Alain de Botton has written ~17 books and runs the School of Life channel, which now has almost 10 million YouTube subscribers. He rarely ever does interviews but finally said yes after more than a year of prodding him to come on the show.
Some highlights from our interview:
Writer's block is a conflict between shame and the desire for honesty.
A clear night sky is a challenge to everything. If we really took on board what that night sky is telling us, we'd have to lie down and just question absolutely everything.
The effect of mass media is to industrialize and commercialize our thinking, which leaves no room for the free thinker, the honest thinker, and the authentic thinker.
You've got to be attentive to your own sensations and thoughts. That's the real work of writing.
Every person is an incredible library of sensations but so often, particularly in the academic world, people think: “Let’s ignore ourselves as a source of data and find out what Cicero said, or what Socrates said, or what Michel Foucault said.
Writing can be revenge for the silenced person, which is why so many writers are meek in person but fierce on the page.
A work of art is the best thing you can do with your dislocation and distress, and sometimes, it’s even an alternative to losing your mind.
Emerson said: "In the minds of geniuses, we find our own neglected thoughts." The thoughts of geniuses aren’t fundamentally different from others. It’s just that they’re able to put words to sensations we’ve long felt but couldn’t articulate.
This episode reminded me of a line from Tyler Cowen: "It’s the weird that’s truly normal. It’s how people actually are, what they really care about."
The need to write is driven by loneliness of experience. If everyone around you understood, what’d be the point of writing? That’s why writing begins with “nobody gets this.”
Writing prompt: If there were no rules, if you couldn't fail, if no one was going to laugh, if you were going to be dead tomorrow, what would you actually do and say? How would you write, let's say? That's the thing you should write.
Transcript
Table of Contents
[03:39] Difficulty Naming and Feeling Emotions
[07:59] The Importance of Fragments in Writing
[13:38] The Value of Notebooks and Note Taking
[17:07] Navigating Insecurities as a Writer
[21:51] The Importance of Structure and Editing
[26:38] Writing About Love and Relationships
[30:31] The Role of Psychology in Writing
David Perell:
You've written so many books, and with the School of Life—I mean, almost 10 million YouTube subscribers. As I was thinking about what you do—what gives you joy as a writer for yourself, but also a sense of relief for us as the viewer on a School of Life video or as a reader—it's this joy of capturing sensations and emotions in words. So much of the world is not concrete, and writing makes it concrete. By doing that, it gives us clarity, gives us peace, whatever it is.
Alain de Botton:
That's beautiful. I think you've got it there. Let's end it there.
David Perell:
End of the podcast.
Alain de Botton:
Yes, it is all about pain and pleasure. Anything that is painful, I want to put words to it. Anything that's very beautiful, I want to put words to it. It is about capturing and, to use a slightly strange word, controlling the experience. Controlling pain in order to lessen it, controlling beauty in order to keep a hold on something that is fugitive.
The idea is that the more I can do—I mean, it's broadly therapeutic. It's why people journal. I began as a writer, as a teenager, trying to master emotions that felt bigger than me. I felt a basic sense of relief, which has not changed to this day, at turning an emotion into an idea, at putting words to feelings. They lessen, and that brings enormous relief. You can divide humanity into what people do with their pain.
Some people drink their pain away. Some people talk their pain away. Some people exercise their pain away. Some people achieve their pain away. And some people want to write it away, and I'm one of those. It is all about processing difficult feelings.
I wrote my first book, which in the United States was called "On Love," and in many other parts of the world was called "Essays in Love." That was an attempt to understand sensations around love that had basically been very painful and mysterious. I gained relief, and in a rather magical process, it ended up in the hands of other people who would say things like, "How did you know that about me?" Wow. I would say, "I have no idea about you, but I'm just keeping a track of me." If I'm doing that faithfully, then it may have an echo in somebody else.
It's very strange how that happens. Sometimes people say to me, "What research have you done? What's your authority base?" I go, "Just empirical observation of me." All of us are this incredible library of sensations, this incredible data source. So often, particularly in the academic world, the feeling is, let's ignore ourselves as a source of data. Let's go and find out what Cicero said, what Socrates said, or what Michel Foucault said. While that could be helpful, it's far better to mine your own mind. But there's not much encouragement for that. The whole school system is based on trying to get you to find out what other people thought, rather than going into what you might think.
[03:39] Difficulty Naming and Feeling Emotions
David Perell:
So, what do you do when there's a sort of pain or emotion that you're just grappling with, and you can't quite name it? You know that there's something there, because I've always struggled to feel my emotions. This has been a lot of what I've learned over the last five years in particular. I really struggle with it. So a lot of writing for me, and actually the pain of writing, is to almost force myself to feel the thing, to really feel the thing and to stop the resistance.
Then to somehow name the thing is to constrain the thing. Once you've constrained it, now you can look at it as almost an object that's separate from you, but it's remarkably painful. So how do you do that?
Alain de Botton:
There's definitely a moment when certain feelings are not ready to be turned into literature, into words. It's not ready; it's not cooked. That has to do with one not understanding what it is sufficiently.
A piece of prose has to obey certain rules of coherence. You have to be able to understand it well enough to put yourself in the shoes of somebody who doesn't know it. You have to be able to introduce a stranger to a feeling, and in order to do that, you have to know it a little bit yourself.
David Perell:
Yeah.
Alain de Botton:
I'm writing again about love at the moment, and for maybe three weeks or so, I was toying around with it. I saw a couple in a restaurant, and they were having a lovely meal, and it was summertime in London, and they looked really happy.
I had a thought, and the thought was, if their relationship breaks down, it's an evening like this that will cost them both dear, or one of them, dear. This will be a locus of pain. Let's say the man is abandoned or the woman's abandoned. They will return to that lovely meal when the future looked beautiful.
So I became interested in how a pleasurable experience later turns into a nightmare. Observing my own life, I've seen how much when a relationship breaks down, you don't really sit around lamenting the argument that you had or the bad times about their sibling. Your mind turns towards the beautiful times, that holiday you took, that amazing walk you took one evening. These are the moments of pain when it's beautiful.
It's a sort of dark thought. It's the beautiful things that are storing up cost that the pleasurable participant isn't yet fully aware of. It's really the psychology of mourning and loss. You only lose what's beautiful and good. Therefore, while achieving anything beautiful and good, if you're a wiser, older person, you're thinking, wow, this is what I'm going to need to maybe have to pay for later on.
These thoughts were in my head, but for a while they were tangled. Then yesterday it all came to me. It often does come in a sort of moment of, right, this is cooked, this is bubbling, this is a boiling point.
I was looking through my notes and thought, okay, I know this is like a little essay on the debt that we may have to pay for our pleasures. So it emerges a little piece. That's a journey from fragments to something more complete.
You have to be able to name it and see it, because sometimes you don't know what it is. You don't know what a feeling is. You don't know where it belongs, wherein, if you imagine a giant library, our minds are giant libraries, and they've got an index system and a stack system. Sometimes you get some words and you think, I don't know what the book is. I don't know where it would go on the stacks. It takes a while, and then eventually you find a location for it in your intellectual worldview.
[07:59] The Importance of Fragments in Writing
David Perell:
You gotta tell me about that word, fragments. Fragments, fragments, because I think that's where so much of writing starts, as fragments.
Alain de Botton:
Absolutely. And I think it should start. I think that novice writers often get this wrong. They say things like, I just don't know where to start with my book. I don't know what the story, etc.
And I always say, look, I compare it to archaeology. In archaeology, you come across a little broken bit of a pot and you know that there's other bits of the pot. They're going to be somewhere in the area and you have to dig through the dirt to assemble them and find them, and then assemble them into a plausible pattern. You have to go, right, my first thought is this, what's the next bit that it could fit into? And it takes a long while, like archaeology, like archaeological sort of reconstitution. It takes a while and one can panic and think, I'd never get this.
But I think that many books start with an image of thought, a fragmented idea. If I think of certain books, they literally began with half a scene. And I thought, right, what's? I'm working on a book now and I just have an image of a man emerging from a visit to a dental hygienist in Wimpole street in London. He's gone there in a moment of some despair and inner turmoil and he's had his teeth cleaned and he's emerging into the street.
