BITESIZE | The Truth About Modern Anxiety & A Surprising Way To Find Joy and Meaning | Alain de Botton #558

Have you ever wondered why, despite all our modern comforts, so many of us still struggle with unhappiness and anxiety? What if a more fulfilling life isn’t about constant positivity but rather a form of ‘cheerful pessimism’? Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests. Today’s clip is from episode 495 of the podcast with author, internationally renowned philosopher, and founder of The School of Life, the wonderful Alain de Botton. Alain is known for his thoughtful, often humorous take on the complexities of modern life. In this clip, Alain explains a concept that he calls ‘cheerful pessimism’ which challenges what he describes as the modern obsession with happiness and introduces the idea that a more melancholic outlook to life might actually lead to greater fulfilment. His message of hope and understanding about the shared human experience of suffering and complexity is both comforting and inspiring and his thoughtful and practical strategies offer a roadmap for anyone seeking a more authentic and meaningful life. Alain’s latest book: A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons From The School of Life. Thanks to our sponsor ⁠⁠⁠https://www.drinkag1.com/livemore⁠⁠ Show notes and the full podcast are available at https://drchatterjee.com/495 Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts ⁠⁠https://apple.co/feelbetterlivemore⁠⁠ For other podcast platforms go to ⁠⁠https://fblm.supercast.com.⁠⁠ DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 0:41Rangan Chatterjee?

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• 1:20Rangan Chatterjee?

  See all details at drinkag1.com/livemore. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 495 of the podcast with author, internationally renowned philosopher and founder of the School of Life, the wonderful Alain de Botton. In this clip, Alain explains a concept that he calls cheerful pessimism, which challenges what he describes as the modern obsession with happiness, and introduces the idea that

• 2:04Rangan Chatterjee?

  a more melancholic outlook to life might actually lead to greater fulfilment.

• 2:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  Last night, I came across one of your TED Talks. And in it, you said, "It's easier now to make a good living, but harder than ever before to stay calm and be free from career anxiety." I found that really an interesting phrase. You said that 15 years ago on the TED stage. Do you still stand by that today?

• 2:37Speaker 01

  I mean, perhaps even more so. I mean, I was calling it in those days, I mean, I wrote a book on this called Status Anxiety, which is really, and it's a feature of what we call the modern world, which the modern world existed for 200 years in the West, you know, what we call the modern world, which is, you know, a world where people are defined primarily by their activities, by their jobs. Nowadays, if you meet somebody for the first time, you say to them, "What do you do?" And according to how you answer that question, people will either be really pleased to see you, or they'll kind of leave you aside and think of you as, you know, that quintessential punitive modern word, a loser. And the thing about the modern world is that it accords status according to a professional race, which by definition, not everybody can win.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  I mean, that's the whole point. You know, it's, it's, it's a race, and there can only be a selective number of winners. This is an incredibly punitive system. Furthermore, we insist, particularly find this in America, but really all over the world, on the idea that everybody has an equal chance to get to the top. And if you listen to politicians, right, left, all sides of political spectrum, they're always trying to build a world which is meritocratic. In other words, where those who get to the top deserve their success. But there's a nasty sting in the tail of that argument, because if you really believe that those who are at the top deserve their success, you have to believe that those who are at the bottom deserve their failure. So in other words, the modern world adds to poverty and low status, a condemnation,

• 4:07Speaker 01

  an implicit condemnation, that you have failed because of your own deficiencies, rather than, you know, because of the system. I mean, You know, in the Middle Ages, let's say, in Britain, the poorest were known as unfortunates, right? That's a really fascinating word, unfortunate. You unpack that word unfortunate. It literally, there's the word fortune in there. In other words, these people have not been blessed by fortune. And fortune was originally a Roman goddess, and she was believed to determine people's careers. So if you ended up with a really high-flying position in the Roman world, at least you acknowledge that at least half of your success was down to fortune. Nowadays, it's a very odd concept. You know, if I said to you, I've been doing really well lately,

