Quotes from Alain de Botton: The School of Life an Emotional Education

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[consolation over solution]
There can wisely be no "solutions", no self-help, of a kind that removes problems altogether. What we. can aim for, at best, is consolation - a word tellingly lacking in glamour. To believe in consolation means giving up on cures; it means accepting that life is a hospice rather than a hospital, but one we'd like to render as comfortable, as interesting and as kind as possible.

 

[modern society wants us to cheer - but there is beauty in melancholy]
Modern society's mania is to emphasize buoyancy and cheerfulness. It wishes to either to medicalize melancholy states - and therefore "solve" them - or to deny their legitimacy altogether. Yet malncholy springs from a rightful awareness of the tragic structure of every life. We can, in melancholy states, understand without fury or sentimentality that no one truly understands anyone else, that loneliness is universal and that every life has its full measure of shame and sorrow.

 

[know what you don't know}
Socrates' simple command: ``Know yourself''. Yet he added, ``I am wise not because I know, but because I know I don't know.''. The eventual result of a quest fro self-knowledge might be presumed to be a confident understanding of the corridors of the mind. But a truly successful outcome might involve something rather different.

 

[self-love]
Self-love is the quality that determines how much we can be friends with ourselves and, day to day, remain on our own side. ... In relationships, do we have enough self-love to leave an abusive union? Or are we so down on ourselves that we carry an implicit belief that harm is all we deserve?

 

[on therapists]
Most people are not quite nice - they are jealous, bored, vindictive and keen to prove a point, or distracted by their own lives. But therapists focus on our case, their room set aside from daily pressures. The enter into our experience and view reality from our eyes so they can help us correct a legacy of shame and isolation. Soemtimes, we are too kind to look at some vulnerabilities we have, and express them outward. But a therapist allows us to pull those out.

 

[Being our own friends]
We need to become better friends to ourselves. The idea sounds odd, initially, because we nautrally imagine a friend as someone else, not as a part of our own mind.  [we help friends out, and are warm to them, so we should be like that to ourselves as well]

 

[meditation]
In meditation, we strive to empty consciousness of its normal medley of anxieties, hurts, and excitements, and concentrate on the sensations of the immediate moment, allowing even events as apparently minor but as fundamental as the act of breathing to be noticed. In a bid for serenity and liberation, we still the agitations of what the Buddhists evocatively term our ``monkey minds''. ... Key is to ask three majo questions:

1. What are we anxious right now?

2. What am I upset about right now? (What we call depression is in fact sadness and anger that have for too long not been paid the attention they deserve.)

3. What am I ambitious and excited about right now?

 

[breaking down]

The reason we break down is that we have not, over years, flexed very much. There were things we needed to hear inside our minds that we deftly put to one side; there were messages we needed to heed, bits of emotional learning and communicating we didn't do, and now, after being patient for so long, far too long, the emotional self is attempting to make itself heard in the only way it now knows how.

``A crisis represents an appetite for growth that hasn't found another way of expressing itself. Many people, after a horrific few monhts or years of breakdown, will say, ``I don't know how I'd ever have got well if I hadn't fallen ill.''

 

[enemies]

People are bad, always, because they are in difficulty. They slander, gossip, denigrate, and growl becasue they are not in a good place. Though they may seem strong, though their attacks can place them in an apparently dominant role, their ill intentions are all the proof we require to know as a certinaty that they are not well.

[on romanticism]

The movement known as Romanticism has further cast the kind person into the role of the unexciting bore, identifying drama and allure with the naughty and the ``wicked'' (which has become a term of praise) while bathing niceness in an aura of tedium. The choice seems to be between being authentic, spontaneous, and a bit cruel or else sweet, gentle, and distinctly off-putting.

[on pessimism]

As with optimists, pessimists would like things to go well. But by recognizing that many things can, and probably will, go wrong, the pessimist is adroitly placed to secure the good outcome both parties ultimately seek. It is the pessimist who, having never expected anything to go right, ends up with one or two things to smile about.

 

[On anxiety]

Anxiety is not a sign of sickness, a weakness of the mind, or an error for which we should always seek a medical solution. It is mostly a hugely reasonable and sensitive response to the genuine strangeness, terror, uncertainty, and riskiness existence.

 

[on romanticism]

1. Deeply hopeful about marriage - marriage will combine all the excitement of love affair with all the advantages of a settled practical union.

2. Combined, conceptually, love and sex. Sex is the supreme expression of admiration and respect.

3. True love must mean an end to all loneliness/

4. Choosing a partner is a matter of surrendering to feelings rather than evaulating practical considerations.

5. Manifests a powerful disdain for practicalities and money.

6. True love should involve delighting in a lover's every faucet, that is synonymous with accepting everything about someone.

 

[people do shit and laundry]

Relationships are made or broken over grand, dramatic matters: fidelity and betrayal, the courage to face society on one's own terms, or the tragedy of being ground down by the demands of conventions.

 

[on friendship]

We hear the offer of friendship as something synonymous wih insult because our Romantic culture has, from our youth, continuously made one thing clear: Love is the purpose of existence; friendship is the paltry, depleted consolation prize.

 

[imposter syndrome]

The root cause of impostor syndrome is an unhelpful picture of what people at the top of society are really like. We feel like impostors not because we are uniquely flawed, but because we can't imagine how equally flawed the elite must necessarily also be underneath their polished surfaces.

Impostor syndrome has its roots far back in childhodd - specifically in the powerful sense children have that their parents are really very different from them.

[Maslow's hierarchy of needs]

Commercials used to appeal to the lower parts of the pyramid. Now that the lower parts of the pyramid is something taken for granted, corporations aimed their advertisements so that their product will satisfy the higher parts of the pyramid. However, the products fail to fulfil their promises, thus making us unhappy.

`` [marketin companies] Play a cruel trick on us, for while they excite us with reminders of our buried longings, they cannot do anything sincere about satisfying them. The objects adverts send us off to buy fall far short of the hopes that they have aroused. '''

 

[on richness]

There are two ways to get richer: One is to make more money and the second is to discover that more of the things we could love are already at hand. We are astonishingly, already a good deal richer than we're encouraged to think we are.

 

[religion]

Traditionally, religion provided an ideal explanation for and solution to this painful loneliness. The human soul, religious people would say, is made by God and so only God can know its deepest secrets. We are never truly alone, because God is always with us. In their way, religions addressed a universal problem: They recongnized the powerful need to be intimately known and appreciated and admitted frankly taht this need could not be realistically ever be met by other people. What we replaced religion in our imaginations, as we have seen, is the cult of human-to-human love we now know as Romanticism, which bequeathed to us the beautiful but reckless idea that loneliness might be capable of being vanquished, if we are fortunate and determined enough to meet the one exalted being known as our soulmate; someone who will understand everything deep and strange about us, who will see us completely and be enchanted by our totality.