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I Am In General A Very Pessimistic Person With An Optimistic, Day To Day Take On Things. The Bare Facts Of Life Are Utterly Terrifying. And Yet, One Can Laugh. Indeed, One Has To Laugh Precisely Because Of The Darkness: The Nervous Laughter Of The Trenches.

-Alain De Botton

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I Am In General

Alain De Botton

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I Am In General A Very Pessimistic Person With An Optimistic, Day To Day Take On Things. The Bare Facts Of Life Are Utterly Terrifying. And Yet, One Can Laugh. Indeed, One Has To Laugh Precisely Because Of The Darkness: The Nervous Laughter Of The Trenches.

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It Is This Idea 'decency' Should Be Attached To Wealth -and 'indecency'' To Poverty - That Forms The Core Of One Strand Of Skeptical Complaint Against The Modern Status-ideal. Why Should Failure To Make Money Be Taken As A Sign Of An Unconditionally Flawed Human Being Rather Than Of A Fiasco In One Particular Area If The Far Larger, More Multifaceted, Project Of Leading A Good Life? Why Should Both Wealth And Poverty Be Read As The Predominant Guides To An Individual's Morals ?

Most Of Us Still Caged Within Careers Chosen For Us By Our Not Entirely Worldly 18-22 Year Old Selves.

These Inventors Were Elevating The Formulation Of Entrepreneurial Ideas To The Status Of A Visionary Activity. Though Forced To Justify Their Efforts In The Pragmatic Language Of Venture Capital, They Were At Heart Utopian Thinkers Intent On Transforming The World.

It Is In Books, Poems, Paintings Which Often Give Us The Confidence To Take Seriously Feelings In Ourselves That We Might Otherwise Never Have Thought To Acknowledge.

People Who Hold Important Positions In Society Are Commonly Labelled "somebodies," And Their Inverse "nobodies"-both Of Which Are, Of Course, Nonsensical Descriptors, For We Are All, By Necessity, Individuals With Distinct Identities And Comparable Claims On Existence. Such Words Are Nevertheless An Apt Vehicle For Conveying The Disparate Treatment Accorded To Different Groups. Those Without Status Are All But Invisible: They Are Treated Brusquely By Others, Their Complexities Trampled Upon And Their Singularities Ignored.

Forcing People To Eat Together Is An Effective Way To Promote Tolerance.

Year-end Financial Statements Express A Truth About Office Life Which Is No Less Irrefutable Yet Also, In The End, No Less Irrelevant Or Irritating Than An Evolutionary Biologist's Proud Reminder That The Purpose Of Existence Lies In The Propagation Of Our Genes.

Life Gives Us No Such Handy Markers - A Storm Comes, And Far From This Being A Harbinger Of Death And Collapse, During Its Course A Person Discovers Love And Truth, Beauty And Happiness, The Rain Lashing At The Windows All The While.

If Optimism Is Important, It's Because Many Outcomes Are Determined By How Much Of It We Bring To The Task. It Is An Important Ingredient Of Success. This Flies In The Face Of The Elite View That Talent Is The Primary Requirement Of A Good Life, But In Many Cases The Difference Between Success And Failure Is Determined By Nothing More Than Our Sense Of What Is Possible And The Energy We Can Muster To Convince Others Of Our Due. We Might Be Doomed Not By A Lack Of Skill, But By An Absence Of Hope!

The Only Way To Be Happy Is To Realise How Much Depends On How You Look At Things

There May Be Significant Things To Learn About People By Looking At What Annoys Them Most.

Significant Things

Life Seems To Be A Process Of Replacing One Anxiety With Another And Substituting One Desire For Another--which Is Not To Say That We Should Never Strive To Overcome Any Of Our Anxieties Or Fulfil Any Of Our Desires, But Rather To Suggest That We Should Perhaps Build Into Our Strivings An Awareness Of The Way Our Goals Promise Us A Respite And A Resolution That They Cannot, By Definition, Deliver.

Wealth Is Not An Absolute. It Is Relative To Desire. Every Time We Yearn For Something We Cannot Afford, We Grow Poorer, Whatever Our Resources. And Every Time We Feel Satisfied With What We Have, We Can Be Counted As Rich, However Little We May Actually Possess.

Symons Remarked That The Most Common And Unhelpful Illusion Plaguing Those Who Came To See Him Was The Idea That They Ought Somehow, In The Normal Course Of Events, To Have Intuited Long Before They Had Finished Their Degrees, Started Families, Bought Houses And Risen To The Top Of Law Firms - What They Should Properly Be Doing With Their Lives. They Were Tormented By A Residual Notion Of Having Through Some Error Or Stupidity On Their Part Missed Out On Their True Calling.

Art Holds Out The Promise Of Inner Wholeness.

To Cut Out Every Negative Root Would Simultaneously Mean Choking Off Positive Elements That Might Arise From It Further Up The Stem Of The Plant. We Should Not Feel Embarrassed By Our Difficulties, Only By Our Failure To Grow Anything Beautiful From Them.

It Seems, In Fact, That The More Advanced A Society Is, The Greater Will Be Its Interest In Ruined Things, For It Will See In Them A Redemptively Sobering Reminder Of The Fragility Of Its Own Achievements. Ruins Pose A Direct Challenge To Our Concern With Power And Rank, With Bustle And Fame. They Puncture The Inflated Folly Of Our Exhaustive And Frenetic Pursuit Of Wealth.

