Why Compatibility is Overrated: Alain de Botton’s Guide to Relationships That Last

15:48Alain de Botton:Look, the topic that is perennially of interest to me and to everyone is relationships. It's the area, it's the litmus test of emotional maturity. And most of us come unstuck here. I want to say that a good functioning relationship is the hardest thing in the world for a human to achieve. You know, careers are very hard as well, really hard to get a good career off the ground. I'd say it's harder to get a good relationship off the ground. It is the hardest thing, particularly if you've had, you know, difficult, challenging upbringing. So I had a challenging upbringing. I went through a divorce, was married for many years, went through a divorce, entered the dating world as a fairly elderly person, etc.

16:35Alain de Botton:It's not easy. These things are not easy. They are very, very complicated. The good news is it's so fascinating. I mean, my goodness, I don't stop learning. I'm constantly learning. I look back 10 years ago, what did I know, etc. I'm constantly expanding my body of knowledge. And as I say, it's relationships that really strikes a chord. So much of our material is around the difficulties of getting in and out and sustaining a relationship. We could talk about this for millennia. It is the great challenge in people's lives. It's also, by the way, the great source of joy in people's lives. You know, I think it's been estimated that something like 70 % of a person's life satisfaction is dependent on the quality of their relationship.

17:15Alain de Botton:We've built a very odd world in that if you look at what people are doing, they're not spending 70 % of their time working on their relationships. The economy is not devoted 70 % to the sustaining and development of relationships. So a visiting Martian would go, hang on a minute, there's this thing that's really important. And most of the time, none of you guys are actually doing very much about it, and then you're surprised that it goes wrong. We're still living in a romantic age that's about 250 years old, that has all sorts of assumptions about relationships, one of which is don't think too much about them, that true love should not be philosophy.

17:53Alain de Botton:It shouldn't be logic. It should be an impulse, a kind of freewheeling, spontaneous feeling. And if you get that feeling, don't ask too many questions of it. Which is why still nowadays, among respectable people, you can say, I've met somebody, I had an amazing feeling, and we're getting married in Vegas in two weeks, and people will go, oh, that's so romantic, that's brilliant, rather than get these people to an insane asylum, get these people to a therapist, you know, they don't know what's going on. So we have a tremendous amount of respect for instinct in a way that we don't have in any other area of functioning.

18:24Alain de Botton:I mean, if you went to a boardroom and said, I've got an instinct that we should, you know, start a company in Shanghai and divest ourselves of the Australian market, people go, how do you mean an instinct? Could we have some data on this? Could we proceed logically? In love, you say, I'm divorcing this one, I'm going to marry that one, and everyone just goes, oh, well, that's fine. We're not asked to submit our emotional movements to rational analysis with tremendously difficult effects. I mean, impulse is as liable to be wrong in matters of the heart as it's likely to be right. And I speak with experience, authority, and a lot of pain on this.

19:01Alain de Botton:We like to believe that our impulses are going to lead us to the right people in the right situations. That's fine if your training, your impulse training has been healthy. But most of us, many of us, have come from difficult backgrounds where our impulses, far from reflecting logic and health, are actually geared towards, you know, the management of a rather traumatic situation. And therefore, when those impulses are activated in adult life, they're likely to be pushing you towards a disaster as they are towards health and happiness. You know there's a very normal quote that goes, the head or the heart.

19:38Sarah Ann Macklin:How do you know which one's right?

19:41Alain de Botton:Look, it's so complicated. I would say nothing fast. Listen to what you call the heart or maybe the gut, which is a rather interesting thing, or the unconscious. In other words, the bit of your experience to which you can't immediately have access. You may need to quieten yourself. You may need to go into a sort of liminal state. You might need to be in a bath or on a walk or just as you're going to sleep or something. You try and access a part of you that isn't there in the chatter of the day. And you can ask yourself some of those deeper questions like, what do I really think about them? Or, what am I really trying to achieve?

20:21Alain de Botton:And often there is an answer, rather an interesting answer, waiting for you in the backdrop. It's like an analogy might be, it's very noisy during the day, and then as the hubbub of the day goes down, if you're living in a city, you might suddenly hear church bells. Those church bells have been ringing all the time. It's only once the noise of the city goes down that they're audible. And there's, as it were, a little church bell inside us that sometimes is trying to tell us things. Now, we mustn't think that is the truth and everything else is false? No, it's more complicated than that. Let's explore that church bell bit, submit it to reason, and come ultimately to a committee decision.

20:57Alain de Botton:We need to sit a variety of ourselves around the table, the child self, the bell ringing self, the rational self, and we need to hear everybody's voice and then come to a measured view. We spoke about vulnerability at the beginning, and I read that you argued that love demands

21:15Sarah Ann Macklin:vulnerability, but also being our unedited selves can ruin relationships. How do we reconcile those two truths? Because it's very hard to be vulnerable and communicate, but also not too much.

21:28Alain de Botton:Yeah. I think what we need is a meta perspective on vulnerability. In other words, you've got to be in touch with vulnerability. You've got to be able to communicate your vulnerability, but that doesn't mean you need to act out from a place of vulnerability always. Look, I think a great ideal in relationships is to be quite polite. I know this is really, it's ideal. And, you know, many of us lose our tempers at moments and we should apologize, etc. But the idea of not submitting another person regularly to your rage, your disappointment, your confusion, not to make them feel ashamed or guilty unnecessarily, etc.

21:59Alain de Botton:These belong to the rules of adult life. And many, many people are not there yet. There's a lot of substandard behavior in relationships. And to simply go, oh, well, that's just me being me. Hmm, That's not quite good enough. I think, yes, we need to try and access the vulnerable parts of us. But does that mean that you've got to shout at your partner every time you feel frustrated or let out every comment, even a devastating one, simply because you feel it? No. There has to be censorship. There has to be an ability to manage the data that comes from your vulnerable self and share it in a way that it can be digested.

22:37Alain de Botton:So I'm afraid a nuanced position on this one. vulnerability, yes, but a lot of politeness and a lot of patience and a lot of, um, an attitude of criticism towards your own first impulses.

22:51Sarah Ann Macklin:You know, when I asked you what's been your kind of most heavy hitting video that you've put out or moment or theme, and you said, love, I obviously went back and looked at all of the content and I've been obsessed with the school of life for years, just for my own self. And that's why this conversation to me feels just probably one of my biggest because I feel so connected to the work that you do. And it's true, universally love. I think the substrate of life is love to ourselves and to other people. Yet a lot of us will put most of our pressures at work on ourselves. And even if you're a founder, finding your co-founder feels like the biggest connection that you're ever going to do in life.

23:34Sarah Ann Macklin:Yet actually the person you're going to marry really is your co-founder. that's how I think about things and one of the biggest videos of all time on YouTube that I found is am I going to marry the wrong person and that came from an article that you wrote I think it was in 2008 might be later for the New York Times and it's absolutely blown up people are too afraid to ask that question or think about that question the actual title sorry to be annoying is why you

24:01Alain de Botton:will marry the wrong person why you will marry the wrong person and I think that the reason that title resonated is because it's a fear that we all have that we're going to marry the wrong person. It's such a cataclysmic fear. To name that fear is ticklish but also hopeful. And the message of that film and the article is a hopeful one, which is to say, okay, the bad news is you'll marry the wrong person. The good news is there's no right person. Once you do away with the idea of a totally right person, you actually liberate it. You know, we live in a culture that is obsessed by the idea of a soulmate, somebody who will understand us totally, somebody around whom there will be no friction.

24:40Alain de Botton:This is a one-way ticket to disaster. App culture, for example, is based on the idea that there is a so-called right person, and you just keep swiping and keep changing and keep dating, etc., until you find this so-called right person, around whom there will be no major incompatibilities. Compare this with pre-modern societies. Pre-modern societies, they didn't date very much. You more or less had three or four meetings, and And then you'd marry. And we look at that and we go, well, that's crazy. You don't even know the person. And the premodern answer is you know one thing about a person that's absolutely key, perhaps the only thing you need to know.

25:15Alain de Botton:And what you need to know is they're very committed to having a relationship with you. So we don't know at all who they are, but they're very committed to a relationship and you're very committed to a relationship. And the suggestion, fanciful to our ears but provocative, is maybe that's the most important thing about making a relationship work. Because if you, you know, in our day, what we do is we spend about four or five or ten years checking out if we're compatible. He likes golf, oh, she likes yellow curtains, et cetera. Oh, no, likes the novels of this, et cetera. And it goes on and on and on.

25:46Alain de Botton:And then finally, after seven years, oh, sorry, I've got to leave because we're not quite compatible. And so I've got to upgrade to a more compatible person and everybody's devastated. And you think, hang on, is this right? Isn't it better, in a sense, go on four dates, think, okay, broadly speaking, I'm getting a good feeling. The number one thing we need to do is commit. And then from there, what we need to do is to work on compatibility. The compatibility is an achievement of love. It's not a precondition of love. We've got it the wrong way around.

26:16Sarah Ann Macklin:So what questions should we be asking when we first go on first dates?

