Alain de Botton is one of my favorite thinkers/writers/intellectuals. I’ve written about his work in the past, such as his TED talk on success and his book Religion for Atheists.
By now I’ve read and watched a lot of the content he’s put online, so I wanted to share some of my favorite insights across his work with you. So in no particular order…
(most of the below is paraphrase, with direct quotes in italics)
Alain de Botton on how to think more about sex
1. There’s nothing that is considered sexy that isn’t, with the wrong person, disgusting
2. The magic of oral sex is that it takes the dirtiest part of us and makes it clean. That part is accepted by another person
3. What turns us on? It’s often what’s missing…from our childhoods, our moms
4. Why do we have too little sex? It’s because the person we have sex with is someone we do too much other stuff with (in past, people had more specific gender and vocational roles but now, we do everything together)
Alain de Botton on success
on YouTube
5. Snobbery is when you know only a little bit about someone but draw much larger conclusions about them
6. We’re not materialistic, we live in a society where emotional rewards are pegged to material goods. So when you see a Ferrari driver, don’t criticize them for being greedy, instead, see them as somebody who is incredibly vulnerable and in need of love
7. We’ve done away with the caste system. We’re told anyone can achieve anything, which generates envy (envy is our dominant modern emotion)
8. What is envy? Envy is relatability. When you can’t relate to them, you can’t envy them
9. It’s bad enough to not get what you want. It’s even worse to get what you want, after all this hard work, only to realize it may not be what you wanted all along
Alain de Botton on status anxiety
10. Low-paying jobs are frowned upon not just because of the pay…but because of their perceived status. Vice-versa for high-paying jobs
11. In a “just” society like ours, we believe the rich deserve their success, but we also assume the poor deserve their failure (which makes it harder to tolerate our own mediocrity or lack of success)
12. Jesus and Socrates as great exemplars for being sacrificial and sticking to their beliefs
13. We want the respect of people who we don’t even respect
Alain de Botton on why pessimism is healthy
14. The problem with society is that, with the engines of science, technology, and commerce, we’ve taken such great strides as mankind that we forget pessimism’s usefulness in individuals, and in the day-to-day.
15. Ironically, the secular are least suited to cope because they believe we can achieve heaven on earth through Silicon Valley, Fortune 500s, university research, etc
16. Religions provide angels – forever young and beautiful – to worship, and our lovers instead to tolerate (whereas secular people are always complaining, “why can’t you be more perfect?”).
Alain de Botton’s talk at Google
on YouTube
17. We’ve offloaded making up our minds to things like social media and the news
18. News drives us insane with envy; envy is good, but we don’t extract its lessons
19. We need MORE bias in the news: GOOD bias, not false fairness
Alain de Botton on Socrates and self confidence
on YouTube
20. There are 5 steps to have a good thought:
Step 1. look for “plain common sense” statements
Step 2. try to find exceptions
Step 3. if an exception is found, that must mean statement is false or imprecise
Step 4. try to incorporate the exception into the original statement
Step 5. continue this process, keep finding exceptions, until it’s impossible to disprove
21. Socrates believed we can have an interesting philosophical conversation anywhere, on a street corner or at home or in a foreign place
22. Socrates had reservations about democracy (lived in Athenian democracy). He argued that just because the majority of people believe something doesn’t make it right. What matters is whether the argument is logical and reasonable, not whether the majority says so
Alain de Botton on La Rochefoucauld
Philosophers Mail
23. There are some people who would never have fallen in love, if they had not heard there was such a thing.
Alain de Botton on Epicurus on happiness
on YouTube
24. Happiness is important: it comes from friends (as permanent companions), freedom (Epicurus left city life to start a commune), and an analyzed life (to find the time and space for quiet thinking about our lives)
Alain de Botton on Schopenhauer and his views on love
on YouTube
25. Being hurt by rejection is to not fully understand the requirements of acceptance
26. Love has nothing to do with happiness, it’s all about procreation, the “Will to life” (like Nietzsche’s “Will to power”)
Alain de Botton on Nietzsche and hardship
on YouTube
27. One of the few philosophers who wrote about pain and hardship, he believed they were necessary evil for enjoyment and success
Alain de Botton on Montaigne on self-esteem
28. Animals often surpass us in wisdom. They are much more natural about their bodies
29. Every society has customs which create narrow minds. To counter it, travel widely
30. How can you test for wisdom? Ask questions such as:
What should one do when anxious?
What is a good parent?
How can you tell if one is in love or infatuated?
31. “even on the highest throne, we are seated, still, on our asses”
From Religion for Atheists
32. As John Stuart Mill, another Victorian defender of the aims of education, put it: ‘The object of universities is not to make skillful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings.’
33. We feel guilty for all that we have not yet read, but overlook how much better read we already are than Augustine or Dante, thereby ignoring that our problem lies squarely with our manner of absorption rather than with the extent of our consumption.
34. The single danger of life in a godless society is that it lacks reminders of the transcendent and therefore leaves us unprepared for disappointment and eventual annihilation. When God is dead, human beings – much to their detriment – are at risk of taking psychological centre stage
35. The modern world is not, of course, devoid of institutions. It is filled with commercial corporations of unparalleled size which have an intriguing number of organizational traits in common with religions. But these corporations focus only on our outer, physical needs, on selling us cars and shoes, pizzas and telephones. Religion’s great distinction is that while it has a collective power comparable to that of modern corporations pushing the sale of soap and mashed potatoes, it addresses precisely those inner needs which the secular world leaves to disorganized and vulnerable individuals.
36. Religions do not, as modern universities will, limit their teaching to a fixed period of time (a few years of youth), a particular space (a campus) or a single format (the lecture).
37. Comte…was convinced that humanity was still at the beginning of its history and that all kinds of innovation – however bold and far- fetched they might initially sound – were possible in the religious field, just as in the scientific one. […] The age he lived in, he asserted, afforded him a historic opportunity to edit out the absurdities of the past and to create a new version of religion which could be embraced because it was appealing and useful… He drew most heavily from Catholicism […] and also essayed occasional forays into the theology of Judaism, Buddhism and Islam.
38. Images of tranquillity and security haunt it: a particular job, social conquest or material acquisition always seems to hold out the promise of an end to craving. In reality, however, each worry will soon enough be replaced by another, and one desire by the next, generating a relentless cycle of what Buddhists call ‘grasping’, or upādāna in Sanskrit.