Most Replayed Moment: Alain de Botton - Individualism Is Making Us Miserable!

Alain de Botton is a philosopher, author, and the founder of The School of Life. He is known for his insights into the intersection of philosophy, love, and the modern world, often exploring how societal structures impact mental well-being. In today’s Moments episode, Alain explores the psychological toll of living in an individualistic, meritocratic society. He reflects on the regression in mental health despite societal progress, and how ancient views could offer us a healthier path. Listen to the full episode here! Spotify: https://g2ul0.app.link/Dy8GbYDXDVb Apple: https://g2ul0.app.link/tmgaYAJXDVb Watch the episodes on YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:04Steven Bartlett?

  You got me thinking about this concept of happiness as you're speaking, and whether it's a natural thing for our species to be aiming at, or whether it's a new, more modern thing that we've decided to focus upon. And are we causing ourself immense distress in this pursuit of this thing that maybe our ancestors didn't ever think about? This whole, you know, we think about self-actualisation, and they were probably thinking about survival and reproduction more.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Look, these all belong to the sort of paradoxes of modern times. Modern times have obviously brought us enormous advantages, but they've also brought us particular complexities that I think we'd be wise to realise. And one of them is the disappearance of religion. I mean, we are still among the first generations in many parts of the world to be trying to live good lives without the support of religion. Think of our religion's structure, time and human experience in time. As a religious person, you immediately feel that the present moment is not as important as 100, 200, 2,000 million year history that has come before and that will continue after. The present moment is a speck in time, and there's a whole narrative of which you're part of.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  That immediately diminishes you in scale. Now, nowadays, all of us want to be rather large. We want to be big people. We want to make a big impression. But arguably, this is a fast route to mental illness, because the graceful acceptance of your miniscule position in the cosmos is the gateway to calm and harmony. And when people say, you know, "I went into this hotel, the person made me feel small", that's a bad way of being made to feel small, but there's a good way of being made to feel small. Pick up an ancient text, read words that were written by someone in a foreign tongue 3,000 years ago. That'll make you feel small. Go into the desert, notice the age of the rocks

• 1:58Speaker 01

  inscribed in, you know, time inscribed in sand. That'll put you in your place. Spend time with an animal that has no concern for your status, your sense of importance. Your foiled narrative of your own success, all these things that drive modern humans mad. These are not present in an older kind of religious sphere. And as I say, what religions do is they tell us you're part of a bigger story. They also tell us, many faiths tell us, that life and you in particular are imperfect. You know, think of Catholicism and its notion of original sin. Now, lots of, lots of bad stuff associated with original sin. I'm not, you know, a huge fan of many aspects, but let's look at the good side, right?

• 2:42Speaker 01

  What Catholicism tells us is that everybody's broken. Everybody is flawed. It's quite a helpful starting point, right? Because if you think, well, all right, I'm a bit broken, but so is somebody else, so is somebody else. So we're all doing our best. That's the gateway to vulnerability, to friendship, if you like.

• 3:01Steven Bartlett?

  Lower expectations.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  Lower expectations, but also to, to connection with others, you know? So often people who become successful find it really hard to make friends. Why? Because they associate success with invulnerability. And the more successful they get, the harder it is for them to admit to the real truth about being human, which is that we're all helpless children, some of the time, at least frightened helpless children. And it becomes harder to make, to keep up the contact with that, let alone admit that to somebody else. So again, religions handily reduce our expectations and our sense of ourselves. We are merely flawed humans. There is a perfect world. It doesn't exist in Beverly Hills. It doesn't exist in, you know, the fancy parts of Singapore or Sydney.

• 3:46Speaker 01

  It exists up there in a, in another world. In other words, the human realm is inherently imperfect. Quite a good starting point. I mean, even if you went on a date, right? Imagine two characters you might go on a date with, right? First one tells you. Yeah, I'm kind of perfect and I'm achieving, I'm aiming to achieve total perfection. Think, wow, good for them, but slightly scary. Next to somebody else who goes, I'm kind of flawed, but I'm sort of managing my flaws. And I'm interested in how to get to know my flaws and work with them. Instantly one thinks, hmm, life might be easier around such a person. There's, there's something about the pursuit of perfection, which makes day to day life extremely hard. And religions, slightly by the by, tick that box.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  They were able to reduce us in our own eyes while raising us in the eyes of, you know, a divine being. And, and that has helped us to have, that helped us to have an easier relationship with, with ourselves. And, and the notion also was, you cannot perfect this life. You know, life becomes perfect in another realm. We'll build Jerusalem somewhere else, not on this earth, in the next world. Again, it takes the pressure off us. We moderns, we modern people, we think the present moment is supremely important. Now is important. Everything that's going on right now is supremely important. Doesn't matter, remember a hundred years ago, a thousand years ago? Now is the only criteria of time. You are perfectable, right? So if there's something wrong with you, you're failing against an ideal of perfection. Again, very, very hard.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  And that you are made, I mean, the biggest, the biggest challenge of all, you're made to be happy, as you suggested, that the true goal of every human is happiness. Not fulfillment, not, you know, the realization of a grand scheme, not living for others, your own happiness. And again, it's a beautiful idea, but goodness me, does it cause problems? Goodness me, you know, think of Emil Durkheim. Beginning of the 20th century, French sociologist, writes this book, contrasting the differences between ancient societies and modern societies. And he identifies one troubling difference between ancient societies,

