There has been a huge increase, at least in recorded incidents, of what we call mental illness, mental unwellness. Nietzsche predicted, I think very accurately, that the end of belief would be trouble for human beings.
I am here with Alain de Botton. Alain, thanks for joining me.
Thank you so much for having me.
So I think this conversation is probably, I don't know, two decades coming. I feel like I've known about you for at least 20 years and admired your work from afar. You've done many things. You've written many books, and you have the School of Life, which I would love to talk about. But how do you describe your career at this point? What is it that you focus on, and how are you showing up mostly now as a thinker?
Sure. Well, I mean, I'm broadly interested in the slightly paradoxical and elusive sources of human unhappiness — happiness, sorry — that are not really related to material or political shortfalls or events, but broadly lie in the psychological space. Our amazing human ability to make a hell out of often pretty benign circumstances. I'm fascinated by, as I say, the knots we tie ourselves into. And I write books. I operate on YouTube. As you say, I run this organization called the School of Life in London. We're interested in emotional education, and I'm also a psychotherapist, so I see clients one day a week.
Nice. And as well as writing books and things — and the School of Life has published many books — are you the author of those books, or do you...?
I am. I and a colleague are the authors of all the books. Yes.
Wow. So, well, you are more prolific than you get credit for, then. How many books have you written?
There are a lot of them. Well, the School of Life has 70 books under its brand, and I've written 15 under my name. So it's a little too much, and I leave it to experts to diagnose what the problem might be. This is L. Ron Hubbard territory, though happily with much better content.
Wow. Okay. Well, then I'm glad to see you away from your keyboard for at least the hour that we're speaking.
Well, so, you know, you have focused on these timeless issues of — I mean, as you just put it, you know, our capacity to suffer unnecessarily. That it's pretty easy to uncouple that from the historical moment. I mean, there are ways in which current technology and changes in culture, I think, are amplifying that capacity and making it more difficult to be happy in some very ordinary ways. Perhaps these changes are making it easier, too. Let's just talk about culture for a moment. What most concerns you about the cultural changes that we're seeing happening, more or less, you know, accelerating hour by hour around us now?
I wonder if I might start in a slightly unusual and slightly provocative place, which is with religion, and with the decline in much of the modern world of what I would be careful to call a religious mindset, as opposed to belief. And I think we're still — you know, I still diagnose modern societies as coming out of the very long religious age which preceded it. And, you know, taking my cue from a thinker like Nietzsche, who predicted, I think very accurately, that the end of belief would be trouble for human beings. I mean, it's not like there was no trouble before — don't get me wrong, there was a lot of trouble before as well — but there were particular kinds of trouble that were going to beset non-religious eras, predominantly non-religious eras. And I think that's a good place to look.
I mean, let's look at some of the things that religious societies do and secular societies have problems with. One of the things that religious societies do is to socialize, in ritual forms, certain kinds of psychological transitions which secular societies have a lot of trouble orchestrating or putting on the agenda. I mean, our diaries are filled with business meetings and technical priorities. In the more religious eras, days were devoted to ideas, to priorities of the soul, if you like. Now, one can have all kinds of objections to how those priorities were framed. But it's a very interesting way in which, in the 19th century, what happens is that private life gets personalized and individualized to an unprecedented degree. And so if you're in love, if you're struck by nature, if you're interested in community, if you're moved by the sight of mountains, etc., you do that on your own. You're not within any kind of structure. And, you know, we've had a hard time cohering people into structures that guide psychological — I guess one might call it health. Religions talked of the soul. We don't need to use that word, soul. But it's a very interesting word.
Let me just explore that in the current context. Are there religious societies or large communities now that you envy for the degree to which their commitment to their specific doctrines and ideology grants them, you know, depth of community and kind of thickness of culture, and they're not atomized in ways that you admire?