Most Of Us Stand Poised At The Edge Of Brilliance, Haunted By The Knowledge Of Our Proximity, Yet Still Demonstrably On The Wrong Side Of The Line, Our Dealings With Reality Undermined By A Range Of Minor Yet Critical Psychological Flaws (a Little Too Much Optimism, An Unprocessed Rebelliousness, A Fatal Impatience Or Sentimentality). We Are Like An Exquisite High-speed Aircraft Which For Lack Of A Tiny Part Is Left Stranded Beside The Runway, Rendered Slower Than A Tractor Or Bicycle.

Every Fall Into Love Involves The Triumph Of Hope Over Self-knowledge. We Fall In Love Hoping We Won't Find In Another What We Know Is In Ourselves, All The Cowardice, Weakness, Laziness, Dishonesty, Compromise, And Stupidity. We Throw A Cordon Of Love Around The Chosen One And Decide That Everything Within It Will Somehow Be Free Of Our Faults. We Locate Inside Another A Perfection That Eludes Us Within Ourselves, And Through Our Union With The Beloved Hope To Maintain (against The Evidence Of All Self-knowledge) A Precarious Faith In Our Species.

Falling In Love

We Used To Build Temples, And Museums Are About As Close As Secular Society Dares To Go In Facing Up To The Idea That A Good Building Can Change Your Life (and A Bad One Ruin It).

Secular Society

In The Works Of Lucretius, We Find Two Reasons Why We Shouldn't Worry About Death. If You Have Had A Successful Life, Lucretius Tell Us, There's No Reason To Mind Its End. And, If You Haven't Had A Good Time, "why Do You Seek To Add More Years, Which Would Also Pass But Ill?"

We Accept The Need To Train Extensively To Fly A Plane; But Think Instinct Should Be Enough For Marrying And Raising Kids.

Insomnia Is A Glamorous Term For Thoughts You Forgot To Have In The Day.

It Is No Coincidence That The Western Attraction To Sublime Landscapes Developed At Precisely The Moment When Traditional Beliefs In God Began To Wane.

Most Good Thinking Has Its Origin In Fear.

Being Funny Should Be An Incidental Byproduct Of Trying To Get To Something Truthful, Not A Destination In Itself.

Taking Photographs Can Assuage The Itch For Possession Sparked By The Beauty Of A Place; Our Anxiety Over Losing A Precious Scene Can Decline With Every Click Of The Shutter.

I Think People Want To Get Married To End Their Emotional Uncertainty. In A Way, They Want To End Powerful Feelings, Or Certainly The Negative Ones.

The Assumption Is That Life Doesn't Need To Be Navigated With Lessons. You Can Just Do It Intuitively. After All, You Only Need To Achieve Autonomy From Your Parents, Find A Moderately Satisfying Job, Form A Relationship, Perhaps Raise Some Children, Watch The Onset Of Mortality In Your Parents' Generation And Eventually In Your Own, Until One Day A Fatal Illness Starts Gnawing At Your Innards And You Calmly Go To The Grave, Shut The Coffin And Are Done With The Self-evident Business Of Life.

The Universe Is Large And We Are Tiny, Without The Need For Further Religious Superstructure. One Can Have So-called Spiritual Moments Without Belief In The Spirit.

To Be Loved By Someone Is To Realize How Much They Share The Same Needs That Lie At The Heart Of Our Own Attraction To Them. Albert Camus Suggested That We Fall In Love With People Because, From The Outside, They Look So Whole, Physically Whole And Emotionally 'together' - When Subjectively We Feel Dispersed And Confused. We Would Not Love If There Were No Lack Within Us, But We Are Offended By The Discovery Of A Similar Lack In The Other. Expecting To Find The Answer, We Find Only The Duplicate Of Our Own Problem.

Falling In Love

Many Moments In Religion Seem Attractive To Me Even Though I Can't Believe In Any Of It.

Social Media Has Lots Of Benefits, But Compared To Christianity, It Tends To Group People By Interests. Religion Puts You With People Who Have Nothing In Common Except That You're Human.

According To One Influential Wing Of Modern Secular Society There Are Few More Disreputable Fates Than To End Up Being 'like Everyone Else' For 'everyone Else' Is A Category That Comprises The Mediocre And The Conformist, The Boring And The Suburban. The Goal Of All Right-thinking People Should Be To Mark Themselves Off From The Crowd And 'stand Out' In Whatever Way Their Talents Allow.

Secular Society

Feeling Lost, Crazy And Desperate Belongs To A Good Life As Much As Optimism, Certainty And Reason.

The Only People We Can Think Of As Normal Are Those We Don't Yet Know Very Well.

A Good Half Of The Art Of Living Is Resilience.

We Might Have Been Ready To Offer Sympathy, But In Actuality There Were Stronger Reasons To Want To Congratulate Her For Having Found Such A Powerful Motive To Feel Sad. We Should Have Envied Her For Having Located Someone Without Whom She So Firmly Felt She Could Not Survive, Beyond The Gate Let Along In A Bare Student Bedroom In A Suburb Of Rio. If She Had Been Able To View Her Situation From A Sufficient Distance, She Might Have Been Able To Recognise This As One Of The High Points In Her Life.