• 4:51Speaker 01

  you know, great business, but I said, oh, it's not, it's not me. It's just, I've been blessed by fortune. You'd go, odd guy, oddly modest, is he arrogantly modest? It'd be odd. Similarly, if I said to you, well, things are really actually not going so well for me. I've been sacked. You know, my, my, my income's dropped, but it's not my fault. It's fortune turned against me. You think, you know, you're making an excuse here. We hold people incredibly tightly to their own biographies. As communal structures dissipate and as religious explanations for people's destinies fade, what you find is that people are held so responsible for what happens to them that it becomes unbearable. And if it's only your fault, at some point, you know, people

• 5:34Speaker 01

  will, will break. And that's why we've moved from that term unfortunate now to that much more punitive term loser. You know, if, if you think somebody's failed, you know, lost in their jobs, you might call them, especially in America, a loser. Why is that word particularly used in the United States? Because the United States is the most meritocratic society which believes that people's destinies are in their hands.

• 5:54Rangan Chatterjee?

  And there's upsides to that as well, though.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  A hundred percent, but there's also serious downsides.

• 5:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  Like most things.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  And so we need to keep a handle on those downsides.

• 6:02Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah. Either in this book or one of your videos I was watching yesterday, you said that actually many societies now are living in a world where there is nothing at its centre that is non-human.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  I think that is a major source of, of stress and difficulty that, and that's why, you know, very anecdotally, people will say, the things I love are nature, my dog and my child. Now, let's look at nature, dogs and children. They've got one thing in common. They de-center the adult human. They recalibrate the importance of adult.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Purposeful life as we define it in, you know, the modern world. Your dog doesn't care if you were promoted. Your child's not interested in, you know, if you've just made it to the C suite. They care about other things. Can you throw a ball? Are you into, have you got any jokes? Are you fun to be around?

• 6:58Rangan Chatterjee?

  Are you around?

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Are you around? Are you around? Are you around? Are you nice? Similarly, when you go out into nature, you know, the forest isn't interested in your recent reversal. The cliff face doesn't care that, you know, you didn't get what you wanted in the, the office promotional race. There is a kind of impassivity to human destiny in the natural world, which it could look like it's going to humiliate us. It's like, you know, look, there are many ways of feeling small. If you go to a grand hotel and you say, you know, I'd like a cup of tea. You may be made to, in inverted commas, feel small by the people at the desk. And no one likes that. And we think, you know, my ego has not been respected. So constantly the human ego is looking to be respected by other human egos.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  And this is a terrible sort of, you know, zero sum game in which everybody is competing for a limited amount of attention for the, for the recognition of their own self. The wonderful thing about nature is that it takes us out of that and introduces us to an older, grander, slower, different dimension, which rather than crushing us, actually helps us. We are longing to be made to feel small and insignificant. It's delightful to be made to feel insignificant because what we suffer from is our foiled desire for significance in a world which will never be able to accord everyone the significance that they crave. It will only be called a very narrow elite, and even them, it will not satisfy them.

• 8:28Rangan Chatterjee?

  One of the things I wanted to explore with you today was pessimism versus optimism. So can you just sort of unpick that term?

• 8:37Speaker 01

  I mean, if you look at Stoic philosophers, they do a fascinating analysis of anger. Their argument is that behind every angry outburst lies, rather surprisingly, optimism. We may think of angry people as rather pessimistic, dark, people who, you know, losing their temper, everything. But no, their view was, the Stoic philosophy is that scratch the surface of any angry person and you will find a demented optimist. Take, take rain, you know, imagine, we're recording in the UK, it's raining again today. I don't think anybody's angry about the rain. And the reason is that it rains almost every day in this country. So you would not get angry about rain because it's it's now, are you happy about the rain?