26:20Alain de Botton:Well, I think a very useful question to flush people out on a first date is how are you crazy? How are you crazy? And if somebody goes, how do you mean I'm not crazy at all, that's a really insulting question, leave. Because if somebody has such a brittle and unexamined relationship to their own flaws, it's not a good starting point. But if someone goes, well, where do we start the list? And it's playful and knows exactly what you're saying and is basically happy to go in there. That's really good because in love we don't need perfect people. We need people who know that they're imperfect, have a kind of handle on what's imperfect about them and are able on a good day to tell you about their imperfections before they've hurt you too much with them.

27:02Alain de Botton:That's gold and we don't have enough of it.

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28:35Sarah Ann Macklin:Our sexual well-being matters and everyone deserves support. Do you think that heartbreak is one of the most important life lessons that we can learn?

28:46Alain de Botton:Heartbreak is an absolute nightmare. I would say that it is one of the worst things that anyone can go through. I didn't know this. I didn't go through heartbreak till later on in life. And I used to think, oh, what are those songs about? What's this drama about? I mean, lots of people have not really had heartbreak. They've had breakups and they felt a little bit sad for a week or two. It's not heartbreak, guys. Heartbreak is the serious thing. Heartbreak is a year, two years, three years of your life where you are in pieces. This is no fun at all. I mean, it is a quasi-medical condition. You should get time off work for it.

29:22Alain de Botton:It is a major life event. It is an annihilation of yourself that existed in the life of another person. The worst heartbreaks are those that are not properly explained. We can take a lot if they'd been explained. I think there should be almost a government law that you cannot leave a relationship without giving the other person maximal closure. Why did this happen? What's going on? How did you come to this decision? The thing that will devastate anyone is a relationship that seems to be going well, you feel invested, you trust, you love, you adore, you're planning a future, and then from one day to the next the person goes, I'm so sorry, I'm not feeling I've got to leave and I can't really explain why.

30:06Alain de Botton:You probably lost the next two years. Just then and there, you lost the next two years, at least. And it will have a massive impact on your ability to trust other people, etc., etc. So, as I say, you get fined about£100 for dropping a Coca-Cola can on the ground. Not great. But what do you get fined if you do this to another human being? Nothing. It's in the realm of private life. Now, I don't want to call the police in. But guys, let's raise our game here. You cannot just exit somebody's life after a five or ten or twenty year relationship with a, oh, you know, sorry, I wasn't feeling it anymore.

30:40Alain de Botton:I'm off and I'm going to block you now. We can't do this to people. It's devastating.

30:45Sarah Ann Macklin:It is probably one of the most soul-destroying moments. I mean, it's very connected to trauma when those things happen.

30:53Alain de Botton:It is a trauma. It is a trauma. It is a trauma. And because it literally is an annihilation of yourself in the eyes of another. Another person knows everything about you, everything. You've told them everything. You've shown everything about you. You've shown yourself in total vulnerability. And then for no reason, that witness, that friend, that lover, vanishes from your life. And it is like you have to be born again, as it were. Not in a nice way religious people talk about. I mean, in the grimmest way, you have to start again. And yeah, so anyone who's suffering from heartbreak. I mean, they need so much help.

31:30Alain de Botton:They need so much kindness, so much support. They are not going to be themselves for months and years.

31:36Sarah Ann Macklin:But do you think at that point they develop a different type of self once they heal and grow from the pain that they endured?

31:44Alain de Botton:Sarah, I'm not from California. We're recording this in the UK, in the United Kingdom. We're recording this in old Europe. Europe is tragic. America is optimistic. I know many of our viewers from the United States. I say this with love and compassion and desire to be helpful. Some things are tragic. Some things are not always the road to some beautiful future. Some things are just shit and we need to, you know, some things shouldn't have happened and nothing beautiful happens. You just have to scrabble. I mean, look, imagine we're living, we're staying in a lovely apartment. Imagine this apartment is torched and burnt thing.

32:15Alain de Botton:And you might go, well, after the torching, you know, some wallpaper was better, et cetera. You might also want to go, this was a total waste of time. My life was fine, and then my apartment burnt down, and it was a disaster. And I think there is a little bit of that with heartbreak. Yes, sometimes we get stronger. Yes, sometimes we learn about boundaries. Yes, sometimes we learn that the next person we go on a date with, we better ask some sharper questions, and we better behave. So, of course, there are good lessons we can learn, of course. But I want to make a case for just the pain. And sometimes there are lessons we wish we hadn't had to learn.

32:53Alain de Botton:And bless those who don't have to learn some of life's hardest lessons.

32:58Sarah Ann Macklin:Yeah, I mean, I'm in complete agreement with you there. I think one of the most interesting moments for myself, maybe, personally on this, was that it made me have to understand myself more. Like, it took me to a place that I probably would never have had to go to without that. And I think that is something with one of my favorite terms of all time, which you just said, we're in Europe and old England, that everyone will cringe when I say this word. Quite rightly, I did for many years, which was self-compassion. I think it's one of the hardest concepts for anyone who is English to connect to. It's just something that makes you want to go, ooh, to that word.

33:38Sarah Ann Macklin:But they're the moments, I think, that we really develop that understanding of what that means.

33:44Alain de Botton:Let's think about what happens when your heart is broken. So your heart is broken and the rejection is immense. So somebody has known you, seen you and decided you were not good enough. And so from there, you've got some choices. You can side with that person's view. You can essentially go, they knew me, they saw something defective in me. And therefore, you know, I'm, I'm at an end, I'm at rock bottom. And everybody goes through, it goes through that period for a long time, they side with the view of the person who hurt them. And then if things can go well, at some point they have to start to go, hang on a minute, that person was not right.

34:22Alain de Botton:I'm going to be on my side rather than on their side, because otherwise, well, I've got to live with me. I've got to find an argument for being me. Otherwise, you know, I will never get up off the floor. And so slowly you do, as you say, you learn self-compassion. You learn to think, okay, I'm not a perfect person, but there's got to be a way in which I deserve to live as well, and then the slow process of recovery.

34:48Sarah Ann Macklin:How important do you think self-compassion is for our mental health?

34:53Alain de Botton:Look, I think what we mean by self-compassion is an ability to interpret one's own flaws, mistakes, weaker sides, with the kind of kindness that we would give to a friend, even frankly a stranger and and you know the always interesting thing is why we cannot be as kind to ourselves as we can to any random stranger so a random stranger if they said to us you know i've made a mistake at work i've done something wrong we'd go poor you we'd immediately go oh poor you that would be very natural to us we go you blithering idiot what are you you know we speak to ourselves with the harshest possible voice which is often an internalized voice you know the way we speak to ourselves is largely to do with having incorporated the voice of somebody else who spoke to us normally when we were small.

35:46Alain de Botton:And some of us have had the misfortune to have inner voices that are not very helpful. What are you doing? You silly idiot. Why did you forget to tie your shoelaces? Don't touch the kitchen cabinet. Get out of my way. I'm busy. You silly little nonsense, et cetera. Unfortunately, there are childhoods in which those messages are being drawn in. And then that becomes — you see, people who have bad childhoods suffer twice. They suffer in the childhood, and then they suffer because the negativity has been incorporated in their own mind, and they then start to be the negative caregiver to themselves.

36:19Alain de Botton:And they take that out into relationships and the workplace, etc. So that they've got, you know, what Freud called the super-ego, the voice inside themselves that is the voice of an unkind a person of authority. Sometimes people have good internal voices, but many of us have quite bad ones. So it's really interesting to ask oneself, how do I speak to myself when I mess up? Do I speak kindly to myself or do I hate myself? And whose is that voice? It's not yours. It's a voice you've heard and you've taken it inside yourself. And then you need to say to yourself, do I agree with that voice? And you might need to say it, do a little bit of a goodbye ceremony and go, thank you, voice.

37:02Alain de Botton:I know I've taken you inside me. I don't want this voice. Life's too short. Get out.

37:09Sarah Ann Macklin:It's true. I sometimes find it really helpful to name that voice so I don't feel like it's part of me.

37:13Alain de Botton:Yeah, that's right. And it won't be. It'll be the voice of a great aunt or parent. Usually it's a mother or father, but we don't need to point to that, make that point too hard.

37:22Sarah Ann Macklin:How important is that to recognize, though? Because a lot of people will say, well, that voice drives me, it motivates me, it connects me to being a better person in all ways, and the way I work, and the way I am.

37:34Alain de Botton:Yeah, look, there's a lot of equivocation around the value of a whip. A whip, you know, could be a good thing, gets people going, you know, whip yourself a little bit harder, and off you go. And then there's the moment where the whip ceases to be very helpful at all. It's got to be a balance, isn't it? There's got to be motivation, and part of motivation has got to be moments of self-hatred, self-criticism, etc. But there are those of us who are suffering from an excess. It's become really unhelpful. Think of the number of books that don't get written because people are so worried they're going to be bad.

