#1015 - Alain de Botton - 16 Lessons from The School Of Life

28:18My kids come along, they start to have this better life. And somehow in seeing the better life that I designed and tried to overcome in order to be able to make happen, resentment has now come in. And now I feel shame at my resentment and I feel bitterness at my shame about my resentment and anxiety about my bitterness, about my shame, about my resentment. And it's this infinite regress of emotions that you made happen in a positive way. Congratulations, hooray, you overcame this. You were a circuit breaker in this sort of weird serial of string lights and you feel bad about it. I mean, I'm laughing, right?

28:51Because this is where we're hitting kind of the tragedy of being human, which is you try so hard to get it right and you're trying to get this right and something else goes wrong. And I mean, we do need a warm, rich laughter. This is not merely the icing on the cake. It is one of the great solutions. I mean, we're juggling here with the incompatibilities of raising children. It's maddening. If you avoid one problem, you set off another one. I think that, yes. So look, I think we do so much work on ourselves and still we're at square one. There's an old Jewish saying, man thinks, God laughs. In other words, we're thinking that we can master something, we can master a problem.

29:36It's so difficult. But I want to think about sadism because we're talking about bullying. It's a really weird word, sadism. What is that? Maybe it's a sex kink or it's something that really weird people... All of us carry a sadistic impulse, I want to say. In other words, an impulse to turn our own suffering into a desire to punish or give suffering to another person. It always comes from pain in ourselves, and we want to pass it on. And you see low-level, low-level, minuscule, very hard to observe sadism in daily life, in all sorts of areas. You see in relationships, people are sadistic to their partners.

30:21Again, if they were angels, they would be weeping as they looked at human nature. And what are we doing to ourselves and to each other? But there's an economy of suffering. all meanness is inherited all impulse to be mean is coming down the generations from somebody else um and we keep playing pass the parcel with our suffering we go oh look i've got some suffering oh do you want some because i'm just it's going to make me feel better and that's how we end up you know that guy that guy stole my my foot so i'm going to take their eye oh that person hacked off my left finger. Well, I'll chop off their ear and then I'll take a side of their skull.

31:05And on and on and on it goes. I remember you saying a marker of good parenting is that your children don't have any wish to be famous. Yes. There might be a few exceptions to that rule, but I think an outsized desire to shine in the eyes of strangers, to be known by people you don't know is a sign of pathology, I believe. And we're sitting here, you and I. In front of lots of cameras. In front of lots of strangers. So something's gone wrong for us. I mean, and it's so basic. I don't know enough about your childhood. I know a bit about mine. You will have felt invisible. I mean, why become a little bit more visible than everybody else if you don't carry within you a deep sense of having been invisible and unheard?

31:51Is there not a natural pull for that generally that's kind of written into the source code of humans? Oh, I suppose actually, yes, there is. And it's everybody else. And the fact that you are an outlier within that suggests that you are different. Right. Okay. I've answered my own question. Thank you. Yeah. So I think there's a compensatory business going on. And I think the ability to have a so-called ordinary life is a massive achievement. It's, if we can put it this way, an exceptional achievement. It's like comedians. People who have an outsized need to make others laugh are almost always children who were facing something not funny at all that they needed to find a way through.

32:33They learned to make jokes because there was something pretty sad around that they learned to manage. And in all of these, you know, when dealing with those people, or those sort of people who are listening now, You know, the response should always be, how did the way in which I grew up figure as a solution to a problem that I was facing? And therefore, could I now, at whatever age you're at, cut myself some slack and try something else? I needed to laugh in order to be tolerated. What would it mean to be serious? I needed to be famous in order to survive. What would it mean to think about obscurity?

33:10Or, indeed, I needed to be painfully modest and always underperform in order not to spark jealousy. What happens if I tried something different? These are the major breakpoints, turning points in a life. When you think, the things I needed to do to get me through childhood are now hampering my possibilities in adulthood. The situations that required that behavior are no longer in existence. What happens if I tried something different? But in order to do that, you have to see the pattern that you were set by your childhood. Marc Maron, comedian, says, The monster I created to protect the child inside of me is difficult to manage.

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34:50Heading to livemomentous.com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's 35 % off livemomentous.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Status anxiety kind of related to that. you know, this need to be seen, look at me, hello, I am here. I mentioned before, because we are recording in a church or an old church at the moment, that just by chance, you might have decided to wear your flowing robes today. Unfortunately not. But that need, that desire, look at me, look at how special I am, look at how impressive I am. Stateless anxiety is going to be there, I think, no matter how enlightened you are.

35:26I want to feel like I'm needed by other people and respected and admired by people I admire. That's a pretty big one. Is there a good way to deal with, is there a healthy way to sort of deal with status and status anxiety? It's funny you mentioned churches. I mean, the really helpful thing about religions is that they tend to tell their believers that someone really knows them and really cares about them and is looking at them. And if you think about the impulse to be rich and famous and esteemed, it's really a desire that gets soaked up by religions. Religions are saying everybody, you know, in Christianity, every hair on your head is numbered.

36:09In other words, someone's really looking at you. Someone knows you in the way that a parent, a good parent, knows a child. You know, the great thing about early childhood in a good and loving family is that child is a superstar. You know, they come in, they sing a song, everyone claps, In the morning, it's like the little prince has arrived, the princess is doing a pirouette, etc. That doesn't make a child entitled. Entitlement comes from deprivation. The ability to absorb an ordinary life comes from early emotional privilege. If the child is able to be the center of the universe in the early years, they will be able to accept, without too much psychological damage, a subsidiary position in adult life.

