spoken to becomes the way in which we speak to ourselves. I mean, if that sounds too weird, think of language, right? All of us arrive in the world not speaking any language, and by the age of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, you know, we'll have learned a lot of words. But the fascinating thing about human beings is we don't know we're learning. So we can be doing other stuff like, you know, doing handstands in the garden or drawing buttercups in the kitchen. And we're becoming expert grammarians. Hundreds of words are entering our minds. Complex grammatical constructions are entering our minds. Now, the way I like to think about it is that that language analogy holds true for emotional life as well. So at the same time as we're learning a language of, you know, words and declensions, we're also learning a language of emotions. We're learning things like, what's a man like? What's a woman like? What happens if you give something to someone? What happens if you're vulnerable? What happens if you want to play? What happens if you say no? What happens if you say yes? All of these are the syntax. They comprise the syntax of our emotional lives. And it's an invisible syntax, just as our grammatical syntax is invisible, but it's there, and it will operate throughout our lives, and it will be immensely hard to change. I mean, you know what it's like if you're, you know, if you grew up speaking English and then you want to learn a foreign language. You suddenly want to learn Italian. Well, good luck to you. You're going to be learning a long time. It's not impossible can be done, but I think it's helpful to think of how hard it is, because sometimes people get very impatient in their attempts to change things about themselves. They go things like, you know, I want to change how I relate to people in relationships, say, and I've read a book, and I've been to three therapy sessions, and I'm really annoyed. Nothing works. You want to go, okay, imagine this was Italian. So you've looked at a book on Italian, you've taken three classes, and you don't speak fluent Italian, and you're complaining. So we do need some modesty here just in order to be properly ambitious. I mean, as you know, the root cause of sort of early despair and early retirement from things is a false picture of what success demands in an area. And I think in the area of emotional improvement or maturation, we sometimes let ourselves down by thinking it's going to have an ease, which it won't have.
- [02:46]
Chris Williamson
It's interesting thinking about how language shapes our experience of emotions and our experience of the world. That German for instance, has a colorful number of ways to describe certain emotions that you can't in other he said, well, does the fact that we have the word for it almost unlock that emotion in a way it allows us to do self investigation?
- [03:06]
Alain de Botton
Yes, I think, you know, philosophers watching this, philosophers of language may have arguments prone in it. It's a big thing. But I definitely feel that the more words we, the more we can attend to what we feel and in some cases the more we can feel. I remember learning the word anxiety when I was a teenager and thinking, wow, that's a really useful word. Probably nowadays people learn anxiety a lot earlier, but in those days it was a fascinating word to learn. And the more one's vocabulary stretches, the more you're able to put a flag in bits of your psyche that are perhaps painful. And I think if you think about why people go to psychotherapy or even frankly what motivates a lot of friendship, it's somebody else helps to give you a vocabulary for bits of your mind and bits of your experience that have not till now that have eluded definition. And that definition is not merely a fancy thing, it's a life saving thing. Because the more you can define, the easier life gets. Freud speculated that the origins of language lie in an ability to bear frustration. So that if a child can think, I'm currently frustrated, but mummy's coming back and the person's got those words then that can help you to bear missing and also bear excitement or you know, all sorts of things. Things can become more bearable the more you can put them into language. And I think, you know, adults know this when we, we go about journaling. Right. You know, what, why, why is it so helpful to journal to, you know, because we, we know it is. All research shows that it is. What is it about translating a feeling into a word for that feeling? That's helpful and I think it tames, it contains and it narrows the spread of difficult emotions.
- [05:13]
Chris Williamson
It's very ephemeral. Right. You've got these thoughts up here moving around, floating about and then they have to be concretized. And you're right, it almost feels like it squeezes it through an aperture of some kind. You say, okay, this is what I meant by that. It's not this notion. It's not this sort of ambient. It's. Somebody shouted a noise in the next room. It's like, oh, no, it's here. I can touch it, you can see it.
- [05:36]
Alain de Botton
Yeah, yeah, that's right. And, you know, think of relationships, couples. The more their vocabulary for what they're going through increases, the more they can say, you know, I'm feeling this, I'm feeling. You know, when you do that, I feel this, et cetera. And the enemy, you know, the sort of normal word is people who say communication, but it's really language. It's putting language to feelings. And so much goes wrong in life because we're unable to do starts with ourselves. We can't do it with ourselves. There's a useful phrase that psychotherapists use to disassociation. It's a fascinating concept. What would it mean to disassociate? And the way it's understood, sort of therapeutically, is that you could feel an emotion. It's so difficult, tricky in some way, and you then stop feeling it. You disassociate from the feeling that's in you. It's still in you, but. But you're no longer registering it. Tricky, tricky. And the argument is always, the more you can associate and the less you can disassociate, the better off you will be. But look, there are many bits of life that are unbearable to us. Let's remember this. There's a wonderful quote in Middlemarch, George eliot, big fat 19th century novel, where she says, if we could properly register the full sounds of life, we would lose our minds from the full richness of existence. In other words, if you were sensitive to everything that's around you, you would sort of go mad, you know. And I think if we think about what madness is, so called, what colloquially called madness. If you think of people with severe mental illness, very often what has happened is that their ability to sequence thoughts has gone. Everything is coming at them and they can't grade thoughts. They can't say, this thought must go away now. So they'll go, I made a mistake 15 years ago. And if you're balanced, you'll go, well, that was 15 years ago. And it's not a problem. We don't have to have it pressing down. If your reason is buckling, often everything that is alarming comes at you at once, everything that is difficult at once. And so in a way, I'M sticking up for the ability sometimes to take distance from our feelings. So I started off by going, it's really important to know what you're feeling. But let's also remember at points the ability not to feel the full force of everything also belongs to health. So it's a double edged sword there.
- [08:22]
Chris Williamson
What's your advice for how people can heal a negative inner voice? We've got this odd artifact that we've carried with us, this inheritance of our life, but kind of almost some previous life of ours. Where should people begin if they want to have a more friendly inner voice?
- [08:41]
Alain de Botton
Such a good question. I'd say you have to start by finding the inner voice because it doesn't announce itself as an inner voice. So how are we going to, you know, we're not talking here about literally hearing voices. Some people do, but we're not talking about that here. What we're talking about is a way of speaking to yourself or a way of, you know, way of conducting yourself in your own mind that owes more to something from outside than from inside. And that is more negative, or we can put it this way, unfair to you and your chances, your hopes, et cetera. So how do we detect this is even going on? Because I don't think it's necessarily obvious here. I think that it's quite helpful to get people to do what are called sentence completion exercises, where you start off with a stub sentence and then you have an ellipsis. So men are, women are, life is, I am, I want, if, because. And you say to people, here's a list these things without thinking too much, important prompt without thinking too much. Just say the first thing comes into your head. Men are, women are, life is, I am, et cetera. Or even beginnings of stories. Story completion exercises. When I meet someone that I just finish that sentence and what people will come out with is fascinating. They'll go, men are cruel. Wow, wow, wow. Men are cruel. Person might even be surprised that they've said that. And you say, okay, where's that come from? What led you to believe that? And often what you'll find is a story that owes more to something outside than something inside. Or when I meet someone, what will happen is they'll be very friendly to me, then they'll turn against me. Wow, wow. Where did that come from? It's going to be a specific story in the past that is being carried forward.
- [10:44]
Chris Williamson
Isn't it interesting that we're talking about maybe the thing people identify with most, the texture of their own experience, the landscape of their own mind. But you're then saying, well, this may not fully be self generated. This might be something which you've absorbed from the past, from society, from norms, from cultures, from the way that you've compensated for past traumas, et cetera.
- [11:07]
Alain de Botton
Yeah.
- [11:07]
Chris Williamson
Or just habits. But it brings up an interesting question which is, okay, so who are you? Where are you in this? Are you that voice? In some ways you are because you're inexorably linked to all of the experiences you've had. But then we have this sort of transcendent us, which is better. It's the better us. If only I could. It's the me without the compensation, the trauma, the et cetera.
- [11:33]
Alain de Botton
Such a good question. You know, we're not sometimes can be this idea of the real me that is separate from everybody else. We are penetrated by society. Think of how we're speaking. We're using words as we speak to one another. Every one of those words is both spoken by us and was made by other people long before we were even a rumor in anyone's mind. We are penetrated by society. Every one of the words that I am using is the result of generations and generations of people who've used those words, refined their meaning, etc. And then given them to me.
- [12:07]
Chris Williamson
Me.
- [12:08]
Alain de Botton
So that's literally the language. We're permeated by social language. Even our biology as we know our gut bacteria, is both us and not us. The neat Chris Alain. We are these sort of entities where you can put a strict circle around. Now we're interpenetrated by society, biology, history, et cetera. So then the question comes, well, is there anything that's more me, less me? And I think here, Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that one of the journeys. Life's full of journeys, One of the journeys that I think we all are on is to start to separate out a little bit. I can understand there's a lot in me that was just put there by society, by the context in which I was born. Which of those bits do I want to keep or focus on and which those bits do not fully represent my values, my considered choices, et cetera. And this is where life gets interesting because people start to say things like, well, where I come from, normal meant. But the more I think about it, the more I'm reflecting on who I really am, the more I want to ditch that and that and that as a form of editing process, self authorship. Absolutely. And I think that the more mature someone is. I'll use that word because you used others. The more mature someone is, the more what they do, what they think. The values they hold owe more to their own work, their own sifting, their own editing, than it does to the context that they were born into. I think, you know, it's interesting if you look at the arc of a life, right, A very small child is often remarkably authentic, which is why we adults, in small doses at least have such a great time with little ones. Because they come out with stuff and you think, oh, my God, I can't believe they've just said that thing. You know, they've just said that granny's nose is too big or that this restaurant's boring or this very expensive thing is a load of rubbish, et cetera. They'll come out with stuff that is non normative. And that's very interesting because as an adult you recognize a kind of, you know, you recognize your own spontaneity that's been lost normally. So it's kind of bittersweet. You think, oh, you know, you don't want exactly the child's version of it because that would lead you in trouble, but you want an adult version, and it's very hard to get. And probably the high watermark of the opposite is when you're 14 and a half and you're at school and your most fervent wish is to be like everybody else. You want your parents to be like everybody else. You want your name to be like everybody else. You want your appearance, your haircut, et cetera. You cannot bear difference. And then slowly, slowly you individuate, you know, and that's a very exciting journey seeing. I don't think anyone. Sorry, anyone, individuates in all areas. So I think the first choice is what are the areas that matter a lot to you? I'm interested in individuation, but when it comes to clothes, you might have noticed, I kind of, you know, it's a really interesting area, but I just. Just leaving that one for another time, you know, I'm just not engaging with that. Similarly, food, fascinating area, you know, very interesting.