38:06Alain de Botton:Think of the number of businesses that don't get started because people think, oh, that's a silly idea. Think of a number of initiatives that are quashed at birth because somebody is ahead of their own more hopeful sides with that critical voice. So, you know, for every person who didn't bother to get up off bed because, you know, they were just too easy on themselves, there's a million fantastic things that have not happened because people were too critical of their projects and their dreams.

38:34Sarah Ann Macklin:How do you advise people to deal with criticism?

38:39Alain de Botton:First of all, don't be too stoic too quickly. It really hurts. Sometimes people go, I can't believe it. You know, I heard somebody saying something bad about me last month and it's just moving around my brain even now and I'm just, I'm such an idiot. You want to go, don't worry, we're built like this. This is very normal. We are acutely sensitive to criticism. There are probably biological reasons for that. The view of the tribe mattered immensely. When we lived in a village of 15 people, if one of those people had a very bad opinion about you, you should probably know about it and worry about it.

39:08Alain de Botton:The irony, as in so many impulses that we have physiologically, almost. They outgrow their uses. So it was also tremendously useful to eat any sugary thing that came your way, because that way you would preserve your calories. Nowadays, disaster, right? You must not do that thing that you're impulsive. Same thing around gossip and criticism. It doesn't matter. If somebody 800 ,000 miles away, you know, posted something negative on a blog about you,

39:34Sarah Ann Macklin:forget it. Forget it. It doesn't matter.

39:36Alain de Botton:It's not anything that you need to worry about. But we bring to the conditions of the modern city and the modern internet world some of that sensitivity that was essentially honed in the savannah. And it doesn't belong and it causes problems that are unnecessary.

39:50Sarah Ann Macklin:Do you think social media is making this 10 times worse?

39:53Alain de Botton:Social media, look, let's really make a case of social media being the root of all evil. Everybody thinks so, really. And it truly is. So, you know, sorry if you work in it. Sorry if, you know, we all use it. But, look, it aggravates so many fragilities of the mind. for a start, thinking. Thinking's really important. There are lots of thoughts that we need to have in order to unlock our full potential. Thoughts around, what should I do next? How did I behave with someone I care about? What do I really regret? Where do my true talents lie? Et cetera. The answers to those questions are not at the top of our minds.

40:26Alain de Botton:We need quiet. We need space. We need an undistracted environment in order to access those thoughts that will save our lives and give us the direction we need to go in for the next stage of whatever we're trying to do. The problem with damn social media is it's so seductive that it gets in the way of the conversation we're trying to have with ourselves. It's alienating from ourselves. There's an irony. We talk of phones as communication devices. They are miscommunication devices. For all the fact that we can get hold of somebody on another continent at short order, the person we can no longer get hold of is us.

41:00Alain de Botton:Us, the owner of the phone. We can no longer communicate with ourselves because we've got phones, these communication devices that are actually miscommunication devices.

41:10Sarah Ann Macklin:That's so true, the miscommunication with ourselves. I think one of the things I found really interesting that you said that kind of connects to that is that a lot of us are disconnected from how we feel in a somatic experience, right? We're very, a lot of us are very cerebral, very much in our minds, and those devices pull us more into our more cerebral thinking. How important is it, do you think, is to connect back to ourselves in a somatic way?

41:37Alain de Botton:I mean, look, it's totally paradoxical. If you say to somebody, say to a Martian, think about these human beings, they often don't know what they're feeling. The Martian would be a bit puzzled. How do you mean? They don't know their own feelings. They feel, and yet they don't know the feeling. Quite a paradox. But it's absolutely true that we have layers of consciousness and there's lots of things going on in us of which we're not fully aware. Now, some of those things are digesting lunch. So we're digesting our lunch, we're not fully aware of it, and that's great because it means we can get on with having a meeting or something.

42:04Alain de Botton:If we had to know everything that was happening in our bodies in real time all the time, we wouldn't be able to think about other things. So the mind is usefully split into conscious and unconscious, but only so far. There are also very valuable bits of information that are lodged unconsciously that should become more conscious. This is the basis of psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is essentially a discipline that tries to rescue important bits of exiled, alienated knowledge and feeling, and try to bring it in to our more conscious awareness so that we can make better choices and know what's actually going on.

42:38Alain de Botton:And there is a way in which some of our exiled feelings have serious secondary effects when they've not been made conscious. Anger is the classic one. Anger that's not been felt and understood, and very often anger is not felt and understood because we're afraid of its volcanic potential. We're afraid of hurting people or demeaning ourselves. And so we don't register anger as it should be. And it then starts to breed secondary characteristics, like irritability. So we're irritable with everything because we don't know that we're angry with something. We might go off sex. Most sexual problems are anger that hasn't found its way out.

43:14Alain de Botton:Most inability to have sex is really an argument that you forgot to have. And that's why you now absolutely don't want anyone to touch you, your partner to touch you because you're so furious with them. But you've forgotten you're furious because you're supposed to be a nice person. So the feeling that we have, which is, I'm a nice person, I don't get angry, is really noxious. We need to go, everybody's angry all the time about all sorts of things. And what we need to do is connect with that anger and dispel it like a bad smell. And then it will be okay. But if it has to fester, then it gets really, really dangerous.

43:47Alain de Botton:I mean, to the point where people end up twitching or they end up cynical. Cynicism is a kind of congealed anger, years of congealed anger, people who are, you know, one sense is certain people, who they're in a quiet rage with the whole of existence, normally because of something that went wrong, you know, this is not good. And a lot does get lodged in our bodies unconsciously. So many illnesses, I don't need to start telling you, so many illnesses are essentially ideas that have not found their way into the mind. And so they're finding representation, metaphoric representation. An inability to speak has given rise to nodules on the throat, or an inability to express anger has ended up as backache.

44:32Alain de Botton:I mean, the back is, the spinal cord is the place. I mean, it's psychology central, really. It all ends up in the spinal cord, and on and on. And so one very useful exercise that we do at the School of Life is to simply say to people, close your eyes, think of your body, and we're going to ask a rather odd question. And the question is this, what does each part of your body need? Need from you? Need to say? Keep it open. What do your shoulders need? What does your stomach need? What do your hips need? What does your hand need? And the answers people give to those questions are amazing. First of all, people kind of get it immediately.

45:11Alain de Botton:Even if they're normally quite sort of straight people, they'll go, okay, I get it. And it'll be things like, you know, I need my mother to put her arms around my shoulders. Oh, wow. Okay. That's an interesting thing. Or my stomach says, I've had enough, enough of dot, dot, dot. And there is an answer waiting for us. So, you know, there's a lot of talk about how you reconnect the bodies. Very simple exercise. Just ask what different parts of your body need. And there almost always will be an answer waiting for you.

45:41Sarah Ann Macklin:You've referenced quite a few different people there that I really like. Dr. Garbo-Matte talks a lot about, and so does Basil van Derbeckhoff, The Body Keeps the Score. It's a huge thing, but I don't think people connect to it as much. I mean, we go to the doctor a lot about different issues, and normally it's a prescription of an SSRI, an antidepressant, anti-inflammatory for the back, but very rarely is it something to do with emotional health.

46:06Alain de Botton:Yeah. Again, I mean, so much thinking has been done on this area, but obviously our medical therapeutic model is hopelessly split down the middle, hopelessly segmented. We all know, in fact, GPs know that people go to them essentially for therapy. I have friends who are GPs and they go, they shrug their shoulders and they go, huh, I've got five minutes per patient and I know that what they really want from me is a therapist. And they slightly laugh as though, huh, and they've come to the wrong place. You want to go, where does one go? The doctor and the therapist occupying poles that really need to be closer together.

46:43Alain de Botton:In the ancient world, say in ancient Greece, a doctor was seen as somehow a priest and also a philosopher and a healer of the body. Those roles were much more combined because it was understood that illness contains metaphoric elements or psychological elements. And even though we're sophisticated in a lot of ways, we find that still very, very hard. And it's podcasts like yours that are trying to bring this home.

47:11Sarah Ann Macklin:I'm interrupting for one moment to ask one small favour. Please subscribe to the show. This helps it grow more than you know. And I'm so bad at asking this from you. I'm so bad at thinking about this. But you know, my goal is 100 ,000 to get to on YouTube. And I really want to bring you more content and better guests and bigger episodes. And we can only do that with your help together.

47:35Alain de Botton:So please do hit subscribe. Thank you. I think it's one of those, one of those moments that I've had from doing this in the show.

47:43Sarah Ann Macklin:And I'd love to know what your experience is because you started School of Life in 2008. When I was 21, I lived in New York. I'm now 36. So we're going back a while. And I would go to these dinners and I'd sit down and I was very English and someone would say, who's your therapist? and my body would like jump out of itself and go what would you mean I don't have a therapist and well why do you not have a therapist and it was this really odd moment where I hadn't been surrounded by anyone that would ask me that because if I thought I had a therapist for me I was nuts that was just how my mind and the environment that I grew up in was was looked at and then I remember turning on the Ellen show and Jude Law was on there and he said do you know what's really odd about being in America is everyone has a therapist and it's really normal.