• 9:19Speaker 01

  No, almost everybody in England is unhappy about the rain, but no one gets angry about the rain. Now, the Stoic philosopher would be clapping at this point. They'd be really excited about this because this shows exactly where they're trying to get us to across a range of areas. It's not that the sun will always shine, but there are, better and worse, responses to reality. And what the Stoic philosopher is trying to get us to do is meet reality without rage because we've got a richer sense of what reality is actually made of. So they counsel a fascinating exercise called in Latin a prima meditatio, a premeditation. And Stoic philosophers recommend that every morning before you get up, you should lie in bed and premeditate. In other words, look ahead at the whole day that you're going to face.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  And you should tell yourself, and they wrote some beautiful meditations on what you should tell yourself. And there's one from Seneca, who basically says, expect everything, be certain of nothing. And and in the day, you may witness everything from, you know, your plans being foiled, your enemies gossiping about you, your reputation destroyed, all the way to you and your children dying. You know, you might think, oh, my goodness, this guy's advocating that you should think every day that you and your children might die, their reputation might blow up, you might lose all your money. You know, that's cheerful. Well, these guys think, and I don't think they're entirely wrong, and they may be very right, in fact, that this kind of scoping of the darkest possibilities belongs to health and belongs to calm

• 10:47Speaker 01

  because it widens our sense of possibility. It also, incidentally, makes us a huge lot more grateful because if these things don't happen, then, you know, we'll be focused on the upside.

• 10:56Rangan Chatterjee?

  Every day is a great day because that didn't happen.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Because that didn't happen. And and I don't think this is a delusion. I mean, we live extremely, as you know, prone to accident, all of us. And and the number one thing is, we don't expect it. I mean, who has a car crash thinking, oh, today I might have had a car crash? We don't, we don't expect this.

• 11:12Rangan Chatterjee?

  Is it pessimism v optimism or is it more?

• 11:18Rangan Chatterjee?

  The difference between reality and expectation. And you're gonna get anger every time it rains. You're gonna struggle living in the UK.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:26Rangan Chatterjee?

  But if you expect every day to be sunny and you wake up and it's raining, that's where the disappointment is, isn't it? Because you thought it was gonna be sunny. I believe I'm an optimist, but I don't think optimism means that I'm optimistic that tomorrow it's gonna be really, really sunny. When I think of what being an optimist means for me, it's really this belief that most, if not all, situations in life are neutral. And really, the optimist in me is that I get to put the story on that situation

• 12:06Rangan Chatterjee?

  and the story I choose to put on it will ultimately determine its outcome on me. I didn't used to have that mindset. It's something that has intentionally been cultivated. So for me, that's an optimistic mindset, but it's based on a realistic expectation. Does that make sense?

• 12:24Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, absolutely. You know, one can be, I mean, the thing we're not mentioning here, but it's coming up in your face, is humor.

• 12:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  I think that the collision between hope and reality is always the moment when there is possibility of a smile. There's also possibility of a tear. But, but if we can make it, angle it towards smiling. I mean, look, the area where people experience, inverted commas, rain most regularly is their relationships. I mean, if we're talking about an area of hope, we live in a romantic age that promises people that they will all find a soulmate who will understand them perfectly, who will completely combine, you know, a sexual existence and a psychologically rich existence. This will go on throughout a lifetime and that you'll know from the first moment, et cetera. Now, these expectations are responsible for more unhappiness than almost any other feature of the modern world.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Because people constantly feel that they have done personally something wrong, rather than they're existing within an ideology which is incredibly complicated. And so the moment you say to people, No one's perfect. That means your partner and you will not be perfect. Immediately, the temperature goes down. Ah, okay. You know, at the School of Life, we have this, we give people advice on relationships at various points. And we say, right at the beginning of relationships, a really useful thing for two people who are meeting for the first time to do is to go, I don't mean this pejoratively, how are you crazy? Two people to go, how are you crazy? To ask somebody on a date, how are you crazy? Well, they go, that's a bit rude. What does that mean, how are you crazy? Well, the assumption is, we're all crazy.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  So if you're not answering that question, you're really crazy because you're in denial of your possibility of your crazy nature. So already, it's a real win if you're able to go, hmm, the ways in which I'm crazy are this, that and the other. So the acknowledgement of one's imperfection is, plays a vital role in accommodating oneself to reality. We don't need people to be perfect. We need people to have a sense of their varied imperfections and to be able, on a good day, to either warn us of them or at least apologize for them once they've had a run around. But, you know, that's already asking a lot and most of us are not ready for that.