- [15:38]
Chris Williamson
Yeah.
- [15:38]
Alain de Botton
Not quite on my radar yet, but, you know, other areas, what I'm reading, very, you know, opinionated, very individual. So I don't think all of us can do it in all areas, but we choose. And that's also part of what makes someone an individual.
- [15:54]
Chris Williamson
I love the idea of children being unencumbered by sort of expectation in that way. And, yeah. Trying to find the balance between what would the mature, childlike version of ourselves do or say in this moment where have we found ourselves too swayed by the opinions of others, by expectations, by societal norms, et cetera?
- [16:17]
Alain de Botton
Do you remember that story of Picasso, who was going around an art school, like, little kids were doing art, and some kid was sort of scrawling, you know, mummy, whatever. And this kid was 7, and he. Picasso said famously, when I was his age, I was painting, like Raphael, you know, one of the great Renaissance artists. And it was sort of true. I mean, young Picasso. And then he went, and it's taken me all my life to remember how to paint like this.
- [16:43]
Chris Williamson
Unreal.
- [16:45]
Alain de Botton
Now, he didn't. You know, an adult painting like a child is not a child painting like a child. It's something different, you know, which is why people go, oh, a child could have done that. Well, when a child does it, it's one thing, and when an adult does it, it's another thing. And I think it's quite different. And I think that's why, you know, when you look at Picasso and there are lots of artists and lots of figures you could sort of draw that analogy with, but, you know, when you're looking at a painting that Picasso did when he was 93, you know, the end of his life, and it's got elements of stuff that a child might do, but it's gone through, you know, that this guy has been doing so much other stuff, so he's got deeper reasons.
- [17:23]
Chris Williamson
Did you ever read His Dark Materials by Philip Polman?
- [17:26]
Alain de Botton
No.
- [17:27]
Chris Williamson
Okay. Trilogy of children's books. Ostensibly, I guess this was my favorite series when I was a kid. And in it, the protagonist, Lyra, finds this truth teller. It's called an alethiometer. And for some reason, this particular device, it takes an entire lifetime of study to be able to read it. And as a child, she can do it immediately. So it's this beautiful arc, and it's the first time I ever thought about it. And Pullman takes you through unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence, to conscious incompetence to conscious competence. And one of the final scenes of the entire book, at the very, very end, she goes back to the nunnery where she was being raised five years ago before the story begins, and she's lost the ability to read it. She hits puberty, and it's kind of this fall. It talks about kind of the awareness that her and her partner now have, and she says, I can't read it anymore. And the nun turns to her and she says, my dear, it's going to take you an entire lifetime. But the depth of knowledge you have will Be greater than it ever was before. And it's that arc. Unconscious incompetence, unconscious competence. Conscious incompetence, conscious competence. And that finishing side, something that's been earned. You found your way there through effort, agency, self authorship is. Yeah, it's special.
- [18:47]
Alain de Botton
Yeah. And I think, you know, it's interesting, isn't it, when people who've read a lot, thought a lot, et cetera, come out with stuff and it sounds very, very simple. And I think our society gets a bit puzzled by that because the sort of obvious respect goes to people that speak in a very dense way and you can't quite understand what they mean. So, you know, philosophy I started out in, you know, the heroes there, or people like Wittgenstein or Hegel, Kant, et cetera. Very, very hard, not superbly accessible to make headway. And then you turn to the east, you look at Eastern philosophy, you look at the poetry of someone like Basho in Japan, medieval Japan. It's so simple. It's four words on a piece of paper and very easy to go. Mumbo jumbo or child's play, whatever. And to be kind of mature enough to go, okay, I'm going to bear with the anxiety that this is very simple sounding, simple sounding in the East. The idea is that poetry, for example, can sound very, very simple. The point is that it's an interaction between the reader and the work. So not everything is in the poem or the saying. You bring yourself to it. And therefore the ultimate impact of that work is a collaboration between you and the work.
- [20:23]
Chris Williamson
Fascinating.
- [20:23]
Alain de Botton
So the Western view might be to go, there's not that much in there, and it's the artist's fault.
- [20:28]
Chris Williamson
It's your job.
- [20:30]
Alain de Botton
Whereas in east, the view is, well, it's a collaboration. So if you're not seeing anything, it's because you're not bringing enough of yourself. So very interesting to get, you know, lots of the arts. I mean, think of that enso, you know, in, you know, just a circle. This is the whole of life, whole of life. It's just, you know, you're just doing a circle with your brush and amazing, amazing the courage to say, okay, we're gonna go with this. We're gonna, you know, the whole of existence is this circle. And if you meditate profoundly enough on this, you will see the world not just in a grain of sand, but in a circle, et cetera. And we really meet a fault line here. In the Western understanding of depth and profundity, this takes a bit of time for the Western mind to kind of get to grips with that. We're like, come on, is this a joke? Are they just peddling? Yeah, probably not.
- [21:26]
Chris Williamson
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- [22:37]
Alain de Botton
Come on, let's be honest here with the audience and you know, we know what emotions are like. They're not just lovely cuddly things, they're absolutely terrifying a lot of the time. Think of what it takes. Think about love, right? So people, we think that people spend their lives looking for love. And half true, that's a half truth. They spend a good deal of time running away from love as well, in all sorts of forms. We are as assiduous in our escape from love as we are in our pursuit. Perhaps more so. Why? Because it's terrifying. It's especially terrifying if you come from a childhood, a young world where there was some kind of disruption in your attachments, in your, you know, in your experience of love. The next time you then meet love as an adult, half of you is just wanting to run away. And I think people don't still not fully appreciate enough the the strength with which love we are going to resist love, if our earliest experience of it was in any way, in any way difficult. And this explains a great deal of the misery of the world.
- [23:58]
Chris Williamson
It's very interesting to think about how much we try and push away the thing that we're also wanting, how we are complicit in creating the scenario that we're so terrified of having happened. I've been thinking a lot about second order emotions, third order emotions. So you have a thing that happens. You feel agitated, and then you begin to tell yourself a story, and you become stressed at your agitation, and then you become resentful at your stress about your agitation, and then you become anxious about. And that additional layering, this kernel that we began with with regards to the emotion, sort of explodes out. And before you know it, you're feeling an emotion that's not only the thing that started, but it's an entire universe away. And this is now the problem, not this.
- [24:42]
Alain de Botton
Yeah, that's right. And I'm not sure if I understand you fully, but is it really the case that you are not accepting the primary emotion? So let's say you go somewhere, it should be nice, you're disappointed. You can't be disappointed, it's meant to be nice. You can't accept that disappointment. And then you're angry with yourself for feeling disappointed. And then, you know, and on it. Whereas if one could just go, okay, maybe it's all right to be disappointed. I mean, it's not brilliant, but there it is. Or I'm feeling sad. Okay, well, that wouldn't be what I wanted, but let me not be sad that I'm sad or angry that I'm sad.
- [25:21]
Chris Williamson
I think this is why we have certain signature emotions that feel like home base. There's ones that we're intimately familiar with and there's ones that scare us a lot more. And a unsatisfactory but familiar emotion is often more safe to us than a slightly novel, more exotic, but scarier one.
- [25:44]
Alain de Botton
And also, I think, happier one. I mean, you know, talking just a minute ago, people escaping love, people also escape happiness. I mean, the way I think about it is that very often we're in a situation of. It's like being a prisoner. You've been kept in jail for a very long time, your diet's been restricted, it's not been much fun. Then the gate opens and you're allowed to walk out. It should be a great day, Fantastic, you're free. Nah, you know, we know what happens. Let's say you've been on a calorie restricted diet. Suddenly someone says, you know, here's a buffet. You can eat anything you like. You don't want to eat it. You can't. You can't digest it, you can't process it. It's too much. So, you know, something similar goes on in our attitudes to happiness. Often, I mean, it's useful to say to yourself, ask yourself, in the circumstances in which I grew up, what did it mean to be happy? And for some of us, it meant upsetting a parent. It meant challenging the dominant mood in a household. It meant taking away attention from somebody else. It meant danger. And that's odd, because we think, why would it be dangerous to be happy? Well, but there are all sorts of risks associated with it. And so in our deep minds, sometimes in adulthood, we simply cannot accept the circumstances of our lives and therefore go about spoiling them so that we put them more. There's a wonderful paper called something like a criminal psychotherapy. Criminal in search of an offense. A sense that you've done something wrong. If you carry that from your past. And then you think, how am I going to get rid of that feeling? Oh, I know I'll do something wrong and then I won't feel that feeling anymore. Sometimes, you know, it's a bit like that. It's like saying, I'm feeling happy, but I shouldn't be happy. What shall I do? Oh, yes, I'll make myself unhappy. Or, you know, I'm feeling loved. Someone's offering me love. That's not normal. I don't recognize that feeling. Oh, what shall I do? Oh, I'll drive them away. Yeah, I'll go and be rude to them or go and have an affair with somebody else or whatever it is. Something to spoil something. That's nice. So the impulse to spoil is really deep. Happiness and love are hard to bear.
- [27:53]
Chris Williamson
I suppose, if reality is not delivering our model of the world, our expectation of the world, our prediction of the world, we have discordance between the two. And there are two things that we can try and do. We can try and bring our model of the world up to reality, or we can try and bring reality back down to our expectation.
- [28:11]
Alain de Botton
Exactly. Beautifully put.
- [28:13]
Chris Williamson
Is there a danger of intellectualizing challenges of emotion for smart people? People that like to read and consume YouTube channels like yours or podcasts like mine? And we like to investigate ourselves. We want to understand ourselves and the world around us. And maybe we've even got the theory from evolutionary psychology that explains why this is adaptive and that ancestrally we are made up of blah, blah, blah. How much is that a prophylactic against us actually having to feel things? And how can we better break through this intellectualizing of emotions and rationalizing of them away?
