Alain de Botton
Appearances
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Thank you so much. Where do bad inner voices come from? If that sounds too weird, think of language, right? All of us arrive in the world not speaking any language. And by the age of three, four, five, six, seven, you know, we'll have learned a lot of words. But the fascinating thing about human beings is we don't know we're learning.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And I think that's why when you look at Picasso, and there are lots of artists and lots of Figures you could draw that analogy with. But when you're looking at a painting that Picasso did when he was 90, at the end of his life, and it's got elements of stuff that a child might do, but it's gone through. You know that this guy has been doing so much other stuff. So he's got deeper reasons.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Did you ever read His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Well, good luck to you. You're going to be learning a long time. It's not impossible. It can be done. But I think it's helpful to think of how hard it is because sometimes people get very impatient in their attempts to change things about themselves. They go things like, you know... I want to change how I relate to people in relationships, say.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Yeah. And I think it's interesting, isn't it, when... when people who've read a lot, thought a lot, etc., come out with stuff, and it sounds very, very simple. And I think our society gets a bit puzzled by that. Because The sort of obvious respect goes to people that speak in a very dense way and you can't quite understand what they mean. So, you know, philosophy, discipline, I started out in.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
You know, the heroes there are people like Wittgenstein or Hegel, Kant, etc. Very, very hard. Not superbly accessible. To make headway. And then, you know, you turn to the East. You look at Eastern philosophy. You look at the poetry of someone like Basho in Japan, medieval Japan. It's so simple.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
It's, you know, it's four words on a piece of paper and very easy to go mumbo jumbo or child's play or whatever. And to be kind of mature enough to go, okay, I'm going to bear with the anxiety that this is very simple sounding, simple sounding. It's, In the East, the idea is that poetry, for example, can sound very, very simple.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
The point is that it's an interaction between the reader and the work. So not everything is in the poem or the saying. You bring yourself to it. And therefore, the ultimate impact of that work is a collaboration between you and the work. Fascinating. So the Western view might be to go, there's not that much in there. And it's the artist's fault. It's your job.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Whereas in East, the view is, well, it's a collaboration. So if you're not seeing anything, it's because you're not bringing enough of yourself. So very interesting to get lots of the arts. I mean, think of that Enzo in just a circle. This is the whole of life. Whole of life. You're just doing a circle with your brush. And amazing. Amazing the courage to say, okay, we're going to go with this.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
The whole of existence is this circle. And if you meditate profoundly enough on this, you will see the world, not just in a grain of sand, but in a circle, etc. And... We really meet a fault line here in the Western understanding of depth and profundity. This takes a bit of time for the Western mind to kind of get to grips with that. We're like, come on, is this a joke?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And I've read a book and I've been to three therapy sessions and I'm really annoyed. Nothing works. You want to go, okay, imagine this was Italian. So you've looked at a book on Italian, you've taken three classes and you don't speak fluent Italian and you're complaining. So we do need some modesty here. Yeah. Just in order to be properly ambitious.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Are they just peddling us something?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Come on, let's be honest here with the audience. We know what emotions are like. They're not just lovely, cuddly things. They're absolutely terrifying a lot of the time. Think of what it takes. Think about love, right? So we think that people spend their lives looking for love. And half true, that's a half truth, is spend a good deal of time running away from love as well, in all sorts of forms.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
We are as assiduous in our escape from love as we are in our pursuit, perhaps more so. Why? Because it's terrifying. It's especially terrifying if you come from a childhood, a young world, where there was some kind of disruption. in your attachments, in your experience of love. The next time you then meet love as an adult, half of you is just wanting to run away.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And I think people don't still not fully appreciate enough The strength with which we are going to resist love if our earliest experience of it was in any way difficult. And this explains a great deal of the misery of the world.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I mean, as you know, the root cause of early despair and early retirement from things is a false picture of what success demands in an area. And I think in the area of emotional improvement or maturation, we sometimes let ourselves down by thinking it's going to have an ease which it won't have.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
That's right. And I'm not sure if I understand you fully, but is it really the case that you are not accepting the primary emotion? So let's say you go somewhere. It should be nice. You're disappointed. You can't be disappointed. It's meant to be nice. You can't accept that disappointment. And then you're angry with yourself for feeling disappointed.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Whereas if one could just go, okay, maybe it's all right to be disappointed. I mean, It's not brilliant, but there it is. Or I'm feeling sad. Okay, well, that wouldn't be what I wanted, but let me not be sad that I'm sad or angry that I'm sad.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I mean, the way I think about it is that very often we're in a situation of, it's like being a prisoner. You've been kept in jail for a very long time. Your diet's been restricted. It's not been much fun. Then the gate opens and you're allowed to walk out. It should be a great day. Fantastic. You're free. We know what happens. Let's say you've been on a calorie-restricted diet.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Suddenly someone says, here's a buffet. You can eat anything you like. You don't want to eat it. You can't digest it. You can't process it. It's too much. So something similar goes on in our attitudes to happiness often. I mean, it's useful to say to yourself, ask yourself, In the circumstances in which I grew up, what did it mean to be happy? And for some of us, it meant upsetting a parent.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
It meant challenging the dominant mood in a household. It meant taking away attention from somebody else. It meant danger. And that's odd because we think, why would it be dangerous to be happy? Well, but there are all sorts of risks associated with it.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And so in our deep minds, sometimes in adulthood, we simply cannot accept the circumstances of our lives and therefore go about spoiling them so that we put them more, you know, there's a wonderful paper called something like Psychotherapy as a Paper, Criminal in Search of an Offense.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
um a sense that you've done something wrong if you carry that from your past and you think how am i going to get rid of that feeling oh i know i'll do something wrong and then and then i won't feel that feeling anymore sometimes you know it's a bit like that it's like saying um i'm feeling happy but i shouldn't be happy what should i do oh yes i'll make myself unhappy or you know
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I'm feeling love. Someone's offering me love. That's not normal. I don't recognize that feeling. Oh, what should I do? Oh, I'll drive them away. I'll go and be rude to them or go and have an affair with somebody else or whatever it is. Something to spoil, something that's nice. So the impulse to spoil is really deep. Happiness and love are hard to bear.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Let's start with compassion. We are the way we are for poignant reasons. We didn't get to be that way. Think of the bookish child. Think of the child who's reading a lot. Often it's because life around is quite difficult. Now, it's great to read. It's good to read, etc. But if you spend all your time in books... It's often a sign that things are challenging.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And so often people who excel at intellectual pursuits, etc., are in flight from an overwhelming situation. I'd wish them well. That in time, the overwhelming situation could get a little less intense and they could get a little more of reality into their intellectual world. I mean, I'm describing myself. Perhaps you want to try and see reality for what it is.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And if you're warding it off with intellectual structures... let's say thank you to those structures. I think it's really important. Whenever you look at people doing stuff that seems a bit suboptimal or a bit strange, they're reading too much, they're jogging too much, they're trying to make too much money, whatever. They're feeling too much, they're feeling too little.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
All of these departures from so-called health, normality, etc. Always ask yourself, why are they doing it? And it's normally a defence. It is a defence against a situation that was very difficult at some point. They learnt that defence and even though... It would be optimal now to let go of that defensive structure. They're still clinging on to it because that's what feels safe.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
It feels safe to make jokes all the time. It feels safe to be very serious all the time. It feels safe to be depressed. It feels safe to give up. It feels safe to try and win at all costs, including your own health, etc. All these are... defensive structures that once kept us safe that I think in order to evolve, we almost want to say, thank you.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Thank you to your younger self for working this out, for finding a way of coping with reality. But could we learn to cope in a slightly different way?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I think philosophers watching this, philosophers of language may have arguments prone. It's a big thing. But I definitely feel that the more words we have, the more we can attend to what we feel, and in some cases, the more we can feel. I remember learning the word anxiety when I was a teenager and thinking, wow, that's a really useful word. Probably nowadays people learn anxiety a lot earlier.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Yes. And I think our minds, it is much easier to have the headline than the meat of the topic. And very often, we reach a sort of an uncomfortable state of half knowing ourselves. And we think, oh, I've covered it, right? I know in my childhood, there was this, and you know, then there was this, then there was that. And you've got to go to the headline, you know,
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
tension with my dad or you know tricky with my mom whatever it is and we think oh i've got that i've got that i know it now let's go back to the the eastern you know enzo circle right and the east says meditate for hours repeatedly on the thing that looks obvious the thing that you know so they're saying the whole of life is that circle so look at that circle and And keep coming back to it.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And the more you look at it, the more you will see in it. Now, the Western approach is a bit too impatient. It'll say, all right, yeah, it was tense with my dad. I know that. I'll go, hang on, hang on, hang on. That's an Enzo of its own. It was tense with my dad. You could meditate around that for an hour a day or an hour a week or whatever it is. You can keep coming back to that. It's never...