Perhaps Because The Origins Of A Certain Kind Of Love Lie In An Impulse To Escape Ourselves And Out Weaknesses By An Alliance With The Beautiful And Noble. But If The Loved Ones Love Us Back, We Are Forced To Return To Ourselves, And Are Hence Reminded Of The Things That Had Driven Us Into Love In The First Place. Perhaps It Was Not Love We Wanted After All, Perhaps It Was Simply Someone In Whom To Believe, But How Can We Continue To Believe The The Beloved Now That They Believe In Us?

Perhaps It Is True That We Do Not Really Exist Until There Is Someone There To See Us Existing, We Cannot Properly Speak Until There Is Someone Who Can Understand What We Are Saying In Essence, We Are Not Wholly Alive Until We Are Loved.

We Should Keep A Careful Diary Of Our Moments Of Envy: They Are Our Covert Guides To What We Should Try To Do Next.

We Are Sensitized By The Books We Read. And The More Books We Read, And The Deeper Their Lessons Sink Into Us, The More Pairs Of Glasses We Have. And Those Glasses Enable Us To See Things We Would Have Otherwise Missed.

Mental Health: Having Enough Safe Places In Your Mind For Your Thoughts To Settle.

We Are Tempted To Believe That Certain Achievements And Possessions Will Give Us Enduring Satisfaction. We Are Invited To Imagine Ourselves Scaling The Steep Cliff Face Of Happiness In Order To Reach A Wide, High Plateau On Which We Will Live Out The Rest Of Our Lives; We Are Not Reminded That Soon After Gaining The Summit, We Will Be Called Down Again Into Fresh Lowlands Of Anxiety And Desire.

I Feel That The Great Challenge Of Our Time Is The Communication Of Ideas.

Literature Deeply Stands Opposed To The Dominant Value System-the One That Rewards Money And Power. Writers Are On The Other Side-they Make Us Sympathetic To Ideas And Feelings That Are Of Deep Importance But Can’t Afford Airtime In A Commercialized, Status-consciou S, And Cynical World.

I Am Conscious Of Trying To Stretch The Boundaries Of Non-fiction Writing. It's Always Surprised Me How Little Attention Many Non-fiction Writers Pay To The Formal Aspects Of Their Work.

Pick Up Any Newspaper Or Magazine, Open The Tv, And You'll Be Bombarded With Suggestions Of How To Have A Successful Life. Some Of These Suggestions Are Deeply Unhelpful To Our Own Projects And Priorities - And We Should Take Care.

We Should Not Feel Embarrassed By Our Difficulties, Only By Our Failure To Grow Anything Beautiful From Them.

The Longing For Destiny Is Nowhere Stronger Than In Our Romantic Life.

Never Too Late To Learn Some Embarrassingly Basic, Stupidly Obvious Things About Oneself.

Though It May Feel Otherwise, Enjoying Life Is No More Dangerous Than Apprehending It With Continuous Anxiety And Gloom.

The Challenge Of Modern Relationships: How To Prove More Interesting Than The Other's Smartphone.

Her Lie Was Symptomatic Of A Certain Pride She Took In Mocking The Romantic, In Being Unsentimental, Matter-of-fact, Stoic; Yet At Heart She Was The Oppo Site: Idealistic, Dreamy, Giving, And Deeply Attached To Everything She Liked Verbally To Dismiss As "mushy.

We Are Presented With An Unpleasant Choice Between Either Committing To Peculiar Concepts About Immaterial Deities Or Letting Go Entirely Of A Host Of Consoling, Subtle Or Just Charming Rituals For Which We Struggle To Find Equivalents In Secular Society.

Secular Society

It Seems The Only Way To Write A Half Decent Book Is To Worry Oneself Sick On An Hourly Basis That One Is Producing A Complete Disaster.

It Is Not Necessarily At Home That We Best Encounter Our True Selves. The Furniture Insists That We Cannot Change Because It Does Not; The Domestic Setting Keeps Us Tethered To The Person We Are In Ordinary Life, Who May Not Be Who We Essentially Are.

We Fall In Love Because We Long To Escape From Ourselves With Someone As Beautiful, Intelligent, And Witty As We Are Ugly, Stupid, And Dull. But What If Such A Perfect Being Should One Day Turn Around And Decide They Will Love Us Back? We Can Only Be Somewhat Shocked-how Can They Be As Wonderful As We Had Hoped When They Have The Bad Taste To Approve Of Someone Like Us?

Falling In Love

Anyone Who Isn't Embarrassed Of Who They Were Last Year Probably Isn't Learning Enough.

Love Is An Incurable Disease. In Love, There Is Permanent Suffering. Those Who Love And Those Who Are Happy Are Not The Same.

We Wanted To Test Each Other's Capacity For Survival: Only If We Had Tried In Vain To Destroy One Another Would We Know We Were Safe.

It Is Perhaps When Our Lives Are At Their Most Problematic That We Are Likely To Be Most Receptive To Beautiful Things.

Beautiful Things

It Is Perhaps Sad Books That Best Console Us When We Are Sad, And To Lonely Service Stations That We Should Drive When There Is No One For Us To Hold Or Love.

It's Perhaps Easier Now Than Ever Before To Make A Good Living; It's Perhaps Harder Than Ever Before To Stay Calm, To Be Free Of Career Anxiety.

People Only Get Really Interesting When They Start To Rattle The Bars Of Their Cages.

In A Secularising World, Art Has Replaced Religion As A Touchstone Of Our Reverence And Devotion.