- [28:53]
Alain de Botton
Let's start with compassion. You know, we are the way we are, you know, for poignant reasons, not, you know, we didn't get to be that way. You know, think of the bookish child, you know, think of the child who's reading a lot. Often it's because life around is quite difficult now. It's great to read, it's good to read, et cetera. But if you spend all your time in books, it's often a sign things are challenging. And so often people who excel at intellectual pursuits, et cetera, are in flight from an overwhelming situation. I'd wish them well that in time the overwhelming situation could get a little less intense and they could get a little more of reality into their intellectual world. I mean, I'm describing myself. Perhaps you want to try and see reality for what it is. And if you're warding it off with intellectual structures, let's say thank you to those structures. I think it's really important. Whenever you look at people doing stuff that seems a bit suboptimal or a bit strange, they're reading too much, they're jogging too much, they're trying to make too much money, whatever, whatever. They're feeling too much, they're feeling too little. All of these departures from so called health, normality, et cetera. Always ask yourself, why are they doing it? And it's normally a defense. It is a defense against a situation that was very difficult. At some point they learned that defense. And even though it would be optimal now to let go of that defensive structure, they're still clinging onto it because that's what feels safe. It feels safe to make jokes all the time. It feels safe to be very serious all the time. It feels safe to be depressed, it feels safe to give up. It feels safe to try and win at all costs, including your own health, et cetera. All these are defensive structures that once kept us safe, that I think in order to evolve. We almost want to say thank you, thank you to your younger self for working this out, for finding a way of coping with reality. But. But could we learn to cope in a slightly different way?
- [31:00]
Chris Williamson
So great. I'm interested just taking that one step further in the difference between knowing ourselves intellectually and knowing ourselves emotionally. I think even in my less equanimous moments when I do journaling, I find myself Writing more of an essay than a personal inquiry. And, yeah, the difference between knowing ourselves intellectually and knowing ourselves emotionally. Again, for the cerebrally minded praying at the altar of cognitive horsepower, people, it's a coping mechanism. It's a way to distance yourself from this.
- [31:39]
Alain de Botton
Yes. And I think our minds, it is much easier to have the headline than the meat of the topic. And very often we reach an uncomfortable state of half knowing ourselves and we think, oh, I've covered it, right? I know in my childhood there was this and then there was this, then there was that. And you've got a kind of a headline tension with my dad or tricky with my mom, whatever it is. And we think, oh, I've got that, I've got that, I know it. Now, let's go back to the eastern Enzo circle, right? And the east says, meditate for hours repeatedly on the thing that looks obvious, the thing that you know. So they're saying the whole of life is that circle. So look at that circle and keep coming back to it. And the more you look at it, the more you will see in it. Now, the western approach is a bit. It's too impatient. It'll say, all right, yeah, it was tense with my dad. I know that. I go, hang on, hang on, hang on. That's an Enzo of its own. I was tense with my dad. You could meditate around that for an hour a day or an hour a week or whatever it is. You can keep coming back to that. There are so many things still to be discovered there. It's not dead. And so I think I'd almost want to excite those who are listening to think, okay, I think I know something. Do I really know it? Might I go back there? Our real experiences tend to be so much richer than our work a day sense of them. Think about a holiday, right? So have you ever been to Greece? Oh, yeah, I went to Greece. All right. Have you been to Santorini? Yeah, I've been to Santorini. Okay, so we think we covered that one. The person's been to Santorini. Hang on. First of all, our minds are amazing mechanisms of capture. You know, we've got cameras around, sound equipment, et cetera. Nothing beats the human mind for capturing absolutely everything. Often the time to explore. This is sort of twilight of your mind as you're going to sleep or waking up. If you say to yourself, yeah, Santorini, what was that like? What was it really like? And you realize, oh, my God, I remember there was a tiled hallway that led to a blue door. And I actually remember there was a flower in a little vase and there was light coming in from. I think it must have been from the left. And actually, if I looked to the right, there was a little window, et cetera. And it's all there, it's all in your mind, just waiting to be asked. Waiting. This is the famous. Can I talk about Proust? Marcel Proust, great French novelist, 19th, early 20th century, et cetera, came up with this famous idea of the Proustian moment. Some of you will know it, some of you won't. It's basically a moment when you take something sensory, like a sip of water or a smell. Imagine the smell of concrete after rain, or the smell of snow just after a snowfall, et cetera. And suddenly you get that sensory experience and a world opens up. You think, oh, my God, I'm five years old again and I've just gone outside of the garden of the yard where I grew up, and there was a brick wall and there was that exact smell, and I'm there again. And suddenly your world becomes so much richer. And these are just little moments of expansion around a topic, like after a snowfall or first day of spring or Santorini or whatever it is. So, in other words, many of the things that are in our minds in intellectually compressed forms can be expanded with the addition of. I mean, you know, the sort of fancy, trendy modern word is meditation. But, you know, some people don't get on with the word meditation. Let's just say by giving it some time, by allowing an experience to assume its proper shape. And we do rush past our experiences. Things are very compressed. And that's why at the end of an average day, my goodness, how much we've seen, how much we felt, how many little things crossed consciousness, if we were able to give some of that space, how much lighter we would start to feel. But we. We live so much and we experience so little, we see so much and we notice so little.
- [36:00]
Chris Williamson
What would you say to the obsessive person who wants to learn to let go a little more? A lot of what I see in the circles that I move in is a need for control, a desire to limit down the potential paths that the future could go down, to sort of constrain how unpredictable reality could be. And I think the optimization life, hacking productivity world is very much a part of this. Plus a denial of death. If I can fit more life into less time, then maybe it's kind of like living longer. But, yeah, that need to control, that obsessive sort of requirement to be able to wrangle reality as you wish. People learn to take their hands off the wheel a little bit more easily.
- [36:47]
Alain de Botton
Well, I think, I mean, I think the simple answer is that these people are running away from something which is painful and difficult, et cetera, and they're not allowing themselves to think about it. They're not even allowing it inside consciousness. So think of the, Think of mania. You know, when we say so and so is in a manic mood or so and so is doing something manically. What we really mean is that they're doing something in order not to do something else, normally not think about something or feel something. And we all end up in certain points in manic states where we're scrubbing the kitchen just a little bit too assiduously or we're jogging a bit too hard, or we're scrolling our phones a bit too much. And really the question to ask ourselves at that time is a very simple one, which is if you weren't able to do what you're doing now, what might you need to think about or to feel? And the answer's there waiting for you, if you can bear it could be a very, very awkward question to ask yourself, in other words, if you weren't able to clean the kitchen manically or go jogging, et cetera, but you just sit with something, what do you need to sit with? The old saying, don't just sit there, do something. Don't just sit there and think, do something. Well, imagine, don't just do something, sit there and think. Reverse it, you reverse it. And what is it that you need to think about?
- [38:11]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, yeah. The coping mechanisms that we have and the inventive ways that we come up with alchemizing and justifying. Well, a lot of the time people will say it's better to be addicted to the gym than be addicted to drugs. I don't think that's a particularly controversial statement.
- [38:31]
Alain de Botton
If that's the binary choice.
- [38:32]
Chris Williamson
Yes, of course. But then I realized recently, but maybe over the last year or so, I spent a lot of time meditating toward the end of my 20s and trying to turn myself out of the adult infant into maybe an adult adolescent. And most people would look at meditation. You know, sort of an emotion arises inside of you, you notice it, you release and allow like that's, you know, a common sort of tempo that you have. Brilliant. You know, you are no longer as at the mercy of this particular emotion. But it was only when I started doing therapy, as first ever suggested by Charlotte, one of your ex staff from the school of Life. It was only after doing quite a lot of that that I realized that even meditation, or maybe breath work or going to the gym or whatever it might be, is still another way of not having to actually investigate where that emotion has come from. And meditation particularly, or something more like breath work perhaps, is a. Not nefarious, but it's a very. It's so close. It's internal, it feels sort of self investigative, it's mindful. This is brilliant. You go, yeah, but that is going to continue to come up. And you now have a coping strategy. It's not drugs, it's not even as obvious as you running 50 miles a week. But there is another strategy which is not forcing you to turn the eye back down to where's this coming from and why does it keep on arising? And if you have this very good strategy to release these things as they move through you, that cycle will continue. And I think that those emotions are worthy of investigation.
- [40:13]
Alain de Botton
So, Chris, how do you define therapy? Or how do you define what therapy might bring you? That's a bit different from meditation?
- [40:21]
Chris Williamson
I mean, I did twice a week psychotherapy for the last year or so and it was. I've said this before, I learned more about myself in a year of twice weekly psychotherapy than I did in 1500 sessions of meditation.
- [40:40]
Alain de Botton
And if you could characterise what was different about how therapy operates, you have.
- [40:46]
Chris Williamson
Another party investigating your statements, the language that you use. I used the analogy that it felt like living in a house your entire life and then one day just inviting somebody else in and they're walking around and they start pointing out doors in a house that you know intimately, well, every inch. And they start pointing out doors that you never even knew existed. And you go, what's that? Over and you go, and you open the door and you realize that the back of the kitchen actually leads into. I always wondered how those two things came together. And it's this sort of odd. It's very humbling. I found it very humbling experience to see somebody else who knows me for a hundred hours point and say, what about. What about that?
- [41:29]
Alain de Botton
But I think, I think one has to be really. I mean, that's a beautiful way of putting it. Wants to be totally relaxed about that and just say, in the same way that you can't see the back of your head. It's just one of those things. It's not, you know, we just, we can't see some very obvious things. I mean, a therapist, a trained therapist can see within minutes things that have eluded someone for their whole life. Very humbling, very humbling. But you know, someone can do it for the therapist as well. Everybody is like this. We're just, that's how we're wired and best thing to do is laugh. It's funny. I mean, it's funny how inept we are. But as everybody's in on the joke, we can laugh together.
- [42:08]
Chris Williamson
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- [43:31]
Alain de Botton
I mean, this is so, you know, this is really very much at the core of what we could understand by the word love. You know, if a think of it in childhood, a loving parent, right? The child, a young child gets an experience that who they really are is acceptable to someone else. So, you know, little child will go, I hate the teacher and the parent. You know, the good parent is able to bear that even though it's not perfect. The parent's able to go, oh, okay, wonder why. What's, you know, why they upset you sounds like they might have upset you. Rather than someone would go don't be so silly. The teacher's the teacher, and they work very hard to give you an education, so don't complain. Wow, that's. You know, that's a tough comment.
- [44:16]
Chris Williamson
Your emotion is not valid.
- [44:17]
Alain de Botton
Your emotion is not valid. I mean, you know, parents do their best, but goodness me, stuff happens in that crucible of childhood that is a bit suboptimal. But, you know, love come back to love. What love is, is accepting. You know, I don't want to see Granny. Okay, you don't want to see Granny, all right. Or I really love you, or I really hate my sibling, or I really like the dog, or I want to forever all the stuff that little children come up with. Or I'm terrified of Daddy. Actually, I don't like Daddy. Okay, well, let's think about that. What does that mean? So being able to accept, and then in later life, again, having someone. It could be a therapist, it could be a friend who's able to bear the really difficult bits of our psyches, which we all have. I mean, we're all so much weirder than we're supposed to be, so much sadder, so much more worried, et cetera. And to be able to have someone, you know, it might only be one person or two if we're really lucky, and three, if we're, you know, God's gift, who can bear and who we've allowed into that sort of private sanctum.