36:54that the need to be always at the center and always important is a compensation. It's not a sign of health. And therefore, a good childhood is connected up with the ability to give your child that charge of specialness so that then they can go on to do that much more important thing, which is to be ordinary, to accept ordinariness, which is a massive challenge. And all of us are, in the end, ultimately ordinary. And that's okay. And to not feel shame. and not feel shame. And to accept that there are limits on your power, you will need to die, you will accept your finitude. I wrote a little essay about shame.

37:30I wanted to read to you, if that's okay. So, I've been thinking about the shame of simple pleasures. This is a quote from a friend. I have not yet grown wise enough to deeply enjoy simple things. We are all terrible accountants of our own joy. Most of us only accept deposits when the transaction is sufficiently large. The day we get married, the night we play the main stage at Glastonbury, the moment the business sells for$100 million. Anything less, and the entry doesn't even make the ledger. We treat small pleasures like counterfeit currency. Oh, that thing made your day. That small moment made your week.

38:04How feeble, how desperate, how limited your life must be to be thrilled by something so unimpressive. You must not have a lot going on. We roll our eyes at the tiny events that others get excited at, as though joy must be proportionate to scale. And yet, life is made up of little things exactly like this. Not once in a while, but always, your life is constructed out of moments so small they wouldn't even register as an event on anyone's calendar. So why can't something small be something great? Well, sometimes I feel things more deeply than I should do, including the shame at feeling things more deeply than I should do, Also including the shame of being delighted by little things, more than I think I should.

38:46As if taking pleasure in something tiny reveals the smallness of my life. But perhaps that's exactly backward. Maybe the true richness of a life is how much joy you can harvest from the smallest possible patch of soil. And here's the payoff. When you lower the threshold for joy, you don't just get more of it, you get it now. Who is truly the more impressive person? The one who requires a huge cathedral of bullshit, fanfare and galactic accomplishments in order to get the slightest ficker of pleasure, like some masochist at a sex party demanding car batteries get clamped onto his nipples before he can even get started, or the person who can do it with a good coffee in a fresh breeze.

39:21Love it. I mean, Chris, it makes me think that we're incredibly easily led in our sense of what matters in life. We're really bad judges, independent judges, of significance. So if somebody says, you know, that artwork on the wall, that's really expensive, that's really famous, that used to belong to a king or a queen, we think, oh, that's marvellous. And if we don't know who the painter was, who the artist was, or what it is, we think, oh, that can't be any good. So it's almost comedic, isn't it? How supine and dumb we are in deciding for ourselves what matters. So, you know, you do get this in culture.

40:06If a book wins a prize, everybody decides that book's amazing. Before it won the prize, everybody thought it was boring. And, you know, the book hasn't changed. I often think about this in terms, I'm a great fan of flying. I love flying. I wouldn't have guessed that about you. I love it. And I love the technology. I love, you know, all sorts of things, the beauty, the aesthetic. I'm always struck by the way in which flying has nowadays very low prestige in the world compared, let's say, to art. So if you say to somebody, I'm going to a gallery and I'm going to look at some pictures and I'm going to go, oh, that's a very noble thing to do.

40:38If you say I'm going to take a flight and on the flight, I'm going to open the window and I'm going to look at the clouds and I'm going to really delight in them and I'm going to marvel at them and I'm going to be thinking, oh my goodness, this is better than any painting by Leonardo or Poussin or whatever. This is striking, right? People would think, you're making a big deal of it. shut that window, but I'm trying to watch a film. So it's not that prestigious to look out the window. And that's just a tiny example of how bad we are at finding significance by ourselves. I think this is true creativity.

41:10True creativity is when you have a sense that your pleasure could be legitimate wherever it lies. So if you happen to light pebbles, go for it. That's going going to be your pleasure. Or if you like the way that sunlight hits a window blind or concrete, that's going to be the thing for you. And I think it's that small children have it more naturally. That's what makes small children delightful to adults. You know how it is. If you take a small child to a park, it's hilarious. You can't even get to the swings because they will have stopped. The child will have stopped maybe by a wall or they'll have noticed a piece of chewing gum in a rock and you think, and they'll be looking at it, whatever.

41:49And you go, come on, let's go to the swing and they don't want to go to the swing because they've discovered a tuft of grass growing out of a concrete ledge or whatever it is. They are independent arbiters of significance. By 15, they're like, well, what did Drake like? Or what's X telling me to love? They've outsourced their sense of taste. Exactly. And that's so tedious. I mean, bless them, everybody does it. But ideally, by the time you get to full maturity, you become a bit weirder once more. And that's what makes certain adults really delightful they go doesn't matter what everybody thinks for me i'm liking this thing i sometimes think about it in terms of entertaining i don't know how much entertaining you do when people say i'm gonna i'm gonna give a din party i'm gonna invite some friends for dinner they get into such a mess thinking how am i going to organize this dinner and oh i must have a starter and and maybe it's a melon and or maybe it's i don't know prawns or something and then i think i must have this thing called a main course which might be chicken or something and And then they, or I've got a dessert, et cetera.

42:45And they're just, you know, they're overflowing with anxiety, et cetera. And if you are said to them, what do you actually enjoy? You know, if it's suppertime, what do you, and they might go, well, I like opening, you know, a can of tuna, putting it on the table, getting some hummus, dipping that, putting my feet up, et cetera. And you thought, okay, why don't you just do that with your mates? Why don't you just drop the pretense? Have the courage to think what's touching me might touch another person. And your dinner party is going to be a lot more fun. This is ultimately, of course, what great artists do.

43:11Great artists have a sense that what's fun for them, what's meaningful for them, will probably be meaningful for other people, even though right now there's quite a lot of silence about that area. So they've got a faith that the things that turn them on are likely to turn other people on as well. And that's a beautiful confidence. And that's what leads to great art. Great art is really the courage to define the pleasure for yourself. It's a lovely quote from Emerson. He says, in the minds of geniuses, we find our own neglected thoughts. In the minds of geniuses, we find our own neglected thoughts.