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
there are so many things still to be discovered there it's not dead and so i think i'd almost want to excite you know those who are listening to think okay i think i know something do i really know it might i go back there um our our real experiences tend to be so much richer than our workaday sense of them um Think about a holiday. Say, have you ever been to Greece? Oh, yeah, I went to Greece.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
All right, have you been to Santorini? Yeah, I've been to Santorini. Okay, so we think we covered that one. The person's been to Santorini. Hang on. First of all, our minds are amazing mechanisms of capture. We've got cameras around, sound equipment, et cetera. Nothing beats the human mind for capturing absolutely everything.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Often the time to explore this is sort of twilight of your mind as you're going to sleep or waking up. If you say to yourself, yeah, Santorini, what was that like? What was it really like? And you realize, oh my God, I remember there was a tiled hallway that led to a blue door.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And I actually remember there was a flower in a little vase and there was light coming in from, I think it must have been from the left. And actually, if I look to the right, there was a little window, et cetera. And it's all there. It's all in your mind, just waiting to be asked. waiting. This is the famous, can I talk about Proust?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Marcel Proust, great French novelist, early 20th century, et cetera, came up with this famous idea of the Proustian moment. Some of you will know it, some of you won't. It's basically a moment when you take something sensory, like a sip of water or a smell. Imagine the smell of concrete after rain or the smell of snow just after a And suddenly you get that sensory experience and a world opens up.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
You think, oh my God, I'm five years old again and I've just gone outside of the garden of the yard where I grew up and there was a brick wall and there was that exact smell and I'm there again. And suddenly your world becomes so much richer. And these are just little moments of expansion around a topic like after a snowfall or first day of spring or Santorini or whatever it is.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
So in other words, many of the things that are in our minds in intellectually compressed forms can be expanded with the addition of, I mean, you know, the sort of fancy trendy modern word is meditation. But, you know, some people don't get on with the word meditation. Let's just say by giving it some time. by allowing an experience to assume its proper shape. And we do rush past our experiences.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
But in those days, it was a fascinating word to learn. And the more one's vocabulary stretches, the more you're able to put a flag in bits of your psyche that are perhaps painful. And I think...
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Things are very compressed. And that's why at the end of an average day, my goodness, how much we've seen, how much we've felt, how many little things crossed consciousness. If we were able to give some of that space, how much lighter we would start to feel. But we live so much and we experience so little. We see so much and we notice so little.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I mean, I think the simple answer is that these people are running away from something which is painful and difficult, etc. And they're not allowing themselves to think about it. They're not even allowing it inside consciousness. So think of mania, you know.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
When we say so-and-so is in a manic mood or so-and-so is doing something manically, what we really mean is that they're doing something in order not to do something else, normally not think about something or feel something. And we all end up in certain points in manic states where we're scrubbing the kitchen just a little bit too assiduously or we're jogging a bit too hard or we're
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
scrolling our phones a bit too much. And really the question to ask ourselves at that time is a very simple one, which is, if you weren't able to do what you're doing now, what might you need to think about or to feel? And the answer's there waiting for you. If you can bear it, it could be a very, very awkward question to ask yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
In other words, if you weren't able to clean the kitchen manically or go jogging, et cetera, but you just sit with something, what do you need The old saying, don't just sit there, do something. Don't just sit there and think, do something. Well, imagine, don't just do something. Sit there and think. Reverse it. You reverse it. And what is it that you need to think about?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
If you think about why people go to psychotherapy or even frankly, what motivates a lot of friendship, it's somebody else helps to give you a vocabulary for bits of your mind and bits of your experience that have not till now, that have eluded definition. And that definition is not merely, you know, It's not really a fancy thing.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
So, Chris, how do you define therapy or how do you define what therapy might bring you that's a bit different from meditation?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And if you could characterize what was different about how therapy operates.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
It's a life-saving thing because the more you can define, the easier life gets. Freud speculated that the origins of language lie in an ability to bear frustration. So that if a child can think, you know, I'm currently frustrated, but, you know, mummy's coming back. and the person's got those words, then that can help you to bear missing and also bear excitement or all sorts of things.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I think one has to be really, I mean, that's a beautiful way of putting it. One has to be totally relaxed about that and just say, in the same way that you can't see the back of your head. It's just one of those things. It's not, you know, we can't see some very obvious things. I mean, a therapist, a trained therapist can see within minutes things that have eluded someone for their whole life.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Very humbling. Very humbling. But someone can do it for the therapist as well. Everybody is like this. That's how we're wired. And best thing to do is laugh. It's funny. I mean, it's funny how inept we are. But as everybody's in on the joke, we can laugh together.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I mean, this is so, you know, this is really very much at the core of what we could understand by the word love. You know, think of it in childhood, a loving parent, right? The child, a young child gets an experience that who they really are is acceptable to someone else. So, you know, a little child will go, I hate the teacher.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And the parent, you know, the good parent is able to bear that, even though it's not perfect, right? The parent is able to go, oh, okay. I wonder why. Why have they upset you? It sounds like they might have upset you. Rather than someone would go, don't be so silly. The teacher is the teacher. And they work very hard to give you an education. So don't complain. Wow. That's a tough comment.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Your emotion is not valid. Your emotion is not valid. I mean, you know. Parents do their best, but goodness me, stuff happens in that crucible of childhood that is a bit suboptimal. But love, come back to love, what love is, is accepting. I don't want to see granny. Okay, you don't want to see granny. All right.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Or I really love you, or I really hate my sibling, or I really like the dog, or I want to live forever. All the stuff that little children come up with. Or I'm terrified of daddy, actually. I don't like daddy. Okay, well, let's think about that. What does that mean?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
So being able to accept, and then in later life, again, having someone, it could be a therapist, it could be a friend, who's able to bear the really difficult bits of our psyches, which we all have. I mean, we're all so much weirder than we're supposed to be, so much sadder, so much more worried, etc. And to be able to
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
have someone, you know, it might only be one person or two if we're really lucky and three if we're, you know, God's gift, who can bear and who we've allowed into that sort of private sanctum.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Not even your mum because most, as you say, most relationships, all relationships you have to manage and you have to curtail the fear of being abandoned, you know, if you are too honest. This again, the canteen lady and the beans again. This is the third time in two months. Think of how this plays out in couples. So people come together because they're fed up with being lonely. It's lonely.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