48:31Sarah Ann Macklin:I feel un-normal not having a therapist. So I went into this really interesting culture, which I was exposed to, and still quite a young age, 21, where everyone was talking about therapy very openly. But it was something that was really prevention. French medicine wasn't spoken about very much, even in general health. It was more about go to the doctor when you're ill, not go to the doctor to reduce illness. And then when I started studying and really got interested in mental health, I was like, for me, it was like I'd opened so many doors in my mind of understanding myself, which made me feel stronger.

49:08Sarah Ann Macklin:I thought I would feel weaker. And there's been a really interesting shape shift in the landscape over the last 15 years of mental health. What's your understanding of this been? Because you've lived and breathed it during this time? How have you seen the difference, especially in Europe and in England, change?

49:26Alain de Botton:Yeah. I mean, look, psychoanalysis and then psychotherapy has been in existence since the beginning of the 20th century, but I think we've definitely seen a huge expansion in its uptake. And ideas like attachment theory, which were in textbooks and therapists knew about, are now language that 16-year-olds speak. That's wonderful. There are some dangers and we could go into that. Like with many broadly positive things, there are some dangers. But I think, you know, an interesting thing to ask oneself is, what does it mean that we live in a culture where people go to therapy? You see, therapy is something you might do for 50 minutes, and life's a lot longer than that 50 minutes.

50:02Alain de Botton:It's really a therapeutic attitude. And if I can try and summarize what a therapeutic attitude is, a lot of what it is is teaching you to be very respectful of the complexity of your mind, that your mind is not exactly obvious to you. That's the primary starting point of psychotherapy. It's sort of like, why do you need a therapist? You need a therapist because your own first thought about you might not be right. You might not have access to the richest data about who you are. And that's an insight you can hold on to throughout the week. It doesn't just mean that you have to do this with a therapist.

50:37Alain de Botton:And it also is very relevant to relationships, all relationships, colleagues, romantic relationships, et cetera. Because really what it's saying is there's two unconscious minds meeting. Whenever two people meet, it's conscious and unconscious. And if you give room for the unconscious in yourself and in the other, you're going to have a much more interesting time, much more human time. And also, let's come back to it, you've got some bodies as well. You've got two bodies. So you've got a rational mind, a body, and an unconscious mind whenever two people meet. There's already a lot of elements there, and it makes for much richer encounters if you can keep all these different bits in mind.

51:14Sarah Ann Macklin:I think there's an interesting moment with therapy, and I don't know if you've seen this, where people are still scared to open up to their therapist. How can people become comfortable with that and also still not biased at the same time?

51:27Alain de Botton:Well, you know, my background was in philosophy. And one of the things that I've got interested in, I trained as a psychotherapist much later in life. And so one of the questions I asked myself is, what's the difference between philosophy and psychotherapy? And I think that philosophy has this idea that the truth will solve every problem. So if you work out the truth about somebody, it could be personal truth, a political truth, etc., you just give people that truth, and then abracadabra, everything will change. And literally the dialogues of Socrates, the most iconic dialogues in history of philosophy, they literally have that, that Socrates wanders around trying to find people's truth, and then goes, hey, that's the truth for you.

52:05Alain de Botton:What we've discovered, and what psychotherapy discovers, is that's not going to work. You could go up to somebody and go, you're avoidant because your mother, when you were three, left you and your father wasn't really faithful because he had an affair. And the person will go, well, they'll probably go away. Or they'll go, that's true, but I'm not sure it really applies to me. There will be a resistance to it. So most psychotherapists, when they see a client, can work out the broad dynamics of what is wrong with that client, what's going wrong, in 50 minutes. An initial encounter, the psychotherapist gets the picture.

52:38Alain de Botton:All the rest of the work is trying to bring the client gently around to insights which, if they're delivered too harshly and too nakedly, will simply frighten the client and will not go in. So psychotherapy is an education in how slowly we need to absorb important truths about ourselves. We need to cut them up into very small pieces and eat them just a little bit day by day. you can't present people with the truth. I used to do this in my personal life, I still sometimes do it, is that I'll say to somebody, you know, the thing you need to bear in mind is this, that, and the other. And they'll go, no, I don't.

53:18Alain de Botton:And I'd simply put my therapy hat back on and I go, can't speak to people like that. They can't absorb that. No one, none of us can. I mean, if somebody came up to me and said, you know, what's up with you is, I'd go, you know, you crumble. So psychotherapy is a method. It's not just a set of ideas. It's a method for how to get those ideas safely into people's minds. And if there's one word that's key, it could sound odd, it's love. Love helps ideas to get absorbed in somebody else's mind. What the therapist does is to create an atmosphere that is akin to an atmosphere of love, gentleness, kindness, consideration, modesty, sweetness.

53:59Alain de Botton:These are the preconditions in which people can learn. If you go up to somebody and go, you need to learn, no one learns when they're being humiliated. We only learn in an atmosphere of love. And that is modern psychotherapy's great insight. It's relatively recent. It's 50 years old. It was not 100 years old. Initially, those Freudian people just thought, you know, we'll sit in our chair in Vienna and we will tell the patient what's going on and it found it didn't work. The insight was perfect. The method of delivery, catastrophic. No one ever learns from a strange German accent delivered sternly.

54:30Sarah Ann Macklin:It's like that in anything in life.

54:33Alain de Botton:Absolutely. Anything. I mean, think of the teachers you learned something from. Were they the ones that harangued you or they, you know, playfully, gently, you know, got you into something that you could understand and love?

54:43Sarah Ann Macklin:Well, one thing I find really interesting when we think about therapy is you've got an hour with yourself and another person. It's a very intimate moment, right? And you said in the will you marry the wrong person or why you will marry the wrong person, you talked about that we're all addicts. And that addiction is basically any behavior of pattern where you cannot stand to be with yourself. You can be addicted to anything as long as it keeps you away from yourself.

55:12Alain de Botton:That's right. I mean, we are not… Self-awareness does not come easily. It's something we have to work at. Every important idea that you need to learn about yourself will be surrounded by a coating of anxiety. You will not want to go there. It's a paradox. The ideas that we really need are also those that we tend to run away from, which is why we tend to have to wait until pain comes along. Pain provides us the incentive. So there are lots of thoughts that you don't look at until you're at rock bottom. And then you're so in pain, you think, okay, right, better open that cupboard door with all that stuff I haven't looked at, because you're already so down that you then go off and, you know, take that risk.

55:52Alain de Botton:But until then, you're flatlining, and you're avoiding, and you're using your phone to get away from the stuff you really need to think about. So, yeah, and insomnia. I sometimes think of insomnia as a kind of revenge for all those thoughts you carefully managed not to have in the day. In the day, you push them away. And they come back at you at three in the morning. You can't sleep because some thoughts need to be heard. There are truths that we will die if we don't get to hear them, and they press against us. That's the wonderful thing about the mind. We have a conscience, a sort of emotional conscience.

56:27Alain de Botton:There are things that we need to know about ourselves. And if we're not up for knowing them directly, a bit of our minds is going to make damn sure we'll hear about them somehow. Maybe it will be through a piercing headache. Maybe it will be through, you know, a bodily ailment of some sort. But that truth is going to come knocking at the door. It wants to be heard. And we should try and give it space. We should try and say, some part of me is trying to tell me something. So let me just sit a bit quietly, cancel that party, put my phone away and listen to me it can be hard to do that though can't it terrifying it not just hard scary let's name it scary self-knowledge is scary why because imagine how awful you'll feel if you realized you left somebody that you shouldn't have left oh my god that's terrifying you've ended a relationship you shouldn't have ended that will that will make you feel very worried or you left a job that actually was perfectly good or it was because you lost your temper with someone, that you destroyed something that was really important to you.

57:30Alain de Botton:I mean, these are agonizing realizations, and therefore we'll do anything other than face up to them. Ultimately, the kind of, the betting you have to have with yourself is the truth is always worth knowing, that there are benefits to knowing these uncomfortable facts that outweigh the discomfort that you will need to experience in order to get to them.

57:53Sarah Ann Macklin:Do you see men and women going down different paths with this and self-awareness? Do you feel like women can connect more deeply to it than a man or?

58:00Alain de Botton:Absolutely not. Both men and women are equally blind to the really important insights. Maybe they use different methods of distraction. Sure. Men might use, I don't know, certain, I don't know, they chop wood. I don't know what men do. Who knows? I'm barely a man, sort of a man. But anyway, yeah, so some men might chop wood, women, I don't know what they do. All right, cliches. But I think that both genders are equally mired in the business of self-avoidance. It's universal, sadly. I often think, you know, there are real battles of the genders because people tend to date and experience only one gender.

58:39Alain de Botton:The people who really understand the true mess of human life are bisexual people. But heterosexual people, the men go, the women are so crazy. They're so, they do this, that, and the other. And the women in their camp, heterosexual women, are like, oh my God, the men, they do all this, that, and the other. And the real truth is human beings are totally maddening and nutty. But most of us don't date the full range of human beings. So we have this siloed vision. The bad news is everybody's crazy. But that's also the good news. there is no gender that is saintly and there is no gender that is totally impure we're a fabulous

59:14Sarah Ann Macklin:mixture of the two it's wild that we think that we're all not crazy right absolutely we we insist

59:20Alain de Botton:on our normality to comedic extents and and it's only when we you know we're watching larry david or john cleese or david brent that we can kind of go okay let's laugh along because actually a part of us is that crazy, ridiculous person. But yeah, most of the time, we cannot find a safe way, an off-ramp from our normalising philosophy to something broader and more human. We need an off-ramp. Yeah.