Anyway, I'm slowly assembling bits and bits will come from all over and be marshaled by that scene. But it's like a powerful magnet that draws in filaments from elsewhere. But for a long time the magnet is not switched on and so the filaments are just lying around.
So no one thinks in book terms. I mean, a book is an arbitrary construction dictated by the book industry. It's a certain number of words, it's glued together, blah, blah, blah. No one thinks in terms of books. We think in sentences, images, fragments, et cetera. And gradually we may end up with this thing called a book. But it's always a slightly artificial construction, which is why I began by being interested in aphorisms, maxims, the tradition of the short, pithy.
David Perell:
The original tweets.
Alain de Botton:
Right, the original tweets. And I remember this 17th century character, French character, La Rochefoucauld. Do you know him?
David Perell:
No.
Alain de Botton:
La Rochefoucauld, who wrote this book called the maxims in the 17th century. And this beautiful book. It must be, it's about 200 fragments.
Let me give you an example. To say one never flirts is itself a form of flirtation. Another one is, there are some people who would never have fallen in love if they hadn't heard there was such a thing. Another one is, we all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others.
I remember reading this book thinking, I love this. It's not a novel, it's not a biography, it's not a poem. It's like a psychological, as the French would say, aperçu, a little glimpse of a truth. And it's two lines long. Great.
That's how I began writing. I wrote a whole selection of aphorisms for friends at university and we would sort of laugh and some of them were about people that we'd know.
David Perell:
They are funny, right? I mean, Shakespeare said, brevity is the soul of wit.
Alain de Botton:
Right.
David Perell:
And there's a wit and a humor in an aphorism, a maxim.
Alain de Botton:
Yeah. I've always found it really hard to fit into a pre-existing form as a writer. So my books tend to be quite odd. I mean, I wrote a book called the Course of Love.
David Perell:
Oh, real quick, before you get there, I think you're saying something really profound, which is there's that stupid line, it's like, how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? How do you write a book one sentence at a time?
It's fine to just think in sentences and paragraphs and stories. You don't have to think about the big giant thing. I mean, let alone, I want to be a writer. Often you get blocked by the identity of that giant thing.
Alain de Botton:
And also, the fact is that nowadays, for a long time, to be a writer was to write a certain kind of genre. The novel has hugely dominated our sense of what it means to be a writer. And not just the novel, but a certain kind of novel, still based on the 19th-century narrative structure of characters in a realistic setting, where the narrative voice is essentially offstage. It's a kind of disembodied voice telling you what everybody's thinking.
You don't really know who this person is, who this voice is, but it's taking you through a story, action over reflection, et cetera. I remember thinking this is not for me. I don't like this kind of book. I mean, I kind of like it, but I don't love it. It's not dead on course.
It took me a while to discover certain kinds of books that I really liked. The Czech writer Milan Kundera was extremely important for me. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and also his book, The Art of the Novel.
Immensely significant texts that seemed to have incredible freedom. They were messing around with the rules. He would tell a bit of a story, Kundera, and then stop and give you a reflection on tonal music and Beethoven. Then there'd be another bit of narrative, and then a reflection on three words from a dictionary. You're thinking, wow, why not? This opened up a whole horizon.
[13:38] The Value of Notebooks and Note Taking
David Perell:
It's like a collage.
Alain de Botton:
Yes. I was also really inspired by paintings and certain kinds of modern artists. People like Joseph Cornell, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Agnes Martin, Christo. These are all people who, in different ways and different media, were messing about. It seemed to have a certain kind of sensibility.
That was important. I've ended up writing books that don't really quite fit. I've written a couple of novels, Essays in Love and The Course of Love, which are very inspired by Kundera in the sense of a mixture of narrative and psychological analysis. I've written collages of things. I've written books that rely heavily on images. I'm very interested in using pictures in intriguing ways so that the text and the picture are bouncing off each other.
David Perell:
How do you think about what it means to live like a writer? When you are a writer, so little of the work actually happens with your fingers pecking at a keyboard. So much of the work happens when you're thinking, whether you're in the shower, on a walk, or traveling. How do you think about that, which is actually the majority of the work, in terms of time?
Alain de Botton:
I think it's paradoxical. It takes writers. It took me a long time to realize if I'm not doing anything at 9:00 in the morning on a Monday, when most sensible people are gearing up for really intense stuff, it doesn't matter. The really good work could be happening on a Sunday night at 4:00 AM, and real work, as you say, is feeling, thinking, and it may not happen in the standard places.
So I was always like a good boy who wanted to be a dutiful member of society. And I thought I've got to sit at my desk. I can't go to the park. But now I think, well, if the park is where you might think, go for it. If going on holiday is the place where you might think.
Proust has this. Proust, by the way, who I love. Marcel Proust, the great French novelist, wrote this really weird book called In Search of Lost Time, which is again, a mixture of essay, novel, and I don't know, disquisition on the meaning of life. It's a philosophy book, really. He mixed it all up when he was talking about creativity.
He said, if you want to recommend somebody to have insights into life and you could give them a magical choice between meeting a great mind like Plato or Descartes for an evening, or going out, and he's having sexist, heterosexual assumptions, with a woman who will make him suffer. We know who that person should spend the evening with, the woman who will make him suffer.
He had this particular view that suffering, coming back to what we were talking about, pain. He had the view that suffering is the great catalyst of insight. Therefore, if you want to get some material, suffer.
We know this from music, right? Think of the breakup, the great breakup albums. Think of Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks. That's a breakup album. Think of Phil Collins. Face Value, breakup albums. Great bits of music that emerging out of pop music, but also classical music. It's always breakup. There's something about being torn apart, that good writing is partly on the side of madness, death, dislocation, chaos, and just otherness.
If things are going well for you, you unite with the world. You feel kinship with the way things are. You're not a rebel or a revolutionary or a tragic figure. You quite like the way the world is because it's doing good things for you.
But when you're desperate, you want to kill yourself. You want to jump out of the window. I'm just being autobiographical. You're not on the side of that. You're reading life against the grain. In those moods, you're more likely to kind of find the great truths that are outside of the normal, satisfied, smug perfume.
[17:07] Navigating Insecurities as a Writer
David Perell:
Well, let me add one thing to that. I also think that they're the places where reason disappears, and when reason disappears, the emotion, or almost the animal within us take over.
We often, I mean, we escape preconceived language, right? If you get really mad at someone, like you're just freaking angry and you're yelling at them, you will say things that you've never said before, that you've been feeling, that have been deep, deep, deep, deep, deep down, that all of a sudden have come out.
A lot of when writing feels trite or contrived, it's because you're kind of rearranging other words and thoughts that other people have given you or that you've kind of had in the past. In suffering and in anger and in sadness and grief, it's the times when the way that we've always done things, or conventional wisdom, whatever it is, just disappears and breaks down.
Alain de Botton:
Boom.
David Perell:
Like the animal within us comes out.
Alain de Botton:
That's right. In a way, you kind of have to have nothing left to lose. You don't give a shit anymore. You say, fuck this, and you're just there. You're there with certain truths because you've given up lying, deceiving or sentimental reassurance.
The great works of literature often have a relationship to desperation in some way. Desperation could be driven by death. The sense of like, your time's coming up now, you know, have you got anything left to say? Is there something you still want to tell us? Something that you didn't dare before.
Good thinking is good feeling. But what good feeling is, is not caring to subscribe to the kind of normal bromides that we live by.
David Perell:
Well, it hit me the other day, actually, as I was preparing for this, that sometimes you'll read somebody's writing and be like, wow, I really want to write like that. And then you realize that actually you can't just write like that. In order to write like that, you have to think like that. In order to think like that, you have to live like that.
Alain de Botton:
Live like that.
David Perell:
And actually, that's where it begins.
Alain de Botton:
Yeah, that's right. That's right. Look, there are certain kind of clichéd images of the writer in a black cape, escaping bourgeois society, et cetera. We're not talking necessarily these kind of clichés. You could be wearing a T-shirt from wherever. It's not the outward signs. It's where your soul is.