43:54In other words, geniuses, so-called geniuses, don't have thoughts that are completely different from those of other people. What they do is they take the thoughts that we all have and they give them the significance they deserve, some of them, some of those thoughts. And so that's why when you pick up a really great book, often you think, wow, I've always thought that, but I've never known how to say it. And really what we mean is I've never had the courage to give that thought its due because I'm lacking self-esteem. It's a really sort of wonderful blend between boneheaded self-belief, which is kind of rebellious.

44:35It feels a bit spiky, sort of a not that, and a much more sort of warm, cozy sensation, which is, I like what I like, and I like myself for liking it. Does that make sense? There is this rejection of entropy outside and this sort of containment of structure inside. And immediately I'm thinking about the background that would have made the second version possible. I'm imagining a parent who says, do that thing that you like doing. That's fine. You can be slightly weird. And we don't think that's weird here. You can just pursue your own pleasure in a non-brittle way. As you say, it's a gentle acknowledgement of your individuality.

45:20We are in a place that's got some pretty wonderful... Is stained glass art? Is that class as art? I would imagine. Let's play it really loose with the concept of art. Art is anything that excites us. It seems beautiful. You often talk about art. In a lot of your books, you have images of different paintings, of different sculptures, stuff like that. How can people become better at appreciating art? They're white belts at looking at a gallery, and they want to have a better appreciation of it. They feel like there's something that they're missing. They don't understand. And they don't know the story of where this painter came from and where they were at at that point in life.

45:59Well, one thought is people tend to think in order to be a decent person who likes art, I've got to like everything. I've got to go into a museum and I've got to just delight in everything. Think about it in music. People are much saner when it comes to music than when it comes to visual arts. People are really hung up on the visual arts. And I always say, take your cue for music. You know when you like something musically. And you don't care that there's loads and loads of other stuff that doesn't touch you. You don't mind. You like what you like. You make your own playlist. So make your own playlist of the artists that touch you.

46:31And it might be 3 % of the art that's produced by the world. And it might be not any of the famous names. The famous names are on the whole chosen by all sorts of bizarre ways. And find your own way to things that delight you. Have the courage. Also, when walking through a museum, you can't eat it all at once. I mean, these museums are bizarre. They're like archives of everything that's happened over a thousand years. And you're supposed to kind of spend an afternoon and like it all. It's just, we can't absorb it. We can't metabolize it. And so I always think, you know, go to a museum. If you find two things that you'd like to ideally nick and put in your house, it's good going.

47:12Be very personal. People are really normal in the museum gift shop. When they get to the museum gift shop, they're like, right, what postcard should I buy? Then they're thinking, that's the way to love art. It's like, what card should I send my granny? That's the beginning of art appreciation. Because it's like, what do I like? What might they like? Go for it. All the rest is nonsense. You don't need to get caught up too much. I wonder what the difference is between music. I completely agree. I'm very unequivocating about the stuff that I like in music. And yet, when I go and if I imagine myself sitting in front of a painting, sort of furtively be looking to either side to work out, oh, this seems very melancholy.

47:48This must be a melancholy. I must be somber. I'll be somber. That's the way to do it. And I wonder what it is about the medium that makes it a little bit more difficult, a little bit more hard to define your own taste. There's an ancient Greek myth about the origins of painting. There was apparently a shepherd boy who was in love with a shepherd girl, and the shepherd girl was going to go away. and that night on their last night together they were in a cave and there was a shadow on the cave wall of the shepherd girl and the shepherd boy took up a piece of chalk and traced the outline of the shepherd girl's form and that's supposed to be there are lots of paintings of this the origin of of art in other words the impulse to make art comes when something precious is going to vanish And art could be thought of as a bucket in which you preserve something valuable.

48:38And we need art because we can't hold it all in our own fingers. We can't absorb it all. And so we outsource it to something that can stabilize it and hold it for us. That's the imposter to take a picture. You know, when you go to a beautiful place and you go, I like it. There's always a fear of loss. And you think, I'm going to lose it, so I must take a picture of it. Same thing goes on in art. And so the art that you love is almost always the art that contains within it a bit of your true home, your true happiness, that is in danger of slipping away. And it's going to be different for everybody.

49:09I think one of the most interesting questions is why are you touched by the art that touches you? And it tends to be because that art captures something that the person doesn't have enough of a secure hold on and they need to preserve it. So, for example, I love calm art. I love beautiful, empty spaces, linearity, dignity of form, et cetera. I love it. Is my life like that? No, that's not where I live. I live in chaos. But I love that because that's my true home. But I'm not there often enough. So it's a memento. It's saying, come back to this place. That's where you need to be in order to be your true self.

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50:20So you can buy it and try it for three months. And if you don't like it, they'll give you your money back. Right now, you can get a free supply of vitamin D3, K2, and five free AG1 travel packs, plus the 90-day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. That's drinkag1.com slash modern wisdom. You mentioned chaos there. Do you think that humans have always been plagued by the need to keep themselves busy? Or is hustle and grind culture as much of a modern phenomenon as YouTube essays would have us believe? I think it's very hard to sit with yourself because there's panic about what you might discover.

51:05One of the fascinating things is, why are we so easily distracted? Why can't we sit our thoughts. The reason is that there's so much about our thoughts that is mixed up with sadness, regret, fear, et cetera. And it takes courage. It literally takes courage, which is why the best places to think are often those where there's a little bit of distraction and a possibility for introspection. Have you got any places that you do that yourself? Trains. Trains. I mean, we think we invented railways to go from London to Manchester or New York to Philadelphia. We didn't. We invented them as places to think.