The More Dignity Is Widely And Freely Available In A Society, The Less People Want To Be Famous.

We Are All More Intelligent Than We Are Capable, And Awareness Of The Insanity Of Love Has Never Saved Anyone From The Disease.

We Envy Only Those Whom We Feel Ourselves To Be Like; We Envy Only Members Of Our Reference Group. There Are Few Successes More Unendurable Than Those Of Our Close Friends.

Most Anger Stems From Feelings Of Weakness, Sadness And Fear: Hard To Remember When One Is At The Receiving End Of Its Defiant Roar.

The Mind May Be Reluctant To Think Properly When Thinking Is All It Is Supposed To Do; The Task Can Be As Paralysing As Having To Tell A Joke Or Mimic An Accent On Demand.

It Wasn't Only Fanatics And Drunkards Who Began Conversations With Strangers In Public.

The Arrogance That Says Analysing The Relationship Between Reasons And Causes Is More Important Than Writing A Philosophy Of Shyness Or Sadness Or Friendship Drives Me Nuts. I Can't Accept That.

In The Gap Between Who We Wish One Day To Be And Who We Are At Present, Must Come Pain, Anxiety, Envy And Humiliation.

The Materialistic View Of Happiness Of Our Age Starkly Revealed In Our Understanding Of The Word "luxury.

Religions Are So Subtle, So Complicated, So Intelligent In Many Ways That They're Not Fit To Be Abandoned To The Religious Alone; They're For All Of Us.

The More Closely We Analyze What We Consider 'sexy,' The More Clearly We Will Understand That Eroticism Is The Feeling Of Excitement We Experience At Finding Another Human Being Who Shares Our Values And Our Sense Of The Meaning Of Existence.

If The Behaviour Of Babies And Small Children Is Any Guide, We Emerge Into The World With Our Tendencies To Imbalance Already Well Entrenched. In Our Playpens And High Chairs, We Are Rarely Far From Displaying Either Hysterical Happiness Or Savage Disappointment, Love Or Rage, Mania Or Exhaustion--and, Despite The Growth Of A More Temperate Exterior In Adulthood, We Seldom Succeed In Laying Claim To Lasting Equilibrium, Traversing Our Lives Like Stubbornly Listing Ships On Choppy Seas.

The Lesson? To Respond To The Unexpected And Hurtful Behavior Of Others With Something More Than A Wipe Of The Glasses, To See It As A Chance To Expand Our Understanding.

It Would Be Foolish To Describe The Logistics Hub As Merely Ugly, For It Has The Horrifying, Soulless, Immaculate Beauty Characteristic Of Many Of The Workplaces Of The Modern World.

.. If You Asked Most People Whether They Believed In Love Or Not, They’d Probably Say They Didn’t. Yet That’s Not Necessarily What They Truly Think. It’s Just The Way They Defend Themselves Against What They Want. They Believe In It, But Pretend They Don’t Until They’re Allowed To. Most People Would Throw Away All Their Cynicism If They Could. The Majority Just Never Gets The Chance.

Everyone Wants A Better Life: Very Few Of Us Want To Be Better People.

Forgiveness Requires A Sense That Bad Behaviour Is A Sign Of Suffering Rather Than Malice.

Don't Despair: Despair Suggests You Are In Total Control And Know What Is Coming. You Don't - Surrender To Events With Hope.

An Understandable Hunger For Potential Clients Tempts Many [career Counseling Therapists] To Overpromise, Like Creative Writing Teachers Who, Out Of Greed Or Sentimentality, Sometimes Imply That All Of Their Students Could One Day Produce Worthwhile Literature, Rather Than Frankly Acknowledging The Troubling Truth, Anathema To A Democratic Society, That The Great Writer, Like The Contented Worker, Remains An Erratic And Anomalous Event, Immune To The Methods Of Factory Farming.

You Normally Have To Be Bashed About A Bit By Life To See The Point Of Daffodils, Sunsets And Uneventful Nice Days.

Rather Than Teasing The Buyers, We May Blame The Society In Which They Lived For Setting Up A Situation Where The Purchase Of Ornate Cabinets Felt Psychologically Necessary And Rewarding, Where Respect Was Dependent On Baroque Displays. Rather Than A Tale Of Greed, The History Of Luxury Could More Accurately Be Read As A Record Of Emotional Trauma. It Is The Legacy Of Those Who Have Felt Pressured By The Disdain Of Others To Add An Extraordinary Amount To Their Bare Selves In Order To Signal That They Too May Lay A Claim To Love.

Blind Impatience Is Equally Evident In The Fruit Section. Our Ancestors Might Have Delighted In The Occasional Handful Of Berries Found On The Underside Of A Bush In Late Summer, Viewing It As A Sign Of The Unexpected Munificence Of A Divine Creator, But We Became Modern When We Gave Up On Awaiting Sporadic Gifts From Above And Sought To Render Any Pleasing Sensation Immediately And Repeatedly Available.

The Company Of Certain People May Excite Our Generosity And Sensitivity, While That Of Others Awakens Our Competitiveness And Envy.

Travel Agents Would Be Wiser To Ask Us What We Hope To Change About Our Lives Rather Than Simply Where We Wish To Go.

Politics Is So Difficult, It's Generally Only People Who Aren't Quite Up To The Task Who Feel Convinced They Are.