I also think writing is an act of communication between people. And if your communication is just brilliant with the people around you and in your life, what's the point of writing?
Loneliness, loneliness of experience, is also absolutely key. A sense that no one understands. A lot of writing begins with a sense no one around me understands.
If we think about it, what is writing? Socrates was quite good on this. Socrates' view was we shouldn't write books because books are born out of a despair at intra-human communication. He optimistically thought that the way to do philosophy was not to write it down, but to get a group of people in dialogue. That's what you should do.
He was perhaps living at a time when living in a small amazing city at a golden age, you could have those conversations. But for many of us, we can't have conversations, and we become writers because no one's listening and no one's speaking properly.
There's that basic kind of, Freud has this word sublimation to describe the origins of artistic activity. The artist sublimates. The artist is faced with a particularly acute version of all the dilemmas that afflict people: the conflict between duty and pleasure, the conflict between life and death, between money and creativity, all these conflicts.
Freud saw the artist as especially disturbed and compromised by them, and the artistic work arising as a way of reconciling fantasy and reality. It's like the world can't be as you'd wish it to be. One option is to kill yourself or go mad, and the other option is to create a work of art. So the work of art is the best thing you can do with your dislocation and distress. It is an alternative to losing your mind. You're focusing your mind when its complete loss and disintegration is in the air.
[21:51] The Importance of Structure and Editing
David Perell:
Yeah. You have me think about pleasure and pain and how sometimes in a moment when things, when I'm riding high, it's like, wow, we get to live in this world and there's so many different things that we can explore and people we get to meet and places we get to go. It's all so fast and infinite and magical. And then in the moments of pain, there's just a tragedy of it all. It's like you get this one life and you're stuck on this dang thing.
Alain de Botton:
And.
David Perell:
How am I gonna cope with this?
Alain de Botton:
Right, sure. Every life has moments of severe distress. You'd have to be extremely unimaginative, or just very lucky, to not regularly run into quite a lot of distress. We're living in the privileged West, so we're not even talking about some of the more egregious events that can come from the outside. We're just talking about life in a relatively peaceful, prosperous, well-ordered society, which already is an amazing achievement.
You're going to hit so many problems. Someone you love will not love you, first big problem you're going to hit. Or someone's going to love you, but not in the way that feels right. There's going to be a conflict between two people, or someone's going to betray you. Welcome to eons of suffering.
There's going to be a difficulty somewhere along the line between your sense of who you are, how you want to be seen, and how others see you. You will be misheard, misrepresented, etc. There's going to be conflict around money, status, and achievement. There's going to be something about a pull between money's here, fame is there, happiness is there, respectability, some kind of confidence.
Before knowing anything about someone, you can look at a baby in their cradle and think the person's going to hit these walls. That's before anything major has gone wrong. Talk to anyone over 30, anyone over 40, definitely anyone over 50. You're going to find evidence of these incredible scars.
It's from this that I think is born our receptivity to the arts. If you look at Van Gogh's Irises, the man was in pieces. The man was suffering like a religious saint. He was a very unhappy man. Poor thing, he was lonely, desperate, misunderstood, he ached for love. He was just so alone.
Vincent van Gogh, one of the most famous people of the 19th century, was absolutely abject and desperate. When he looks at flowers, he's not just telling you about a flower. He's telling you about a flower seen through the lens of agony. When you look at beauty through the lens of agony, it becomes something slightly different; it becomes a life raft. The guy's not just painting a flower. He's painting a last reason to live, and in the end, he didn't make it. That's what lends the kind of poignancy. Some of the most beautiful things that humans have created have been born out of a kind of negotiation with something appalling.
[26:38] Writing About Love and Relationships
David Perell:
It's easy to think, "Wow, I want to produce something beautiful." The image that came to mind as you were talking is like two sides of a rubber band. As you stretch the pain on one side, you almost get the beauty on the other side.
It's quite hard to create something that's truly beautiful and astonishing. It's almost as if it requires a kind of sacrifice, not just a sacrifice in work ethic, but a sacrifice in terms of what we've been through in order to get there.
Alain de Botton:
Let's not go and hunt out that stuff. It'll come to you. Just sit still. Anyone who's sitting there going, "Oh, when's that great suffering?" Just don't worry, life's cooking up.
David Perell:
That's a good catch.
Alain de Botton:
Do you know the painter Agnes Martin? Abstract artist? Amazing. She just does lines across abstract things. I read about her life. Her life is so full of pain. She had a kind of psychiatric disorder. She lived in New Mexico on her own, and she just makes these beautiful, regular canvases that are just trying to hold onto basic order and stability in a chaotic way. They're so moving again, because you sense the opposite of what the painting is, like those beautiful flowers of Van Gogh. You know that there's something opposed to that, as you say, the rubber band, the other side of it.
David Perell:
Tell me about things that you love and hate, because what you said that I thought was so beautiful is that you're not just inspired by beauty and wisdom, but also inspired by ugliness and cruelty. I'd never heard somebody say that before.
Alain de Botton:
Let's think of visual London. A city where we are has got some really ugly parts, like all big cities, like all modern cities. Why are they so ugly? What on earth has gone wrong? How can humans build beautifully in one place and time? Then, when the world's even richer and has more resources, they suddenly build in a really ugly way. What is going on?
It's a visual translation of the dumbness of the human animal, and it enraged me. I wrote a book called *The Architecture of Happiness*, which was an attempt to think about buildings.
It was born of living in a horrible part of London, not a beautiful part. London is beautiful in parts, but small parts. I wrote it because I couldn't bear the circumstances in which I was living, and I just thought this is so unnecessary.
That got me going, but that's a visual example, and there are psychological examples, too. Mean-mindedness, sentimentality, cruelty, humiliation; these things I want to protest against, make a stand against.
I want to get revenge against. A lot of writing is about revenge. Let's face it, it's about revenge.
What do I mean by revenge? The silenced person who gets to have their say on the page. A lot of writers are quite meek in person. You meet them, and you think, "They wouldn't hurt a fly," and you pick up the text, "Wow!"
They're doing it because they're not so good at hitting back on in life, but it all comes out on the page.
There are people who don't believe in you, there are people who don't understand you, there are people who trample on you, et cetera, and to say, "Here's a book, look at how who books are dedicated to." They're fascinating. It's not just the loved ones; it's often the hated ones, the ones who didn't believe, et cetera.
Writing as revenge, writing as a cure, writing as a memorial, all these different headings we could write about what writing is.
[30:31] The Role of Psychology in Writing
David Perell:
What's so cool about the written word is that it is the closest way that we can best translate our consciousness, what's going on.
One of the things that I found particularly interesting about your process is that sometimes at the end of the day, you'll come home and you'll download thoughts and ideas. I had this image of the different levels of consciousness: Hey, what do you think about right now? Hey, what did you think about today? Over time, as you sit there in stillness and jot down ideas, you realize there's all these layers.
David Perell:
The first thoughts that we have when somebody asks, "What are we thinking about?" often don't even capture the core thing that we are thinking about.
Alain de Botton:
It's not just words that do this. Music obviously does it. If you said to people, "Would you rather have an amazing facility at music or at words?", I would say that most of us would choose music. There is something extraordinarily direct.
Music is the motions of the soul with the minimal intervention, which is why music speaks across the ages, speaks across cultures, et cetera. It is the language of the soul and therefore has this extraordinary power.
Would you rather have written "Hey Jude" or *War and Peace*? You want "Hey Jude". Don't you think? We're trying this out.
David Perell:
Yeah.
Alain de Botton:
To some extent, also the visual language, the language of painting, translates the movements of the soul into a visual.
David Perell:
Would you have rather painted the Sistine Chapel, written "Hey Jude," or written *War and Peace*? That'd be a fun bar conversation.
Alain de Botton:
Yeah, that would be. The Sistine Chapel doesn't do it for me, but there are other paintings, like Van Gogh's Irises.
David Perell:
Yeah.
Alain de Botton:
Because I can do writing, I'm naturally attracted to doing something I can't do. I envy the songmakers and the artists, but maybe if I was a songwriter or an artist, I'd admire the writers.
David Perell:
Yeah.