• 14:47Rangan Chatterjee?

  One of the things you write about is perfectionism. And perfectionism, we know, has been going up dramatically since the 1980s. In relation to what you just said about relationships and this idea that we're all imperfect, why do you think so many of us are struggling with perfectionism?

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Okay, I'll tell you the reason. Because we put humans on the moon.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  If you put humans on the moon and then tell people, oh, humans are a bit silly and they're not really that impressive. You want to go, have you seen the Apollo space program? Of course, it's impressive, right? Once we've, you know, managed to send data across the Atlantic in one second, millisecond, are you really going to expect that everything goes wrong in a human life? No wonder we've got runaway perfectionism. Let's be generous towards perfectionism. It's really hard to think.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  About our imperfections in a world where we are daily reminded of extraordinary, beautiful, amazing things that human beings do. How can we reconcile human greatness with human folly? It's a problem that we have, as it were, at a collective level and an individual.

• 16:01Rangan Chatterjee?

  How do we?

• 16:03Speaker 01

  By reminding ourselves that we really are both angels and beasts, that we are both wonderful and appalling, and the two are true, the two go together. And we have too much pride. We can't quite acknowledge this. It's very hard, as I say, individually and collectively. I mean, let's go back to religions, right? What's the number one dictum of Buddhism? Life is suffering. Okay, these guys start with the dictum, life is suffering, right? Life is not, you know, a penthouse in Monaco and a jet, etc. It is suffering, okay? And it's not just for you or for me, it's for everybody. Everybody life is suffering. What's the central dictum of Catholicism? Central dictum is, we are all sinners.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Life is suffering, we're all sinners. Now you might go, that's a bit mean, well, we're all sinners. I'm not, I'm nice, you know? Life is suffering, maybe for you, but I'm intended to have a nice life. Well, imagine if we started somewhere more in that zone, not necessarily exactly in that zone, but more in that zone. Let's go back to dating, right? Imagine you've got two people. Let's caricature Californians, bless Californians, but they are some of the most optimistic people in the world, right? So you're meeting a Californian for the first, you're on a date with a Californian. So how are you? Great, terrific. What's your character like? Well, I really believe in myself, my potential, and I'm advancing ever further towards, you know, achieving my goals. Wow, it's amazing. You know, do you have any flaws? Well, I'm ironing them all out and, you know, both physically and mentally, I'm, you know,

• 17:33Speaker 01

  on top of things. This is, you know, this could sound like an amazing person, but. Might one also detect a certain brittleness? Uh, might one detect a perfectionism that might have a curdled side? Um, maybe. How much more relaxing to meet somebody goes, I'm a bit broken, actually. I'm, I'm, you know, I'm not a perfect human. I, I mess up. My life's been suffering in lots of areas. You think, oh, this person might be a little bit more livable. I'm advocating a philosophy of cheerful pessimism. Another word for it is a word I really like is melancholy. If we look at what's the UK contributed to world civilization? Not much, food's lousy, et cetera. But one area that the UK really excels at is melancholy.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Now melancholy is an interesting thing because melancholy is not depression, it's not despair. But nor is it cheerfulness. It somehow hovers between the two. It's like a kind of wry acceptance that life's kind of difficult at many points, but it's all right. It's quite beautiful, too. You, you know, you could, you could be a very cheerful person and quite melancholic. So melancholy is tragedy well handled. It might be an emblematic word for what it means to be mature. You know, that's really what maturity is. It's hard to imagine good maturity without an element of melancholy. How can you look at the facts of life without an element of melancholy?

• 18:53Rangan Chatterjee?

  What do you think of happiness?