We Depend On Our Surroundings Obliquely To Embody The Moods And Ideas We Respect And Then To Remind Us Of Them. We Look To Our Buildings To Hold Us, Like A Kind Of Psychological Mould, To A Helpful Vision Of Ourselves. We Arrange Around Us Material Forms Which Communicate To Us What We Need — But Are At Constant Risk Of Forgetting What We Need — Within. We Turn To Wallpaper, Benches, Paintings And Streets To Staunch The Disappearance Of Our True Selves.

Status Anxiety: A Worry, So Pernicious As To Be Capable Of Ruining Extended Stretches Of Our Lives, That We Are In Danger Of Failing To Conform To The Ideals Of Success Laid Down By Our Society And That We May As A Result Be Stripped Of Dignity And Respect; A Worry That We Are Currently Occupying Too Modest A Rung Or Are About To Fall To A Lower One.

Our Disrespect For Thinking: Someone Sitting In A Chair, Gazing Out Of A Window Blankly, Always Described As 'doing Nothing'.

The Desire For High Status Is Never Stronger Than In Situations Where "ordinary" Life Fails To Answer A Median Need For Dignity And Comfort.

We Will Cease To Be Angry Once We Cease To Be So Hopeful.

Our Greatest Furies Spring From Events Which Violate Our Sense Of The Ground Of Our Existence.

Sweetness Is The Opposite Of Machismo, Which Is Everywhere-and I Really Don't Get On With Machismo. I'm Interested In Sensitivity, And Weakness, And Fear, And Anxiety, Because I Think That, At The End Of The Day, Behind Our Masks, That's What We Are.

It Seemed An Advantage To Be Traveling Alone. Our Responses To The World Are Crucially Moulded By The Company We Keep, For We Temper Our Curiosity To Fit In With The Expectations Of Others...being Closely Observed By A Companion Can Also Inhibit Our Observation Of Others; Then, Too, We May Become Caught Up In Adjusting Ourselves To The Companion's Questions And Remarks, Or Feel The Need To Make Ourselves Seem More Normal Than Is Good For Our Curiosity.

Company We Keep

Perhaps The Easiest People To Fall In Love With Are Those About Whom We Know Nothing. Romances Are Never As Pure As Those We Imagine During Long Train Journeys, As We Secretly Contemplate A Beautiful Person Who Is Gazing Out Of The Window – A Perfect Love Story Interrupted Only When The Beloved Looks Back Into The Carriage And Starts Up A Dull Conversation About The Excessive Price Of The On-board Sandwiches With A Neighbour Or Blows Her Nose Aggressively Into A Handkerchief.

Falling In Love

How Generous Was It To Offer Gifts To People One Knew Would Never Accept Them?

William James Once Made An Acute Point About The Relationship Between Happiness And Expectation. He Argued That Satisfaction With Ourselves Does Not Require Us To Succeed In Every Endeavour. We Are Not Always Humiliated By Failing; We Are Humiliated Only If We First Invest Our Pride And Sense Of Worth In A Given Achievement And Then Do Not Reach It.

One Of Our Major Flaws, And Causes Of Unhappiness, Is That We Find It Hard To Take Note Of Appreciate And Be Grateful For What Is Always Around Us. We Suffer Because We Lose Sight Of The Value Of What Is Before Us And Yearn, Often Unfairly, For The Imagined Attraction Elsewhere.

The Degree Of Sympathy We Feel Regarding Another's Fiasco Is Directly Proportional To How Easy Or Difficult It Is For Us To Imagine Ourselves, Under Like Circumstances, Making A Similar Mistake.

The Only Possible Way To Begin A Book Is To Tell Oneself That Its Eventual Failure Is Guaranteed — But Survivable.

Someone Who Has Thought Rationally And Deeply About How The Body Works Is Likely To Arrive At Better Ideas About How To Be Healthy Than Someone Who Has Followed A Hunch. Medicine Presupposes A Hierarchy Between The Confusion The Layperson Will Be In About What Is Wrong With Him, And The More Accurate Knowledge Available To Doctors Reasoning Logically. At The Heart Of Epicureanism Is The Thought That We Are As Bad At Answering The Question "what Will Make Me Happy?" As "what Will Make Me Healthy?" Our Souls Do Not Spell Out Their Troubles.

I Thought About Societies Where Exceptional Fortunes Are Built Up In Industries With Very Little Connection To Out Sincere And Significant Needs, Industries Where It Is Difficult To Escape From The Disparity Between A Seriousness Of Means And A Triviality Of Ends.

The Longing For A Destiny Is No Nowhere Stronger Than In Our Romantic Life. All Too Often Forced To Share Our Bed With Those Who Cannot Fathom Our Soul, Can We Not Be Forgiven If We Believe Ourselves Fated To Stumble One Day Upon The Man Or Woman Of Our Dreams.

I Passionately Believe That's It's Not Just What You Say That Counts, It's Also How You Say It - That The Success Of Your Argument Critically Depends On Your Manner Of Presenting It.

One Of The Better Guarantors Of Ending Up In A Good Relationship: An Advanced Capacity To Be Alone.

Good Relationship

Our Homes Do Not Have To Offer Us Permanent Occupancy Or Store Our Clothes To Merit The Name. To Speak Of Home In Relation To A Building Is Simply To Recognise Its Harmony With Our Own Prized Internal Song. Home Can Be An Airport Or A Library, A Garden Or A Motorway Diner.