David Perell:
I guess when it comes to writing, the reason I say that point about consciousness is when I read David Foster Wallace, I feel like I'm putting on his glasses and stepping into his brain in a way that no other medium can quite do. Now, a painting can show me how somebody is seeing something. Music can make me feel something deeply. You're right, I can feel what the contents of their soul. But writing is unique for the contents of the mind.
Alain de Botton:
Look, we need all of these things. We need all these things. I mean, remember this line in Flaubert where he says we're all mute bears banging desperately on a drum as we look at the beauty of the stars? In other words, we're this kind of trapped, caged animal that's just aware of living in the universe. We don't know what to do other than mutely bang our fists against this drum. And it's this image of inarticulacy.
I mean, all of us go to our graves with most of our experience still locked inside us. When somebody dies, it's not just their physical form that dies. It's millions and billions of impressions of thoughts, of sensations, et cetera, that have evaporated. As every brain switches off, an enormous memory is just deleted.
Every now and then, it's what we call the history of culture. A few things are rescued from this burning library. Think of every person as like a library containing millions of books that are tipped into the ocean. Every now and then, just as those books are cascading down into the sea, someone rescues one book or two or three or four, and we get a little fragmentary impression of what it was like for that person to think.
But this is a fraction. Think of the history of culture not just as all the books in the world, but think that those books are a fragment of what humans have actually thought and felt. Then you're starting to get a sense of the scale of mental activity of which these people we call artists are only a few extracts from that unwritten story.
So writers are writing the story that most humans have no time or inclination to write for themselves. They're just the scribes of humanity's thoughts, not just their own thoughts, but humanity's thoughts more generally, which is come back to that other thing I was saying. Why people will say to me or other writers, "That was my life you were describing. That was my thought that you had for me or with me." And that's just because we bathe in this much wider community of thoughts that's wider than the common sense thoughts.
There's a lovely quote from Emerson where he says, "In the minds of geniuses, we find our own neglected thoughts." In other words, geniuses do not have thoughts that are fundamentally different from other people. What they do have is a kind of fidelity to the more neglected thoughts, the thoughts that are not mentioned in the parlor, as it were, that are not brought up at the dinner table, but that are inside everybody and that are neglected through habit, embarrassment, shame, status seeking, whatever it is that gets in the way of a more honest dialogue.
David Perell:
How much of your experience as a writer has been about a kind of discipline where you sit down, you do the work, you show up. I sit down at 9 a.m., the inspiration comes and finds me versus something where you're channeling something from beyond you?
Alain de Botton:
It's like the proverbial example of sailing, isn't it? You've got to be with your ship, and you've got to have the sail, and you've got to have the sail out, and you're hoping for a prevailing wind.
Yes, but you need that wind. You need to be out. You need to be out on the lake with your boat. You're there with your butterfly net. You've got to be there with the butterfly. Occasionally, a butterfly may fly into it. You've got to be there with the net; otherwise, you're not going to catch it. But what does that actually mean? What does it mean to be out on the lake or to be with the butterfly net? Does it mean you need to be at your desk at 9:00? I don't know. I mean, you've got to have your brain switched on. You've got to be attentive to your own sensations and thoughts. That's the real work.
David Perell:
Attentive to your own sensations and thoughts.
Alain de Botton:
Sure. So if you're scrolling endlessly on your phone, you're lost. Your mind is not with you.
David Perell:
I love that. I've been doing this thing where, at the end of the day, I'll just sit down for 20 or 30 minutes and use an index card. I'll just try to fill the index card, attentive to my own sensations and thoughts. I love that turn of phrase.
I'm just mystified and blown away by how many sensations and thoughts there are that I just don't realize. Most of which have no substance, but some of which really do, but I do not realize in the hustle and bustle of everyday life.
Alain de Botton:
That's right. We would need hours to process minutes, to really pay attention to what's going on in a minute. The human perceptual mechanism is purposefully dampened down. There's a quote from George Eliot, where she says something like, "If we were truly attentive to the mystery and complexity of things, we would hear the squirrel's heartbeat and would hear the grass grow."
Paraphrasing it badly, we would go mad from the multiplicity of things; we would lose our minds. But the key thing is we would hear the squirrel's heartbeat and hear the grass grow. In other words, what she's saying is, you're hearing it anyway, but you repress it. To use Freudian language, you repress it. These things are in you, but you haven't paid them attention, because to be alive to their resonance would be to lose yourself.
In order to speak to you now, I'm having to push away so many thoughts. Every time I create a sentence, I'm sacrificing other sentences in the name of trying to sound logical. I'm dimly aware, as we sit here and speak, that I'm also thinking of other things, things I'm going to do later, things that have happened.
Because I'm not yet mad or senile—I will go mad and will go senile, probably at some point, but not yet. I'm still able to maintain a coherent narrative so that we're speaking. There are many things going on in the mind.
David Perell:
I'm mystified by the history of this room and all the things that have happened.
Alain de Botton:
Right. Our minds are such rich instruments. I can look at you, and I'm also partly looking at those books and thinking about those books and the shape of their spines.
It's almost as though there's some kind of triage system in our minds, which has evolved over thousands of years, of what's important now. Our minds are very good at going, "This is what's important now," so I'm going to sacrifice other things. I'm not going to look at that.
This is what makes very old people or mad people or small children fascinating, but also maddening to talk to, is that they can't keep a coherent thread. If you say to a child, "What have you been doing in the garden?" they'll say, "I've been playing," and then they'll go, "Table." They forget because they see something else. They can't triage their thoughts.
Good art, a good artist, a good writer, is someone who's borrowing from the art of triaging badly. In other words, they are triaging not according to the standard sense of what's important, but according to a more diffuse, free-associative sense. They're going outside the normal bounds.
You mentioned David Foster Wallace. If you said, "David Foster Wallace, go on a cruise ship, what are you noticing?" he wouldn't go, "I'm noticing that the bar's here." He's alive to other resonances that are outside the normal purview, and that's what all writers do.
David Perell:
I had this experience. I've been in London working on this documentary, and the first day we were on the Embankment on Waterloo Bridge for five hours. And you have this really interesting sensation. I was sort of responsible for holding this caution tape and making sure that all the walkers by, I mean a few thousand over the course of however many hours, would see and then wouldn't disrupt what's going on.
And if you look at these people, no one is looking at the Embankment. No one is looking at the buildings around them. Everyone's just going from point A to point B. But then you sit there and you just look and you just stare at the same thing for six hours, and all these things come alive.
You realize all these subtleties in the architecture, in how the sun changes the buildings, and you just realize, oh, my goodness, I've never actually looked at what's going on. And I think that that's a lot of what writing is. You're almost like taking handcuffs to an idea, and you're just tethering yourself to that idea, and you're just forcing yourself to look. Painting is the same way.
I'm continually mesmerized by all the things that I didn't see in hour one, hour two, hour three, that begin to reveal themselves. And then you share that with other people. They're like, how do you see so deeply? You're like, no, no, no, I just looked at it for longer than you did.
Alain de Botton:
That's right, that's right. And again, small children are a guide to this. Anyone who's taken a small child to the park will know how this works. So you as the adult, they're like, right, we're going to the park. And the child's like, hang on, I don't care about the park. I'm just waking up to the mysteries of existence.
So I've just seen a brick wall and I want to run my hand along the mortar of that wall, or there's a little bit of moss and I just want to stroke my cheek against it. And you're thinking, okay, well, that's their priority. And the artist is a little bit like that. The artist is somebody who, everybody's going, go to the park. And they're going, actually, I've just been detained by something a little unusual. And to turn that into something we call a work of art is a great achievement.
David Perell:
What's been the role of poetry in your life? Both as a consumer, but especially as a writer.
Alain de Botton:
From an early age, I felt on the back foot in relation to poetry. There was some early class in poetry that I should have gone to, but somehow didn't. I felt like I didn't get it.
So I remember always reading poetry thinking, what's going on here? What are we supposed to do here? It's slightly weird language, and I don't know what's going on.