• 18:56Speaker 01

  It's a coercive concept. Of course, we all want it. Of course, it's lovely, but it's a, it's a dangerous thing to wield around. I think it's, we need to whisper that word rather than shout it from the rooftops. Because, because it, um, whenever someone sets out to be happy, you know, the gods laugh, the, the spirits laugh. At the, the hubris. I mean, let's go back to our friends, the ancient Greeks, right? They were really fascinated by overreach, by human overreach. All their stories in one way or another, all their legends, all their myths are about people who have forgotten that human beings come below the gods. Think of famous story of Dedalus and Icarus, right?

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Icarus rides too close to the sun, falls in sea. That's the emblematic ancient Greek story.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  And you know, we think of it, oh, it's an old story, doesn't have much to teach us. Oh, boy, oh, boy, does it have a lot to teach us, you know? We're all Icarus in different ways, in different ways, we're all Icarus. And so it doesn't mean an end to ambition. It doesn't mean an end to hope after all the ancient Greeks. I mean, they contributed hugely to civilization and progress in all sorts of areas. But they never forgot the the dangers of overreach and the moment when the human mind forgets its limitations.

• 20:14Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah, it's fascinating. So I do like the term happiness. But I but I also believe that it can be. I believe it can be misinterpreted. I think also we have to be careful. What do we mean by happiness? Because I think you could say the word happiness to 10 different people and they may understand it in 10 different ways. So some people may believe that happiness is that state where you wake up every day with a smile on your face and everything is fantastic all the time.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:46Rangan Chatterjee?

  I don't believe that's happiness.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Can I tell you another word?

• 20:48Rangan Chatterjee?

  Please, please.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  Fulfillment. Because I like the word fulfillment because it's very possible to imagine a fulfilled life that actually has a lot of pain in it. You know, you you could stop someone who is a busy doctor and you go, are you happy today? Oh, no, not really. Are you fulfilled today? Yes, yes. So do you see what I mean? It it allows one to encompass pain, which that, I mean, there are lots of ways of defining the word happiness. But for me, it's it's it's hard to imagine too much pain in a happy state. Whereas in a fulfilled state, you could be quite grumpy. You could be having quite a difficult, tetchy day, but basically still feeling you're leading the right life. I mean, look, part of the problem is that we don't, at a societal level, admit the difficulties involved in many worthwhile tasks.

• 21:31Rangan Chatterjee?

  Yeah.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  We we can't quite bear it. And so people who then engage in those tasks will panic too early. Think of writing. You know, when I started off as a writer, I thought, God, this is hard. And the fact it's so hard means that it can't be going right because it's going so hard. And then I was in a museum in Paris and I looked at the manuscripts of Proust, French writer Marcel Proust, who'd spent years trying to get a novel off the ground. And you look at the manuscripts and you think, oh, my God, this guy can't write one sentence without crossing it out and having to start again. And I thought, that's what I have to go through. But he became Proust. And I thought, oh, OK, that's a cheerful story. In other words, the fact that I'm in pain and the fact it's all going wrong is not a conclusive proof that the whole enterprise is going wrong.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  But in lots of areas, we don't admit to the difficulties actually entail in being a writer and being an entrepreneur and being a doctor and being whatever it is. And so people who start down that road will panic too soon. So I'm only selling rain again. It's knowing how much rain is likely to fall and has to fall so that we don't panic when we meet it.

• 22:32Rangan Chatterjee?

  For someone who has heard our conversation and they feel like they're struggling in their life, that they're lost, they feel unhappy, they don't have fulfillment, what would your final words have been?

• 22:47Speaker 01

  You know, welcome to the suffering spirit in which, you know, we all share that we are all far more lonely than we need to be because we buy into the self-presentation of others. No one wants to present themselves in the way they do. We're just forced. We collectively keep lying to each other about what it means to be human. And I think what we've been discussing is what is it actually like to be human? And the reality is that we are far more silly, far more hopeful, far more desperate, far more sad, far more beautiful than we admit to ourselves and to others. And if we just allow ourselves a broader sense of what it means to be human, our spirits will lift.

• 23:29Rangan Chatterjee?

  Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. I hope you have a wonderful weekend and I'll be back next week with my long-form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.