59:48Sarah Ann Macklin:What was your off-ramp to feel comfortable? I don't know.

59:54Alain de Botton:I mean, And from quite a young age, I didn't place great store in thinking, yeah, I'm one of those normal chaps. I think I just felt it wasn't really an option for me. I was obviously slightly on the unusual end of things. And I just thought the best thing to do is put my hand up and not pretend to be any more normal than I feel. And I also found that it was a route to friendship. It was a route to laughter and friendship. And so initially at school, I was a bit of a house clown. And then, you know, and it sort of carried on. I still think that laughter, you know, laughter is immensely important and an immensely sophisticated thing.

1:00:32Alain de Botton:It fills the gap between how we would love life to be and how it actually is. You know, whenever you sense that gap, there's a role for laughter, which is why, you know, we're sitting in the UK. The UK is quite a funny culture. Why? Because there's quite an acknowledgement that lots is not as it should be. It's like we know life's a bit shit. And so because we know life's a bit shit, we can laugh. Whereas in other cultures, bless our American cousins, it's like we don't accept nada nada. We don't accept failure. We don't accept that things might go wrong. We're building rockets to go to Mars, and we're not laughing here.

1:01:12Alain de Botton:And this has led to an amazing achievement. It's also led to lots of mental unwellness, because there's not that safety valve of making your peace with imperfection. The United States was founded by people who wanted to build Jerusalem in this world, not in the next world, in this world. Europe had been building Jerusalems in the future for centuries. The people who built the United States thought this was the promised land, not in the next life, now. And that's why it's been the most productive economy that the world has ever seen. And it's also a fabulously tormented place.

1:01:52Sarah Ann Macklin:Well, it's interesting because when I think about that, I think about optimism versus pessimism. Because there's these moments, I don't know if you've had them, but when everything just seems to be going wrong at one point. And everyone goes, well, it doesn't happen once, it happens in threes. And all these different things happen and they all go wrong. Yet, when I was thinking about that, it's like we've built our lives thinking it's all going to be optimistic. It's all going to be running smoothly. Yet actually, is it that our lives are just not meant to be running smoothly ever? and that's actually a very pessimistic way of looking at it.

1:02:30Alain de Botton:Look, it's so natural to expect that we want life to go well for ourselves, but that has to be balanced. Any sane life has to be balanced with an awareness that at any point you could get an aneurysm and you're done for, and that applies to everybody. We are hugely exposed to accident of all kinds. A human being is a very vulnerable creature, physiologically, emotionally, status-wise, politically, etc. To expect that you're going to go through life and have no very serious reversal is just naive. I mean, I think that young people should be educated, that they are to expect at least five major reversals in an average life.

1:03:15Alain de Botton:Someone close to you will die and it will devastate you. Someone will leave you emotionally and it will devastate you. You will have a massive career setback that will blow you out of the water. and you know you'd be lucky if you're not living through some very bad health health crisis and also some political crisis that is completely out of your hands that's those are just the facts of life and we have this sunny view that's not going to happen to us we need to go back to the ancient greeks the ancient greeks were obsessed by hubris all their stories you read herodotus you read it's always about the idea that the human being starts to think that it's like a god that it doesn't have the vulnerability of humans.

1:03:55Alain de Botton:And the stories of the Greeks, the Greeks told themselves again and again and again, is look at that king. He thought he'd worked it all out and boom, the gods got to him. Look at that woman she thought is all perfect and then boom. And one story after another. And then Sophocles ends Oedipus Rex with that famous line, call no man happy till he dies. In other words, however high and mighty you are, however grand you are, no one's happy. In other words, accident is written into the story of life. And one could go, well, that's a bit grim. It's not grim at all. I mean, it's true, first of all. And also, what's a gateway to friendship and laughter and kindness?

1:04:33Alain de Botton:If we can accept that everybody is massively exposed to accident, as we are, we won't be grandstanding. We won't be lording it over people. We'll be thinking, okay, things are going well for me now. God knows when this is going to end. Could be in the next five seconds. And therefore, everybody is our brother or sister. The homeless person, the person who's about to die on a cancer ward, the person who's got severe mental illness. It's us. It's just a version of us in a future that might start to unfold in the next 30 seconds.

1:05:05Sarah Ann Macklin:You said a lot of friendship through a lot of these conversations that we've had.

1:05:09Alain de Botton:Yeah.

1:05:11Sarah Ann Macklin:What's the most important quality of a friend?

1:05:14Alain de Botton:I think being able to go to the dark places with you in a way that's upbeat, kind, broadly on the side of the sunlight, but really going to the dark places. We all want that friend, we can call it three in the morning, and go, I'm not in a good place, and that they won't panic. Some people panic, that's not helpful. They go like, oh my god, I love you so much, I can't bear that you're suffering. That's no use. That's not helpful. You don't want that. I mean, bless them, they're only trying to help, but there are all these people who lose it when, you know, you want people who are calm, and you want people go, broadly speaking, I got it.

1:05:52Alain de Botton:You know, first of all, it'll be okay, and even if it's not okay, it'll be okay, because everything's okay. The worst that can happen is we die. It's the very worst thing, so don't worry. At worst, you're going to die, and I'm here, and I'm here, and it's no surprise. Welcome to being human. That's the kind of voice we need, and you know we talk about achievement and people you know founders a lot of founders and they're launching a tech company and they've raised 300 million in their first thing bless them but can they fuck off as well because really the real achievement in life is three good friends if you've got three good friends you've met i mean bless you for doing your a round and your b round and you know i'm being facetious but but that's not that's not real achievement real achievement is three good friends, you can call in the middle of the night, then you've made it.

1:06:39Alain de Botton:If you do that and float your company, then you're really swimming.

1:06:41Sarah Ann Macklin:Then you're really swimming. Yeah, and you're really swimming. Well, I mean, there's so many things I want to ask you in that question. Sorry, I'm really trying. There's a lot of moments, I think, where we look at life on achievements. We talk about work-life balance. Simon Sinek taught me a lot about friendships when he came on this show, talking about people that sit in the mud with you. I loved that phrase and terminology that he used. And he taught something to me that I've really used through the last year of my life, which was eight minutes. Have you heard of this? So a lot of us, especially being English, maybe this is like a broad generalization, but can feel burden to call our friends and say, we really, really need you.

1:07:23And sometimes you might go around it in a quite hard way to show

1:07:29Sarah Ann Macklin:that we're struggling. So maybe say, are you free for dinner next week? Or can I see you? That's not really, you know, you're not a mind reader. So no one really knows that's a cry for help. And he had this situation where a friend of him, a friend of his had texted him and said, can I see you? Anyway, a couple of weeks had gone on. And when he saw her, she said, oh, I really was going through a hard time. And he said, well, why didn't you, why didn't you tell me? She said, well, I did try to text you. I was like, well, where? And he looked at his phone and it was just very average text messages.

1:07:59Sarah Ann Macklin:Like, are you around? Can I see you? And he was like, this, this is a cry for help. I don't know that. And they came up with an amazing theory of eight minutes. So just text me eight minutes. The word eight minutes, because in those eight minutes, whatever I'm doing, I can have eight minutes of time and I can dedicate an hour to you maybe later on in the evening, but I can be there to answer that phone call because I know that I can step out of an interview, out of a boardroom, out of whatever to give that person eight minutes of space. And I've actually used that where I haven't wanted to explain and say, oh, I'm having a really, really hard time.

1:08:37Sarah Ann Macklin:I really need you to call me. It's a simple eight minutes, which I think is really interesting concept. Yeah.

1:08:44Alain de Botton:I mean, look, I think the greatest gift you can give a friend is to bring them a need to be able to say to them, I'm in a bit of difficulty. I'd really like to speak to you. It's amazing the number of friendships where that never happens. If you do that with someone, it does something very important. It allows them to do it back. If ever they need to do it, it's open that door. You've done it for them. They've done it for you, so you will do it for them. It's a reciprocity. To get it going, why don't you do it, as it were? You could even act it out a little bit. It doesn't need to be as urgent, but just to say, I'm feeling a bit low.

1:09:25Alain de Botton:I'd love to have a chat. You know, particularly men. I mean, the average man never says that to his friends. Never, ever. But how wonderful to be able to say to a friend, I'm actually feeling a bit low. And, you know, would you like a chat? I mean, you know, eight minutes, sure, great. It's a nice thing. Why not just try? I'm feeling a bit low. Do you have time for a chat anytime? Simple as that. That is a gift because it opens up the possibility for mutual vulnerability and mutual pain. I put something on my Instagram yesterday and one of your posts about work-life balance.