At the same time, I started to notice that I sometimes had a poetic turn of phrase. By which I really mean that I wasn't, you know, there's that distinction between prose and poetry. Prose is, summarized broadly, you're trying to get to a destination, and you don't care so much about the words that are being used. You're just trying to say it. That's why Safety Instruction Manual is written in prose, not this thing called poetry.
Poetry takes a more meandering route. It's interested in the associations around words, interested in making things more resonant, prettier, whatever it is, more thoughtful. It's taking a serendipitous route to a destination. I remember thinking, I'm interested in that. I'm interested in that as a writer, but I haven't gone to poetry school, and I don't know what these poets do.
There's this idea that the thing that really makes poetry is the length of the lines, the meter, the iambic this thing and that. All of that stuff that I don't know about. I'm not sure whether that is the case. I think that poetry exists within, you can put it in prose sentences.
There is this odd hybrid called the prose poem. Baudelaire, great French writer, wrote prose poems. Lots of people have written prose poems, which is really, you're abandoning some of the formal structure of poetry but retaining some of what I want to call the resonance of poetry within a prose structure. I'm interested in that.
The poets that I favor are what you might call easy-to-read poets. Poets that are not necessarily always talking about Achilles and Ajax and all those mythological figures that slightly fry your mind, but they're speaking in, they're using ordinary words and ordinary situations, but putting them in slightly new ways.
So the English poet Philip Larkin has been incredibly important. Like many people who get confused with poetry, he's a poet for people who don't understand poetry. Very easy to understand. Someone like W.H. Auden, again, very easy to read poet from whom you can get an awful lot, etcetera, etcetera. So I'm with the easy-to-read guys.
David Perell:
Yeah. And girls. For me with poetry, the rules don't help me. The only thing, the only way that I get anything out of poetry is to try to memorize it, and then somehow it comes alive.
Alain de Botton:
Yeah, interesting. That's really interesting.
David Perell:
I can't read poetry. I have to just read it and read it and say, wow, that struck me. I don't know why. And then I memorize it.
Alain de Botton:
That suggests also that it might be fun to do it with someone. That if you were reading it to someone speaking poetry, which, of course, is how poetry began.
David Perell:
Yes, of course.
Alain de Botton:
Of course. That's kind of fun. So memorizing it, speaking it, socializing it might be a really good way in.
David Perell:
What moved you to spend so much time distilling other writers? A lot of the School of Life videos early on was, hey, guide to Nietzsche, guide to Sartre. What moved you to summarize their work as a writer?
Alain de Botton 47:37 - 49:53
I'd written a book called The Consolations of Philosophy, which is a look at a number of six philosophers. I'd written a book on Proust called How Proust Can Change Your Life, et cetera. So I'd always been interested in how you talk about other writers, other thinkers.
I was never interested in being an academic. Academics are always claiming to be very faithful to the ideas of the people they talk about. I was less interested in being absolutely faithful as interested in charting what a writer made me think about, where they took me. So it no longer becomes just the writer. It's the interaction between me and that writer, which could go to a slightly different place.
Not necessarily what did Nietzsche actually say, but what can he say to us now, given the things that he did say? What resonances exist between what he said and our own times, or just my reading of it? So I'm interested in a more flavored, more personal response to things.
I often imagine someone saying, okay, you've read this thinker. What's really stayed with you? Let's be really honest here. What is sticking with you? That's different from trying to write a Wikipedia page on somebody. It's a very different exercise.
You were describing a typical day when you might ask yourself, what really happened today? Imagine doing that similar exercise. You shut somebody else's book. You've been reading Nietzsche and shut somebody else's book, and you think, okay, what's really stayed here? The answer could be quite different. So it's not an academic exercise.
I think insofar as my books on other thinkers have resonated—they've sold extremely well, and YouTube videos have gone extremely well—the reason is that I'm doing something there that's different from the standard, what ChatGPT would do for you, what a Wikipedia page entry, what an academic would do for you. I'm not doing it academically.
David Perell 49:54 - 50:32
The thing that's coming to mind for me is how much of writing, how much people are bogged down by what they feel like they're supposed to do. You keep saying, you know, not an academic, and even in school it sort of pushes us in a certain direction.
I was going to pop in, but it didn't feel right. When you were talking about poetry, I was like, it's probably a good thing that you didn't take that poetry class because so much of the way that we talk about poetry is super left-brained and analytical. You were talking about iambic pentameter this and whatnot. What about just appreciating poetry? Someone comes in like, hey, appreciate poetry, but so often you're just bogged down by, oh, you're just not supposed to do that.
Alain de Botton:
I mean, look, it's one of the great problems of life, this rule of what you're supposed to do. Let's stop talking about writing and talk about business for a minute, just because it's a nice place to go, an unexpected place to go. Businesses are creative enterprises, structures, consumer businesses that get this wrong all the time. Because a consumer business is an attempt to try and work out what will please somebody else. Very often people are guided by what you're supposed to do rather than what you think really might be nice for you. So the same fakeness, sentimentality, plastic quality enters as enters into creative works.
So imagine the sort of bad restaurant. Let's say a restaurant wants to be really elegant and lovely, but it doesn't think about what elegance and loveliness really is. It doesn't really go like, "Do you really need flowers on the table? Do you really want to start with a melon? Do you really like melon?" You know, whatever it is.
Think about people hosting dinner parties. Imagine that first time when you invite a friend around for dinner, you're like, "Please come around." People reach a certain stage in bourgeois urban life where they invite a colleague from work to their home to break bread together. Suddenly it's like, "Wow, I've got to give a dinner party. So I've got to buy some chicken or something because that's what you do." We gotta have the first course and then the second course, and then we gotta sit down. People get terribly hampered rather than thinking, okay, what do I really want to do here?
It might be totally different. I mean, imagine saying, "Okay, let's just have some crisps and a can of tuna and lie on the sofa and just chat because that's actually who we are and what we want to do." Let's turn out the light and look at the stars. Let's go for a walk between courses. Let's cry together. Let's do the washing up. Let's just be weird because we are weird.
There's what you're supposed to do and be and feel, and then there's the truth, which is the weirdness of life. This happens also in relationships. This is the fun thing about a good relationship, right? You meet someone and you're dating them and you're like, "How are you? I'm very fine. How are you?" And then three months down the line, you're like, "Did you mean any of those things? Oh, no. Do you really like ice skating? Oh, God, no. I just thought it would impress you." You suddenly emerge as a much more complicated, ultimately more lovable, more weird kind of person.
David Perell:
Isn't it so weird when it comes to writing how all the people that you like, you like for their idiosyncrasies? They've leaned into something to a degree that you've never seen before. Sometimes they just bend grammar in all sorts of weird ways. Whatever they're doing, it feels true to who they are.
Yet once you sit down to write, you're like, "Oh, I'm not supposed to do that. I'm not supposed to do that." And then you kind of get boxed in, especially when you start off as a...
Alain de Botton:
Writer, which is why those exercises are rather good to think, okay, if there were no rules, if you couldn't fail, if no one was going to laugh, if you were going to be dead tomorrow, what would you actually do and say, and how would you write, let's say?
That's the thing you should write. For me in my writing career, I thought, I want to be a novelist. So I got to write these things called novels based on the 19th century novel. Gradually I just thought, "Fuck it to all those rules," and ended up producing a book which was much weirder, more original, and some people like it.
David Perell:
Which one was that?
Alain de Botton:
That was my first book called On Love Essays in Love. But, as I say, now I'm a spoiled boy. Now I just only do what I want.
And I kind of think if I'm getting bored, the reader will be getting bored. So I just want to write. That doesn't mean the opposite's not true. Just because I'm interested doesn't mean the reader's interested, but it's got a much higher chance of interesting someone.
So now I wake up every morning, and I just think, right, what do I feel like writing about? I'm no longer thinking about books, weirdly. I'm thinking about pieces of prose that are around 800 words long, and I don't care what it's about. I just want it to feel like the thing that I most want to write that day.
I write in the early morning when I'm feeling like other people's agendas, etc., are not really on the horizon. So I'm coming from sleep. It's a protected personal space, and I just write what pleases me. Then I think I'll find a place for it; I'll find somewhere to slot it in because I've got about 22 books on the go now. I just think, oh, I'll put it there, or I'll put it there. One day it will belong to somewhere. But it's written, as it were, from the heart.