So you try and find a special person. And we dignify this concept by saying, I'm in a relationship. I'm a special friend. I'm getting married, et cetera. We've got these words. But really what this means is I'm no longer so alone in a terrifying world. So you have a special person. And in the early days of love, it's thrilling that you can say stuff that you wouldn't say to anyone else.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And it's so delightful. You can say things like, you know, I still long for my teddy bear. And they go, I long for them too. And then, you know, you hug to the teddy bear. And it's so amazing because, you know, you're the CEO and, you know, you're an important lawyer, doctor, banker, and actually you're clutching your teddy bear. And it's amazing.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Things can become more bearable the more you can put them into language. And I think adults know this when we go about journaling, right? Why is it so helpful to journal? Because we know it is, all research shows that it is. What is it about translating a feeling into a word for that feeling that's helpful? And I think it tames, it contains, and it narrows the spread of difficult emotions.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Or you can go, I really want to put, you know, mayonnaise on the pizza. And you That's great. And then, you know, you push it further and then you go, I'm going to go to a museum, but I don't like any of the art. I don't like it either. Or I've never read that book, but I always pretended I did. And it's just thrilling. And, you know, and then and then sex gets invited.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And you go, I like this strange sounding thing. And they go, I like it, too. I like this other thing, etc. And you're building a wonderful universe. But, you know, this is the challenging thing about love because, you know, let's imagine you're with this person and you shared all this stuff, etc. And then you go to a cafe, say, and you say, the waiter's hot.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And then you look at their face and they're like, look, really quite heartbroken that you've just commented on the visual appeal of the waiting staff. And they feel hurt and they feel jealous and they feel upset. And suddenly you think, oh, my goodness, there's a choice here.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
between you know kindness and honesty and i think that's what we're circling around which is can you be you know what at what moment does honesty run up against the limits of kindness or the you know the requirements of kindness i think what you're saying about therapy is you don't have to be kind to the therapists because it's 50 minute session you're giving them money and people go you
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
oh, it's a bore that you're giving the money. Well, you know, Freud thought long and hard about this, about the role of money in therapy. And his view was, it's an agent of liberation. It's a good thing if you can pay the therapist. And that's why you want people to bring cash and leave the cash on the table at the end of every session. Nowadays, you might put your card on.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
But the point is, it's a way of saying, I can be fully myself because I have earned money. this person's attention. Some people go, but they don't really love you, et cetera. And you go, maybe they don't really love you, but that's a deliberation. Correct. There's no obligation. No obligation. Obligation.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I mean, you're putting your finger on a big paradox. I think the idea that you should be yourself in a relationship is one of the most disastrous ideas because the untrammeled self is a frightening specter. Best kept for you and your therapist, you in the mirror. If you have to confront your partner with your stream of consciousness at all times, you can't do this.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Parents don't do this with their children. Obviously, our partners are not children, but it's telling us something about love. In a loving relationship, at points, you edit yourself. It's 11 at night. I'm not going to bring that issue up. They're very tired. I'm not going to bring that up. I'm feeling stressed and raw. I'm not going to start a subject that I won't know how to handle, etc.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Now, all of us fail at points. All of us fail in this area. But I think as an ideal, it's a good ideal. I mean, I could stick up for a word which sounds very odd in the context of love, politeness. It's a good idea to try and be polite. I'm like, oh, that's fake, that's fake. Well, it's also kind to edit yourself, to put a veneer of civilization on certain things. Yeah, why not?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Yeah. You're absolutely right. There are some people who need to work on being more transparent, more communicative, and others who need to be less technical where to think for it is reactive. You know, they're not, you shouldn't come out with whatever it is that you're feeling at all times in its full force. It just depends. I mean,
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
you know, that classic anxious avoidant attachment pattern, we might say that on the whole, avoidant people need to work on their communication skills, you know, and they need to be more transparent and avoidant and anxious people need on the whole to contain certain feelings, you know, and it's just, yeah, horses for courses on this one.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Understand, understand, understand where each one's coming from. I mean, why is someone an avoidant? They're not evil. They're not mean. It can be pretty horrible to be on the receiving end of certain kinds of pattern of behavior. But let's remember, why does this exist? Someone becomes avoidant when they've grown up in an emotional calorie-controlled diet environment where...
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
They have had to get used to very little. The way they survive is mum's not so interested, dad's not so interested, no caregiver around, a lot of disappointment. I'm just going to hunker down and get used to very little, literally like an animal that gets used to a very thin diet. That is what has happened to an avoidant person. And then when they get to love and someone goes, I adore you.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Let's spend every evening together. Let's, you know, you're marvelous. They feel a bit, often they don't even understand that they're feeling it, totally engulfed. They feel overwhelmed. They feel their very identity is in threat of dissolution. By something that's lovely, but it's too much too soon. And what they need is an experience of love titrated. They need the titration of love.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
But often they don't know how to ask for it. They don't even know. Often they might smile through it and go, I'm not really feeling this. And then they can't bear it. They can't bear it. And then they run away. Or just become weird or something. So explanation. Hello, I'm somebody who had to get used to a very calorie-controlled diet emotionally.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I really feel warmly this relationship matters a lot to me. But the kindest thing is not to be too kind to me in an overwhelming way. The most generous thing is not to be too abundant emotionally. Not because I don't want this, but because I grew up in a situation of deprivation. So that's our avoidant friend. Anxious friend, similar kind of story of explanation.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Why do people become so-called anxious? Normally, because unlike the avoidant person, they have had an experience of love. So in some ways, the anxious person's had a better childhood, better journey through life in a way. They have experienced love, but they've also experienced loss and the disruption of that attachment.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
So someone died, someone went away, someone had to go to the army, something happened to disrupt the bond. It was very intense, but it was disrupted. And that person needs to understand that they are – there's a wonderful sentence from Donald Winnicott, a great psychoanalyst, who said, the catastrophe you fear will happen has already happened. And the key thing is, it's been forgotten.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
You forgot the catastrophe. And that's why you keep seeing it in the future, whereas actually it belongs in the past. So what you need to do is understand this structure and repatriate the emotion and put it back where it belongs. And so the avoidant person at dinner on an early date needs to go, I really want to believe in your love.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
