How To Find True Love | Alain de Botton

Transcript:

There's a lot of anger around our love lives, privately held, but a lot of us go around feeling quite enraged, angry privately about the way that our love lives have gone. My task today is to turn that anger into sadness. If we manage to turn rage into grief we will have made psychological progress. And this is the task today. What lies behind rage very often is an unusual quality because we tend to think that very angry people are sort of dark and pessimistic characters. Absolutely not. Scratch the surface of any regularly angry person and you will find a wild optimist. It is in fact hope that drives rage. Think of the person who screams every time they can't find the house keys or every time they get stuck in traffic these unfortunate characters are evincing a curious but reckless faith in a world in which keys never go astray. The roads are mysteriously traffic free. It is hope that is turbocharging their rage. So, if we're to get a little bit less sad and a little less angry about our love lives we will have to diminish some of our hopes. And the reason is that all of us will not manage to find the right person but we will probably all of us manage to find a good enough person. So and that's success. In short we don't know very much how to love it and it sounds very odd because imagine if someone said to you look all of us probably in this room would probably need to go to a school of love. We think what a school of love? Love is just an instinct. No it's not. It's a skill and it's a skill that needs to be learned and it's a skill that our society refuses to consider as a skill. We are meant to always just follow our feelings. If you keep following your feelings you will almost certainly make a big mistake in your life. What is love? Ultimately love, I believe, is something first of all there is a distinction between loving and being loved. We all start off in life by knowing a lot about being loved. Being loved is the fun bit. That's when somebody brings you something on a tray and I ask you how your day at school went etc. and we grow up thinking that that is what's going to happen in an adult relationship. We can be forgiven for that. It's an understandable mistake but it's a very tragic mistake and it leads us not to pay attention to the other side of the equation which is to love. And what does it really mean to love? To love ultimately is to have the willingness to interpret someone's on the surface not very appealing behaviour in order to find more benevolent reasons why it may be unfolding in other words to love someone is to apply charity and generosity of interpretation. Problem is we live in a romantic culture that privileges impulse and when it comes to love something tricky occurs because you don't have to be a paid up believer in psychotherapy or psychoanalysis to realise that the way we love as adults sits on top of our early childhood experiences and in early childhood the way that we learned about love was not just via experiences of tenderness and kindness and generosity. The love that we will have tasted as children will also be bound up with experiences of being let down, being humiliated maybe being with a parent who treated us very harshly, who scolded us, who made us feel small in some way. In other words quite a lot about our early experiences of love are bound up with various kinds of suffering. Now, something quite bad happens when we start to go out into the adult world and start to choose love partners. We think we're out to find partners who will make us happy but we're not. We're out to find partners who will feel familiar and that may be a very different thing.

  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    It is one of the unexpected disasters of the modern age that our new unparalleled access to information has come at the price of our capacity to concentrate on anything much. The deep, immersive thinking which produced many of civilization's most important achievements has come under unprecedented assault. We are almost never far from a machine that guarantees us a mesmerizing and libidinous escape from reality. The feelings and thoughts which we have omitted to experience while looking at our screens are left to find their revenge in involuntary twitches and our ever-decreasing ability to fall asleep when we should

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    [Donald] Keene observed [in a book entitled The Pleasures of Japanese Literature, 1988] that the Japanese sense of beauty has long sharply differed from its Western counterpart: it has been dominated by a love of irregularity rather than symmetry, the impermanent rather than the eternal and the simple rather than the ornate. The reason owes nothing to climate or genetics, added Keene, but is the result of the actions of writers, painters and theorists, who had actively shaped the sense of beauty of their nation.Contrary to the Romantic belief that we each settle naturally on a fitting idea of beauty, it seems that our visual and emotional faculties in fact need constant external guidance to help them decide what they should take note of and appreciate. 'Culture' is the word we have assigned to the force that assists us in identifying which of our many sensations we should focus on and apportion value to

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    At the top of the slope on the perimeter of the site, overlooking six lanes of motorway, is a diner frequented by lorry drivers who have either just unloaded or or are waiting to pick up their cargo. Anyone nursing a disappointment with domestic life would find relief in this tiled, brightly lit cafeteria with its smells of fries and petrol, for it has the reassuring feel of a place where everyone is just passing through--and which therefore has none of the close-knit or convivial atmosphere which could cast a humiliating light on one's own alienation. It suggests itself as an ideal location for Christmas lunch for those let down by their families