I have totally given up the old way of working whereby I'm working on a book, and that means I just need to knit the next bit of the tapestry. I'm just going by feeling. I mean, sometimes, okay, I'm slightly exaggerating. Sometimes I have a sense of, like, it would be good to try and fill this bucket of thoughts around pictures. Okay, maybe drop them in that bucket. But on the whole, I'm trying to keep things fluid and feeling very authentic.
David Perell:
Yeah, my friend Jeremy Giffon once said to me, if you're ever struggling with writer's block, three words: be more honest. Be more honest.
Alain de Botton:
That's what writer's block is. Writer's block is a conflict between the shame and the desire for honesty. It's a sense of what you're supposed to do and feel and what you're actually feeling and doing, which has gone numb.
So again, it's a very useful exercise to say to yourself, what am I actually feeling? What do I actually want? Where am I actually? And seeing.
I mean, it's a very good rule of thumb with people as well. If you've got a blocked relationship with someone, sometimes we get stuck in games playing and double-guessing, and all the rest of it. Just go, what would I really want to tell this person? What do I really? Sometimes it's not always possible to say it, but at least if you've got it in view, that's very helpful.
David Perell:
I got to credit you with changing my mind on one thing. There's one thing you really changed my mind on, and it's the news.
I still remember exactly where it was. There's a part early in the book where you talk about Hegel, and he says that a society becomes modern when it elevates the news to the level of what religious faiths used to be in society. I was like, whoa.
It made me realize to step away from this book, and you just realize everyone is in this constant consumption of the news. It's a weird head scratcher about the modern world: this obsession with people we'll never meet, places we'll never go.
Alain de Botton
And of course it shapes the horizon, the mental horizon in an unbelievable way, the news media. It gives us a sense of what you're supposed to be thinking about.
Back to supposed to. And it's so powerful. So people will say things like, well, of course we're living in this very sad age.
Sometimes I think, let's just take a step back here. Says who? When does age get anointed, and compared to what? The 4th century in Abyssinia or the 12th century in Syria?
They're like, well, because of certain things that have happened in place X that CNN has alerted them to.
I mean, look, you can see how it happens, and we're all prey to that. But any artist worth their salt does not think this way. This is a very programmatic, industrial way of thinking. Our inner lives have been industrialized and commercialized, and that's no good for the free thinker, the honest thinker, the authentic thinker.
We've got to take care around this thing called the news. I think you're not really a responsible adult until you don't know certain significant things that people around you think of as very important. If there's a singer that you don't know about at all, if there's a movie that people know about, but you just don't know about it, you just haven't crossed that threshold, congratulate yourself. You're doing well. You're keeping a bit of your mental experience for yourself. We don't need to know everything that everybody else knows. We need to know the interesting bits of our own experience.
David Perell
I don't know if this is actually the etymology of it, but we'll run with the bit and pretend it's true. You could almost think of the news, the new, all the new things.
I would almost say that knowing all the new things is almost the antithesis of the pursuit of wisdom, which is actually about cultivating the small percentage of old things that have stood.
Alain de Botton
The test of time, or spotting the archetypes, spotting that the so-called new is a repetition of something old. And what is it? What's the story that keeps getting repeated? It's the story of a tyrant who forgave their enemy. It's the story of a society that became decadent. It's the story of greed that got in the way of goodness, or whatever it is.
The news doesn't want us to think that way. It wants us to think that anomalous things have always happened.
Art pulls in another direction. Think of Jericho's Raft of the Medusa. Do you know that painting in the Louvre in Paris? There was a ship called the Medusa in 19th century France, and it ran aground. The passengers ended up on a raft, and they ended up eating each other. There was cannibalism, and they're waving in hope of rescue.
Various people have said various things about this Raft of the Medusa. I think it was Victor Hugo. Someone said, the people on the Raft of the Medusa, that's France. France is on The Raft of the Medusa. It's a painting about the whole of France, which is a way of saying, okay, so it was a news item. It was an accident. It was like a plane crash, one of our, but it was mined for its metaphoric association. Suddenly it could be a metaphor for how the nation has run aground and how people are eating one another, as it were.
All large scale events have that potentially metaphoric quality. If you think of all the ancient Greek myths, Troy, stories, Troy, Odysseus, Penelope, etc., let's imagine they were news items, but they're also myths. What we mean by a myth is something with an application way beyond itself. It's speaking about something eternal in ourselves, which is why they work. The story of Odysseus returning to his beloved Penelope and going through all these adventures is part of your story, my story, and everybody's story right now.
The news doesn't want us to think of that way. News wants to direct us towards only the very surface novelty. So it's thinking in a media way and thinking in a mythic way, and it's very good to try and think in a mythic way.
David Perell
I mean, I don't know if this is actually the etymology of it, but we'll run with the bit and pretend it's true. You could almost think of the news, the new, all the new things. The news, the new is in news.
I would almost say that knowing all the new things is almost the antithesis of the pursuit of wisdom, which is actually about cultivating the small percentage of old things.
Alain de Botton
That have stood the test of time.
David Perell
Or spotting the archetypes.
Alain de Botton
Spotting that the so-called new is a repetition of something old. What is it? What's the story that keeps getting repeated? It's the story of a tyrant who forgave their enemy. It's the story of a society that became decadent. It's the story of greed that got in the way of goodness, or whatever it is.
The news doesn't want us to think that way. It wants us to think that anomalous things have always happened.
David Perell
Whereas art pulls in another direction.
Alain de Botton
Think of Jericho's Raft of the Medusa. Do you know that painting in the Louvre in Paris? There was a ship called the Medusa in 19th century France, and it ran aground. The passengers ended up on a raft. They ended up eating each other. There was cannibalism, and they're waving. It shows them waving in hope of rescue.
Various people have said various things about this Raft of the Medusa. I think it was Victor Hugo. Someone said, the people on the Raft of the Medusa, that's France. France is the one on the Raft of the Medusa. It's a painting about the whole of France.
David Perell
Which is a way of saying, okay, it's one, it was, so it was a news item. It was the, it was the an accident of like it was like a plane crash, like one of our, but it was mined for its metaphoric association.
Suddenly it could be like a metaphor for how the nation has run aground and how people are eating one another, as it were.
Alain de Botton
All large scale events have that potentially metaphoric quality. If you think of all the ancient Greek myths, Troy or stories, Troy, Odysseus, and Penelope, etc., let's imagine they were news items, but they're also myths.
What we mean by a myth is something with an application way beyond itself. It's speaking about something eternal in ourselves, which is why they work.
David Perell
The story of Odysseus returning to his beloved Penelope and going through all these adventures is something that is part of your story, my story, and everybody's story right now.
Alain de Botton
The news doesn't want to think that way. News wants to direct us towards only the very surface novelty.
It's thinking in a media way and thinking in a mythic way, and I think it's very good to try and think in a mythic way.
David Perell
Yeah, and also in the tapestry of the news, the thread of politics is so bound within, and politics is the mind killer.
Say we're having a conversation about Van Gogh's water lilies. Okay, so pretend I don't like the water lilies. You like the water lilies. We'll look at them, and we can just look at this thing and come to the thing fresh. We can say, "Hey, I like this painting. I don't know, something about the way that the blues and the greens are interacting kind of bothers me." Wow, I really don't like that.
Whereas when we have a conversation about a politician, what has now happened is we're coming to that topic with a bunch of preconceived notions. Because of that, we're in these word traps, just as you were talking about earlier, this age of sadness. It's like the right and the left and stuff like that. And because of that, we're in these sort of boxed in. Already the fault lines of divisiveness and separation, and this team versus that team, are kind of rooted inside of it.
Whereas when we read about events that happened, say in Ancient Greece, we don't have those notions.
Alain de Botton
I understand.
David Perell
So we can approach them more freshly.
Alain de Botton
Again, it's back to what you're supposed to think. Political structures give you a map of what you're supposed to think if you are a certain sort of person. So, if you're from the left, you should have certain kinds of antipathies and certain kinds of loves. If you're from the right, ditto. But what's really interesting, once you go beyond politics and once you get to know people really well, this is the fun stuff of life.