- [45:22]
Chris Williamson
That was one of the realizations that Charlotte first taught me and then I learned through my therapy over the last year. One of the very unique parts of a therapeutic relationship is that you're allowed to be as small or boring or petty as you want. And those are areas that, with a friend or a partner, it's really difficult to do because you're managing optics in some way. You're thinking, well, it's my job to kind of entertain this person, even if they're there, to sort of sit and listen with me. Like, not that. Not the fact that the way that the lady in the canteen ladled my beans today seemed a little bit disparaging or dismissive or something. And like, oh, my God, how shameful for me to think that that's something that should play on my mind. So small. The story I tell, the second, third, fourth order emotions come in, and that is one of the very few. It's that and your mum are kind.
- [46:16]
Alain de Botton
Of not even your mom. Because most, as you say, most relations, all relationships, you have to manage and you have to curtail the fear of being abandoned. You Know if you are too honest.
- [46:26]
Chris Williamson
This again. The canteen lady and the beans again. This is the third time in two months.
- [46:31]
Alain de Botton
Think of how this plays out in couples, right? So people come together because they're fed up with being lonely, right? You know, it's lonely. So you try and find a special person and we, we dignify this concept by saying, I'm in a relationship. You know, I'm, I'm a special friend, I'm getting married, et cetera. We've got these words. But really what this means is I'm no longer so alone in a terrifying world. So you have this special person. And in the early days of love, it's thrilling that you can say stuff that you wouldn't say to anyone else. And it's so delightful. You can say things like, you know, I still long for my teddy bear. And they go, I long for them too. And then, you know, you hug to the teddy bear. And it's so amazing because, you know, you're the CEO and you know, you're an important lawyer, Dr. Banker, and actually you're clutching your teddy bear and it's amazing. Or you can go, I really want to put, you know, mayonnaise on the pizza. And that's great. And then, you know, you push it further and then you go, I'm going to go to a museum, but I don't like any of the art. I don't like it either. Or, I've never read that book, but I always pretended I did, and it's just thrilling. And then sex gets invited and you go, I like this strange sounding thing. And they go, I like it too. I like this other thing, et cetera. And you're building a wonderful universe. But this is the challenging thing about love because let's imagine you're with this person and you've shared all this stuff, et cetera. And then you go to a cafe, say, and you say, waiter's hot. And then you look at their face and they're like, look really quite heartbroken that you've just commented on the visual appeal of a waiting staff. And they, they feel hurt and they feel jealous and they feel upset. And suddenly you think, oh, my goodness, there's a choice here between kindness and honesty. And I think that's what we're circling around, which is, can you be. At what moment does honesty run up against the limits of kindness or the requirements of kindness? I think what you're saying about therapy is you don't have to be kind to the therapist because it's 50 minute session, you're giving them money, and people go, oh, it's a bore that you're giving them money. Well, Freud thought long and hard about this, about the role of money in therapy, and his view was it's an agent of liberation. It's a good thing you can pay the therapist, and that's why you want people to bring cash and leave the cash on the table at the end of every session. Nowadays, you might put your card on, but the point is, it's a way of saying, I can be fully myself because I have earned this person's attention. Some people go, but they don't really love you, et cetera. And you go, maybe they don't really love you, but that's a liberation.
- [49:08]
Chris Williamson
Correct.
- [49:09]
Alain de Botton
Because you.
- [49:09]
Chris Williamson
There's no obligation.
- [49:10]
Alain de Botton
No obligation.
- [49:12]
Chris Williamson
Just lingering on that balance between transparency, emotional openness, and you said kindness. But I think that there's other reasons to add it too. Is there a place for editing yourself in a relationship? Should we not be open, honestly, communicating all the time? This is how I feel. You want to see the inner texture of my mind, don't you?
- [49:33]
Alain de Botton
I mean, you're putting your finger on a big paradox. I think the idea that you should be yourself in a relationship is one of the most disastrous ideas because the untrammeled self is a frightening specter best kept for you and your therapist, you in the mirror. If you have to confront your partner with your stream of consciousness at all times, you can't do this. Parents don't do this with their children. Obviously our partners are not children. But it's telling us something about love in a loving relationship. At points you edit yourself. It's 11 at night. I'm not going to bring that issue up. They're very tired. I'm not going to bring that up. I'm feeling stressed and raw. I'm not going to start a subject that I won't know how to handle, et cetera. Now, all of us fail at points. All of us fail in this area. But I think as an ideal, it's a good ideal. I mean, I could stick up for a word which sounds very odd in the context of love, politeness. It's a good idea to try and be polite, or might go, oh, that's fake, that's fake. Well, it's also kind to edit yourself to put a veneer of civilization on certain things. Why not?
- [50:49]
Chris Williamson
There's a very slippery slope with that, though. A lot of people, especially if they have started doing therapy, some self increase, some emotional work, thank God, like I should push the amount that I'm emotionally open, I should improve my transparency. For so long I played a role I was terrified of. Making my. My needs known, my desires, putting myself first, realizing that I even have needs. I'm putting those out there. And now there's these odd bits of territory that I shouldn't stray into. What happens if I stray over there? And the tendency for you to overcorrect and go in the other direction. Neil Strauss says unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments. And we have this balance between the two.
- [51:37]
Alain de Botton
Yeah, you're absolutely right. There are some people who need to work on being more transparent, more communicative, and others who need to be less technical. Word I think for it is reactive. You know, they're not. You shouldn't come out with whatever it is that you're feeling at all times in its full force. It just depends. I mean, you know, that classic anxious, avoidant attachment pattern. We might say that on the whole avoidant people need to work on their communication skills, you know, and they need to be more transparent and anxious people need on the whole to contain certain feelings. And it's just horses for courses on this one.
- [52:14]
Chris Williamson
What would be your advice to people in the classic anxious, avoidant relationship? The two polarities coming together.
- [52:23]
Alain de Botton
Understand, understand, understand where each one's coming from. I mean, why is someone an avoidant? They're not evil, they're not mean, they're not, you know, it can be pretty horrible to be on the receiving end of certain kinds of pattern of behavior. But let's try and remember, why does this exist? Someone becomes avoidant when they've grown up in a calorie, emotional, calorie controlled diet environment where they have had to get used to very little. The way they survive is mum's not so interested, Dad's not interested. No caregiver around, a lot of disappointment. I'm just gonna hunker down and get used to very little. Literally, like an animal that gets used to a very thin diet. That is what has happened to an avoidant person. And then when they get to love and someone goes, I adore you, let's spend every evening together. Let's, you know, you're marvelous. They feel a bit often they don't even understand that they're feeling it. Totally engulfed. They feel overwhelmed. They feel their very identity is in threat of dissolution by something that's lovely, but it's too much too soon. And what they need is an experience of love titrated. They need the titration of love. But often they don't know how to ask for it, they don't even know. Often they might smile through it and go, I'm not really feeling this. And then they can't bear it, they can't bear. And then they run away or just become weird or something. So explanation. Hello, I'm somebody who had to get used to a very calorie, controlled diet. Emotionally, I really feel warmly, this relationship matters a lot to me. But the kindest thing is not to be too kind to me in an overwhelming way. The most generous thing is not to be too abundant, not because I don't want this, but because I grew up in situation deprivation. So that's our avoidant friend, anxious friend. Similar kind of story of explanation. Why did people become so called anxious? Normally? Because unlike the avoidant person, they have had an experience of love. So in some ways the anxious person's had a better childhood, better journey through life. In a way, they have experienced love, but they've also experienced loss and the disruption of that attachment. So someone died, someone went away, someone had to go to the army. Something happened to disrupt the bond. It was very intense, but it was disrupted. And that person needs to understand that they are. It's a wonderful sentence from Donald Winnicott, great psychoanalyst, who said, the catastrophe you fear will happen has already happened. And the key thing is it's been forgotten. You forgot the catastrophe and that's why you keep seeing it in the future, whereas actually it belongs in the past. So what you need to do is understand this structure and repatriate the emotion and put it back where it belongs. So the avoidant person at dinner on an early date needs to go, I really want to believe in your love, but if you say you love me, I might not be able to believe it very easily. And what I will do is test it. And the person might go, oh, test, fine, fire away. And the anxious person should go, yeah, this test is going to be quite unhealthy, quite horrible. It's going to mean that when you say I love you, I'm going to start to act up because I want to see if you really do. So I'm going to be really difficult around you, not because I don't want you, but because I want to test whether your affection is really real. And the only way I know how to do that, because I'm carrying this stuff from childhood, is to act up, play up. And so when we're in a nice restaurant and you tell me that things are great, I'm going to Say, actually, the food's not that nice and I don't really like the clothes you're wearing and I'm going to cause a drama. Why? To test whether the love is real. Very unfortunate. So the more the anxious friend can get on top of their anxiety, the more they can translate everything I've just said into something that sounds like it's been processed and can be understood by another person, then the better it can be. So anxious and avoidant people are walking wounded and they need to be able to explain the nature of their particular wound so that appropriate care can be set up. Awareness, Awareness. Which is why it's great for people to go to therapy. It's great for people to explore themselves. It's not merely fancy, it's not merely whatever. It's a serious indicator of an easier life with them. I mean, if you're with a partner who's able to go, okay, hang on a minute, I think I'm slipping down. I think I'm confusing you with my mother at the moment. Or I think, I think an anger that actually belongs to my father is weirdly in the room. Because that's what happens when you start to explore your past. You see the intermingling of past and present all the time. And the more you're able to get a handle on that and warn your partner, the easier it is. I mean, we don't need people to be perfect. We need people to understand how they're imperfect and warn us of the coming imperfection or retrospectively apologize for it. In relatively civilized terms, that's what we need.
- [57:31]
Chris Williamson
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- [58:52]
Alain de Botton
I'm hopeful here that we can definitely make progress from wherever we start. We can make progress that a temperament where we're inclined to close ourselves off because we constantly think that no one will be able to understand us once we start to think, okay, this is what I do. I feel very easily misunderstood and I go and essentially sulk. Once you notice that that's a big step, you know, and we're so good at marking milestones. It's somebody's birthday, let's throw a party. It's, you know, somebody's just run a marathon, let's give them a medal, et cetera. We need different kinds of medals. You know, the medal for the avoidant person who understood that they sulk rather than explain dong. Let's put them on television, let's give a game show in their honor. These are major milestones. Let's give a party, let's give a party to the person who's understood that that's going on to mark there's much more significant than their birthday, you know what I mean? Which might not be tracking anything significant. That's a significant milestone. So we should give more public within our circles, public recognition of moments of emotional maturation.