But if you say you love me, I might not be able to believe it very easily. And what I will do is test it. And the person might go, oh, tests, oh, fine, fire away. And the anxious person should go, yeah, this test is going to be quite unhealthy, quite horrible. It's going to mean that when you say, I love you, I'm going to start to act up. Because I want to see if you really do.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
So I'm going to be really difficult around you, not because I don't want you, but because I want to test whether your affection is really real. And the only way I know how to do that, because I'm carrying this stuff from childhood, is to act up, play up. And so when we're in a nice restaurant and you tell me that, you know, things are great, I'm going to say, actually, the food's not that nice.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Yeah. That's right. And, you know, think of relationships, couples. The more their vocabulary for what they're going through increases, the more they can say, you know, I'm feeling this. I'm feeling, you know, when you do that, I feel this, et cetera. And the enemy, you know, The sort of normal word is people say communication, but it's really language. It's putting language to feelings.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And I don't really like the clothes you're wearing. And I'm going to cause a drama. Why? To test whether the love is real. Very unfortunate. So the more the anxious friends can get on top of their anxiety, the more they can translate everything I've just said into something that sounds like it's been processed and can be understood by another person, then the better it can be. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Anxious and avoidant people are walking wounded and they need to be able to explain the nature of their particular wound so that appropriate care can be set up. Awareness. Awareness. Which is why, you know, it's great for people to go to therapy. It's great for people to explore themselves. It's not merely fancy. It's not merely whatever. It's a serious indicator of an easier way life with them.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
If you're with a partner who's able to go, okay, hang on a minute, I think I'm confusing you with my mother at the moment, or I think an anger that actually belongs to my father is weirdly in the room, because that's what happens when you start to explore your past. You see the intermingling of past and present all the time. The more you're able to handle on that and warn your partner,
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
the easier it is. I mean, we don't need people to be perfect. We need people to understand how they're imperfect and warn us of the coming imperfection or retrospectively apologize for it in relatively civilized terms. That's what we need.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I'm hopeful here that we can definitely make progress. And wherever we start, we can make progress. That a temperament where we're inclined to close ourselves off because we constantly think that no one will be able to understand us Once we start to think, okay, this is what I do, I feel very easily misunderstood, and I go and essentially sulk. Once you notice that, that's a big step.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
We're so good at marking milestones. It's somebody's birthday. Let's throw a party. Somebody's just run a marathon. Let's give them a medal, etc., We need different kinds of medals. The medal for the avoidant person who understood that they sulk rather than explain. Dong! Let's put them on television. Let's give a game show in their honor. These are major milestones. Let's give a party.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Let's give a party to the person who's understood that that's going on. There's much more significant than their birthday, which might not be tracking anything significant. That's a significant milestone. So we should give more public attention within our circles public recognition of moments of emotional maturation and how much is that you know I think a
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And so much goes wrong in life because we're unable to do it. It starts with ourselves. We can't do it with ourselves. There's a useful phrase that psychotherapists use, disassociation. It's a fascinating concept. What would it mean to disassociate? And the way it's understood therapeutically is that you could feel an emotion, it's so difficult, tricky in some way, and you then stop feeling it.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
It's been around a while, in a good way. And it's based on very solid science. We've been going at this for 50 years.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Yes. And I think, not to try and sound trendy, but I think AI is going to have a real impact on us in a sense that... So often what happens is we lose sight in the moment of things we know, but are no longer in our minds, right? And so people will have, you know, let's say a couple have a rather sort of torrid time, difficult time, and then each one goes to therapy in the week.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And then they all come back and they're kind of, they're starting to, you know, they're back on track. They can see things more clearly again, or they've spent some time alone, they've journaled, etc., etc. I can imagine a world where we allow technology to nudge us in the same way that we've learned that technology can nudge us awake, nudge us to sleep, nudge us to eat this.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Imagine a little nudge for an avoidant, a little nudge for an anxious person, etc. A little reminder, hang on, hang on, hang on. You're slipping, you're sliding. Psychotherapists talk about the window of tolerance where it's a window in which you're in charge emotionally or you're kind of in control and you slip out of the window of tolerance into something. You lose command of yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
You can imagine a little AI helper Just nudging you to stay within the window.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And, you know, a lot of people will say things like, oh, it's not, you know, I don't want to give my data, blah, blah, blah. Okay. I grant all of that and, you know, it could be spooky, etc. It's no different from, think of people who got their first word, religions. Religions understood that if you want to keep people on track, you've got to get them repeating stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
It's not enough to tell someone something once. You need rituals, systems of memorializing the important things. That's why, you know, if you're an Islam, if you're Muslim, you know, you'll be praying multiple times a day. You'll be saying the same words Because those words have, as it were, been forgotten. Not intellectually, but emotionally. Their full resonance has been forgotten.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
So we can be doing other stuff like doing handstands in the garden or drawing buttercups in the kitchen. And we're becoming expert grammarians. Hundreds of words are entering our minds. Complex grammatical constructions are entering our minds. Now, the way I like to think about it is that that language analogy holds true for emotional life as well.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
In Judaism, you're reading the Torah every Saturday in synagogue. You're reading the Torah and you just go back over it. You don't just read it once. You keep reading. You keep going back. to the same important text. We're very bad at that in the modern world. We think, oh, well, I read this book on attachment. It was quite interesting. And now that's it. I know it now. I know it now.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
You disassociate from the feeling that's in you. It's still in you, but you're no longer registering it. Tricky, tricky. And the argument is always the more you can associate and the less you can disassociate, the better off you will be. But look, there are many bits of life that are unbearable to us. Let's remember this.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
No, you don't. You need to go back. You need to read it all the time. That's why the idea of nudging is not as strange as it might sound. Not as futuristic. It's a very old idea that you might give new life to.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Yeah. You know, T.S. Eliot in The Four Quartets says, you know, we return to the place where we started. It's the idea of that's kind of part of every journey is you come back to the place where you started. The entire story of The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, right? Right. Exactly. And so… I noticed also when you were speaking just now, your smile on your lips, and that's not coincidental.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I think the more one journeys through life, the more there's really only one major solution, which is a smile on one's lips at the sheer, let's put it bluntly, idiocy.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Absurdity of oneself. At the School of Life, we did a class on confidence, and we wrote a little book about confidence. Great book. Thank you. And the...