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    The essence of the charge made against the modern high-status ideal is that it is guilty of effecting a gigantic distortion of priorities, of elevating to the highest level of achievement a process of material accumulation that should instead be only one of many factors determining the direction of our lives under a more truthful, more broadly defined conception of ourselves

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    What a peculiar civilisation this was: inordinately rich, yet inclined to accrue its wealth through the sale of some astonishingly small and only distantly meaningful things, a civilisation torn and unable sensibly to adjudicate between the worthwhile ends to which money might be put and the often morally trivial and destructive mechanisms of its generation

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    The assumption is that life doesn't need to be navigated with lessons. You can just do it intuitively. After all, you only need to achieve autonomy from your parents, find a moderately satisfying job, form a relationship, perhaps raise some children, watch the onset of mortality in your parents' generation and eventually in your own, until one day a fatal illness starts gnawing at your innards and you calmly go to the grave, shut the coffin and are done with the self-evident business of life

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    In the immediate vicinity, there might well be stability and peace. In the garden, a breeze may be swaying the branches of the plum tree and dust may slowly be gathering on the bookshelves in the living room. But we are aware that such serenity does not do justice to the chaotic and violent fundamentals of existence and hence, after a time, it has a a habit of growing worrisome in its own way

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    Whatever modern democracies may tell themselves about their commitment to free speech and to diversity of opinion, the values of a given society will uncannily match those of whichever organizations have the scale to pay for runs of thirty-second slots around the nightly news bulletin

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    A popular perception that political news is boring is no minor issue; for when news fails to harness the curiosity and attention of a mass audience through its presentational techniques, a society becomes dangerously unable to grapple with its own dilemmas and therefore to marshal the popular will to change and improve itself

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    But the answer isn't just to intimidate people into consuming more 'serious' news; it is to push so-called serious outlets into learning to present important information in ways that can properly engage audiences. It is too easy to claim that serious things must be, and can almost afford to be, a bit boring. The challenge is to transcend the current dichotomy between those outlets that offer thoughtful but impotent instruction on the one hand and those that provide sensationalism stripped of responsibility on the other

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    We could not be fulfilled if we weren't inauthentic some of the time—inauthentic, that is, in relation to such things as our passing desires to throttle our children, poison our spouse, or end our marriage over a dispute about changing a lightbulb

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    [L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humour or gravity, works of art--novels, poems, plays, paintings or films--can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    We continue to need exhortations to be sympathetic and just, even if we do not believe that there is a God who has a hand in wishing to make us so. We no longer have to be brought into line by the threat of hell or the promise of paradise; we merely have to be reminded that it is we ourselves -- that is, the most mature and reasonable parts of us (seldom present in the midst of our crises and obsessions) -- who want to lead the sort of life which we once imagined supernatural beings demanded of us. An adequate evolution of morality from superstition to reason should mean recognizing ourselves as the authors of our own moral commandments

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    Growth occurs when we discover how to remain authentically ourselves in the presence of potentially threatening things. Maturity is the possession of coping skills: we can take in our stride things that previously would have knocked us off course. We are less fragile, less easily shocked and hence more capable of engaging with situations as they really are

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    Everyone endeavours to eliminate through the other individual his own weaknesses, defects, and deviations from the type, lest they be perpetuated or even grow into complete abnormalities in the child which will be produced

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be internal, consisting in an aspect of our mentalities: in the widely held belief that our work should make us happy. All societies have had work at their centre; ours is the first to suggest that it could be something more than a punishment or a penance. Ours is the first to imply that we should seek to work even in the absence of a financial imperative

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    Love could not induce us to take on the burden of propagating the species without promising us the greatest happiness we could imagine

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction. We are invited to imagine ourselves scaling the steep cliff face of happiness in order to reach a wide, high plateau on which we will live out the rest of our lives; we are not reminded that soon after gaining the summit, we will be called down again into fresh lowlands of anxiety and desire

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    While a common reaction to seeing a thing of beauty is to want to buy it, our real desire may be not so much to own what we find beautiful as to lay permanent claim to the inner qualities it embodies.Owning such an object may help us realise our ambition of absorbing the virtues to which it alludes, but we ought not to presume that those virtues will automatically or effortlessly begin to rub off on us through tenure. Endeavouring to purchase something we think beautiful may in fact be the most unimaginative way of dealing with the longing it excites in us, just as trying to sleep with someone may be the bluntest response to a feeling of love.What we seek, at the deepest level, is inwardly to resemble, rather than physically possess, the objects and places that touch us through their beauty