We Should Read Other People's Books In Order To Learn What We Feel; It Is Our Own Thoughts We Should Be Developing, Even If It Is Another Writer's Thought That Help Us To Do So.

There Are Things That Are Not Spoken About In Polite Society. Very Quickly In Most Conversations You'll Reach A Moment Where Someone Goes, 'oh, That's A Bit Heavy,' Or 'eew, Disgusting.' And Literature Is A Place Where That Stuff Goes; Where People Whisper To Each Other Across Books, The Writer To The Reader. I Think That Stops You Feeling Lonely – In The Deeper Sense, Lonely.

What Is Fascinating About Marriage Is Why Anyone Wants To Get Married.

I Learnt To Stop Fantasising About The Perfect Job Or The Perfect Relationship Because That Can Actually Be An Excuse For Not Living.

When I See Someone Like Richard Dawkins, I See My Father. I Grew Up With That. I'm Basically The Child Of Richard Dawkins.

It Is In Dialogue With Pain That Many Beautiful Things Acquire Their Value. Acquaintance With Grief Turns Out To Be One Of The More Unusual Prerequisites Of Architectural Appreciation. We Might, Quite Aside From All Other Requirements, Need To Be A Little Sad Before Buildings Can Properly Touch Us.

Being Content Is Perhaps No Less Easy Than Playing The Violin Well: And Requires No Less Practice.

If Our Lives Are Dominated By A Search For Happiness, Then Perhaps Few Activities Reveal As Much About The Dynamics Of This Quest - In All Its Ardour And Paradoxes - Than Our Travels.

Reputation Matters So Much Only Because People So Seldom Think For Themselves.

The Bourgeois Thinkers Of The Eighteenth Century Thus Turned Aristotle's Formula On Its Head: Satisfactions Which The Greek Philosopher Had Identified With Leisure Were Now Transposed To The Sphere Of Work, While Tasks Lacking In Any Financial Reward Were Drained Of All Significance And Left To The Haphazard Attentions Of Decadent Dilettantes. It Now Seemed As Impossible That One Could Be Happy And Unproductive As It Had Once Seemed Unlikely That One Could Work And Be Human.

If We Are Inclined To Forget How Much There Is In The World Besides That Which We Anticipate, Then Works Of Art Are Perhaps A Little To Blame, For In Them We Find At Work The Same Process Of Simplification Or Selection As In The Imagination.

For Paranoia About 'what Other People Think' : Remember That Only Some Hate, A Very Few Love - And Almost All Just Don't Care.

A Successful Work Will Draw Out The Features Capable Of Exciting A Sense Of Beauty And Interest In The Spectator.

I Went To Church And Couldn't Swallow It. The Music Was Nice But I Don't Belong There.

Good Sex Isn't Just Fun, It Keeps Us Sane And Happy. Having Sex With Someone Makes Us Feel Wanted, Alive And Potent.

A World Where A Majority Had Imbibed The Lessons Implicit Within Tragic Art Would Be One In Which The Consequences Of Our Failures Would Necessarily Cease To Weigh Upon Us So Heavily.

Gaffe-focused Journalism: Revenge Of Intelligent People Who Know True Evils Are Out There But Lack The Access/time To Get To Them.

Though Debts Are Condemned In The Financial World, The World Of Friendship And Love May Perversely Depend On Well-managed Debts.

Love And Friendship

Serious Journalists Often Imagine Society Is Adrift Because People Don't Know Certain Things. Yet Often, They Know But Just Don't Care. So The Task Of Serious Journalism Isn't Just To Lay Out Truths. It Is To Make Vital Truths Compelling To A Big Audience.

Sublime Places Repeat In Grand Terms A Lesson That Ordinary Life Typically Teaches Viciously: That The Universe Is Mightier Than We Are, That We Are Frail And Temporary And Have No Alternative But To Accept Limitations On Our Will; That We Must Bow To Necessities Greater Than Ourselves.

The Genius Of Religions Is That They Structure The Inner Life.

The Difference Between Hope And Despair Is A Different Way Of Telling Stories From The Same Facts.

It Is The Most Ambitious And Driven Among Us Who Are The Most Sorely In Need Of Having Our Reckless Hopes Dampened Through Immersive Dousings In The Darkness Which Religions Have Explored. This Is A Particular Priority For Secular Americans, Perhaps The Most Anxious And Disappointed People On Earth, For Their Nation Infuses Them With The Most Extreme Hopes About What They May Be Able To Achieve In Their Working Lives And Relationships.

We Don't Exist Unless There Is Someone Who Can See Us Existing, What We Say Has No Meaning Until Someone Can Understand, While To Be Surrounded By Friends Is Constantly To Have Our Identity Confirmed; Their Knowledge And Care For Us Have The Power To Pull Us From Our Numbness. In Small Comments, Many Of Them Teasing, They Reveal They Know Our Foibles And Except Them And So, In Turn, Accept That We Have A Place In The World.

The Media Insists On Taking What Someone Didn't Mean To Say As Being Far Closer To The Truth Than What They Did.

It Is Striking How Much More Seriously We Are Likely To Be Taken After We Have Been Dead A Few Centuries.

The Price We Have Paid For Expecting To Be So Much More Than Our Ancestors Is A Perpetual Anxiety That We Are Far From Being All We Might Be.

There Is Always The Option Of Being Emotionally Lazy, That Is, Of Quoting.