- [60:01]
Chris Williamson
And how much is that? I think lots of people envy the other side. If only I could have a little bit more of that anxiousness. If only I could actually lean in a little bit more. If I could feel a little bit more easily, if I could communicate or God, if I could just be a little bit more distant, if I didn't need the reassurance in this way, if I didn't have this requirement to feel safe in order to be able to feel comfortable, I wasn't externalizing my own sense of self worth onto somebody else. Quite in this sort of a way.
- [60:35]
Alain de Botton
Yeah.
- [60:35]
Chris Williamson
I think it's a question. Attachment styles are kind of the hot new girl in school, psychological, emotional work. At the moment. It's very trendy.
- [60:44]
Alain de Botton
It's been around a while in a good way, and it's based on very solid science. You know, we've been going at this for 50 years.
- [60:51]
Chris Williamson
I looked at some really interesting stuff recently that attachment styles like everything psychologically, genetically predisposed. Not necessarily predetermined, but predisposed. And given that you are raised in the environment, which is probably the breeding ground for that very predisposition, it gets reinforced.
- [61:10]
Alain de Botton
Yep.
- [61:11]
Chris Williamson
So not only have you got the raw materials to make this thing happen, but unless your parents have somehow managed to sort of pivot in the opposite direction, you then get this additional boost, which is, oh, well, the environment. Nature came along and nurture, then enhanced it. Yeah, it's interesting. It's going to be interesting, I think, over the next few years to see what sort of interventions we have to be able to help people to ameliorate.
- [61:37]
Alain de Botton
Yes. And I think not to try and sound trendy, but I think AI is going to have a real impact on us in the sense that so often what happens is we lose sight in the moment of things we know but are no longer in our minds. And so people will have, let's say a couple have a rather torrid time, difficult time. And then each one goes to therapy in the week, and then they all come back and they're kind of. They're starting to. They're back on track. They can see things more clearly again. Again. Or they've spent some time alone, they've journaled, et cetera. I can imagine a world where we allow technology to nudge us in the same way that we've learned that technology can nudge us awake, nudge us asleep, nudge us to eat this. Nudges. Imagine a little nudge for an avoidant, a little nudge for an anxious person, et cetera. A little reminder. Hang on, hang on, hang on. You're slipping, you're sliding. And, you know, psychotherapists talk about the window of tolerance, where it's a window in which you're. You're in charge emotionally, or you're kind of in control. And you slip out of the window of tolerance into something, you know, you lose command of yourself. And you can imagine a little AI helper just nudging you to stay within the window.
- [62:55]
Chris Williamson
Yeah. Your attachment strap has piped up and said, notice you were a little bit stressed at the moment. This might be because of yes, X, Y and Z.
- [63:02]
Alain de Botton
And, you know, it sounds supernatural and strange and, you know, a lot of people will say things like, oh, it's not, you know, I don't want to give my data, blah, blah, okay, I grant all of that. And, you know, it could be spooky, et cetera. It's no different from think of people who got there first, were religions. Religions understood that if you want to keep people on track, you've got to get them repeating stuff. It's not enough to tell someone something once. You need rituals, systems of memorializing the important things. That's why, you know, if you're in Islam, if you're Muslim, you know, you'll be praying multiple times a day, you'll be saying the same words because those words have, as it were, been forgotten. Not intellectually, but emotionally. Their full resonance has been forgotten. In Judaism, you're reading the Torah every Saturday in synagogue, you're reading the Torah and you just go back over it. You don't just read it once, you keep reading, you keep going back to the same important texts. We're very bad at that in the modern world. We think, oh, well, I read this book on attachment. It was quite interesting. And now that's it.
- [64:03]
Chris Williamson
I know it now.
- [64:03]
Alain de Botton
I know it now. No, you don't. You need to go back. You need to read it all the time. That's why the idea of nudging is not as strange as it might sound, not as futuristic. It's a very old idea that you might give new life to.
- [64:15]
Chris Williamson
One of the most shameful or humbling realizations of going down a personal development journey for a while. Is that the tool that you're looking for to the problem you're encountering now is not only something that you know, it's one of the first things that you ever discovered when you began this journey. It's maybe something you wrote about. It's maybe something that you practiced for a very long time. And I often get asked, I was doing these live events recently, and one of the most common questions is, what advice would you give yourself 10 years ago? The interesting thing about that question, I think, is that the answer that you give what you would tell yourself 10 years ago is almost always invariably the answer that you right now need to hear as well. Because the big problems remain the big problems because they're so fundamental to who you are. If they weren't fundamental to who you are, they would probably not be the big problems. If you were able to detox that it's the ancillary stuff, it's the extraneous outsides that you end up tinkering with. But the core, you know, the middle of the cake, is this chocolate? Is it strawberry? That's really where it is. And yes, to think, not only is this challenge that I'm encountering, you know, to break the fourth wall, I've used a number of videos from the School of Life over the last decade when I've encountered the same situations, like I already. I've. Not only have I watched this, there's been periods where I've learned entire passages from this as a little mantra that I can reflect on. And I go, I'm going back to the same. But you're right, this temptation novel, new, there is a better answer. We're five years hence, there must be something that's come out in the last however long. And I guess this is what art and heritage history does, that it helps to sort of strip that away. What's stood the test of time, what's been sufficiently lindy that it's still with us now.
- [66:08]
Alain de Botton
Yeah. TS El is in the Four Quartets. We return to the place where we started. It's the idea of that that's kind of part of every journey, is you come back to the place where you started.
- [66:19]
Chris Williamson
The entire story of the Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.
- [66:21]
Alain de Botton
Right, right, exactly. And so I noticed also when you were speaking just now, you had a smile on your lips. And that's not coincidental. I think the more one journeys through life, the more there's really only one major solution, which is a smile on one's lips at the sheer, let's put it bluntly, idiocy, absurdity. Absurdity of oneself. At the School of Life, we did a class on confidence and we wrote a little book about confidence. Great book. Thank you. And I remember sitting with my co author, great friend of mine called John Armstrong, and I said to John, because we started the topic, he's like, okay, what makes us confident? And we'd read a few books, each of us on bestselling books, and saying things like, repeat yourself, how great you are, Repeat yourself, your potential. Get in touch with, you know, what sort of. And I said, I've read all these books and I'm starting to feel humiliated, depressed. Like, I know that. I know that it's kind of wise, but I don't know. And then I remember John saying to me, okay, what makes you feel confident? And I said, if somebody goes, it's okay. You can just be a Total idiot. It's all right. You're a bit of an idiot, and it's okay. Not, you're an idiot, but we're all idiots. That makes me feel, I'm ready to play. I'm ready to have fun. I'm ready to take risks.
- [67:44]
Chris Williamson
Removes the seriousness.
- [67:46]
Alain de Botton
Well, remove inhuman expectation of what a human life can be and accept that we're all of us blockheads who can't really make very much progress. And, you know, there's a wonderful painting which we put in the book by.
- [68:04]
Chris Williamson
Bruegel, this Ship at Sea.
- [68:07]
Alain de Botton
Yeah, well, the Ship of Fools. And anyway, forget this exact title, but it's showing people doing mad things, silly things. One person's eating his foot, the other one's walked into a wall, the third one's jumping off a cliff. It just shows human folly in all its exaggeration. And you think, yeah, that's us. That's we humans. And that opens up such an avenue of compassion. You just think, okay, compassion for yourself, compassion for the other. We're all flailing about in the darkness. And if we can have a relaxed relationship to our foolishness and our blindness, that's a huge confidence booster.
- [68:42]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, I want to try and linger on that as well. I think, again, the sorts of people that listen to the show, the sorts of people that read your work, they'll probably take life seriously. They think it's a thing that you're supposed to apply earnest pressure to. Perhaps a kind of sort of dynamic persistence, but maybe more persistent than dynamic. And what's your advice for people to try and embrace some more playfulness when it comes to life? Serious, serious things. I want to be taken seriously. I want to do things. I want to make an impact in the world. I don't want to grip too tightly. I know that when I grip too tightly, it kind of ruins the entire point.
- [69:21]
Alain de Botton
Well, I think the way is not to say, oh, what you need is lighten up and tell a few jokes. Because I think that's going to rile people up. I think the thing to do is to push some pessimism their way. Because it's actually, if you think about what a joke is, a joke is always basically a bit of pessimism wrapped up in, you know, artfully wrapped. But it's basically pessimism. One of my favorite sayings by the Stoic philosopher Seneca, he goes, what need is there to weep over parts of life? He says, the whole of it calls for tears. And everyone who hears that sort of gets a smile on their face and you think the guy wasn't trying to tell a joke, he wasn't trying to make it funny. He was just trying to be bleak or say it how it is. And then it makes us smile out of relief. And the relief is, phew. It's not just me. Arthur Schopenhauer, another great pessimistic German philosopher, said, today it is bad, tomorrow it will be worse. Until the worst of all happens. Death, you know, totally bleak. And you read that and you think, I feel a bit better about today already I'm starting to cheer up. Up. I think we really get it wrong, but we think the only way to cheer someone up is to tell them something cheerful. I think the Brits have understood this. This country's got lots of problems, but one thing it understands is melancholy and the relief available in dark humor. And bless our American friends. But they don't get it as much. If you pitch up in LA and someone goes, how are you? And you go, you know, it's bad today, tomorrow it'd be worse until the worst of all happens. I love you. Sectioned. It's not, you know, your life in Los Angeles is not going to take off. You know what I mean?
- [71:07]
Chris Williamson
Yeah. I've heard you refer to melancholy as tragedy. Well handled.
- [71:11]
Alain de Botton
Absolutely.
- [71:12]
Chris Williamson
Tragedy well handled. I adore that. I think it's so great. You know, Sam Harris has something. He says something very similar. You know, you have to smile at the absurdity of life. These situations, just as things were smooth, something comes along and completely sideswipes what you had planned. And an interesting insight. I suppose that the volume that you complain is probably proportional to the amount that you aren't. That you're enabled to see life for what it is, which is not at your whim. Life is going to have problems thrown at you.
- [71:52]
Alain de Botton
Yeah, but Chris, let's not do down complaining.