51:41Because in a half-empty carriage, what better place than to get to know not the destination, but yourself. You're looking out of the window, and there's enough distraction from the telegraph poles going by or the birds overhead. There's enough to take your imagination to tether the more anxious sides of you. But there's also enough encouragement to keep going and keep making discoveries. It's really hard to think when thinking is all you're meant to do. If you want to terrify somebody, put them in a blank room and give them a sheet of paper and go, write out who you are and what you're really concerned about.

52:13You know, that's panic-inducing. If somebody, you know, why do our best thoughts come to us in the shower? You're not supposed to be thinking in the shower. You're just, your mind is let loose from an agenda. That's when the good thought comes through. Good thoughts are charged with anxiety. Thinking is an anxious process. And so we need to give ourselves a little bit of comfort. That's why people often like to work in a cafe. It's like, the reason is there's a lot of bustle around. That bustle's absorbing the nervous energy and allows sometimes a good thought to come through. I think much better if I have a pen in my hands and from 18 years of full-time education, you know, just sitting in lectures and class and twirling a pen through my fingers.

52:54You're right, it blows off just that additional bit. For me, my favorite place for thinking is doing the washing up dishes. Because you're not supposed to be doing the thinking. and also dishes are so amazing because you go from real mess to real tidiness in three and a half seconds it's so quick and the problem with the modern world is that so many of the things we want to do take so long and you know the great thing about pre-industrial world is that we used to be able to achieve things within a handy time scale you know you ran a bakery and in the morning you had the flour and you put it together and the yeast and then it had risen and then you sell it and then you know on and on it goes and in a 24-hour cycle you've gone through the whole thing nowadays most people work in organizations a thousand two thousand people they're working on projects that will take years to come to fruition um i sometimes think why do people love sports again sports take place within a concentrated time period you know football match is 90 minutes within 90 minutes there will be an objective a goal a victory defeat etc it's it's manageable Most of us have lives in which the pitch is 8 ,000 kilometers long.

54:06The game takes 20 years. There's 25 balls. There's 18 goalposts. You don't know what's going on. You lose the thread of your own life and of the game that you're meant to be playing, which is why so many of us have crises where we think, hang on a minute, what am I supposed to be doing? Because we're within complex organizations that deny us that clarity of the earlier pre-industrial world. What is an existential crisis, in your opinion? I mean, it's a word that sometimes people reach when they feel that the building blocks of their life have ceased to make sense, that for all sorts of reasons, the place they find themselves in no longer feels like it makes sense anymore.

54:50You might have a sense of, why am I in this relationship? Why am I in this job? Why do I live in the country I live in, et cetera? And existential crises are good things. We should have them. They are positive things. They often happen on a Sunday evening. Sunday evening is that moment in the week when there's a gap to question, why am I me? What's this assumption that I have about what I should be doing? And to regularly submit yourself to a complete existential audit, as it were, to go, could I be someone totally different? Is it all gone wrong, et cetera. That's a sign that you're a questioning person.

55:29Don't get me wrong, it's terrifying. It's terrifying to feel that most of what we're doing is slightly arbitrary. There is no necessity. We tell ourselves, well, I have to do this, and I have to be here. And the existential insight is, no, you don't. We're all completely free. We could be doing other things. The necessity is one that we're putting on ourselves. But that's dizzying. I I mean, that's existential vertigo. And we think, oh my God, I've got so much possibility that I don't know where to start. And going back to the busyness, the hustle and grind, when the base level of noise is very loud, it's very hard to hear those more subtle whispers of fleeting thoughts.

56:10As my therapist talks about, pay attention to fleeting thoughts. But fleeting thoughts easily get drowned out if you've got a ton of really loud, fast-moving ones like, oh, I must get that project finished before tomorrow and I have all of these emails to do and it's very busy. I must get, the gym's going to be hard because of those roadworks on the street outside of my house. I love the idea of fleeting thoughts. What do we mean? We mean thoughts that are on the outer perimeter of consciousness that have some clue as to what we should be doing next in all sorts of areas. Part of that metal detector again.

56:46Yeah, they're carrying hints, suggestions, but they're hard to reach because, again, they're to do with learning. And we don't like learning. Learning's really difficult because it throws into question how we've been doing things. And to be able – I mean, there should be classes on this. You know, how to land your fleeting thoughts. Plato had this idea that thinking was like an aviary in which birds are flying around all the time. And the philosophical challenge is to land those birds and be able to study them. But most of the time, they're whizzing in and out. And so they're not just fleeting thoughts, they're racing thoughts.

57:23And to be able to still things enough, I sometimes think a very basic exercise is to lie down in bed and ask yourself, what am I really feeling? What's really going on? I know what's supposedly going on, but what am I feeling behind the feeling? What's the feeling behind the feeling? and to be able to make that hierarchy of the surface and the depths and to realize that there's likely to be something going on in the depths all the time that's a bit different, an anxiety, a sadness, a worry, a desire for tenderness, whatever it is. If you can be somebody who gives space to the fleeting thoughts, you're going to become a much richer human being.

58:04And remember the old adage, we can only go so far with other people as we've gone with ourselves. We can only be interesting to other people insofar as we've paid attention to the more neglected bits of ourselves. And one of the weirder bits of social life is some people make you feel quite boring and other people make you feel really interesting. Isn't that a weird thing? Why is that? The people who make you feel boring are people who haven't opened many doors in themselves and you pick it up instantly. And so therefore when they go, what was your weekend like? you go, I don't know. Because suddenly you realise there's nothing that I could say that's meaningful about my weekend that they would understand because they haven't gone into those more interesting bits.