Differ Though We Might With Christianity's View Of What Precisely Our Souls Need, It Is Hard To Discredit The Provocative Underlying Thesis, Which Seems No Less Relevant In The Secular Realm Than In The Religious One-that We Have Within Us A Precious, Childlike, Vulnerable Core Which We Should Nourish And Nurture On Its Turbulent Journey Through Life.

All Tours Are Filled With Humiliation. My Publisher Once Hired A Private Jet To Fly Me To A Venue Where 1,000 People Were Waiting. It Almost Bankrupted Him.

Endeavoring To Purchase Something We Think Beautiful May In Fact Be The Most Unimaginative Way Of Dealing With The Longing It Excites In Us, Just As Trying To Sleep With Someone May Be The Bluntest Response To A Feeling Of Love.

If Cynicism And Love Lie At Opposite Ends Of A Spectrum, Do We Not Sometimes Fall In Love In Order To Escape The Debilitating Cynicism To Which We Are Prone? Is There Not In Every Coup De Foudre A Certain Willful Exaggeration Of The Qualities Of The Beloved, An Exaggeration Which Distracts Us From Our Habitual Pessimism And Focuses Our Energies On Someone In Whom We Can Believe In A Way We Have Never Believed In Ourselves?

Falling In Love

Newspapers Are Being Read All Around. The Point Is Not, Of Course, To Glean New Information, But Rather To Coax The Mind Out Of Its Sleep-induced Introspective Temper.

Pegging Your Contentment To The Overall State Of The World Rather Than Of Your Own Life: The Basis Of Morality, Or A Sort Of Madness?

A Great Writer Picks Up On Those Things That Matter. It’s Almost Like Their Radar Is Attuned To The Most Significant Moments.

Despite Its Maddeningly Vague, Inarticulate Form, Anxiety Is Almost Always Trying To Tell You Something Useful And Apposite.

We Don't Really Learn Anything Properly Until There Is A Problem, Until We Are In Pain, Until Something Fails To Go As We Had Hoped ... We Suffer, Therefore We Think.

I Assemble My Ideas In Pieces On A Computer File, Then Gradually Find A Place For Them On A Piece Of Scaffolding I Erect.

Why, Then, If Expensive Things Cannot Bring Us Remarkable Joy, Are We So Powerfully Drawn To Them?

One Of The Unexpectedly Important Things That Art Can Do For Us Is To Teach Us How To Suffer More Successfully.

How Do The Stems Connect To The Roots?' 'where Is The Mist Coming From?' 'why Does One Tree Seem Darker Than Another?' These Questions Are Implicitly Asked And Answered In The Process Of Sketching.

Because The Rhythm Of Conversation Makes No Allowance For Dead Periods, Because The Presence Of Others Calls For Continuous Responses, We Are Left To Regret The Inanity Of What We Say, And The Missed Opportunity Of What We Do Not.

Rather Than Employing It As A Supplement To Active, Conscious Seeing, They Used The Medium As A Substitute, Paying Less Attention To The World Than They Had Done Previously, Taking It On Faith That Photography Automatically Assured Them Possession Of It.

The More Familiar Two People Become, The More The Language They Speak Together Departs From That Of The Ordinary, Dictionary-defined Discourse. Familiarity Creates A New Language, An In-house Language Of Intimacy That Carries Reference To The Story The Two Lovers Are Weaving Together And That Cannot Be Readily Understood By Others.

The Mind Does Most Of Its Best Thinking When We Aren't There. The Answers Are There In The Morning.

If It Is True That Love Is The Pursuit In Another Of Qualities We Lack In Ourselves, Then In Our Love Of Someone From Another Culture, One Ambition May Be To Weld Ourselves More Closely To Values Missing From Our Own Culture.

Status Anxiety Definitely Exists At A Political Level. Many Iraqis Were Annoyed With The Us Essentially For Reasons Of Status: For Not Showing Them Respect, For Humiliating Them.

Work Is Most Fulfilling When You're At The Comfortable, Exciting Edge Of Not Quite Knowing What You Are Doing.

Intimacy Is The Capacity To Be Rather Weird With Someone - And Finding That That's Ok With Them.

According To Montaigne, It Was The Oppressive Notion That We Had Complete Mental Control Over Our Bodies, And The Horror Of Departing From This Portrait Of Normality, That Had Left The Man Unable To Perform Sexually.

Must Being In Love Always Mean Being In Pain?

Artistic Accounts Involve Severe Abbreviations Of What Reality Will Force Upon Us.

One Wants Never To Give Up This Crystalline Perspective. One Wants To Keep Counterpositioning Home With What One Knows Of Alternative Realities, As They Exist In Tunis Or Hyderabad. One Wants Never To Forget That Nothing Here Is Normal, That The Streets Are Different In Wisebaden, And Louyang, That This Is Just One Of Many Possible Worlds.

Taking Architecture Seriously Therefore Makes Some Singular And Strenuous Demands Upon Us...it Means Conceding That We Are Inconveniently Vulnerable To The Colour Of Our Wallpaper And That Our Sense Of Purpose May Be Derailed By An Unfortunate Bedspread

We Are Certainly Influenced By Role Models, And If We Are Surrounded By Images Of Beautiful Rich People, We Will Start To Think That To Be Beautiful And Rich Is Very Important - Just As In The Middle Ages, People Were Surrounded By Images Of Religious Piety.

Anxiety Is The Handmaiden Of Contemporary Ambition.