- [71:54]
Chris Williamson
I mean, it's one of the great pleasures. It's one of Britain's great pastimes.
- [71:57]
Alain de Botton
Well, you know, it's one of everybody. And being able to complain to a loved one. And you'll have to listen to their complaints, too. But to complain without expectation of a solution. I mean, the big complaint that every mortal directs to the sky ultimately, is, why do I have to die? And then you work your way down from that to why do I have to go to work? All these things. But yes, life would be a poor thing if we weren't allowed to spend a good deal part of it. Complain.
- [72:26]
Chris Williamson
I've heard you say that adult relationships are a litmus test of our Emotional development, that they're a moment where your past catches up with your present. How so?
- [72:36]
Alain de Botton
Why is that the case? So the way we love as adults always bears the imprint of the way which we were loved and we loved as children. And that hugely restricts how we're able to behave and explains the very peculiar, often nonsensical, often counterproductive ways in which we love. We're not free to love just anyone. And this, you know, I'm sure you'll have had this in your life, met people, et cetera, who will say things like, seem to have ended up with quite a difficult person for me. You know, they're really, they're quite challenging for me. Why can't I go and love somebody else? Why am I so in love with this person who's quite challenging? And often it's because what's challenging sits on the very area that was challenging in your past and that's what makes them attractive.
- [73:26]
Chris Williamson
Now.
- [73:26]
Alain de Botton
Before we want to jump off a cliff at the pessimism involved, let's be a little optimistic here. In a good relationship, we are drawn towards people who, yes, carry some of the puzzles, some of the knots, some of the challenges of a parental figure or figure of a caregiver, but they hold out the promise of a different ending. So whereas in the relationship with parent or caregiver it ended up with shouting and you stormed out of the house and you're no longer in touch with them. Imagine the joy, imagine the sense of triumph over sort of adversity and human non communication. If you are together as a couple, able to move towards understanding and mutual growth. I think that explains why people hang in there with people who, you might think, you know, attachment theory, an anxious person who teams up with an avoidant one. You might want to go, why? Why are you with this avoidant person? Look at this other. I'm going to present you with a perfectly securely attached person. And you go, oh, they're a bit boring, don't really want them. You think, why? What's going on? Is this pure perversion? Let's be generous towards that impulse. They're trying to find a different ending to probably a very painful early situation. And to be able to do that, to be able to grow together is literally, I think, one of the most exciting and lovely things. It's rare, which is why successful love is rare. But yeah, to grow together away from your early attachment wounds powers a lot of the ambition of love.
- [75:07]
Chris Williamson
We'll get back to talking to Alain in one minute, but first I need to tell you about function, stop guessing about what's happening inside of your body. Staying on top of your health requires more than just an annual physical, which is why I partnered with function. They run lab tests twice a year that track over 100 biomarkers and monitor for early signs of thousands of diseases. They even screen for 50 types of cancer at stage one, which is five times more data than you get from an annual physical. You receive insights from a team of expert physicians who provide a detail written clinician summary of their observation and phone consultations for any critical findings. The world of healthcare has kind of changed. We don't need to be reactive. We can be proactive. We can catch things before they happen. And this is one of the best and most accessible ways to start right now. You can discover where your health stands by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com modernwisdom that's functionhealth.com modernwisdom seems like deciding whether to stay in or leave a relationship can sometimes be a protracted decision, which might be surprising given that we have this short time on earth and we don't want to waste it. I think a lot of people have problems breaking up with someone, even though they might not make them particularly very happy. Why do people get stuck in unhappy relationships in that way?
- [76:29]
Alain de Botton
There are, you know, I think the mood of the modern world, the mood of modern Instagram, I've observed, is all about, or ditch them, chuck them, run away. It's pure pathology. You are sticking around someone suboptimal for purely pathological reasons. That's got to be true in some cases. It is definitely true in some cases. But because it's so well known nowadays that that's true, let's stick up for the other side. Sometimes it's hard. Sometimes we stick around very challenging situations because we want to try and grow together. We want to try and make progress. And sometimes we can, sometimes we can't. So it's a balance. I don't want to advocate an endlessly unfulfilling relationship, but good relationships will be marked by a heavy dose of what psychotherapists call rupture and repair. A break and a repair and the ability to, you know, the thing crashes at night, but the next morning it's fixed. You know our friends in the east, you know the Japanese tradition of Kintsuki, fixing that bowl with golden lacquer, fixing the break. It's a very, very important and satisfying part of all relationships.
- [77:52]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, yeah. What about the people who are in a relationship but don't have the courage to leave. They probably have this. They feel stuck, sort of stuck in this unsatisfactory, not abusive, not terrible, but just. They have that fear, pulling the pin, making a move.
- [78:13]
Alain de Botton
You know, you talked about primary, secondary emotions. Let's not shame these people. Let's not add to their woes that they are deficient and ill in some way. They're finding something very hard, and that's okay. Let's bear with how difficult it is. Again, I'm frustrated by the modern temper, which is like, get out, shoot the awful person and join the liberated uplands. Maybe, maybe. And maybe that is what they're going to do. But, you know, let's be very thoughtful about why they've ended up there. Let's not, you know, this might just be. They might find 100 things in life quite easy. This is what they're finding difficult. And let's acknowledge that. Let's be very kind to that, and let's hold their hands through it. You know, why. What's difficult for them? Is it that they think that they'll be judged by other people? Right. What's the fear? What's the fear? I'll be judged by the. Okay, how does that fear stack up with what might really happen? Or I'll never meet anyone new? Okay, let's think about that. Let's not immediately say, oh, you will, maybe they won't. You know, let's take it calmly, et cetera. I just. I'm really resistant to some of this narrative, which is, you know, get out. Get rid of the awful, underperforming people and get into that golden relationship that's been promised to you in heaven. It's not, you know, that may be the direction of travel, but let's just acknowledge the bumps.
- [79:43]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, I think it's unrealistic. You know, there's a lot of people who just don't want to make a fuss, that there's this sort of fear, this question, is it fair to want what I want? You mentioned before, how do people that from the outside, you go, why her with him? Why him with her? Why would that union happen? And we don't get to choose what we love in many ways, you know.
- [80:09]
Alain de Botton
Absolutely not. We are. We are. You know, we think we've done away with the arranged marriage. No, we haven't. It's just become an emotionally arranged marriage. Internally arranged, rather than arranged by our parents.
- [80:21]
Chris Williamson
Yeah. I think, again, for the cerebrally predisposed, you kind of rail against that. Why can't I. Why, if only I could. Can you not get in line with you, please? All of the things, they're there in front of me, they have the.
- [80:38]
Alain de Botton
And we get literally irritated. And just to be able to understand, it's like saying, why can't Mount Everest be smaller? Why can't the sky be less blue? Whatever. We're trying to change a constituent element of reality. And I think we need to have as much respect for the inner architecture as we do for the outer architecture. You wouldn't look at a building and go, I just want to get rid of that wing immediately. You'd understand that it was incredibly difficult. It's the same thing. Just because it's intangible doesn't mean it's not incredibly stubborn and it's hard to change.
- [81:10]
Chris Williamson
Do we need to build, create the capacity to give up on people in that way? Does that help?
- [81:18]
Alain de Botton
Yes, I think some of us do. Again, life's all about finding what's the lesson that you need to hear. So there are some people, not everyone, but some people really need to hear a little lesson about how sometimes they should give up on people. That sometimes making excuses for people or trying to understand where people are coming from, et cetera, it can go too far. Those very nice traits can go too far. And that the next best thing that you need to do is to be able to say goodbye without too much regret. That might be the lesson that you need to do. And let's remember the people who on the whole find it very hard to give up on people are people who couldn't give up as children can't, on parents who are very unsatisfactory. You can't expect a five year old child to give up on a parent. So a parent can be beating the child every night and the child will think, oh, maybe it's my fault. Because the child cannot bear to give up on the parent and do the thing that would be natural to do, which is to say, I'm in the hands of an abusive parent. You can't do that when you're five. You've got no access to lawyers, you've got no money, you can't go anywhere. You are trapped. And therefore you become a world expert in not giving up on people. But some of what adulthood requires is precisely the opposite.
- [82:30]
Chris Williamson
Sometimes getting perilously close to people pleasing here and that sort of tendency to put other people's emotions ahead of our own, make their emotional state our responsibility. If you're not okay, I'm not okay. How can we better alchemize that and understand that tendency.
- [82:53]
Alain de Botton
I mean, look, let's remember. So the psychology of the so called people pleasing person is someone who no one tried to please for themselves. In other words, they were in an asymmetrical relationship, probably with a caregiver or parent who didn't care about their feelings, they didn't prioritize their needs, et cetera, and they had to adjust to them. So if you've got a parent with a volcanic temperature where anything might set them off, well, what you say or think is going to disappear completely because all you're going to be doing as a child is managing the mood of a parent. They will be an infant, essentially, and you will have to be in the parenting role and you'll have to put aside your needs. And children are great geniuses at reading the room and doing what needs to be done to survive. It's a survival strategy. I will become a people pleaser not in order to annoy people in later life, but in order to survive, in order to get to the next stage of existence in order to reach adolescence. Let's face it. And the problem in this, as in so many other neurotic structures, is a very good idea outlives its use. And so it's still operating in circumstances where it's no longer needed. So what we need to tell, what the people pleaser needs to tell themselves is it was amazing. At the age of five, I cleverly worked out that I needed to people please in order to cope with my intemperate father. But that situation's now gone. And if I keep doing this with my partner, with my colleagues, et cetera, it's going to annoy everybody and it's going to create serious problems. So what needs to be done is that person shouldn't feel shamed, they should be made to feel proud. There should be a little ceremony where they're able to say to their five year old self, thank you, thank you little whatever it is, thank you for carrying me to a later stage and working out something so clever. And this applies for all defensive neurotic structures. I mean, let's imagine somebody, somebody who can't feel very much, who's invulnerable, doesn't open themselves up to other people and in relationships that person may be shamed. Oh, so and so. Oh, they're afraid of intimacy. You want to go, okay, shaming this person's not going to help. You have to ask a other question, which is in what circumstances did their current behavior make sense? First question. And it Always will make sense. You go back in time and you say, right, in those circumstances, of course it may. You know, your father was dying, your mother was absent, of course it made sense not to feel anything. You would have been destroyed by your feelings. Therefore, very clever five or six year old you to work out that it's best not to feel. Problem is, you're now 35 or 45 and there's lots of reason to feel because there's someone loving nearby or you've got children or whatever. And therefore we need to say thank you to the younger self and then we can move on. But shame is not going to do it. It to wag a finger and go, oh, another one who's afraid of intimacy. No one ever changed like that.