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    The business card does not fully reflect who we are. We are being judged, we feel, in a humiliating way. We feel there is so much in us that has not got an expression in capitalism. You know, capitalism is a machine that recognizes outward financial, external achievement. And most of us carry all kinds of richness which we are unable to translate into that language

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    The kinds of purchases surveyed in the news generally sit well beyond necessity. In acquiring them, what we are after is rarely solely or even chiefly just material satisfaction; we are also guided by a deeper, often unconscious desire for some form of psychological transformation. We don't only want to own things; we want to be changed through our ownership of them. Once we examine consumer behaviour with sufficient attention and generosity, it becomes clear that we aren't indelibly materialistic at all. What makes our age distinctive is our ambition to try to accomplish a variety of complex psychological goals via the acquisition of material goods

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    To grow interested in any piece of information, we need somewhere to 'put' it, which means some way of connecting it to an issue we already now how to care about

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    The challenge lies in knowing how to bring this sort of day to a close. His mind has been wound to a pitch of concentration by the interactions of the office. Now there are only silence and the flashing of the unset clock on the microwave. He feels as if he had been playing a computer game which remorselessly tested his reflexes, only to have its plug suddenly pulled from the wall. He is impatient and restless, but simultaneously exhausted and fragile. He is in no state to engage with anything significant. It is of course impossible to read, for a sincere book would demand not only time, but also a clear emotional lawn around the text in which associations and anxieties could emerge and be disentangled. He will perhaps only ever do one thing well in his life.For this particular combination of tiredness and nervous energy, the sole workable solution is wine. Office civilisation could not be feasible without the hard take-offs and landings effected by coffee and alcohol

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    What we encounter in works of art and philosophy are objective versions of our own pains and struggles, evoked and defined in sound, language or image. Artists and philosophers not only show us what we have felt, they present our experiences more poignantly and intelligently than we have been able; they give shape to aspects of our lives that we recognise as our own, yet could never have understood so clearly on our own. They explain our condition to us, and thereby help us to be less lonely with, and confused by it

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    It may come very fast, this certainty that another human being is a soulmate. We needn’t have spoken with them; we may not even know their name. Objective knowledge doesn’t come into it. What matters instead is intuition: a spontaneous feeling that seems all the more accurate and worthy of respect because it bypasses the normal processes of reason

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the species, that we lie beyond comprehension. Our embarrassments, our sulks, our envy, our feelings of guilt, these phenomena are conveyed in Austen in a way that affords us bursts of almost magical self-recognition. The author has located words to depict a situation we thought ourselves alone in feeling, and for a few moments, we see ourselves more clearly and wish to become whom the author would have wanted us to be

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    Insofar as we appreciate order, it is when we perceive it as being accompanied by complexity, when we feel that a variety of elements has been brought to order--that windows, doors and other details have been knitted into a scheme that manages to be at once regular and intricate. (p184)

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    For us to deem a work of architecture elegant, it is hence not enough that it look simple: we must feel that the simplicity it displays has been hard won, that it flows from the resolution of demanding technical or natural predicament. Thus we call the Shaker staircase in Pleasant Hill elegant because we know--without ever having constructed one ourselves--that a staircase is a site complexity, and that combinations of treads, risers and banisters rarely approach the sober intelligibility of the Sharkers' work. We deem a modern Swiss house elegant because we not how seamlessly its windows have been joined to their concrete walls, and how neatly the usual clutter of construction has been resolved away. We admire starkly simple works that we intuit would, without immense effort, have appeared very complicated. (p 209)

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    Partially undermining the manufacturer's ability to assert that its work constituted a meaningful contribution to mankind was the frivolous way in which it went about marketing its products. Grief was the only rational response to the news that an employee had spent three months devising a supermarket promotion based on an offer of free stickers of cartoon characters called the Fimbles. Why had the grown-ups so churlishly abdicated their responsibilities? Were there not more important ambitions to be met before Death showed himself on the horizon in his hooded black cloak, his scythe slung over his shoulder?

