Name: Alain de Botton on Emotional Education
Uploaded: 2020-03-25T03:15:41.000Z
Duration: 1 h 1 min 31 s
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Thio Talk, which has a really strange sounding title.

We're very used to the idea that we need to get educated in certain sorts of skills maths, Latin, geography, physics, accountancy.

But the notion that we need to be educated in our emotional functioning is very peculiar.

Surely we know about our emotions, our capacities, to love and to hate, to feel anxious and to feel calm to direct our lives.

We would wish surely we know all that stuff.

We don't need an education in the pursuit off fulfilled emotional life.

But let me ask you just a question to see if we can just prove that who in this room is happy to be married but not in love?

And if you happy to be married, but no, you know, tolerating tolerating the part.

But what were what was sensing is that there is a broad consensus that you guys would like to be married.

Who here is happy to be in a job where you're earning money, but you're not fulfilled.

But broadly speaking, this is why you need an emotional education because you have very high expectations.

It's very, very hard to be married and happy.

It's very, very hard to be in a job and fulfilled not merely earning money.

These are new expectations that we have of our lives.

And yet we continue to cling to an ancient model that somehow the knack for knowing how to pull off a successful emotional life is something that we should pick up by intuition.

10 years ago with colleagues, I started Open Organisation called the School of Life.

I'm here to present a new book, which is simply called the School of Life, an emotional education.

It's 10 years worth of our thinking around the business of how we might become emotional adults.

You just eat cereal and food and wait for time to pass, and you'll get that, Um, emotional adult is a different thing.

Most of us will be pushing 300 years old before we've really got the hang of it, But it's an aspiration, you know.

We're operating in a world in which religion no longer guides us as it once did, and it's within the context of a secularizing world that I and colleagues set up the school of life.

You know, when religion first went into decline in the mid 19th century in England and other parts of Western Europe, people asked, Where were people going to get the emotional and spiritual guidance that churches had once given?

And there was a legitimate sense that there was going to be troubled because we're all mortal.

We're isolated with lonely, were confused on the church's for better and for worse, dispensed guidance in these areas.

Where was that gonna come from if it worked out, If one worked out that the whole story, the biblical story waas scientifically speaking nonsense.

That culture would replace Scripture, and that's why there was an extraordinary boom in the development off the humanities.

In the 19th century, giant libraries were built, theaters were built, a university courses in the arts was started for the very first time on dhe.

Ah, huge push was made towards the idea that what we have previously been able to gain from religion, we would now be able to source from the plays of Shakespeare the novels of Jane Austen, the paintings of Rembrandt, Caravaggio that these sort of things would be able to give us, what previous ages it found in religion.

You know, this is in some ways part of what we're doing by gathering, but without any insult on the fantastic host of this festival and giant real success of this festival.

Broadly speaking, culture has not replaced Scripture.

And you know this because if you show up at the Tate Modern and you go on your knees and you say I'm lost, I don't know how to live.

You will be very swiftly ushered out by some guards.

This is simply not what you two or three show up at the University of Oxford and you're reading philosophy, Say, the home of the largest questions you say.

I don't know where I should seek guidance for the largest questions.

How can I make sure my life is properly letter again?

One could say that those who are the guardians of culture in our society have a certain coolness about them.

It's only as though the sort of people who there imagine dealing with Don't wake up at three in the morning as many of us here do, I hope wondering what on earth it's all about and what we meant to be doing on this planet, There's a sort of sense that most of us know how to live.

Well, the starting assumption of the school of life is, of course, we don't know how to live on.

There is, of course, an industry devoted to guidance in this area.

It's called the self help industry, now being sophisticated, intelligent and cultured people, all of you would have steered well clear of anything.

I mean, it's really it's a It's a horror term.

Forgive me if there any Californians in the room with a sort of naive West Coast utopianism.

The covers a garish, the promises are over blown.

There's a sort of sense of, you know you can change your love life in five minutes of the perfect sex life made a $1,000,000 in a year, etcetera, in other words, overblown, naive, sentimental promises designed to cover up a much harder reality.

Now, the starting point off the school of life is that actually trying to tell people that life is a perfect business that can be made ideal is one of the quickest ways to depress them.

The best way to cheer anyone up is to tell them life is difficult for everyone.

We suffer all of us alone, thinking that we are massively unique in our sufferings were not there.

What binds us together on Dhe being able therefore to say we are a broken species is the first step towards consolation on an act of friendship.

The first tenet of Buddhism is life is suffering.

It goes, and it goes on from there on the grimness of existence.

Far from an acknowledgment of that grimness being a route to ultimate despair, it's actually the birth off, compassion towards ourselves and compassion towards others.

Knowing that we are broken creatures, as I say, is a sort of beginning off a fringe of it also makes you a nicer person.

Imagine two people on a dinner date, right?

They don't know each other well, and one of them starts saying, Well, I'm pretty perfect and the other one does.

I'm pretty perfect to my job's doing well, the other ones as well.

You know, things have been going pretty great for me to insufferable a rigid, insufferable perfectionism.

How much nicer it would be if this couple got together.

This look like they were able to build a friendship and a sense of neutrality precisely on on an acknowledgment off.

How much in them was not perfect, isn't it?

I should say the goal of life is not the god of emotional life should never be to try and be entirely sane.

However, the best possible kind of sanity you can aim for is what we like to call sane insanity, whereby you have what Michael handle on What's wrong with you?

There's still something wrong with you because of something wrong with everybody.

But you can describe it in eloquent and reassuring terms to those who live near with Andi.

If you don't want to harm too much, that is the best that we can do.

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Alain de Botton on Emotional Education

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