1:10:02Sarah Ann Macklin:I've been struggling a lot with this concept of work-life balance. And so you spoke about friendships there, you know, having three core friends is really important for, I guess, a life well lived, to feel supported, to have community, to feel heard, to feel seen. To feel seen, I think, is one of the most important things in life. I think a lot of people might go through and have friendships but never feel truly seen. Then we come into this concept of the work-life balance. Trying to balance your friendships, maybe a romantic relationship, a career. I mean, as a woman, you have like another extension of being a mother and a family and also not losing that autonomy over your career.

1:10:41Sarah Ann Macklin:How, like, is there a thing of work-life balance? Does it even exist?

1:10:45Alain de Botton:Look, I think we have to think about how we imagine a good life. Most of us, if you look at it meteorologically, imagine a blue sky. We imagine that a good life is one where there is a permanent blue sky. And we think, right now there's problems, but soon I'm going to get to that blue sky. And I think we have to accept a more complicated, nuanced picture. If you live in a northern climate like the UK, or if you live in Seattle or something, you'll know that there are breaks in the clouds, but there are always clouds. Even on a sunny day, you will get some clouds. That's a much more accurate picture of actually what life is like.

1:11:20Alain de Botton:We're made of moods. We're not made of stone. We're not made of arguments. We're not made of silicon. We are made of moods. We're made of water and fog. And our moods are constantly shifting from one thing to another. If you're in a good mood for 15 minutes, good for you. A bad one will come along later. If you're feeling serene and calm in the evening, you will feel agitated and nauseous at another point. It's nothing to do with you. It's the way we're built. We're constantly cycling through emotions. And I think we long too much and unhelpfully for an idea of reaching a state of eternal, solid calm.

1:11:54Alain de Botton:We have to embrace the mobility and the kind of roiling quality of our moods. So if you're having a working life that's complicated, a personal life that's complicated, etc., of course you're going to be up and down and sideways and round about all the time. And rather than fighting about that and thinking something's gone wrong, no, this is just a sign that you're human. Happiness comes in 15-minute bursts. If things are feeling more or less settled, don't worry, they will feel unsettled soon. It's just the norm. And if they're feeling totally unsettled and you think it's the end, don't worry, they will become a more hopeful moment.

1:12:32Alain de Botton:It's just the way we built up and down, up and down, up and down. That's the way we're built. there's always this external pursuit for happiness well the yes the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of a stable good mood and it doesn't exist which is why resort hotels are so funny the hilarious thing about resort hotels is you know the kind four seasons i can name some brands you're very expensive places and beautiful parts of the world and they say to you we'll take your money and you're going to be happy for 10 days in you know wherever it is on the coast of some beautiful place. And we can't be happy for two weeks, 10 days, even four days, even one day.

1:13:09Alain de Botton:It can't happen. So you're there and there's the eat as much as you like buffet and everybody's saying, can I get you anything? And you're having a juice, et cetera. And there are hilarious, tragic comic moments. Someone's shouting, someone's unhappy, someone's having a nervous breakdown, someone's planning their divorce, someone's planning, you know, et cetera. And, you know, that's what makes these places funny because they're hubristic. They are arrogant. They're not. And at three in the morning, when you're sad, you can't call up concierge and go, I'm going nuts. They'll just go, can I get you a papaya?

1:13:35Alain de Botton:I mean, they just, they don't, they can't respond spiritually to the agonies of being human. So we've built these, and these places are symptomatic. These resort hotels are symptomatic of a world which we've created, which has forgotten about the needs of the psyche at its elite level. It's like, our notion of a really good life, private aeroplane, you know, resort hotel, etc. These things do not factor in the psyche and its demands and the way in which it hilariously undercuts all the pretensions and all the achievements. You can have a fantastic private plane. If you're being left by someone you love, good luck to you.

1:14:12Alain de Botton:You might as well go on a bicycle. You might as well crawl across broken glass at your destination because that's how it's going to feel. So chuck the plane away. It's not going to work. So we are susceptible to our emotional agonies, and indeed physical agonies. That's where we have to start.

1:14:28Sarah Ann Macklin:The interesting point that came to my mind then was the word success. Do you know what it says in the Cambridge Dictionary and Oxford Dictionary how they describe success? It's got three words, fame, wealth, and social status.

1:14:46Alain de Botton:Amazing. I mean, in an older definition, what success actually means is doing well at something. That's really what it means, doing well at something. And that introduces much more oxygen into the definition, because you can then be in a position of thinking, okay, I want to do well at something. I don't want to be a failure and a loser, but I want to choose what I want to do. And it might not be fame and money and status. It might be something else. So, you know, the person who sits Buddha-like and contemplates the universe and achieves, you know, karmic karm, they're also really ambitious and really successful.

1:15:22Alain de Botton:They've just focused on a particular area. The person who's decided to become a gardener and rake leaves might be a real success at interpersonal relations and keeping steady. So all of us are successes in some areas and failures in others. The so-called successes that we hear about and read about in the press are almost always successes in some material element and almost always very unsuccessful at everything else, because there's only so many hours in the day. So, you know, if you've been doing brilliantly at accumulating money, shorting the stock market, probably, you know, your relationships might be suffering.

1:16:00Sarah Ann Macklin:Do you know when the term changed from accomplishment of a desired end into fame, wealth and social status? No. It was when the newspaper started.

1:16:09Alain de Botton:Oh, so interesting.

1:16:10Sarah Ann Macklin:And you just connected part of that to media, which is where exactly where our understanding of success has changed from all of the work that you've done in the School of Life. And I really believe that, you know, so much about this show is everyone has their own individual understanding of what living well, being well means to them. And I do think living well, being well is your own definition of success. How would you describe success from all of the kind of wisdom that you've been collating over these years and going further and further into the understanding of personal growth, happiness, all of the areas.

1:16:49Sarah Ann Macklin:What would you see as success?

1:16:50Alain de Botton:I think success is working out your unique nature and trying to fit that nature to the conditions of the world. In the personal space, I think it means finding somebody who can respect your unique nature and you can respect theirs. So connecting over a high level of self-awareness around who you really are. And then in the working environment, again, being able to make a contribution to some part of the world economy that is particularly suited to your interests and tastes. These are immense challenges, huge challenges. They're the work of a lifetime. Many of us will never get to even a fraction of that.

1:17:30Alain de Botton:But I think that's the meaning of life. And we need a huge amount of help to get there.

1:17:35Sarah Ann Macklin:What would you say the first piece of advice to someone who is on that self-awareness journey to start with?

1:17:41Alain de Botton:Give yourself an enormous amount of time to work it out. A lot of people, when they're 22, go, I don't know what to do with my life. I need to choose a career. And so the answer's got to come immediately. Or if it's not there immediately, it means something's wrong. Assembling the plan for a career is such a subtle work of self-knowledge and also exploration of the world, a beautiful mixture of self and world that has to come together. you have to give it time and you need a lot of support and as I say thinking it requires thinking and detective work we need to be detectives of ourselves passing over the ground like like somebody with a metal detector listening out for faint beeps of our true selves that are lying scattered under the surface that we need to try and recover I do think that's our life's journey

1:18:29Sarah Ann Macklin:is to really understand who we are.

1:18:31Alain de Botton:And we won't get there. I mean, we won't, you know, we won't ever get to a point where we'll know the whole thing. We will go to our deaths with, you know, the library of ourselves with only a few volumes read. A lot of, you know, this is what makes death so tragic that the entire library is tipped into the sea and we start again. We should talk about self-compassion. We shouldn't berate ourselves. We do our best. If we've, If we've managed to open one or two books of the true self of our natures and read one or two chapters and one or two lines resonated, that's all right. We can die happy.

1:19:04Sarah Ann Macklin:How many books have you written?

1:19:05Alain de Botton:I've written about 70 books under the School of Life brand and I've written 15 books under my own name. So that's a lot of books.

1:19:13Sarah Ann Macklin:That's a lot of books. That's a lot of books.

1:19:14Alain de Botton:I've been busy boy.

1:19:15Sarah Ann Macklin:I mean, I've only just finished writing one and it's taken me on a real journey. what from i mean i can't quite get my head around 90 books one where do you have the time but two what what's been the one that stuck with you the most i really like a book i wrote called the course

1:19:32Alain de Botton:of love i think it's the best book i've written i think it's the book that summarizes everything that it's actually not done in the form of a novel um but i think uh yeah it's a really good book i can say modestly um and yeah it took it had to be written in blood as it were it was very painful to right. Because it's very hard to get the ideas out and arrange them properly.

1:19:53Sarah Ann Macklin:What was so hard about it?

1:19:55Alain de Botton:There were big painful truths that didn't want to come out easily. So they had to be coaxed out like a little animal.

1:20:01Sarah Ann Macklin:Can I ask which ones?

1:20:02Alain de Botton:Which truths?

1:20:03Sarah Ann Macklin:Yeah.

1:20:04Alain de Botton:Oh, I mean, not one thing. Just observation properly. Lots and lots of thoughts about love, relationships, children, family, lots of stuff.