So, I remember being with a group of friends, and we started playing a game. It was trying to reduce the shame around the idea of which politicians you found kind of sexually attractive, despite maybe not agreeing with their politics. Was there any kind of sexual feeling around certain politicians?
Of course, we all ended up giggling a lot because there were such striking dissonances or discrepancies between what you were supposed to feel and what people actually felt around certain politicians and ideas, et cetera. So, no one actually thinks in a purely left or right way. They just think they're supposed to. The reality is much more nuanced and complicated. Think of ideas of masculinity and femininity, which we know that an archetypal man, really, in many points, does not think like an archetypal man and feel like an archetypal man.
David Perell
And Napoleon's letters to Josephine.
Alain de Botton
Right.
David Perell
I'm just amazed every time I read those. You think of Napoleon's military conqueror, and it's like the sweetest, most desperate love.
Alain de Botton
Right, right. Yeah, it's a good example. Millions of other examples.
Exactly. A true picture of human nature is so much more nuanced, and politics is a massive abbreviation. When people argue about politics, they're half the time also arguing with themselves, trying to make the world simpler than it is. Inside every right-winger, there's a left-winger inside. Vice versa. Inside every man, there's a woman. Inside every woman, there's a man. Inside every adult, there's a child. These things are multiple. Whenever you come across a more simplified version, we know it's not true.
David Perell
The thing that surprised me the most from this conversation so far is how much you've referenced paintings. That's not something I expected coming into the conversation. I want to hear more about how you look at paintings and how you pull from paintings to bring them into your own creative expression.
Alain de Botton:
I think in many ways, one could point to various paintings and go, that's a bit of me, if you want to understand me. Look at these paintings.
The work of Cy Twombly, for example, is really important to me. Take some of those chalk writing images of Twombly, where it looks like someone's writing on a chalkboard in a crazy script, meaning something profound and archaic and strange. That, to me, is like a portrait of what thinking looks like. He's making mental maps of what thinking looks like. I think you could apply that metaphor to lots of things. A certain artist is giving you a picture of what X looks like, and it could be an inner state. Abstract artists are obviously very good at this. You can look at a Rothko and go, this is what melancholy looks like. This is what dejection looks like. This is what humiliation looks like. But you could also look at a realistic representation and go, this is what hope looks like. This is what courage looks like.
David Perell:
Serenity.
Alain de Botton:
Serenity, etc.
Paintings matter a lot, as does architecture and design. The visual environment is constantly communicating values to us. There's a lovely quote from the French writer Stendhal: "Beauty is the promise of happiness."
In other words, when we find something beautiful, it's really promising us a happy way of living. That's a much richer, complicated thing. So it's always good to ask somebody who says, "I find Greece beautiful," or "I find this house beautiful." You might go, "Okay, well, what's the way of life that you imagine? What are the values that you associate with this? How would an average day look? How would you want to live?"
There's a Rilke poem where the poet sees the bust of Apollo in a museum. The challenge is the bust of Apollo is beaming to Rilke a vision of life. It's saying, "Imagine what it would be like to live as this bust is suggesting that I live in." These are archaic, mythic, ancient Greek values. Every object is essentially beaming out to you how to live. This chair, which I don't particularly like, is suggesting how to be a person. It's got a vision of life.
Advertisers sometimes do this, but it's quite helpful. It's like, if your car turned into a person, what kind of a person would it be?
David Perell:
Right?
Alain de Botton:
If your chair turned into a person, what kind of person would it be? If your font on your book turned into a person, what kind of font? What's its character?
Things have character much more than we normally think. If this cloud in the sky was a person, what would it want to tell you? We're very good at that kind of synesthetic connection once we allow ourselves to be.
David Perell:
As writers, how should we think about our readers? In what way should we serve our readers and write for them, and in what ways should we say, "Ah, no, I'm writing for myself here, and I'm focused right now. Maybe I'll worry about the reader later." How do you navigate that relationship?
Alain de Botton:
I think you've got to have a reader inside you. It's not like I'm the David Perellnd the reader is out there. We all have a reader inside us. We are all readers as well as writers, and we host as well as perform. You just have to appeal to the inner reader.
What makes people very boring as conversational partners is they've stopped wondering how their words might sound to somebody else. We all know those people who have lost the ability to ask themselves a cruel but necessary question: How might what I'm saying fit into somebody else's life? Where could this go?
David Perell:
Totally oblivious.
Alain de Botton:
We all know these people who tell very boring stories. You ask, "How was your trip?" and they go, "Well, it was great, but when you get to the airport, the form..." You're thinking, "I understand this was very impactful for you, but I can't use this."
Somebody else might be using the same material but has prepared it a bit differently. They'll say, "You know how bureaucracy gets in the way of things, and the bureaucratic mindset has a certain sadism. Do you ever wonder when they say, 'Get to the back of the line?'"
Suddenly you're like, "They're telling you about their holiday, but they've given you something that you can eat, absorb, and metabolize. Something's nicely being prepared."
I think a good writer is thinking, "Where could this go inside the reader's mind?" They're also really faithful to a bit of themselves and saying, "It has to start with you and what you want to say, and then you've got to find a way of bridging that to what a reader could possibly absorb."
A perceptive friend of mine once looked at my writing style. Let me tell you a bit about my history as a person.
I had a very academic father, very erudite and very academic. Not a person of great originality of thought, but very well-read and spoke in a solemn way, like a proverbial professor.
Then I had a nanny who brought me up. My parents were off the scene for long periods, and I was left in the charge of a woman who was very uneducated but very clever, not an academic at all. Someone who loved nature, was brought up in a rural village in Switzerland, didn't think in academic terms, always wanted to think about nature, and was quite religious.
This friend of mine said, "You're basically trying to write a book that could be understood and liked by your father and your nanny."
I thought, "Wow, that's true. That's exactly what I'm doing, trying to speak to two different audiences."
To answer your question, one of the things about people and their readers: it's not just like, are you thinking of the reader? But what sort of reader are you picturing, imagining, honoring?
Let me tell you the other origins of my writing.
I had a teddy bear when I was little. I had all sorts of problems as a little kid, and I invented this bear. This bear had a life that was quite similar to mine, and I was its father.
I would speak to the bear in my mind and say, "I know this thing. I went to boarding school when I was eight years old. I was picked up, shipped to England from my native Switzerland."
In my mind, my way of processing and dealing with that is my bear also went to boarding school, and I was its father, and I was a really sweet and kind father. I would basically tell it nice things every evening and say, "Look, I'm really sorry that those boys threatened you today, but it's okay because you've got to go to school, and the holidays will come." I was the father to this bear.
Someone said to me, "The school of life is just your continuation of your bear. You're just doing for people what you did for that bear, translating your own experience into something digestible for an imaginary audience that's cheering you up and might be cheering them up too."
I thought that was perceptive, too.
If we think about religions, because religions are very onto this, a religion… I'm not a believer, and I'm sorry if members of your audience are. I have huge respect for religious belief. I think religion is a fantastic way of externalizing and metaphorizing our inner lives, ascribing to a supernatural figure an authority, wisdom, or kindness that actually exists within all of us, but it's refracted in this beautiful theological system.
I don't want to be impious, but I say it with respect because I don't think a Richard Dawkins editor would go, "That's very immature, and that's a silly thing." No, this is an amazingly beautiful and complex thing that humans can do. We reify some of our own mental processes, and this helps us to cope with the agonies of being alive. That's an amazing thing that we humans do.
I think there's a link between how children play, when they'll say, "That table's watching me," or "That's a good table. That table's kind. It's got my interest in mind."
You've lodged something from in you in there, and it's helping you to cope and to live. Artists are doing elements of this too. I just want to get on the table these different elements: children playing, imaginative play, art, the creation of art, and the creation of religions. We're dealing with common elements and common maneuvers in those three arenas.
David Perell:
What else do you think that we can take from the faiths that you've studied? One of the things that you've spoken about that I definitely see in your writing is the difference between a lecture and a sermon. That a lecture is there to give you information. A sermon is there to give you information and maybe a story so that it yields a change in behavior.