- [85:42]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, the realization that doing that internally, being a tyrant to yourself also isn't necessarily the best way to encourage you into behavior change, whipping yourself into submission.
- [85:56]
Alain de Botton
But also it's missing the logic of why you're doing what you're doing. As I say, so much of what we do as adults makes no sense even to us. Why am I worried every morning? Again, ask yourself the question. It's a key question for your viewers. Listeners. When did the current behavior, which now doesn't seem to make sense, when did it once make sense? In what circumstances did this pattern develop? This pattern that is now inverted commas, mad or destructive or boring or counterproductive? When did it make sense? And if you can start to see a logic, and there always will be one, one, I would suggest there almost always will be one. There will be a moment when to feel anxious every morning was bound up with your safety and your survival to the next stage of life. So if you can recover contact with what that stage was, you'll then be in a position to honor the defensive strategy, but also say goodbye to it.
- [86:51]
Chris Williamson
What are some of the best and worst ways to tell somebody that it's over in a relationship? Yep.
- [87:00]
Alain de Botton
Look, one of the worst ways is not to explain at all why something has come to feel necessary. In other words, just running away and leaving someone no sense. Because that then leaves the person to imagine everything. And most of our imaginations are dark places in this regard. In other words, we think that someone hates us boundlessly or is trying to humiliate us or deliberately want to be cruel to us or et cetera. And in many, many cases, I venture to say most cases, when someone leaves someone, it isn't those things. The truth is better than we think. It's still tough, you know, it's very Very tough. You know, those attachment ruptures in everyone's life, they're some of the most painful things we will ever have to go through to build a life with someone and then see that life disappear. I mean, we need space to mourn. In Judaism, when someone dies, you lose a spouse, you're allowed a year of mourning. You wear black and you have allowed a year of mourning. When not too much is expected of you, both professionally and personally, you can go a bit mad and that's all right. Everyone looks after you, they know you're in mourning. We kind of need that when we're heartbroken, when we're serious because we're dealing with something that is, from an emotional point of view, as serious. This is as serious. I mean, this literally is a loss. Someone has died and so we need that space. So to come back to your question, how to break up, to be able to explain diplomatically, kindly, generously, some of the real reasons why and as the person who's leaving, not to feel that those reasons, not to be ashamed of those reasons. You know, people feel relationships don't have to go on forever. Sometimes relationships have a sell by date. They are there, they were formed for a particular purpose, unconscious, to carry us to a next stage. And maybe that stage has come to an end for someone and we can explain that, we can try and, you know, verbalize that, but also clarity. And sometimes people try to be kind in ways that. That end up being very, very cruel. I want to leave you, but let's go on holiday together. Is that a wise thing? Or I want to leave you, but let's be in touch every day and I'll just still call you what I used to call you when we were very intimate. That's tough. That's tough. So we may, couples may, out of kindness, out of mutual respect, go, there's still a lot of love, there's still a lot of affection. But probably we shouldn't be in touch that much for a little while.
- [89:41]
Chris Williamson
You think it's a bad idea for exes to try and be friends?
- [89:44]
Alain de Botton
Look, it depends, but I think, you know, there needs to be healing, doesn't there? There needs to be a break that's marked and honoured so that two people can recover.
- [89:59]
Chris Williamson
How do you come to think about the balance between fixing our patterns, investigating them and dwelling on them? It seems like a lot of criticism is thrown at sort of reflecting on our past as akin to indulging in it in a way, not allowing us to move forward. This is a common debate that I'm seeing online at the moment.
- [90:21]
Alain de Botton
Yes. And people I think are very afraid about responsibility here, aren't they? They're very afraid that someone will go, oh, I'm sorry I did that thing. But the thing is, it's my childhood and that's why, you know, and the people will evade basic responsibility. So I think one can take full responsibility, full ownership it, while still explaining it. People are also very worried about blaming parents often. That's another one that comes up a lot. You know, people will go, if I start to investigate patterns, et cetera. The only solution is then to get angry with my parents. Well, again, there's a real, you know, people allied was like anger, blame, et cetera. You can say this happened because of childhood dynamics. No one really wanted it, maybe no one's evil, but it definitely happened. And you know, we can't evade that, you know, is the result. Anger, fury. It doesn't have to be. Sometimes it could be, yeah. So look, so many of these lessons, it's horses for courses.
- [91:20]
Chris Williamson
Broad strokes are very difficult with stuff like this. I understand that. But yeah, I think dealing with an unhappy childhood retrospectively not resenting things that happened to us then, and we're now at the mercy of wanting to be able to investigate why we are the way we are whilst not allowing that to define us. I don't know. There's an interesting movement at the moment almost towards denial. We've got, you know, the horseshoe has horseshoed back around it, it's been rotated a couple of times. And I wonder whether this is just a requisite pushback to some of the over pathologization of normal human emotions. You know, the use of therapy, language online, that somebody hasn't been mean to me, they've caused me trauma, that that person isn't selfish, they're a narcissist.
- [92:10]
Alain de Botton
Exactly.
- [92:11]
Chris Williamson
And yeah, I'm starting to see now a little bit more of a lean away from reflecting on why you are the way you are. And again, it's very much this is just one cohort of people saying that. Cohort of people over there. Their strategy doesn't work for me. And vice versa.
- [92:30]
Alain de Botton
Look, I mean, we're a car that needs different gears. You know, sometimes we need to go forward, sometimes we need to go backwards, we need to turn right, we need to turn left, we need full maneuverability. Right. And I think when people discover an exciting idea, the great tendency is to go, well, this toolkit will explain absolutely everything. Correct. And this will be the only thing I need. And, and this is why we need the whole history of ideas. This is why well stocked mind has got in it some books on the Stoics as it were. Some ideas from the Stoics, some ideas about resilience and about shutting down emotion and about turning towards pain and all that. We need that. Sometimes we need an aristocratic side. We might have read Nietzsche and his aristocratic sense of needing to overcome and what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, et cetera. Sometimes we need Nietzsche. But if you only dieting on Nietzsche, you may also need John Boldman attachment theory. But if you're a only snacking on Bobby. So we need a well stocked mind. And I think that, as I say, I appreciate that people fall so in love with certain ideas that they think that's all they're going to need. It's rather, you know, it's monotheism. You know, only one God.
- [93:37]
Chris Williamson
Correct? Yes.
- [93:38]
Alain de Botton
And you know the great thing about paganism, you know, ancient Roman or Greek religion, but you know, find in India too and other parts of the world, there were many gods. There was the God of the river, but there was also the God of the sky and there was the God of the cloud and there was the God of rain and there was the God of sunshine and many, many gods. And we need many gods. And just as in our social lives, let's remember, you know, total monotheism doesn't, you know, it's like I need one lover and they will answer all my needs. Ah, that's quite tough on the lover. You may also need a friend who's brilliant at that thing. And there's a friend who's also good at this. So we need a paganism of ideas.
- [94:16]
Chris Williamson
Yeah. My friend Gwinda has this idea called the Golden Hammer. When someone, usually an intellectual who has gained a cultish following for popularizing a concept, becomes so drunk with power, he thinks he can apply that concept to everything.
- [94:28]
Alain de Botton
Exactly, exactly. We think it's the hammer that the.
- [94:32]
Chris Williamson
One size fits all. Yeah. And this is everything. Looks like a nail that slots into your very specific, very fancy gilded piece of work.
- [94:41]
Alain de Botton
But you know, we can forgive it. It's, it's very exciting when you come across an idea that you think and does explain a lot of the world. I mean this happens when people discover Marxism. They think, oh my goodness, this model explains everything. And then. No, it's really good explaining certain things. And then this type of Freud, Freudianism, it explains everything. No, you know, go study. We need multiple tools.
- [95:01]
Chris Williamson
I wonder whether this helps to constrain some of the complexity of the world as well. What if I have one book, if it's meditations or if it's. If it's some ancient Chinese text, if we're looking at some Lao Tzu or something, you think, well, that one thing answers everything. I don't need to look elsewhere. And the problem is that we're finite creatures surrounded by infinite complexity. So the battlefield is stacked somewhat, the deck is offset against our favor. And if we can constrain down the complexity that we're fighting with, we say, well, we've got this one person and he's got all of the answers. One guy has all of the answers.
- [95:48]
Alain de Botton
And we see it in religion, we see it in politics. One person has got everything and it can't be true. But you're right, I mean, we're drowning in inputs. And that leads us to a certain kind of remorseless quest for the one input. And I remember there was reading a book, there's a line saying something like, all of us are going to die with a book half read on our bedside. It may not literally be true, but there's capturing something important there, that our exploration will be unfinished. It's quite daunting. It's a very sad thought, you know, that we won't. And of course, the book that we really won't have finished reading is the book of ourselves. We won't have understood more than a share of ourselves. That's very frightening. We'll have on an average gravestone, it should say, here lies who half understood who they were. They only half understood. That's very weird. You're on your deathbed and you don't really know who you have been.
- [96:54]
Chris Williamson
Was it Goethe on his deathbed? Pronounced, nobody really knows me. I don't really know anybody else. Nobody knows anyone, really. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [97:04]
Alain de Botton
So that kind of despair, surrounded by.
- [97:07]
Chris Williamson
Friends and family, what a way to curtain call. See you later on.
- [97:10]
Alain de Botton
Yeah, exactly.
- [97:12]
Chris Williamson
Speaking on that, do you think it's inevitable for deep thinkers to be more lonely? Is the deep or sensitive thinker kind of fated to have a bit of distance, you know?
- [97:24]
Alain de Botton
It's a ticklish topic, isn't it? Because to say, you know, I'm not doing so well in life, I'm a bit isolated from things because I'm so marvelous, you know? Come on, you know, however, let's face it, you know, look, it's like imagine. Imagine you had a very sophisticated diet. And you walk through, you know, we're in London now. You walk through every street of London. There would be Fewer restaurants and eating places and supermarkets that you could go into to get the food that you need, because your dietary needs will be quite complicated. There's a version of this around sociability. If you only need to talk about certain things, you know, if you are. I don't know, let's imagine you're Brian Cox. I don't know Brian Cox personally. And you really, just really love interplanetary phenomena. You're not going to meet that many people who will really be able to meet you on those topics. I mean, or even be that interesting. They might go, oh, Brian, I loved your show, but just, you know, enough.
- [98:28]
Chris Williamson
With the black holes.
- [98:29]
Alain de Botton
Enough of the black holes, you know. And so he might find himself a little bit lonely. I mean, who knows about his life? I'm sure he's, you know, but.