58:48Whereas if somebody's giving off that vibe of I've opened many doors in myself, we'll have so much to say to them. I feel safe in doing the same. But also you'll feel understood. I mean, let's say podcasting. Why are some people good podcasters? Why can some people get stuff out of people and other people can't? And it's fascinating. And we've become used in the modern world to very high quality podcasts because the people who have famous podcasts are generally those who can really do it. But why can they do it? Is it because they can ask good questions? Nah, it's not that. It's because they've gone far in themselves.

59:27The interlocutor feels it and then they go deep in themselves. So the reason I'm babbling with you, and I could have tons to say to you, is because I know, and I don't know intellectually, I just know in a sensory way, that you've gone very far in all sorts of ways. And I think I could tell this guy anything and he'd go, yeah, and that gives encouragement. So that fascinating distinction, someone who makes you feel interesting and someone who makes you feel boring, it's the other person that's doing the work, even though they may be hardly saying anything. It's in the eyes, it's in the twitch of the mouth, it's all there.

1:00:02I adore that idea. I took inspiration from that video of yours and coined inverse charisma. Some people are interesting. Some people make us feel interesting. And a lot of the time, especially young guys, they want their stories to be electric and their aura to be magnetic and the walk into a room and for everybody to feel impressed. But when I thought about the sort of people that I liked spending my time around the most, it wasn't necessarily the ones that were the most impressive. I might walk into a room and I'd be very happy to see them, but nobody else might notice. And I would try my very best to sit next to them at dinner because I knew that that would be the most sort of fruitful ground.

1:00:42Have you ever heard that story about Jenny Jerome, Winston Churchill's mother? So she went, she was a little bit of a starlet type, socialite person. And she got to go for dinner with Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone on consecutive nights separately. And she said, when I finished dinner with Disraeli, I felt like he was the smartest man in all of England. When she finished dinner with William Gladstone, she said, I left that dinner feeling like I was the smartest woman. And some people are interesting. Some people make you feel interesting. But it's really important to say, this is not flattery.

1:01:16When someone makes you feel interesting, it's not that they're flattering. You go, oh, that's amazing. It's not that they genuinely unleash an interest which is actually in you. You know what I mean? It's not a con trick. People are interesting, but they need an audience to release that interest. It's not mere flattery. It's opening doors in the other person on the basis that you've opened doors in yourself. I'm interested in the temptation to intellectualize emotions you know you were talking before ask the sort of why beneath the why and getting below the neck as it's known in embodiment okay fantastic we have this very developed who is that um philosopher that talked about being a philosopher is like being a mouse with a huge oversized ear on its back uh you know you have this one particular thing that you've grown to monstrous size.

1:02:11And anybody that is smart can do the work, but doing the work is just turning feelings into theories. And I wonder, I'm interested in this temptation of how to overcome intellectualizing emotions as opposed to actually sitting and feeling them. What's wrong with intellectualizing? Intellectualizing gets a bad name because at some point, it ceases to have an accurate relationship to reality. So in other words, your theory has left behind the facts. Your map is no longer mapping the territory accurately. That's what's wrong with it. There's nothing wrong with having a map, but there's something very wrong with having a misguided map.

1:02:52And I think when we say intellectualizing is bad, it's when it gives us a rather rigid description of the territory, which no longer sees the actual full complexity of the terrain it's aiming, it's purporting to represent. And so what do we need to do? We need to constantly check our maps against the territory. In other words, we need to think, okay, I've got this nice, neat theory. Maybe I need to blow it up because it's liable to have grown a bit stale. I need to head out back into the world and assume I know nothing, blow up my theory in order to build a better one. So it's not about abandoning.

1:03:33I think, you know, humans are naturally theory makers. There's nothing wrong with that. There's something wrong with clinging to outdated theory. If you hold it too tightly, that's an issue. I've got this visual in my mind, the difference between a way marker, which is being planted to give you an idea of the terrain and a tether to which you are attached. Oh, I can't move from this thing anymore. or this made sense five years ago when I first left university, and that explained where I was at, and it gave the chaos in the world a sense of order. I understood where I was going and what was happening.

1:04:07Oh, if that no longer has accurate explanatory depth, I need to come up with a new theory, and that's scary. I have to start all over again. You're telling me I have to start all over again? I think we regularly have to start all over again. And I think, you know, that old adage, Socrates was asked why he was so wise, and he said that he was so wise because he knew that he wasn't wise. In other words, ignorance, a capacity to acknowledge one's ignorance is at the root cause of sophisticated thinking, that you should be returning to a kind of basic ignorance. I remember the story of Picasso who went to an art school in old age and he looks at some children scribbling and doing drawings and he said, you know, when I was their age, I could paint like Raphael and now I'm learning again how to paint like them.

1:04:57um that's really a story about giving up the old map and allowing oneself to be ignorant again and i think that's a true gift we give to ourselves when we allow ourselves to say you know what i don't know very much at all i mean people often say to me they must say this to you you know people say to me oh you must know so much about you know love or death or this or that you know spend all the time thinking and I rush to tell them I literally don't know anything um and I'm not this is not false modesty it's a genuine sense that um you know with every passing day I I know less um and you know it's not even wisdom it's just comedic really with every passing day I know less I love that yeah this the the other thing to consider there is that almost everyone's body of work is a thinly veiled autobiography.

1:05:53You are looking to the person who has put the most time into this. Why do you think I put the most time into this? Because I see me as most deficient in precisely all of the different areas that I am focusing on. 100%, exactly. So someone who's, you know, providing a guide to goodness probably finds goodness really hard. Somebody who's really interested in wisdom is really in touch with the chaos in them and in the world. You wouldn't do it otherwise. You're right. It's a compensatory activity. And so be it. So we should never look to our gurus to actually be, somebody's got, oh, I thought they'd be wise.