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
i remember sitting with my co-author great friend of mine called john armstrong and i said to john because we started the topic she's like okay what makes us confident you know and we'd read a few books each of us on like best-selling books and they're you know saying things like repeat yourself how great you are beat yourself your potential get in touch with you know what's right and i said i've read all these books i'm starting to feel humiliated i feel like
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I know that it's kind of wise, but I don't know. And then I remember John saying to me, okay, what makes you feel confident? And I said, if somebody goes, it's okay, you can just be a total idiot. It's all right. You're a bit of an idiot and it's okay. Not you're an idiot, but we're all idiots. That makes me feel... I'm ready to play. I'm ready to have fun. I'm ready to take risks.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Removes the seriousness. Well, remove the inhuman expectation of what a human life can be. Pressure. And accept that we're all of us blockheads who can't really make very much progress. And, you know, there's a wonderful painting which we put in the book by Bruegel. The Ship at Sea. Well, the ship of fools. Anyway, forget this exact title, but it's showing people doing mad things, silly things.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
There's a wonderful quote in Middlemarch, George Eliot, big fat 19th century novel, where she says, if we could properly register the sounds, the full sounds of life, we would lose our minds from the full richness of existence. In other words, if you were sensitive to everything that's around you, you would sort of go mad. And I think
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
One person's eating his foot, the other one's walked into a wall, the third one's jumping off a cliff. It just shows human folly in all its exaggeration. And you think, yeah, that's us. That's we humans. And that opens up such an avenue of compassion. You just think, okay, compassion for yourself, compassion for the other. We're all flailing about in the darkness. And
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
If we can have a relaxed relationship to our foolishness and our blindness, that's a huge confidence booster.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Well, I think the way is not to say, oh, what you need is lighten up and tell a few jokes, because I think that's going to rile people up. I think the thing to do is to push some pessimism their way, because it's actually, if you think about what a joke is, A joke is always basically a bit of pessimism wrapped up in artfully wrapped, but it's basically pessimism.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
One of my favorite sayings by the Stoic philosopher Seneca, he goes, what need is there to weep over parts of life? He says, the whole of it calls for tears. And everyone who hears that sort of gets a smile on their face. And you think, the guy wasn't trying to tell a joke. He wasn't trying to make it funny. He was just trying to be bleak, which say how it is.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And then it makes us smile out of relief. And the relief is, phew, it's not just me. Arthur Schopenhauer, another great pessimistic German philosopher, said, today it is bad, tomorrow it will be worse, until the worst of all happens. Yes. Totally bleak. And you read that and you think, I feel a bit better about today already. I'm starting to cheer up.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I think we really get it wrong, but we think the only way to cheer someone up is to tell them something cheerful. I think the Brits have understood this. This country's got lots of problems, but one thing it understands is melancholy and the relief available in
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
dark humor um and and you know bless our american friends but they don't get it um as much you know if if you pitch up in la and someone goes how are you and you go you know it's bad today tomorrow your life in los angeles is not going to take off you know what i mean Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Yeah, but Chris, let's not do down complaining. I mean, it's one of the great pleasures. It's one of Britain's great pastimes. Well, you know, it's one of everybody, you know, and, you know, being able to complain to a loved one. And, you know, you'll have to listen to their complaints too. But to complain without expectation of a solution.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I mean, the big complaint that every mortal, you know, directs to the sky ultimately is why do I have to die? And, you know, and then you work your way down from that to why do I have to go to work? You know, all these things. But yes, life would be a poor thing if we weren't allowed to spend a good deal part of it complaining.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
So the way we love as adults always bears the imprint of the way which we were loved and we loved as children. And that hugely restricts how we're able to behave and explains the very peculiar, often nonsensical, often counterproductive ways in which we love. We're not free to love just anyone. And I'm sure you'll have had this in your life, met people, et cetera, who will say things like,
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
seem to have ended up with quite a difficult person for me. They're quite challenging for me. Why can't I go and love somebody else? Why am I so in love with this person who's quite challenging? And often it's because what's challenging sits on the very area that was challenging in your past. And that's what makes them attractive.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
If we think about what madness is, what's colloquially called madness, if you think of people with severe mental illness, very often what has happened is that their ability to sequence thoughts has gone. Everything is coming at them, and they can't grade thoughts. They can't say, this thought must go away now. So they'll go, I made a mistake 15 years ago.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Now, before we want to jump off a cliff at the pessimism involved, let's be a In a good relationship, we are drawn towards people who, yes, carry some of the puzzles, some of the knots, some of the challenges of a parental figure or figure of a caregiver. But they hold out the promise of a different ending.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
So whereas in the relationship with parent or caregiver, it ended up with shouting and you stormed out of the house and you're no longer in touch with them. Imagine the joy, imagine the sense of triumph over adversity and human non-communication if you are together as a couple able to move towards understanding and mutual growth.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I think that explains why people hang in there with people who you might think, you know, Take, you know, attachment theory, an anxious person who teams up with an avoidant one. You might want to go, why? Why are you with this avoidant person? Look at this other, I'm going to present you with a perfectly securely attached person. And you go, oh, they're a bit boring. Don't really want them. Why?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
What's going on? It's pure perversion. Let's be generous towards that impulse that trying to find a different ending to probably a very painful early situation. And to be able to do that, to be able to grow together is literally, I think, one of the most exciting and lovely things. It's rare, which is why successful love is rare.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
But to grow together away from your early attachment wounds powers a lot of the ambition of love.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I think the mood of the modern world, the mood of modern Instagram, I've observed, is all about ditch them, chuck them, run away. It's pure pathology. You are sticking around someone suboptimal for purely pathological reasons. That's got to be true in some cases. It is definitely true in some cases. But because it's so well known nowadays that that's true, let's stick up for the other side.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Sometimes we stick around very challenging situations because... We want to try and grow together. We want to try and make progress. And sometimes we can, sometimes we can't. So, you know, it's a balance. I don't want to advocate, you know, an endlessly unfulfilling relationship. But...
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And if you're balanced, you'll go, well, that was 15 years ago, and it's not a problem. We don't have to have it pressing down. And if your reason is buckling, often everything that is alarming comes at you at once, everything that is difficult at once. And so, in a way, I'm sticking up for the ability sometimes to take distance from our feelings.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Good relationships will be marked by a heavy dose of what psychotherapists call rupture and repair, a break and a repair. And the ability to, you know, the thing crashes at night, but the next morning it's fixed. Our friends in the East, the Japanese tradition of kintsuki, fixing that bowl with golden lacquer, fixing the break. It's a very, very important and satisfying part of all relationships.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Let's not add to their woes that they are deficient and ill in some way. They're finding something very hard, and that's okay. Let's bear with how difficult it is. Again, I'm frustrated by the modern temper, which is like, get out, shoot the awful person, and join the liberated uplands. Maybe, maybe, and maybe that is what they're going to do. But
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
you know, let's be very thoughtful about why they've ended up there. Let's not, you know, this might just be, they might find a hundred things in life quite easy. This is what they're finding difficult. And let's acknowledge that. Let's be very kind to that. And let's hold their hands through it. You know, why? What's difficult for them?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Is it that they think that they'll be judged by other people? Right? What's the fear? What's the fear? I'll be judged by, okay, how does that fear stack up with what might really happen? Or I'll never meet anyone new. Okay, let's think about that. Let's not immediately say, oh, you will. Maybe they won't. You know, let's take it calmly, etc.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I just, I'm really resistant to some of this narrative, which is, you know, get out, get rid of the awful underperforming people and get into that golden relationship that's been promised to you in heaven. It's not, you know, that may be the direction of travel, but let's just acknowledge the bumps.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