1:20:16Sarah Ann Macklin:What would you say, I guess, the understanding of so much about this conversation today has been understanding about love with yourself and with others, whether that's romantic or friendships. What would you say is, so I'm 36. To have, hopefully, a long-term successful relationship, what is the advice that you would want to distill in me or pass to me?

1:20:40Alain de Botton:I think you have to have a therapeutic atmosphere within a couple. And what I mean by therapeutic atmosphere is an atmosphere whereby you can safely, both of you, acknowledge how peculiar and demanding and wobbly and not optimal you both are, and that that can be done safely. Someone can go, I felt a bit jealous then, or I've been a bit insecure, or I've wanted to push you away. I don't even know why. I love you, but actually I kind of hate you at the moment, or whatever it is, these difficult truths can be aired safely. The sexiest thing you can do in a couple is become as close as possible to the truth in a way that's gentle and kind, even difficult truths that you can reconnect around those things.

1:21:26Alain de Botton:As I say, it could be really difficult material. I slightly fancy somebody at work and I'd love you to know that because I love you and I don't know what to do with this feeling. That is not disloyalty. That is the beginning of ultra-loyalty. That's like, wow, you really trust your partner because you're able to get that kind of message across. Or, you know, I really love you, but I kind of want you to be a bit more distant from me because I'm feeling a bit engulfed. Wow. If you can say that to someone and say it in a way they'll understand with enough love, that's the kind of dialogue that keeps relationships going.

1:21:59Alain de Botton:So when they say communication, what we really mean is a certain way of communicating at depth around difficult material with love and tenderness.

1:22:07Sarah Ann Macklin:To me also, that has to emulate you understanding yourself to communicate that.

1:22:13Alain de Botton:Absolutely. If you're a mess who doesn't understand that you're angry or lustful or needing space or needing proximity, etc., you can't begin to tell the other person. And I think I want to berate bits of the audience, bits of ourselves, bits of me. You know, people will say something like, well, I was really angry. I just didn't know. And I didn't tell you. You want to go, oh, my goodness, that's not a good look. It's like, try and get in touch with your feelings. You have to get in touch with your feelings. Because as you say, if you're not in touch with your feelings, you can't communicate those feelings.

1:22:43Alain de Botton:And then it's a double mess. I think the biggest messes in relationships are when someone goes through an experience and they go, oh, I'm so sorry. I couldn't tell you what I was going through because I didn't know. And you think, oh my goodness, you were acting blind. And I then had to pick up all the pieces. So people can do serious damage by not understanding themselves properly in time.

1:23:04Sarah Ann Macklin:Do you think couples therapy is an important part to integrate into a relationship or not?

1:23:12Alain de Botton:What couples therapy means is really important. There are actual couples therapists who are no good. There are actual couples who probably don't have enough time or enough money, etc., etc. So let's keep aside the sort of actual couples' therapy. This is more what couples' therapy symbolises, which is an examined relationship, a relationship where two sides are quite committed to hearing how the other side feels without quashing it. The worst thing that couples do is to deny each other their reality. So someone will go, you know, you've been angry and it's because of your mother. And the other person goes, well, A, I don't think I'm angry, and I don't think it's got anything to do with my mother.

1:23:52Alain de Botton:And then suddenly you're in a conflict. If someone goes, I feel that you're angry, and I feel it might have something to do with your mother, then we're talking, which is why therapists bang on about saying, I feel. Always locate your vision of what's happening in the couple in yourself, in your own experience. Do not give a meta-analysis. That way, the other person can have their own truth. So you go, I feel that you're angry. Another person goes, well, I feel that you are actually depressed, or whatever it is. And there can be two realities. The number one thing that helps couples is to keep in mind that in one couple, there can be two realities.

1:24:29Alain de Botton:That just because you see it very strongly this way, it might look different through somebody else's eyes. It sounds basic. It's one of the most major pieces of moral education, if you like, where you're able to understand that other people exist. and other people have a legitimate viewpoint. And it's dazzling. You kind of think, hang on, what? We were sharing the same apartment. I know what's going on. No, no, no. Because in somebody else's mind, it looked very different. And to be able to just give that person room. How did it feel for you? I've told you how it felt for me. How did that feel for you?

1:25:01Alain de Botton:Oh, well, for me, I just thought that you were mocking me. And the other one goes, I hear that you think I was mocking you. The way I felt was I felt you were crushing me. And you think, okay, both things are true. Both things are totally true. And then you make progress. And then you make love. And it becomes really exciting. That's when relationships make progress.

1:25:21Sarah Ann Macklin:I asked a friend the other day, who's been married for 10 years, what's your greatest piece of advice so far into a marriage? And they said something that quite surprised me. They said, actually, go to bed on an argument. Because when you wake up, you're actually disentangled from those emotions and you can think a little bit more clearly

1:25:44Alain de Botton:I like counterintuitive advice so just on that basis I love that argument look um maybe I mean look what I don't like in arguments is when people say I don't want to talk to you about this you know and and freeze someone out and it could be a night or it could be day you know people who go um I can't address this because I'm too busy etc yeah get to the table as quickly as possible and start communicating as quickly as possible and communicate with yourself and then communicate with the other person. I think all those methods of prevarication, you know. And look, one of the big nightmares, we have to say, we talked about phones, WhatsApp.

1:26:21Alain de Botton:WhatsApp is the cancer of modern relationships where it's made to make people feel anxious. You look at your phone, where's the message from the person that I was expecting to hear from? Or, oh my God, I've received 12 messages and now I'm flooded, I'm overwhelmed. So if you're anxiously attached or voidantly attached, that WhatsApp's going to drive you nuts. And so there needs to be early on in any couple conversation, how are we going to handle this medium? Because it has the capacity to drive us mad to aggravate all attachment issues.

1:26:46Sarah Ann Macklin:Yeah, we haven't spoken about attachment issues yet. What's the most common attachment style that you think that you see?

1:26:54Alain de Botton:The most common dynamic that you get is someone standing too close and someone standing too far away. In other words, someone proverbially is feeling that avoidance sense, I'm being engulfed. Someone's engulfing me. And then someone else is feeling that anxious sense of, I'm being abandoned. No one loves me properly. And these are two of the most common dynamics in all relationships. And it rotates. Sometimes one person's feeling abandoned, the other person's feeling engulfed, etc. But what do we need to do with these things? Have grown-up, sensible, kind conversations about them within a couple to be able to find a language.

1:27:31Alain de Botton:And again, something that should be done on an early date. A little bit of public education is important here. That on an early date, someone should go, I skew towards being very anxious in my relationships, or I skew towards being avoidant. Many people don't understand themselves in this. There are lots of people who think they're anxious, who are in fact avoidant, because if you're an avoidant person, and you are as many avoidant people are, if you have experience in a relationship where the other person was avoidant as well, then you will have manifested an anxious pattern. But that still might make you, deep down, somebody who reacts with avoidance, especially when there is somebody who is more secure, more anxious, who comes into your remit.

1:28:13Alain de Botton:So it's tricky. Working out where one is is tricky. But at least acknowledging that there are going to be attachment issues all the time is a good starting point. And I have to go gently and compassionately and kindly and humorously.

1:28:26Sarah Ann Macklin:Is there a way, I've heard that you can change your attachment styles through the course of your life.

1:28:30Alain de Botton:I've heard rumours of that as well. We're still, there's some search parties. They're out there. They're still, I think they may have found one person in the South Seas who started 50 years ago and it may now be, yeah. So there are rumours. There are rumours out there, never yet corroborated, that there may be a land of hope and honey with formerly anxious and avoidant people who've become secure. But in the real world, nada, nada, not much change. However, there could be management of a chronic illness. So you can manage your chronic problem around avoidance or anxiety. In other words, warn people, warn yourself, know it's coming, take mitigating steps.

1:29:14Alain de Botton:You can dial down arguments that might have been running at a 10, and you can dial them right down to a 3. That's major progress. Major progress. So dialing down the heat is definitely possible.

1:29:26Sarah Ann Macklin:I think knowing that you can get a grasp on it, if it feels like it's running the show, is essential.

1:29:32Alain de Botton:Absolutely. That's a lovely way of putting it. Getting a grasp, making sure it doesn't run the show. It'll be part of the show, make sure it's not running the whole thing.

1:29:39Sarah Ann Macklin:Is there a reason why we're so drawn to the opposite attachment style?

1:29:44Alain de Botton:Sure. We're trying to solve something. I mean, this is major insight of psychoanalysis. Freud called it the repetition compulsion, that rather than trying to head for people who won't give us problems, we head for people who will repeat the problem that we knew in our early lives. And the reason we do this is not just that it feels familiar, and familiar is good, there's a more hopeful angle. We're trying to solve the problem. As kids, we couldn't solve it. We didn't have the resources, didn't have the intelligence, etc. As adults, we want to return to a problem which defeated us as kids and give it a shot, which is why the children of alcoholics want to find an alcoholic and get them off alcohol, which is why the children of avoidant parents want to find an avoidant and say, right, let's go to therapy.

1:30:24Alain de Botton:That's nirvana, to be able to find the problem that you suffered from and solve it with the tools of adulthood.