• 5:59Speaker 01

  pre-modern agricultural, village-based societies where religion plays a role, and modern, urban, technologically driven, success-oriented, individualistic societies. And that's the suicide rate. He realizes in his book on suicide, published in 1900, that modern societies, for all their advantages, leads their members, a share of their members, often the most ambitious of their members, to take their own lives. Why? What's going on? And this becomes, well, it's the birth of modern sociology, really. It's, it becomes a major inquiry into what modern times does to the soul. And I'm deeply fascinated by that.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  I can't let that one go because what's this paradox? What's this paradox of suffering amidst plenty? Of regress amidst progress? This fascinates me.

• 6:54Steven Bartlett?

  I spoke to the CEO of Calm, Campaign Against Living Miserably, Simon Gunning. And he shared some stats with me about exactly what you're talking about, about suicide. He said someone dies by suicide in the UK every 90 minutes. Six, 76% to male. There's 25 attempts for every death. The single biggest cause of death for men under 45 is suicide. Single biggest cause of death for 15 to 49 year olds is suicide. That 19 to 35 year old category are twice as likely to report being in crisis than any other group. And 16 to 24s is the fastest growing group in history to exhibit suicidality. And more recently, there's a big conversation emerging now around young women and suicidality,

• 7:35Steven Bartlett?

  which is a fairly recent, unfortunately exploding trend. This trend of young women now experiencing suicidality.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  And look, people don't just commit suicide when things are bad. People commit suicide when things are bad and they think, it's a delicate point. They think it's their fault. They cannot disassociate the trouble they feel from an intense sense of responsibility, which then also entails shame. And what's going on there? You see, when I say that we live in an individualistic world, what that really means is we live in a world where people feel that they control their own narratives, that, that what happens to them is very tightly a reflection of who they are and what they've done. And this was not always the case.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  You see, for long periods of history, people were not necessarily tightly held to the observable outcomes of their lives. This happened with money, for example. In Old English. A poor person was known as an unfortunate, right?

• 8:47Speaker 01

  What is an unfortunate? Let's unpack that word unfortunate. There's the word fortuna in there. What was fortuna? For the Romans, fortuna was the goddess of luck, the goddess of fortune. And the Romans were therefore all the time sacrificing things to the goddess of fortune as a way of saying, you know, please, you know, it's not me. It's, you know, this outside agency. Nowadays, this sounds completely weird. I mean, what do we call? In the most individualistic country in the world, United States, what are poor people called? It's not a nice term. They're called losers, right? You say, that's a loser. So we've gone from unfortunate to loser. That's a trajectory of 400 years. What's happened in that time is a story about who's responsible for people's fate.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  And nowadays, you know, if I said to you, Stephen, things have not been going so well for me. I've just been sacked, uh, you know, my, my book hasn't sold, you know, but it's not me. I've just had a bit of bad luck. You, very nice person, but a modern person, side of you be thinking, hmm, you must have done something wrong. Right? You'd be thinking, you must have done something wrong because that's how we think. We don't allow people the benefit of luck, right? Similarly, if you said to me, oh, uh, you know, my, my podcast be doing brilliantly. We've now got 8,000 million, million, billion subscribers, how many you got nowadays? Um, and, and you said, and you said to me, oh, I just, just a bit of good luck, right? I think, oh, Stephen's really, you know, he's very modest, but you know, it's not true. He's done something.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  We believe that people do things and that that action leads to results or failures. And that's why people take their own lives because in extremists, people think there is nothing other than me to explain what happens to me. Of course, the reality is much more complicated. I'm not saying that's the truth, but that is the perceived truth. You know, look, we live in a world that is meritocratic, right? That word meritocracy is on everybody's lips. If you take politicians, left and right, in the United States, all over the world, everybody wants to create a world that is meritocratic. Some people think we've already got there. What does that word mean? I don't know. Meritocratic is, the concept of meritocracy is a world in which people's

• 11:05Speaker 01

  Outcomes are dependent on their merit, rather than on who their parents were, some corrupt class in society, the influence of whatever. So, you know, a left-wing politician and a right-wing politician say, we want to make a meritocratic world where your kids will go to where they deserve, where if you work hard, you can get there. And, you know, where everyone has a chance to succeed. You know, you know that kind of rhetoric.