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    It seems, in fact, that the more advanced a society is, the greater will be its interest in ruined things, for it will see in them a redemptively sobering reminder of the fragility of its own achievements. Ruins pose a direct challenge to our concern with power and rank, with bustle and fame. They puncture the inflated folly of our exhaustive and frenetic pursuit of wealth

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    Our feelings of anxiety are genuine but confused signals that something is amiss, and so need to be listened to and patiently interpreted -- processes which are unlikely to be completed when we have to hand, in the computer, one of the most powerful tools of distraction ever invented. The entire internet is in a sense pornographic, a deliverer of a constant excitement that we have no innate capacity to resist, a seducer that leads us down paths that for the most part do nothing to answer our real needs

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    On account of its scale and complexity, the world will always outstrip the capacity of any single body to ask fertile questions of it

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    What we colloquially call 'feeling bored' is just the mind, acting out of a self-preserving reflex, ejecting information it has despaired of knowing where to place

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    I never wavered in my certainty that God did not exist. I was simply liberated by the thought that there might be a way to engage with religion without having to subscribe to its supernatural content - a way, to put it in more abstract terms, to think about Fathers without upsetting my respectful memory of my own father. I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illustrated manuscripts of the faiths

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    In literature, too, we admire prose in which a small and astutely arranged set of words has been constructed to carry a large consignment of ideas. 'We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others,' writes La Rochefoucauld in an aphorism which transports us with an energy and exactitude comparable to that of Maillard bridge. The Swiss engineer reduces the number of supports just as the French writer compacts into a single line what lesser minds might have taken pages to express. We delight in complexity to which genius has lent an appearance of simplicity. (p 207)

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    Though anger seems a pessimistic response to a situation, it is at root a symptom of hope: the hope that the world can be better than it is. The man who shouts every time he loses his house keys is betraying a beautiful but rash faith in a universe in which keys never go astray. The woman who grows furious every time a politician breaks an election promise reveals a precariously utopian belief that elections do not involve deceit.The news shouldn’t eliminate angry responses; but it should help us to be angry for the right reasons, to the right degree, for the right length of time – and as part of a constructive project.And whenever this isn’t possible, then the news should help us with mourning the twisted nature of man and reconciling us to the difficulty of being able to imagine perfection while still not managing to secure it – for a range of stupid but nevertheless unbudgeable reasons

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    We each appear to hold within ourselves a range of divergent views as to our native qualities.. And amid such uncertainty, we typically turn to the wider world to settle the question of our significance.. we seem beholden to affections of others to endure ourselves

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    what ease our seemingly entrenched lives might be altered were we simply to walk down a corridor and onto a craft that in a few hours would land us in a place of which we had no memories and where no one knew our name

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    The pursuit of personal happiness and the production of healthy children are two radically contrasting projects, which love maliciously confuses us into thinking of as one for a requisite number of years. We should not be surprised by marriages between people who would never have been friends

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    Our minds are susceptible to the influence of external voices telling us what we require to be satisfied, voices that may drown out the faint sounds emitted by our souls and distract us from the careful, arduous task of accurately naming our priorities

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    It is hope--with regard to our careers, our love lives, our children, our politicians, and our planet--that is primarily to blame for angering and embittering us. The incompatibility between the grandeur of our aspirations and the mean reality of our condition generates the violent disappointments which rack our days and etch themselves in lines of acrimony across our faces

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    Far from rejecting outright any hierarchy of success or failure, philosophy instead reconfigures the judging process, lending legitimacy to theidea that themainstream value system may unfairly consign some people to disgrace and others to respectability

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    By conceiving of love as biologically inevitable, key to the continuation of the species, Schopenhauer's theory of the will invites us to adopt a more forgiving stance towards the eccentric behaviour to which love so often makes us subject

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    a lack of love:between a man and a woman is the announcement that what they might produce would only be a badly organized, unhappy being, wanting in harmony in itself

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    To live in modernity--an era contemporaneous with the triumph of the news--is to be constantly reminded that, thanks to science and technology, change and improvement are continuous and relentless. This is part of the reason we must keep checking the news in the first place: we might at any moment be informed of some extraordinary development that will fundamentally alter reality. Time is an arrow following a precarious, rapid and yet tantalizingly upward trajectory

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A
  • Copy Image
    Alain de Botton quote

    Those who divorce aren't necessarily the most unhappy, just those neatly able to believe their misery is caused by one other person

    Moms Typewriter
    A
    A