1:30:31Sarah Ann Macklin:Is that why so many of us can get into toxic patterns in relationships? And I guess maybe that's quite a heavy word and terminology to use because toxic can feel very profound. But is there a reason why we can feel that we're getting into that?

1:30:44Alain de Botton:Because we're drawn drawn, what we call exciting or even sexy, is an apprehension of the familiar problem. And so one way is to say you should try and get excited by somebody else. That's very hard. Easier way is that we should manage people that we are excited by more skillfully than we have done to date. So it's learning the management skills. So in other words, if you're drawn — and that's very handy things like drawing boundaries, knowing exactly what you'll tolerate, speaking with relevant authority on something. Let's imagine you skew towards avoidant partners. They make you feel excited, that distant look, that sense that you never quite know what they're thinking.

1:31:26Alain de Botton:If that excites you, right, you might not be able to change that, but you might be able to handle it better. So very early on, lay down some rules here. So like, you may be avoidant, but I need six texts from you a day. I'm not going all day without hearing. I need to hear. And if I don't get six texts, that's fine, but we'll be ending by nightfall. Now, that might take you 30 years of experience to be able to get there. And if you make those demands, strangely, people, you know, as teachers know, if you're a strict teacher and you arrive at school and you go, kids, no one's going to shout in this class.

1:31:55Alain de Botton:No one shouts. And they're fine. They don't mind shouting. No, not shouting. And similar thing happens in a relationship. People will behave to us the way that we ask them to behave to us. So if you go into a relationship and you go, from you, Mr. or Mrs. Avoidant, I want six texts a day, they'll do it. If you go around going, oh, do you really love me? You know, it's not going to work. So you need to slightly bring about the conditions where the behavior you want to see has been asked for directly. It's a lot of work to be done internally to get you to that place.

1:32:24Sarah Ann Macklin:Yeah, and confidence that comes along with it, right? Self-assurance.

1:32:27Alain de Botton:And I think the thing that gives you confidence is having completely messed up some relationships where you didn't do that and it went completely to hell. and that is why people are a little bit older, dated a while, been in some wars, when they get together on an early date, you can tell because one of them's going, well the thing I need is and the other one goes, well the thing I need is and they're both quite confident and you know on a good day that will be a better set up for the relationship.

1:32:53Sarah Ann Macklin:Is there an understanding that if you have that too much of, I don't know how to describe this, whether it's toxic, excitement and actually the happiest relationships are the ones that don't have those intense fireworks in the beginning. Is there any truth to that?

1:33:09Alain de Botton:Look, empirical evidence would suggest that there are people who excite something really quite perverted and damaged in us, and they can often lead to immense sexual excitement, but it's not a good idea. And there is a way in which, after some experiences, one might go, okay, here's somebody. They're not the most exciting person, but they're sane. And oh my goodness, sanity is interesting at the moment. They're reasonably calm. They're not fireworks, but there's something much better, which is they're real and they're kind. And we might sometimes not have tolerated such a person when we were younger.

1:33:52Alain de Botton:And yet we're ready for them now.

1:33:54Sarah Ann Macklin:Well, good for your nervous system. Yeah.

1:33:57Alain de Botton:That's right. That's right. There's a lot to be said for calm. I don't want to use the word like boredom, but people who don't insist on ramping up tension all the time. They're able to tolerate a steady atmosphere. Very special people, actually.

1:34:13Sarah Ann Macklin:Yeah, I think the nervous system balance in a relationship, I think about that as friendships. You know, the friends that actually make you feel very calm and relaxed are the ones that you tend to gravitate actually more for a long-term friendship.

1:34:27Alain de Botton:That's really interesting. Sure, that's true.

1:34:30Sarah Ann Macklin:I guess that's my own experience. Yeah. From such a different, diverse amount of friends in different parts of my life.

1:34:37Alain de Botton:I mean, look, sometimes we need to be stimulated and need a bit of fun, but I think maybe the people we come back to are the calm ones. Yeah. Yeah, I think so.

1:34:45Sarah Ann Macklin:So, Alan, what's next for you?

1:34:47Alain de Botton:Such a good question. First of all, we don't know. We're in the hands of the gods, as it were. But in terms of what I would like to do, is just keep exploring matters of the heart. I'm writing a book about love, and I'm particularly interested in the ways in which we turn down love. And we say we want love, and yet so much of what we actually do is refuse it because it's challenging, it's frightening. It evokes disappointments that we might have had, particularly in childhood. And so a lot of personal life is arranged so as to guarantee that we won't get the love we say we want. and it's just a study really of the strange and dedicated ways we have of not finding love.

1:35:29Sarah Ann Macklin:Not finding love makes you feel very sad.

1:35:31Alain de Botton:Absolutely. But the book is going to be optimistic. The book is trying to give some keys. Okay, that's good.

1:35:36Sarah Ann Macklin:That's great. I think one of the most beautiful love stories I've heard is with my great aunt and uncle who met when they were 15. They didn't spend a night apart ever. and when she died, he died 12 hours later of a broken heart. That to me was just profound of just understanding how powerful love can be.

1:35:58Alain de Botton:But let's put it in context. What you've described is about as rare as Usain Bolt running as he does, etc. You're describing the Olympic athletes of love. And one of the taboos is that love is a hierarchy. There are aristocrats of love. There are world champions of love. And then there are most of us who are about as good at love as the average person is as good at playing the violin. We pick up the violin, we'd like to play, and a horrible screechy sound comes out and we put it down. We think, oh my goodness, that was scary. We're mostly like that. And I use that metaphor pointedly because what we really need to do is practice.

1:36:38Alain de Botton:We need to practice love and try and get good at it. And most of my life has essentially been about trying to practice at love And the School of Life is a giant machine to help us to try and get better at that.

1:36:50Sarah Ann Macklin:I think it's one of the greatest lessons of life. I mean, I definitely haven't had that. It didn't run in the family. But it was an amazing story that, for me, shows how powerful love can be.

1:37:03Alain de Botton:Yeah.

1:37:03Sarah Ann Macklin:You know, I think when there's so much, I mean, one in two people get divorced now.

1:37:06Alain de Botton:Yeah.

1:37:07Sarah Ann Macklin:When there's so many terrifying statistics of love. I think that's something that when I don't hear those stories, it can make me feel unhopeful.

1:37:15Alain de Botton:Yeah.

1:37:15Sarah Ann Macklin:you kind of feel like you're up, you're all ready to give up because you have all of these stats being thrown at you. You're kind of preparing for a battle where maybe there isn't a battle to be had.

1:37:25Alain de Botton:Yes. And also that, you know, people spend so much time in dating culture, trying to find the right person. And there is so much rightness that you can put into place in yourself, which will increase your chances of any relationship that you do end up in working well. There's a huge amount that one can do to help things to go right by doing the inner work.

1:37:47Sarah Ann Macklin:So if you were to leave our listeners with a tip for self-worth, which we haven't, self-worth has been woven through this conversation, just not in direct question formats, but it is, I think, one of the biggest kind of predictors for a happy long-term relationship. What advice would you give to someone listening to this on how to build that self-worth?

1:38:10Alain de Botton:I think it's a tolerance of your humanity. The great English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott famously came up. He was dealing with a lot of anxious mothers, and he came up with a wonderful phrase. He said, no child needs a perfect mother. They need a good enough mother. And you can stretch that concept. No human needs to be a perfect human. They can just be a good enough human. And I think that is the foundation stone of self-compassion and route to adequate self-worth. Good enough.

1:38:40Sarah Ann Macklin:Good enough. Not perfect. Yeah.

1:38:43Alain de Botton:Good enough.

1:38:44Sarah Ann Macklin:So, Alan, what does Live Well Be Well mean to you? It means an ambition to try and learn every day and acquire slowly some building blocks to

1:38:59Alain de Botton:make life more tolerable, more easy, calmer, et cetera. It suggests a rooted, regular ambition. rooted regular ambition i love that you can have that too optimistic not too pessimistic

1:39:15Sarah Ann Macklin:we're just in the middle yeah balance balance and i can't wait to read your 91st book something like that yeah in a shop near you a couple of years something like that who knows coming soon yeah well a year and a bit something they take a long time now yeah well i mean they don't take that long you've been a 90 this one will take long well thank you for just sharing i mean we started it with vulnerability i started the i wanted to start it there it's so hard when you have somebody sat in front of you who has versed in so many different areas of personal growth and you go personal growth is one of the biggest umbrellas to cover i mean i really believe that everything your whole life is is about personal growth it's true in a way yet the vulnerability conversation of all of us trying to get more authenticity in ourselves, I think is so critical for our own direction in life and a life well lived and feeling comfortable with being vulnerable.

1:40:12Sarah Ann Macklin:And so thank you for being vulnerable with me today.

1:40:14Alain de Botton:Thank you. And all the work that you've done.

1:40:16Sarah Ann Macklin:It's amazing.

1:40:17Alain de Botton:Thank you for all the work you've done. It's amazing.

1:40:20Sarah Ann Macklin:You'll have to come back. I will.

1:40:21Alain de Botton:I'd love to come back.

1:40:32Thank you.