All of the things they're there in front of me, they have the, and we get literally irritated. And, and just to be able to understand it, It's like saying, you know, why can't Mount Everest be smaller? Why can't the sky be less blue? We're trying to change a constituent element of reality. And I think we need to have as much respect for the inner architecture as we do for the outer architecture.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
You wouldn't look at a building and go, I just want to get rid of that wing immediately. You'd understand that it was incredibly difficult. It's the same thing. Just because it's intangible doesn't mean it's not incredibly stubborn and hard to change. Yeah.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Yes, I think some of us do. Again, life's all about finding what's the lesson that you need to hear. So there are some people, not everyone, but some people really need to hear this.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
So, you know, I started off by going, it's really important to know what you're feeling. But let's also remember, at points… The ability not to feel the full force of everything also belongs to health. So it's a double-edged sword there.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
a little lesson about how sometimes they should give up on people, that sometimes making excuses for people or trying to understand where people are coming from, etc., it can go too far, that those very nice traits can go too far, and that the next best thing that you need to do is to be able to say goodbye without too much That might be the lesson that you need to do.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And let's remember, the people who, on the whole, find it very hard to give up on people are people who couldn't give up, as children can't, on parents who are very unsatisfactory. You can't expect a five-year-old child to give up on a parent. So a parent can be beating the child every night and the child will think, oh, maybe it's my fault.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Because the child cannot bear to give up on the parent and do the thing that would be natural to do, which is to say, I'm in the hands of an abusive parent. You can't do that when you're five. You've got no access to lawyers. You've got no money. You can't go anywhere. You are trapped. And therefore, you become a world expert in not giving up on people.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
But some of what adulthood requires is precisely the opposite sometimes.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I mean, look, let's remember. So the psychology of the so-called people-pleasing person is someone who no one tried to please for themselves. In other words, they were in an asymmetrical relationship, probably with a caregiver or parent, who didn't care about their feelings, didn't prioritize their needs, etc., and they had to adjust to them.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
So if you've got a parent with a volcanic temper where anything might set them off, well, what you say or think is gonna disappear completely because all you're gonna be doing as a child is managing the mood of a parent. They will be an infant essentially, and you will have to be in the parenting role and you'll have to put aside your needs.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And children are great geniuses at reading the room and doing what needs to be done to survive. It's a survival strategy. I will become a people pleaser, not in order to annoy people in later life, but in order to survive, in order to get to the next stage of existence, in order to reach adolescence, let's face it.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And the problem in this, as in so many other neurotic structures, is a very good idea outlives its use. And so it's still operating in circumstances where it's no longer needed. So what the people pleaser needs to tell themselves is, It was amazing at the age of five. I cleverly worked out that I needed to people please in order to cope with my intemperate father. But that situation is now gone.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And if I keep doing this with my partner, with my colleagues, etc., it's going to annoy everybody and it's going to create serious problems. So. What needs to be done is that person shouldn't feel shamed. They should be made to feel proud. There should be a little ceremony where they're able to say to their five-year-old self, thank you. Thank you, little whatever it is.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Thank you for carrying me to a later stage and working out something so clever. And this applies for all defensive neurotic structures. I mean, let's imagine somebody who can't feel very much, who's invulnerable, doesn't open themselves up to other people. And in relationships, that person may be shamed. Oh, so-and-so, they're afraid of intimacy.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
You want to go, okay, shaming this person is not going to help. You have to ask another question, which is, in what circumstances did their current behavior make sense? First question. And it always will make sense. You go back in time and you say, right, in those circumstances, of course it made sense. Your father was dying. Your mother was absent. Of course it made sense not to feel anything.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
You would have been destroyed by your feelings. Therefore, very clever, five or six-year-old you, to work out that it's best not to feel.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
problem is you're now 35 or 45 and there's lots of reason to feel because there's someone loving nearby or there's you've got children or whatever um and therefore we need to say thank you to the younger self and then we can move on but shame is not going to do it to wag a finger and go oh another one who's afraid of intimacy there no one ever changed like that yeah the uh
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
realization that doing that internally being a tyrant to yourself also isn't necessarily the best way to encourage you into behavior change whipping yourself into submission yeah but also it's it's it's missing the logic of of why you're doing what you're doing as i say so much of what we do as adults makes no sense even to us you know why am i worried every morning again ask yourself the question it's a key question for your viewers listeners um
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
When did the current behavior, which now doesn't seem to make sense, when did it once make sense? In what circumstances did this pattern develop, this pattern that is now, in inverted commas, mad or destructive or boring or counterproductive? When did it make sense? And if you can start to see a logic, and there always will be one, I would suggest, almost always will be one.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
There will be a moment when to feel anxious every morning was bound up with your safety and your survival to the next stage of life. So if you can recover contact with what that stage was, you will then be in a position to honor the defensive strategy but also say goodbye to it.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Such a good question. I'd say you have to start by finding the inner voice, because it doesn't announce itself as an inner voice. We're not talking here about literally hearing voices. Some people do, but we're not talking about that here.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Hmm. One of the worst ways is not to explain at all why something has come to feel necessary. In other words, just running away and leaving someone no sense. Because that then leaves the person to imagine everything. And most of our imaginations are dark places in this regard.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
In other words, we think that someone hates us boundlessly or is trying to humiliate us or deliberately wants to be cruel to us, etc. And In many, many cases, I venture to say most cases, when someone leaves someone, it isn't those things. The truth is better than we think. It's still tough. It's very, very tough.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Those attachment ruptures in everyone's life, they're some of the most painful things we will ever have to go through to build a life with someone and then see that life disappear. I mean, we need... We need space to mourn. In Judaism, when someone dies, you lose a spouse, you're allowed a year of mourning.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
You wear black and you're allowed a year of mourning where not too much is expected of you, both professionally and personally. You can go a bit mad and that's all right. Everyone looks after you. They know you're in mourning. We kind of need that when we're heartbroken, when we're serious, because we're dealing with something that is, from an emotional point of view, as serious.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
This is as serious. I mean, it literally is a loss. Someone has died. And so we need that space. So to come back to your question, how to break up, to be able to explain diplomatically, kindly, generously, some of the real reasons why. And as the person who's leaving, not to feel that those reasons, not to be ashamed of those reasons.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
You know, people feel relationships don't have to go on forever. Sometimes relationships have a sell-by date. They are there. They were formed for a particular purpose, unconscious, to carry us to a next stage. And maybe that stage has come to an end for someone. And we can explain that. We can try and, you know, verbalize that. But also clarity.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And sometimes people try to be kind in ways that end up being very, very cruel. I want to leave you, but let's go on holiday together. Is that a wise thing? I want to leave you, but let's be in touch every day. I'll just still call you what I used to call you when we were very intimate. That's tough.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
What we're talking about is a way of speaking to yourself or a way of conducting yourself in your own mind that owes more to something from outside than from inside and that is more negative, or you can put it this way, unfair to you and your chances, your hopes, etc. So how do we detect this is even going on? Because I don't think it's necessarily obvious.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
that's tough so we we may you know couples may out of kindness out of mutual respect go you know there's still a lot of love a lot of affection but probably we shouldn't be in touch that much for a little while you think it's a bad idea for exes to try and be friends um look it depends but i think i think you know there needs to be healing doesn't there needs to be um a break that's marked and honored so that two people can um recover
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Yes. And people, I think, are very afraid about responsibility here, aren't they? They're very afraid that someone will go, oh, I'm sorry I did that thing. But the thing is, it's my childhood. And that's why, you know, and the people will evade basic responsibility. So I think one can take full responsibility, full ownership while still explaining it.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