1:06:31And then I saw them cursing at the airport and said, what a fool they are. You want to go, of course they did that. They're so invested in maintaining a sort of adult poise. Of course, they're going to have a fragile hold on it. They wouldn't bother otherwise. And that's okay. That's absolutely fine. I think, I mentioned this to you last time, but I think it's one of the reasons why your work in particular, Oliver Berkman, who wrote 4 ,000 Weeks, this very sanguine look at human nature, it's got a distinctively British quality to it, which I love. This sort of, it doesn't get too big for its boots.

1:07:07It's kind of got a carry-on camping sort of signature to it. I mean, look, bless the Americans, but the problem with America is that it was started by people who thought you could build Jerusalem on this earth, that you literally could build a city on the hill here and there. Whereas, you know, European culture was a tragic culture, which essentially thought of human beings as inherently flawed, the playthings of the gods, and unable to master the show until maybe the next life, but definitely not this one. which immediately creates a comedic modesty around the gap between your aspirations and your reality.

1:07:48And so growing up in Britain, I mean, Britain doesn't do many things well, but one of the things it really does well is a kind of melancholy, dark humour. I mean, this is the home of the Smiths. This is the home of Monty Python. These people are latching onto the fact that life is absurd, dark, and that the most sophisticated response is a kind of rich, somber hilarious laughter um and you know the the reason why america has changed the planet so radically is that it's made up of people who think that such a thing is possible and you don't have to wait till the next world you do it right here and now with some tools and you go to silicon valley and off you go and it's wonderful it's created you know wonders of the world however psychically, my goodness, the toll has been enormous.

1:08:35Enormous because it forces everybody in that society to measure themselves against an ideal, which is so punishing. So, you know, the secret sorrows of the American heart is a volume without end. It's a very big volume because this is a society that puts its people under unbelievable psychic stress. Because of blue sky thinking, you can do all of these things. I wonder whether it's one of the reasons why victimhood culture and its sort of modern incantation hasn't quite caught on in the UK in maybe the same way as it's often sort of the finger is pointed at because if you're a child and you're told you can be whatever you want to be the sky the sky is not even the limit you can go beyond that and go further the literally South African living in America is the guy that's going trying to go past the moon yeah to go and do this thing uh it's the paradox of meritocracy, isn't it?

1:09:30We hear a lot about this idea of trying to build a society where everybody gets to where they merit to be. And it's a wonderful idea, a beautiful idea. But if you really think that you can create a society where everyone deserves to be where they are, my goodness, you're going to have a problem explaining why you failed in that society. Because not only is success merited, but so is failure, which is why failure is so crushing if you really believe in meritocracy. In certain European countries, this tragic idea, no one thinks it's a meritocracy. Everyone thinks the whole system is random, it's rigged.

1:10:05The ancient Greeks were obsessed by the idea of the arbitrary nature of fate, because the gods are in control of human destiny. Not humans. Humans can't control their destiny. But in the modern American view, of course you control your destiny, and you are responsible, Which is why the American word for someone who hasn't succeeded is a loser. The loser is somebody who's played a game which had fair rules and they've messed up. And therefore, they deserve no pity and they just deserve to be called a loser. which is why the more meritocratic the system is, the more psychological pressure there is, the more impulse there is to kill yourself if you don't succeed.

1:10:42I mean, suicide rates skyrocket the more people believe that individual destiny reflects the essence of who you are. And suicide rates fall when the explanatory factor is thought to lie outside the individual. Whereas the ancients would call those losers unfortunates. 100%. Lady Fortuna. Lady Fortuna. Yeah. And I mean, the Greeks, I mean, if you read any Greek history, folk tales, etc., the ancient Greeks are obsessed by the notion of the gods are pulling us like marionettes all the time. Lady Fortuna is the one with the... The wheel? Well, the tiller, the tiller? No, I thought it was a set of scales.

1:11:29Is it not scales that balance out? And it's also a tiller, you know, like a ship and able to control destinies. And often a cornucopia as well, holding lots of goods. So if Fortuna's in good mood, she'll chuck you lots of lovely stuff. And if she's in bad mood, she'll just, you know, adjust the tiller and off you go to your death. If you haven't been feeling as sharp or energized as you'd like, getting your blood work done is the best place to start, which is why I partnered with Function. They run lab tests twice a year that monitor over 100 biomarkers. They've got a team of expert physicians that take the data, put it in a simple dashboard and give you actionable insights and recommendations to improve your health and lifespan.

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1:12:37Who was the, uh, stoic philosopher that had his legs broken and then was incarcerated? Is that Epictetus? Uh, that was Boethius. Okay. Well, I seem to remember a story from him where he was imprisoned and loads of things went wrong and he was sort of in his fifties and he wasn't able to see his family and all of this stuff. And one of his friends came to him and was, you know, lamenting the fact, look at how much has gone wrong. He must be so despondent. He said, well, look at the first 50 years of my life. Look how blessed Lady Fortuna had sort of come. And, you know, I guess the scale or the cornucopia, you sort of run a little bit dry.

1:13:11I had a great, great crack at it for the first however many five decades. I mean, the Stoics were fascinating in that they had academic discussions about not if a wise person, how should a wise person look at having two legs and losing one leg? It's like, how many legs do you need in order to be happy? And the sort of position that you would get to after lots and lots of study of Stoic thought is the wise man appreciates having two legs, but can cope with having only one. And that's really the essence of Stoicism. You want to have two legs. It's okay to want two legs, but it's also, you will know how to cope with only one leg.

1:13:50That's years and years of stoic study. You mentioned last time about the virtue of pessimism, sort of melancholy, a great British tradition. And I wonder how you think about people learning to be a little bit more hopeful, sort of the opposite side of that. Because yes, we definitely do have, what was the thing that they said in Harry Potter? mischief managed, they said, to make the marauder's map go away. Melancholy managed. I feel like we've got melancholy well managed. However, the other side, to fortuna this, how can people learn to be a little bit more hopeful? Look, I love that very simple question.