- [98:36]
Chris Williamson
But used to be a rock star. Do you know that?
- [98:38]
Alain de Botton
Yes.
- [98:38]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [98:40]
Alain de Botton
Or imagine if you are. I don't know. Imagine if you were Freud. And Freud was, you know, he had some collaborators, but he also fell out with a lot of them and didn't get on with, you know, lots of people. So one might argue that complexity of mind militates against easily finding fewer people like you.
- [99:04]
Chris Williamson
You're going to have to work harder.
- [99:05]
Alain de Botton
In order to say, that's fair enough.
- [99:06]
Chris Williamson
Yeah, that's fair enough.
- [99:08]
Alain de Botton
Yeah.
- [99:10]
Chris Williamson
We mentioned. We sort of touched on it earlier on. I think it's maybe worth just revisiting a little bit, trying to. The deeper thinker, the more serious person, the earnest person, how can they find more fun? Inject a little bit less of that loneliness in. They're in an area where maybe people don't resonate quite so much. They don't have quite so many of the conversations that.
- [99:37]
Alain de Botton
Can I answer a slightly different question? Just because. Look, I think it's really important to think that the deep thinker, the earnest person, et cetera. I don't want us to suggest that there are these people called geniuses wandering around the world and they're so different from everybody else. I love this quote from Emerson where he says, in the minds of geniuses, we find our own neglected thoughts. So key in the minds of geniuses, we find our own neglected thoughts. I think what he was saying there was. Geniuses don't have thoughts categorically different from the ones everybody has. What's different is they hold onto them, they look at them, they feel them. You could say, in the minds of artists lie feelings that, you know, lie our own neglected feelings. In other words, artists, geniuses, et cetera they're just paying more attention to the stuff that's in everybody's mind. It's not that there's stuff in their mind is completely radically different. Which is why often when you hear a great song or a great piece of poetry or whatever, or read a written book, sometimes you think, I kind of knew that that was already in me. That I'm merely being put back in touch with something that's in me already. Because what the so called clever person has done is just pay it more attention. So let's not deify these people and let's also open up, you know, quickest way to become a genius. Pay more attention to your own neglected thoughts.
- [101:06]
Chris Williamson
I'm interested, you know, having followed your work for a very, very long time. And it's been one of the most reliably influential things, I think, on my intellectual JO. So I want to thank you for parasocially guiding me through an awful lot of situations. I'd like to say that I remind myself of your work when things are good. But it does tend to be the sort of thing that I go to when I need a little bit more guidance. But I'm interested in what drives you, the sort of primary motivating forces that are behind your studies and sort of thinking over the years.
- [101:41]
Alain de Botton
So it's brutally and horribly simple just to help me get through the day. It is extremely personal and motivated entirely by a desire for self help if it helps anybody else. I mean, people sometimes say things like, gosh, you must have studied a lot. How did you know that about me? Me? And I'm like, frankly, I have no clue. I was just doing my stuff and it's beautiful and lovely that it should echo near somebody else. But that's not how I started. It started always with me and I became a writer. I wrote my first book when I was 22. And it was not, it grew out of writing a diary. It grew out of trying to solve my own confusions. It was a way of trying to stay afloat emotionally, psychically. And it had nothing to do with a career in that sense. Later on became some of the accoutrements of a career. But as I say, it began, and it still is to this day, an emotional necessity. I would say it's a way of coping. I'm an intellectual, not a fancy, fancy thing, but I'm an intellectual in the sense that I intellectualize pain. Pain. If something horrible happens, my immediate impulse not to jog or drink or do all sorts of things people do. But it's to try and think about what is this thing, what lesson is there here? And that lesson is being fished out for me. If it helps anybody else, fantastic. But I do it. I do it anyway. That's how I operate. Right.
- [103:28]
Chris Williamson
I've found an odd resonance with what I've done with the show as well. In many ways, there is a temptation to do what may be popular or trendy or accumulate the most exposure or status or make you look good. And that's always there. And neither of us are immune to those incentives. But I think. I think one of the reasons that I resonated with your work and hopefully some microcosm of people resonate with mine is research very much, is me search in this situation. And the fact you're right, how could you have seen? The human experience has been really sort of shown to me that it's like you've turned the mirror around to myself. It's almost like you're speaking to me. Well, because there's broad buckets of people that sort of fall into similar kind of cohorts. And it would appear that perhaps me and you are in a non too dissimilar cohort. And this, I think, is a reason for confidence in our own work and in listening to our instincts rather than trying to work out what the market, the audience, the reader wants. Just saying, okay, well, what would be useful to me right now? What would have been useful to me previously? Especially given the fact that the thing you need to hear right now is probably the thing that you would tell yourself 10 years ago. So it's still, it's the same lessons over and over. It's looking at that circle. And I think it is the best justification for selfishly following your instincts when it comes to an intellectual investigation of yourself, of the world around you. Because if you think a thing, if you feel a thing, if you're challenged with a particular issue, it's probably reliable that some non insignificant, absolutely majority perhaps of other people are feeling the same. How narcissistic do you need to be.
- [105:31]
Alain de Botton
To think with the only one?
- [105:32]
Chris Williamson
Me. Yeah, me.
- [105:33]
Alain de Botton
This is because that's too mean. That's too mean because we don't think of it it nastily. We think of it shamefully. We think I've been singled out for a particularly personal curse. Yeah, we don't think I'm so great and I'm alone. We think, oh God, I've been cursed and broken. I'm uniquely broken. And you're absolutely right. It's so important to bear that in Mind, by the time you're feeling it, other people will be feeling it too. And it's so hard to hold onto that thought because we. Well, frankly, because we see no visible evidence of it. We don't see people talking about it in our vicinity, in the hundred people we know go and move around. No one's talking about it openly. They're feeling it up, but they don't talk about it. And so we have to hold our nerve. And there's a lesson here about capitalism here and business, which is fascinating. I mean, it's not naturally the area I fall into more. You've talked a lot about this, but so many great businesses start precisely like this, that somebody thinks there's this thing I really want and need or that thrills me, and it sounds quite weird to everybody else, and the person just sticks with it and just has a hunch about it. Just as many, many business failures are all about someone going, someone doing something. And then if you say to them, do you want this? Would you buy this thing? And then they go, actually, no, I wouldn't. So why are you making it for somebody else if it's got no resonance with you? You know, careful, careful. The biggest business disasters are people making stuff that they haven't asked themselves, would I really want this?
- [107:07]
Chris Williamson
Yes. The word grift is thrown around on the Internet a lot, and I've asked people to define it. You know, this person is grifting or shilling for a particular product or company or ideology, whatever it might be. And I ask the best definition that I've ever heard, one that I actually accept. I don't like the word because I think it gets pattern matched incorrectly almost all the time. But the best definition is somebody promoting something that they themselves would not use or believe. I think that's good.
- [107:35]
Alain de Botton
And there's an intellectual version of that. When someone reads a book, et cetera, and they've lost touch and they're spouting Kant or Hegel or Wittgenstein or whatever it may be, or attachment theory, and it's not fitting them, and therefore there's something wrong. But I think many hours ago now, we began in this. This place, which is how difficult it is to hone that authentic muscle where you feel something, you hold onto it, you think no one else is talking about it. But let me stay with that, because I think it's a thing for me. So it may be a thing for somebody else, even though no one's mentioning it. Takes a lot of courage.
- [108:11]
Chris Williamson
How much better have you become at understanding yourself. Over the years, how much have you been able to nudge those fundamental physics of your system?
- [108:20]
Alain de Botton
I've made some progress, yeah, definitely made some progress. And I'd say that I understand myself more than I've been able to change myself. And one could go, oh, so nothing's really changed. Well, understanding is a thing as well. That is its own legitimate thing. You know, do I always make wise choices now? Am I always, you know, no. But I do understand things better, yes. I think I've also better at understanding my unconscious. And by that I mean, you know, it's also what people call their gut instinct. I do think that there are things we know without fully knowing why we know them or how we know them. And to allow a little bit more for that slightly mysterious form of knowing, we're talking about sentence completion exercises where you're completing sentences, you're letting something bubble up from your unconscious. I try and do that more and more. But I also myself simple questions like, you know, what am I really feeling here? Don't overthink this. What's really going on? You've met this person, what do you really feel around them? Just say it, say it to yourself. What do you feel? And then holding on to that, that something quite important's gone on there, that your answer captures something that a more thought laden answer might not. And trusting that a bit more in love, in work, in friendship, in areas of daily life.
- [109:44]
Chris Williamson
I would say that one of the biggest contributions, at least that I've seen from your work, for me personally, is that stark assessment of the human condition. A very sanguine, some would say British, slightly self deprecating, honest admission of how flawed, how insane, how irrational, how silly, shameful we can be a lot of the time. And yourself, Oliver Berkman, if you're familiar with Oliver as well, again sort of really embracing that British melancholic, sort of tragedy, well handled type thing. This has been a very long time coming. I've wanted you on the podcast since before I began. I went back and looked at my first ever set of notes that I had that has your name in. I'm sure there's stuff that's a little bit earlier than that. And that was 2017, so it's late to the party, perhaps in the broad scheme of things, but very early to the party in my intellectual trajectory and making people feel less alone in the challenges that they face. The day to day machinations, this, personal curse that, huh. I didn't know anybody else felt like that. At least I'M not. At least it's not just me. At least I've not had this thing sort of thrown down on me from above. And yeah, I definitely, when I find myself embracing that with the show, with the content that I create, with the thoughts that I have, with the way that I try to direct things, with the way that I try to push people forward, especially at my age. I'm 36, and this is. There's a number of different directions that I can kind of go down. And the one that's pulling me the most at the moment is a much more stark assessment of the silliness and irrationality and shamefulness of the human condition. And I just wanted to say thank you very much for helping to be a role model for me to be able to do that more.
- [111:46]
Alain de Botton
Thank you so much, Chris. Lovely words. So generous. Thank you. Thank you.
- [111:50]
Chris Williamson
Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with more of the stuff that you're doing?
- [111:54]
Alain de Botton
So School of Life, the organization that I started, if you follow our stuff every day, I'm writing stuff for our website, for our app, et cetera. So there's content coming out all the time. And we've got a lot of books. I've written 15 books under my own name. I've written about 70 books under the School of Life, together with my colleague John. So we've got a lot of stuff out there. Yeah.
- [112:18]
Chris Williamson
I appreciate you so much. Thank you, mate.
- [112:20]
Alain de Botton
Thank you. Thank you, Chris.