People are also very worried about blaming parents often. That's another one that comes up a lot. You know, people will go, if I start to investigate patterns, etc., the only solution is then to get angry with my parents. Well, Again, there's a real, you know, people are lied. It was like anger, blame, etc. You can say this happened because of childhood dynamics. No one really wanted it.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Maybe no one's evil, but it definitely happened. And, you know, we can't evade that. You know, is the result anger or fury? It doesn't have to be. Sometimes it could be. Yeah. So... Look, so many of these lessons, it's horses for courses.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
We're a car that needs different gears. You know, sometimes we need to go forwards, sometimes we need to go backwards, we need to turn right, we need to turn left. We need full maneuverability, right? And I think when people discover an exciting idea, the great tendency is to go, well, this toolkit will explain absolutely everything. And this will be the only thing I need.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And, you know, this is why we need the whole history of ideas. This is why well-stocked mind has got in it, you know, some books on the Stoics, as it were, some ideas from the Stoics, some ideas about, you know, resilience and about shutting down emotion and about turning towards pain and all that. We need that. Sometimes we need an aristocratic side.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
We might have read Nietzsche and his aristocratic sense of needing to overcome and what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, etc. Sometimes we need Nietzsche. But if you're only dieting on Nietzsche, you may also need John Bowlby and attachment theory. But if you're only snacking on John Bowlby… So we need a well-stocked mind. And I think that, as I say, I…
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I appreciate that people fall so in love with certain ideas that they think that's all they're going to need. It's rather, you know, it's monotheism. You know, only one God. And, you know, the great thing about paganism, you know, ancient Roman or Greek religion, but, you know, it's finally in India too and other parts of the world. There were many gods.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Here, I think that it's quite helpful to get people to do what are called sentence completion exercises, where you start off with a sub-sentence. And then you have an ellipsis, dot, dot, dot. So men are, women are, life is, I am, I want, if, dot, dot, dot, because, dot, dot, dot. And you say to people, here's a list of these things.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
There was the god of the river, but there was also the god of the sky. And there was the god of the cloud. And there was the god of rain. And there was the god of sunshine. Many, many gods. And we need many gods. And just as in our social lives, let's remember, total monotheism doesn't – it's like, I need one lover and they will answer all my needs. That's quite tough on the lover.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
You may also need a friend who's brilliant at that thing. And there's a friend who's also good at this. So we need a paganism of ideas.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
But, you know, we can forgive it. It's very exciting when you come across an idea that you think and does explain a lot of the world. I mean, this is what happens when people discover Marxism. They go, oh, my goodness, this model explains everything. And then, no, it's really good to explain certain things. And then they discover Freud. Freudianism, it explains everything. No, you know, go study.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I don't necessarily... We see it in religion. We see it in politics. One person has got everything. And it can't be true. But you're right. I mean, we're drowning in inputs. And that leads us to a certain kind of... Yeah, remorseless quest for the one input. And I remember there was a line saying something like, all of us are going to die with a book half-read on our bedside.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
That may not literally be true, but that's capturing something important there, that our exploration will be unfinished forever. It's quite daunting. It's a very sad thought. And of course, the book that we really won't have finished reading is the book of ourselves. We won't have understood more than a share of ourselves. That's very frightening.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
On an average gravestone, it should say, here lies, who half understood who they were. They only are understood. That's very weird. You're on your deathbed and you don't really know who you have been.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Yeah. So that kind of despair.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Without thinking too much, an important prompt, without thinking too much, just say the first thing comes into your head. Men are, women are, life is, I am, et cetera. Or even beginnings of stories, story completion exercises. When I meet someone that I dot, dot, dot, just finish that sentence. And what people will come out with is fascinating. They'll go, you know, men are cruel.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
You know, it's a ticklish topic, isn't it? Because to say, you know, I'm not doing so well in life. I'm a bit isolated from things because I'm so marvelous. You know, you could go, come on. However, let's face it. Look, it's like, imagine you had a very sophisticated diet and you walk through, you know, we're in London now, you walk through every street of London.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
There would be fewer restaurants and eating places and supermarkets that you could go into to get the food that you need because your dietary needs would be quite complicated. There's a version of this around sociability. If you only need to talk about certain things, if you are, I don't know, let's imagine you're Brian Cox. I don't know Brian Cox personally.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And you really just really love interplanetary phenomena. you're not going to meet that many people who will really be able to meet you on those topics. I mean, or even be that interested. They might go, oh, Brian, I loved your show. Enough of the black holes, mate. Enough of the black holes. And so he might find himself a little bit lonely. I mean, who knows about his life?
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I'm sure he's, you know, but... He used to be a rock star. Do you know that? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very cool. Or imagine if you are, I don't know, imagine if you were Freud. And Freud was, you know, he had some collaborators, but he also fell out with a lot of them and didn't get on with, you know, lots of people. So,
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
One might argue that complexity of mind militates against easily finding- Fewer people like you.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
loneliness in they're in an area where maybe people don't resonate quite so much they don't have quite so so many of the conversations that they can answer a slightly different question just because look i think it's really important to think that the deep thinker the the earnest person etc um
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I don't want to suggest that there are these people called geniuses wandering around the world and they're so different from everybody else. I love this quote from Emerson where he says, in the minds of geniuses, we find our own neglected thoughts. So key. In the minds of geniuses, we find our own neglected thoughts. I think what he was saying there was,
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
geniuses don't have thoughts that are categorically different from the ones everybody has. What's different is they hold on to them. They look at them. They feel them. You could say in the minds of artists lie feelings that, you know, lie our own neglected feelings. In other words, artists, geniuses, et cetera, they're just paying more attention to the stuff that's in everybody's mind.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
It's not that their stuff in their mind is completely radically different, which is why often when you... When you hear a great song or a great piece of poetry or whatever, or read a great book, sometimes you think, I kind of knew that that was already in me, that I'm merely being put back in touch with something that's in me already.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Because what the so-called clever person has done is just pay it more attention. So let's not deify these people. And let's also open up, you know, quickest way to become a genius, pay more attention to your own neglected thoughts.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Wow, wow, wow, men are cruel, are they? You know, a person might even be surprised that they've said that. Yeah. Then you say, okay, where's that come from? What led you to believe that? And often what you'll find is a story that owes more to something outside than something inside.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
So it's brutally and horribly simple just to help me get through the day. It is extremely personal and motivated entirely by a desire for self-help. If it helps anybody else. I mean, people sometimes say things like, gosh, you must have studied a lot. How did you know that about me? And I'm like, Frankly, I have no clue. I was just doing my stuff.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And it's beautiful and lovely that it should echo in somebody else. But that's not how I started. It started always with me. And I became a writer. I wrote my first book when I was 22. And it was not... it grew out of writing a diary. It grew out of trying to solve my own confusions. It was a way of trying to stay afloat emotionally, psychically.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And it had nothing to do with a career in that sense. Later on became some of the accoutrements of a career. But as I say, it began, and it still is to this day, an emotional necessity, I would say. It's a way of coping. I am... I'm an intellectual, not a sort of fancy, fancy thing, but I'm an intellectual in the sense that I intellectualize pain.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
If something horrible happens, my immediate impulse is not to jog or drink or do all sorts of things people do, but it's to try and think about, well, what is this thing? What can we... What lesson is there here? And that lesson is being fished out for me. If it helps anyone else, fantastic. But I do it anyway. That's how I operate.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
So at the same time as we're learning a language of words and declensions, we're also learning a language of emotions. We're learning things like, what's a man like? What's a woman like? What happens if you give something to someone? What happens if you're vulnerable? What happens if you want to play? What happens if you say no? What happens if you say yes? All of these are...