1:14:31If you knew you couldn't fail, what would you want to do? It's such a big question, but such a useful one. It has this elemental simplicity to it. But if you knew you could not fail, what would you want to do? Because people don't even allow themselves to play. If you think about what play is, play is doing something without fearing consequences. Let's just do this as a game. Children know how to play because they're not so scared of consequences. So they'll just give it a shot. And a good adult life does require us to rediscover that freedom of playing. And the way in which we do it is we think, if everything went wrong, it would still be okay.

1:15:14And what about the idea of thinking, this could go right? There couldn't be any massive consequences. So, rediscovering play around your ambition is really important. Is that lowering the stakes in a way? Yeah. And of course, pessimism has a role to play. There's a lovely quote from Montaigne, kings and philosophers shit and so do ladies. Now, what he was trying to say there is, you know, CEOs are, he also has another quote, he goes, on the highest throne in the world, we're seated still upon our arses. He loves to use this sort of pungent French language in which he's basically saying, stop being so intimidated by people in power.

1:15:56They sit on the toilet every day like you do. So, you know, a lot of people have that secret toilet-based confidence. It's like, you're feeling really intimidated. Know that your hero heroine is only a few hours, minutes away from going off to defecate and use that as an anchor point to relativize their status in relation to you. Yeah. Jason Pargan has got this great idea where he says, are all of your heroes are full of shit. Your heroes aren't gods. They're just regular people who got good at one thing by sacrificing literally everything else. And you don't get to see that. Probably one of the most fascinating questions that's captivated me since starting the show is what is the price that people pay in order to be someone that others admire?

1:16:51What are the externalities that are on? I don't look at it like that because I think that people tend to achieve what they need to achieve. They're not going, well, I could have this sort of life or that sort of life, but I'll choose to try and win Wimbledon or go to the moon. I think they're driven. It's not a choice. And it's a compulsion. And we can feel sorry for that compulsion, but also appreciate that it is a slightly neurotic overcompensation. Should you look at successful people with more pity than envy in that regard? Sure. I mean, somebody with an outsized need for anything always think, what's the opposite of that?

1:17:32The very funny person, they're really afraid of seriousness. The very wealthy person, they've got a really complicated relationship to a modest income, et cetera, et cetera. So yes, there is a massive overcompensation which speaks of lack. Ultimately, it's a lack. Think how poor you must feel in order to make that much money. think how deprived you must feel inside in order to need that level of status in order to be thought so special by millions of strangers how much you must despise yourself and we know this every single biography teaches us this we know this about the lives of everyone who's done an outsized thing in one area we know there's a relationship with the undersized opposite speaking of being special to strangers, why do you think online dating is so miserable reliably for most people?

1:18:25Look, I think the problem with online dating is that it teaches us that the main problem with love is finding the right person. And of course, it's one of the issues that we need to locate a candidate who broadly fits certain criteria. But that's probably a lot easier and we tend to think the real challenge is how do you get on with another human being? And that's not spoken of within dating culture. What dating culture tells us is if there's a conflict or a problem, it's that you're not with the so-called right person rather than accepting everybody you're likely to find is really problematic.

1:19:03So as soon as you found a more or less okay candidate, do the real work, which is learning how to live with them. but the emphasis is constantly thrown on that other thing, which is just finding the next shiny object. So it's a massive distractor of effort. It teaches us to place the effort in the wrong place. Yeah. Turning the microscope around, turning it from a telescope that's searching to a microscope that's looking at us. Okay, well, how can you make yourself and this other person into something that's a better unit as opposed to just getting rid of them and moving on to the next. And there's a tremendous ingratitude.

1:19:44I mean, people will say, I've swiped through 800 profiles today. And you think, what, you've just sort of executed as it were 800. 800 people are not good for you. That can't be true. It isn't true. There's likely to be lots of people in that cohort that were of value. But we're encouraged to look through such a narrow lens at value that we end up discarding. And that leaves, I think, a kind of moral hangover or sickness, because we know we've done something a bit disreputable. What's that, a judgy not lest ye be judged? You have done a lot of judging, so you think this is probably happening to me too.

1:20:22Yeah. And so it's ultimately an unkind world. It's not a world that anybody in particular is responsible for. Most of us are innocents on this treadmill, but undoubtedly I think it leads to moral confusion. I wonder whether when it comes to a relationship and not seeing our partner as the sole source of everything that we need in this life, I wonder whether love is more about managing disappointment than it is about chasing joy in that way. look the thing is that we can either have the expectations we have um or we can have lower ones if we're going to stick with the expectations we have around relationships boy oh boy do we need to do the work and this is the problem of our society we have these sky high expectations but a serious reluctance to work at it it's like you know i want my partner to be you know my ideal co-partner chauffeur soulmate uh sex partner blah blah all these things they have to register on all these fronts.

1:21:23And the sole work I'm going to do is, you know, once in a while, listen to an Esther Perel podcast, and I'm going to think it's going to swing it, or if that. And you think, hang on a minute, if this was the flute, and you wanted to get good at the flute, you'd be practicing three hours a day. So I think there doesn't have to be anything wrong with the expectations we have. Some people go, oh, you know, we've got overly high expectations. Fine, let's have really high expectations of relationships. Why not? But then do the work. And that means hours and hours, daily hours of practice, which involves a lot of learning and a lot of giving it a go.