Nowhere Was The Airport's Charm More Concentrated Than On The Screens Placed At Intervals Across The Terminal Which Announced, In Deliberately Workmanlike Fonts, The Itineraries Of Aircraft About To Take To The Skies. These Screens Implied A Feeling Of Infinite And Immediate Possibility: They Suggested The Ease With Which We Might Impulsively Approach A Ticket Desk And, Within A Few Hours, Embark For A Country Where The Call To Prayer Rang Out Over Shuttered Whitewashed Houses, Where We Understood Nothing Of The Language And Where No One Knew Our Identities.

Happiness Is Impossible For Longer Than 15 Minutes. We Are The Descendants Of Creatures Who, Above All Else, Worried.

Much Of The Really Serious Trouble In The World Gets Going With A Sense Of Humiliation.

Our Responses To The World Are Crucially Moulded By The Company We Keep, For We Temper Our Curiosity To Fit In With The Expectations Of Others.

Company We Keep

I Know A Lot About Writing, But I Don't Know Much About How Other Industries Work. I've Tried To Use My Naivety To My Advantage.

Only As We Mature Does Affection Begin To Depend On Achievement.

What We Find Exotic Abroad May Be What We Hunger For In Vain At Home.

If One Felt Successful, There'd Be So Little Incentive To Be Successful.

There Is Psychological Pleasure In This Takeoff, Too, For The Swiftness Of The Plane’s Ascent Is An Exemplary Symbol Of Transformation. The Display Of Power Can Inspire Us To Imagine Analogous, Decisive Shifts In Our Own Lives, To Imagine That We, Too, Might One Day Surge Above Much That Now Looms Over Us.” P. 38-39

Dreams Reveal We Never Quite Get 'over' Anything: It's All Still In There Somewhere.

Despite The Best Efforts Of Critics And The Hopes Of Authors, Our Tastes In Books Are Probably As Inherent & Unbudgeable As Those In Food.

It Would Scarcely Be Acceptable, For Example, To Ask In The Course Of An Ordinary Conversation What Our Society Holds To Be The Purpose Of Work.

Every Time We Feel Satisfied With What We Have, We Can Be Counted As Rich, However Little We May Actually Possess.

The Very Act Of Drawing An Object, However Badly, Swiftly Takes The Drawer From A Woolly Sense Of What The Object Looks Like To A Precise Awareness Of Its Component Parts And Particularities.

The Real Issue Is Not Whether Baking Biscuits Is Meaningful, But The Extent To Which The Activity Can Seem To Be So After It Has Been Continuously Stretched And Subdivided Across Five Thousand Lives.

As Victims Of Hurt, We Frequently Don't Bring Up What Ails Us, Because So Many Wounds Look Absurd In The Light Of Day.

We Read The Weird Tales In Newspapers To Crowd Out The Even Weirder Stuff Inside Us.

He Was Marked Out By His Relentless Ability To Find Fault With Others' Mediocrity - Suggesting That A Certain Type Of Intelligence May Be At Heart Nothing More Or Less Than A Superior Capacity For Dissatisfaction.

Paying Tax Should Be Framed As A Glorious Civic Duty Worthy Of Gratitude - Not A Punishment For Making Money.

There Is No Such Thing As Work-life Balance. Everything Worth Fighting For Unbalances Your Life.

Never, Ever Become A Writer. It's A Nightmare.

There's A Whole Category Of People Who Miss Out By Not Allowing Themselves To Be Weird Enough.

Not Being Understood May Be Taken As A Sign That There Is Much In One To Understand.

We Feel Something, And Reach Out For The Nearest Phrase Or Hum With Which To Communicate, But Which Fails To Do Justice To What Has Induced Us To Do So....we Stay On The Outside Of Our Impressions, As If Staring At Them Through A Frosted Window, Superficially Related To Them, Yet Estranged From Whatever Has Eluded Casual Definition.

Unnatural To Expect That Learning To Be Happy Should Be Any Easier Than, Say, Learning To Play The Violin Or Require Any Less Practice.

It Looks Like It’s Wasting Time, But Literature Is Actually The Ultimate Time-saver - Because It Gives Us Access To A Range Of Emotions And Events That It Would Take You Years, Decades, Millennia To Try To Experience Directly. Literature Is The Greatest Reality Simulator - A Machine That Puts You Through Infinitely More Situations Than You Can Ever Directly Witness.

True Love Is A Lack Of Desire To Check One's Smartphone In Another's Presence.

Man Seems Merely Dust Postponed: The Sublime As An Encounter - Pleasurable, Intoxicating, Even - With Human Weakness In The Face Of Strength, Age And Size Of The Universe.

It Should Not Be Illiers-combray That We Visit: A Genuine Homage To Proust Would Be To Look At Our World Through His Eyes, Not Look At His World Through Our Eyes.

It Is By Finding Out What Something Is Not That One Comes Closest To Understanding What It Is.

It Is Perhaps Sad Books That Best Console Us When We Are Sad.

The Arab-israeli Conflict Is Also In Many Ways A Conflict About Status: It's A War Between Two Peoples Who Feel Deeply Humiliated By The Other, Who Want The Other To Respect Them. Battles Over Status Can Be Even More Intractable Than Those Over Land Or Water Or Oil.

Rather Than Getting More Spoilt With Age, As Difficulties Pile Up, Epiphanies Of Gratitude Abound.

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