Alain de Botton:
That's right. That's right. That's right. And I'm obviously much more in the sermon.
David Perell:
Yeah, exactly.
Alain de Botton:
Religions have been, I know there are a lot of people who've been traumatized by religion, hurt by religion.
David Perell:
Yeah.
Alain de Botton:
We want to honor those people and hear them too. And then the people who have been very helped and are religious, and then there are the people who might be atheists and quite totally indifferent. I would want to say to that constituency, look at these structures because they're really rather interesting. You thought they had nothing to say to you because you don't believe, but oh, my goodness, there's a lot going on here that you need to find out about.
I mean, we are also talking about the cultural aspect, the paintings, the whatever, but it's really what's animating these structures. I look at religions and think of religions as the most sophisticated attempts to persuade and change the inner life of humans.
Art also tries to do this, but it's so much weaker, largely because in post-romantic art, the artist is a lone creator. They're not trying to build a church, they're not trying to build a movement. It's just them, and they have their own utterances, and that's fine, but it's going to be weak in the world, in a noisy world.
So what we really have nowadays are corporations who know how to amplify their messages and lone creators who are tiny next to the messages of these corporations. In the olden world, we had religions. I mean, of course we still have religions, but we're not creating new religions. Sometimes we are. But at the height of the creative potential of many religions, there was this idea of using art, architecture, poetry, fashion, smells, locations, et cetera, to amplify a message. And I'm very interested.
David Perell:
One of the through lines of this conversation, of your work and of this particular topic, the word that's coming to mind is enchantedness. We live in an age of disenchantment. Part of an age of disenchantment is a time when logic and reason and things that we can point a cause and effect to, those are the things that we value and trust.
What I see you doing, talking about here, but also doing just in the way that you speak, is mining these more ancient philosophies, sort of bathing in how they think.
I think that a lot of the reason why your work resonates with non believers, people who are atheists, is because they're feeling that enchantment. So that when I say, hey, I'm interviewing Alain de Botton, people are like, cool. You're one of the people where people are like, wow, that person had an impact on me. They spoke to my heart because the tools of enchantment are the things that sort of seep past the gates of the rational mind.
Alain de Botton:
That's the most wonderful thing about religions. They're alive to what gets called the numinous or mystery, mysterium tremendum. This German theologian invented this term to capture the idea of the religious mindset being open to things that transcend the understanding, the ordinary understanding, the thing you're supposed to understand.
We all have intimations of this. Look, the night sky is the, and the great thing about the night sky is it's there every night. We're not picking up on the resonances of the night sky. The night sky has got all sorts of things to tell us.
A clear night sky is a challenge to everything. If we really took on board what that night sky is telling us, we'd have to lie down and just question absolutely everything.
David Perell:
Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are, up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky. That is Kids can feel that enchantment. How I wonder what you are. Wow.
Alain de Botton:
Yeah, it's wonder. We've let the scientists take over that area. Scientists build planetariums, and they want to tell us exactly how many moons Saturn has and exactly the distance between Pluto and some next galaxy. Fair enough. These guys are sometimes doing great work, but most of us don't care about the stars from that point of view.
We care about the night sky in terms of reorienting us as human beings and reminding us that the earthly priorities and the priorities of the thing that's a meter ahead of you is only one part of existence. It's just a permanent reminder of otherness. I think this is what we always forget, that our own minds and thoughts are only one part of this giant thing that we could be thinking about.
Every time we travel, every time we land in a foreign destination, we're like, "Oh, my God, the world's so strange. I was in one place at one time, and now we're in another place, and here's a guy reading a newspaper by a palm tree, and I didn't know that they existed, that palm tree existed, that newspaper existed, that font existed. What's going on?" The world is so amazing, beautiful, strange, etc., and suddenly we're jolted out of habit. Most of the time, we're living under habit.
Art is the most stabilized form of dislocation. It's a way of seeing beyond habit at the true mystery and strangeness and beauty and pain of everything.
David Perell:
How does AI factor into your writing reading process? Do you hate it, or do you use it all the time?
Alain de Botton:
I don't really use it in my writing, but I use it as a therapist. I'm actually a trained psychotherapist. I practice one day a week. I did a training a few years ago. It's strange that I would say I think it's pretty good at taking fragments of interpersonal psychology, especially if you prompt it right, at teasing out certain resonances that are pretty good. I think it's good at that.
Look, it has awesome powers. Any creative person will be asking themselves, "Is the game up, or do I have anything to contribute?" The good news is that it really forces you to do that thing that you should always have been doing as an artist, which is to stop doing what you're supposed to do, do what you really want to do, be really honest, and explore your own experience with renewed honesty. The AI only provides a summation of what has already been thought and said. Yes, it can be recombined, etc., but essentially, it's giving you standardized answers. Sometimes very good standardized answers. Sometimes standard answers are great and way in advance of what you would know yourself.
There are still bits of our own minds that remain distinctive. The pressure is on creatives to further up their level of self-exploration to get ahead of this machine.
David Perell:
Why don't you use it in your writing?
Alain de Botton:
I use it sometimes for bits of research. "Provide me with where is there a cafe that looks like this? Or is there a painting that was blah, blah, blah?"
If I were going to write an essay on nostalgia and I said to AI, "Structure me an essay on nostalgia in my style," it would do a perfectly decent job, but it wouldn't be picking up on why I'm a writer, why I want to be a writer. I don't just want to be a writer to produce that number of words. I want to be a writer in order to honor certain feelings, and AI can't know those feelings because it's not me.
It doesn't know what I really want to say. If I simply give it over to AI, it will crush my nascent sense, my intuition about what it is that I want to say. I'd rather write the essay and then ask AI if I've missed out anything. "Oh, yes, I've missed out something. Let me go back and add something that the generic had some insight that I wasn't picking up on." But normally, I can't be bothered to change it anymore. It was what it was. It was what I thought. I'm not trying to write a Wikipedia article on a topic. I'm trying to honor my own state of mind, so I've got a more selfish project. I don't want to know what everybody thinks or what the last word is. I want to try and do justice to what I happen to be feeling.
David Perell:
If I invited you to a university and I were to say, "All right, this is your class of writers. You're going to do a semester to teach writing, how would you structure that curriculum? What would you tell them? This is what I've learned. This is what you need to know from my experience about how to be a writer."
Alain de Botton:
First, I'd really want to play around with the notion of what it means to be a writer. What's the kind of book that a writer writes?
And I'd really want to see whether they are being oppressed by a notion of a kind of literature that they're supposed to write. I'd also explore what it is that made them want to be a writer, because maybe they shouldn't be a writer. Maybe they should be something else, something easier, something more fun. It's not that great fun to be a writer, so just to explore where that career ambition came from. I think I want to look at that.
We might want to have fun with introspection, introspective exercises, trying to, you know, you talked about downloading the brain after every day. I think those exercises are very fascinating.
Let's all go to have an experience. Let's all go to the park. Let's see the same thing, and then let's all reflect on it in our own way.
Maybe do an exercise where we try and describe what we think we're supposed to say about a visit to the park. Let's do the objective visit to the park, and then we say what was really going on in your mind, which might have absolutely nothing to do with the park. Maybe you're thinking about something completely different, just to show that contrast between the supposed and the inner thing, to flex that inner muscle.
I'd essentially want to try and awaken or further develop students' relationship to what you might call inner voice or fragments of authentic feeling, what Emerson was calling neglected thoughts. So they become more attentive to the neglected thought.
David Perell:
Really striking even in that answer, you didn't mention any of the things that we learned in school. You didn't mention grammar, you didn't mention syntax. You mentioned the authenticity of feeling, the difference between what you're supposed to feel and what you actually feel. And then you start off with, why do you want to do this in the first place? That's not how most people talk about teaching writing.
Alain de Botton:
Yeah, it's no surprise that I've never been asked to teach.
David Perell:
Thanks, man. Such a cool person to talk to. Thank you so much.
Alain de Botton:
Thank you.
David Perell:
That was what a joy. What a joy. Thank you for coming on.
Alain de Botton:
Thank you. What a pleasure.