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Or when I meet someone, what will happen is, dot, dot, dot, they'll be very friendly to me, then they'll turn against me. Wow, wow. Where did that come from? It's going to be a specific story in the past that is being carried forward.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
fucking narcissistic do you need to be to think with the only one me yeah me this is because that's too mean that's too mean because we don't think of it nastily we think of it shamefully we think i've been singled out for particularly personal curse yeah we don't think i'm so great and i'm alone we think oh god i've been cursed broken yeah yeah i'm uniquely broken yeah and you're absolutely right it's so important to bear that in mind by the time you're feeling it
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Other people will be feeling it too. And it's so hard to hold on to that thought because we – well, frankly, because we see no visible evidence of it. We don't see people talking about it in our vicinity, in the hundred people we know and move around. No one's talking about it openly. They're feeling it, but they don't talk about it. And so we have to hold our nerve.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And there's a lesson here about capitalism here and business, which is fascinating. I mean, it's not naturally area I fall into more. You've talked a lot about this. so many great businesses start precisely like this, that somebody thinks there's this thing I really want and need or that thrills me. And it sounds quite weird to everybody else.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And the person just sticks with it and just has a hunch about it. Just as many, many business failures are all about someone going, someone doing something. And then if you say to them, Do you want this? Would you buy this thing? And then they go, actually, no, I wouldn't. So why are you making it for somebody else if it's got no resonance with you? You know, careful.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
The biggest business disasters are people making stuff that they haven't asked themselves before. Would I really want this? Yes.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I think, ah, that's good. And there's an intellectual version of that. When someone reads a book, et cetera, and they've lost touch and they're spouting Kant or Hegel or Wittgenstein or whatever it may be, or attachment theory, and it's not fitting them. And therefore there's something wrong. But-
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I think many hours ago now we began in this place, which is how difficult it is to hone that authentic muscle where you feel something, you hold on to it, you think no one else is talking about it, but let me stay with that because I think it's a thing for me. So it may be a thing for somebody else, even though no one's mentioning it. It takes a lot of courage.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I've made some progress. Yeah, definitely made some progress. And I'd say that I understand myself more than I've been able to change myself. And one could go, oh, so nothing's really changed. Well, understanding is a thing as well. That is its own legitimate thing. Do I always make wise choices now? No, but I do understand things better. Yes. I think I've...
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Also better at understanding my unconscious. And by that, I mean, you know, it's also what people call their gut instinct. I do think that there are things we know without fully knowing why we know them or how we know them. And to allow a little bit more for that slightly mysterious form of knowing.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
We're talking about sentence completion exercises where you're completing a sentence, you're letting something bubble up from your unconscious. I try and do that more and more. But I ask myself simple questions like, What am I really feeling here? Don't overthink this. What's really going on? You've met this person. What do you really feel around them? Just say it. Say it to yourself.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
What do you feel? And then holding on to that, that something quite important has gone on there, that your answer captures something that a more thought-laden answer might not. And trusting that a bit more in love, in work, in friendship, in areas of daily life.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Thank you. Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with more of the stuff that you're doing? So School of Life, the organization that I started, if you follow our stuff, every day I'm writing stuff for our website, for our app, et cetera. So there's content coming out all the time. And we've got a lot of books. I've written 15 books under my own name.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I've written about 70 books under the School of Life together with my colleague, John. So we've got a lot of stuff out there.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Thank you. Thank you, Chris.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Such a good question. Sometimes we have this idea of the real me that is separate from everybody else. We are penetrated by society. Think of how we're speaking. We're using words as we speak to one another. Every one of those words is both spoken by us and was made by other people long before we were even a rumor in anyone's mind. We are penetrated by society.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Every one of the words that I am using is the result of generations and generations of people who've used those words, refined their meaning, et cetera, and then given them to me. So that's literally the language. We're permeated by social language. Even our biology, as we know, our gut bacteria is both us and not us. The neat Chris, Alain, we are these sort of entities where you can
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
put a strict circle around now. We're interpenetrated by society, biology, history, you know, etc. So then the question comes, well, is there anything, you know, that's more me, less me? And I think here, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that One of the journeys – life's full of journeys – one of the journeys that I think we all are on is to start to separate out a little bit.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
I can understand there's a lot in me that was just put there by society, by the context in which I was born. Which of those bits do I want to keep or focus on and which of those bits do not fully represent my values, my considered choices, etc.? This is where life gets interesting because people start to say things like, Where I come from, normal meant dot, dot, dot.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
But the more I think about it, the more I'm reflecting on who I really am, the more I want to ditch that and that and that. This is a form of editing process. Self-authorship. Absolutely. And, you know, I think that the more mature someone is, I'll use that word because you used others.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
The more mature someone is, the more what they do, what they think, the values they hold are more to their own work, their own sifting, their own editing than it does to the context that they were born into. I think, you know, It's interesting.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
The syntax, they comprise the syntax of our emotional lives. And it's an invisible syntax just as our grammatical syntax is invisible. But it's there and it will operate throughout our lives and it will be immensely hard to change. I mean, you know what it's like if you grew up speaking English. And then you want to learn a foreign language. You suddenly want to learn Italian.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
If you look at the arc of a life, a very small child is often remarkably authentic, which is why we adults, in small doses at least, have such great time with little ones because they come out with stuff and you think, oh my God, I can't believe they've just said that thing.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
They've just said that granny's nose is too big or that this restaurant's boring or this very expensive thing is a load of rubbish, et cetera. They'll come out with stuff that is non-normative and that's very interesting because as an adult, you recognize your own spontaneity that's been lost normally. So it's kind of bittersweet.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
You think, oh, you don't want exactly the child's version of it because that would lead you into trouble, but you want an adult version and it's very hard to get. And probably the high watermark of the opposite is when you're 14 and a half and you're at school and your most fervent wish is to be like everybody else. You want your parents to be like everybody else.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
You want your name to be like everybody else. You want your appearance, your haircut, etc. You cannot bear difference. And then slowly, slowly, you individuate. And that's a very exciting journey. Seeing... I don't think anyone individuates in all areas. So I think the first choice is, what are the areas that matter a lot to you? I'm interested in individuation.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
But when it comes to clothes, you might have noticed, it's a really interesting area. But I'm just leaving that one for another time. I'm just not engaging with that. Similarly, food, fascinating area. Very interesting. Yeah. Not quite on my radar yet. But, you know, other areas, what I'm reading, very, you know, opinionated, very individual.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
So I don't think all of us can do it in all areas, but we choose. And that's also part of what makes someone an individual.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
Do you remember that story of Picasso who was going around an art school, like little kids were doing art, and some kid was sort of scrawling, you know, mummy, whatever, and this kid was seven. And Picasso said famously, when I was his age, I was painting like Raphael, one of the great Renaissance artists. And it was sort of true. I mean, young Picasso.
Modern Wisdom
#898 - Alain de Botton - How To Fix Your Negative Patterns
And then he went, and it's taken me all my life to remember how to paint like this. Now, he didn't. an adult painting like a child is not a child painting like a child. It's something different, which is why people go, oh, a child could have done that. Well, when a child does it, it's one thing. And when an adult does it, it's another thing. And I think it's quite different.