• 11:33Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  It's the rhetoric of modern times. Now, it sounds great, and in many ways, it's an enormous advance. But again, let's just focus on the psychological toll of that. Because if you really believe in a world in which those who get to the top deserve to get to the top, by implication, you are also positing the existence of a world in which those who are at the bottom deserve to be at the bottom. In other words, a meritocratic worldview turns success and failure from chance to a necessary fate. And that's why it makes the winners quite hard, potentially, quite heartless, because

• 12:19Speaker 01

  they're thinking, well, I got there on my own, you know, don't need to thank anybody, might not need to pay many taxes. Why pay taxes? You know, it's fine. And similarly, those at the bottom are kind of crushed. So we've created this very complicated ideology where there's a hidden toll.

• 12:41Steven Bartlett?

  And this has happened within a couple of generations, doesn't it? Because I even think about my mother. She's from, I know it's a different country and there's different traditions there, but even in my mother's generation, when she grew up in Africa, if they wanted good fortune, they would take their sheep, their animals, and they would take it to the local witch doctor and basically offer a sacrifice. They'd obviously pray, but they were, they were so in the opinion that their outcomes were determined by a religious god of sorts. And even her moving to the UK and starting businesses here, I think she's moved a little bit away from that thinking to the sort of, as you kind of almost posit it. It's almost like the curse of personal responsibility, or at least the pitfalls of personal responsibility, where she now definitely thinks that her outcomes are correlated

• 13:26Steven Bartlett?

  to her hard work. And it's so interesting, I've never considered the fact that that could be bad for us on a psychological level.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Sure, because, you know, we know that there are good sides of it, of course we do. And so, you know, I'm really pointing out something that is less often spoken about, because we know the good sides. Of course, a world in which people take responsibility can be good, but at what moment does it crush the spirit? And, you know, talking about your mother, and, and, you know, moving away from an agricultural society, a rural society, to an urban, modern individualistic society. In many parts of the world, in the old world, in the pre-modern world, when people met each other for the first time, they would say, where are you from? Where are your ancestors? Who are your ancestors? Who's your father? Who's your mother? That was people's identity. Nowadays, of course, as you know, what's the first question that anyone asks anyone? What do you do? And according to how you

• 14:16Speaker 01

  answer that question, people are either really pleased to see you, or they kind of gently sideline you and you're left by the peanuts. And, you know, no one wants to talk to you. We live in a world, it could sound like an odd world, word, we live in a world of snobs. Now, the word snob is often associated with some kind of old English interest in like people with castles or, you know, ancient lineage. I don't mean that. Snobbery is really just any way of judging a human being according to one, but only one, aspect of their whole identity. Right? So if you meet a clothed snob, and you say, you know, my, my, my jumper's from, you know, wherever, they'll go, you can't be a good person, because, you know, you are so under invested in your fashion taste, right? Doesn't matter how pure your heart is, or how great your poems are, or whatever, you look, you know, your clothes

• 15:01Speaker 01

  are wrong. So that's a clothed snob. Now, the dominant form of snobbery in the modern world is, of course, job snobbery. And that's why, you know, the opposite of a snob is your mother. Your mother, as it were, one's mother, the ideal mother, right? The ideal mother doesn't care how you've performed. She's maybe fictive, caring about who you are. But most people do not care who we are. They care how we have performed. And so, you know, we're often told, we live in such materialistic societies, the world's so materialistic, you know, we're all chasing money.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  I don't think we're actually chasing money. I think we're chasing the love and respect that money in our society brings. We have connected the possession of material goods with the possession of honour and respect. But you know, if you if you rearrange it a different way and you said, you know, you could own a plastic token and get love and respect, people would always want the plastic tokens. It's not it's not the material goods we want, it's the emotional rewards, which actually, you know, sometimes we think people are very greedy. All they're doing is shopping for more things and buying fancy cars. But you know, the next time you see a guy driving a Ferrari, don't think this guy's a greedy person, you know, he's so vulgar and greedy and what.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Just think this is somebody with a really intense need for love. Because often, the avid pursuit of material goods is really masking something much more poignant, which is the avid pursuit of love and respect.

• 16:31Steven Bartlett?

  It was for my whole my whole life. I, you know, I bought all the Louis Vuitton Range Rover mansion in that chapter of my life where I was really trying to prove something to someone or be accepted by someone. And that's why I got it. And in fact, as the more secure I've gotten myself, the more you'll see me every day just wearing all black, no watch, no sports car, and leaning towards utility in the decisions that I make.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  That's so fascinating, and I think that is a journey.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  You know, one doesn't want to say these goods shouldn't be available to everybody. Of course, they can be available to everybody. But the question is, is your need for them coming from a wound or coming from a genuine desire? And when it comes from a wound, it's a problem because it's not going to solve the wound. That's the problem. Because you know, the love that you're going to get, it's like it's like fame. I always think, you know, a sure sign of being a good parent is that your children have no interest in being famous. Because, you know, fame is trying to satisfy a gap that should ideally be satisfied through more intimate human connections. But we do live in a world which doesn't have much time for that.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  And so both in the sort of economy of fame and the economy of material goods, we've we've created a world where people are hugely incentivized to move away from what they really want, which is to be loved, to be seen, to be heard, and into a kind of vortex of material acquisition.

• 18:00Steven Bartlett?

  What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.