1:21:58That wonderful line from you, compatibility is an achievement of love. It shouldn't be its precondition. Again, this is something which can be built over time as opposed to the entry price that needs to be paid before it starts. Exactly. And it really helps, of course, if the whole culture is supporting us. If the culture is patient, if the culture tells us, okay, you've had a huge argument. What happens next? Currently, we think, oh, we break up because we've had a moment of incompatibility rather than this is a massive learning moment. Let's go back to school on this. Let's really study this.

1:22:32And we were talking earlier, we're very suggestible creatures. We pick up our cues about the work we should do according to societal nudges. Currently, society is not particularly nudging us to work at some of those rough points in in dialogues with others. What is the subtext? What are the whispers of what society is saying about relationships at the moment, do you think? It's basically telling us that if there's a problem, it's that we found somebody with red flags. There may be a narcissist. They could be borderline. They could be emotionally unintelligent, et cetera, and therefore in the bin.

1:23:12They should go in the bin. I mean, the problem with this red flag language. It's all very well. But if you're going to put everyone in the bin who's a red flag, well, good luck to you. You're not going to have many friends. I mean, there's a lot of red flags around in everybody, including you. So you's in me. And it gets exciting when we go, okay, I own up to the red flags. Can we do something about it? When two people meet each other and go, I know I'm desperately flawed. Can we help each other? I mean, the enemy of relationships is self-righteousness. The enemy is defensiveness. The enemy is people go, well, I feel like this, and you need to acknowledge that.

1:23:48And this is the way it is. These are my boundaries. And give way. Give way. And I've been submissive too long, and this is the way it is now. You want to go, okay, all right, maybe. But can we meet halfway? Can we somehow find a way of having a dialogue that acknowledges we're both in a bit of a muddle here, both likely to be carrying all sorts of difficulties, blah, blah, blah. That kind of modesty is a saving grace. I mean, when that modesty kicks in, the angels are singing because they know that a relationship is going to be safe. My goodness, we waste relationships. I meet people all the time.

1:24:27They go, oh, I was together with someone for eight years and then we were squabbling, so I ended it. or, you know, I was with someone for seven years, you know, and you think, my goodness, all those shared jokes, all those investments, all that faith, and then you chuck it all in the sea and you begin again. And you might do this seven times in a lifetime. How exhausting it is. Now, I'm not, you know, it's not a plea for everyone to stay together at all costs. Obviously, there are relationships you need to exit. But, you know, there are serious grounds for questioning the way certain of these relationships end.

1:24:57You think, couldn't there have been a little more patience, a little more forbearance, a little more of an understanding that what you were meeting here was not an incompatibility in one person, but the scale of human intra-confusion that you're likely to meet up anywhere. Rather than thinking you've met one particularly corrupt human being, it's like, well, you've just met another typical human and you go off and meet another one and in seven years, we're back to the same place. Are there any questions or statements or framings that you have found to be particularly neutralizing? You're in the midst of the back and forth.

1:25:37This is the argument. Maybe it is the seven-year point that you're deep into. Are there any ways of beginning a conversation or interjecting into one of those disagreements that you have found to be particularly fruitful in bringing the energy down in the room? Of course. I mean, everybody knows these, but it's worth repeating because we do forget, especially at moments of crisis, if you make the other person feel heard, that even though their reality is not yours, doesn't need to be, that you have the wherewithal and the patience to acknowledge. They thought you were insulting them. They read it as an insult.

1:26:17Now, you can immediately go, no, no, it's not an insult. You can carry on. Good luck to you. You can argue this in court, but you're not going to get anywhere. So try another tack. Acknowledge. Okay, I'm hearing that you're really insulted. You can then go on to go, I didn't mean to, this is why, but acknowledge it first. And then also when you're asserting your point of view, don't frame it as universal, frame it as coming from you. I feel, from my point of view, I'm thinking that, you know, not you're an idiot, but in this area, I feel softening language, maybe, perhaps, the world can be saved by a few more maybes and perhapses.

1:27:01They're wonderful words. Perhaps this, or I might, not I will or I am, I might, I may, softening diplomatic language is, This goes a lot along the way. You know, that word diplomat, diplomacy, we tend to think of it as a job for specialists, you know, people who work in the foreign office, in the State Department, et cetera. A diplomat is somebody who's an expert at breaking difficult news into something that another person's going to be able to digest. And we all need to be diplomats, whatever our jobs. We all need to be diplomats. We all need to be able to have that capacity to take difficult information and get it across to another person.

1:27:41And so often we think that the truth is going to liberate people. If you just tell someone the truth, they'll go, wow, well, then I accept it. No, no, no. You've got to get around their defenses, their fears, their sense of threatened righteousness, et cetera. That doesn't mean being manipulative or overly flattering or obfuscating or something. It means being alive to people's panic. Whenever there's an argument, there's two frightened people in the room. and it's all very well. You're hyping up the tension and just asserting how right you are. But really what you need to do is to take care of your own fear and the other person's fear.

1:28:20There's two scared people. All arguments are about fear. And if you can drop down the level and go, we're not really arguing about the teacup, are we? We're not really arguing about, you know, we're arguing about two people's fears. If you can drop down to that fear and identify what that fear is, literally ask yourself in the middle of an argument, what am I really scared of? And ask the other person. also reveal it. And often it's very simple. I'm scared you don't love me. I'm scared that if I stay around here, I'm going to be humiliated and maltreated. If you can say that to another person, first of all, it shifts the template.

1:28:55Suddenly, we're not arguing about the stain on the floor. We're arguing about somebody who's a vulnerable child. Great. Really good starting point. Then we can take that vulnerable child and give them a hug. Alan, you're fantastic. I adored our conversation last year. I've adored this one as well. I can't wait to sit down with you again. I don't have anything else to say. Thank you so much. When I first started doing personal growth, I really wanted to read the best books, the most impactful ones, the most entertaining ones, the ones that were the easiest to read and the most dense and interesting.

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