Alain De Botton
speaker
1,037 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Jan 2024
last heard 1 Jul
Alain De Botton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So we have to understand that this is the way we're born.
How long are we going to let that lopsided entry into the world determine our lives?
Ideally, a minimal amount of time.
What you need to do is to realise the nature of the lopsidedness, accept the lopsidedness and start to correct it as early as possible.
You know, it depends in which area.
Love and work, the two great areas of life.
This is Freud said, you know, happiness means getting love and work right.
And most of us get love and work dramatically wrong with things that are probably related to early childhood.
We pick up – what happens in childhood is that we don't only learn language and social skills.
We learn a whole emotional vocabulary about who we are, how we function, what's expected of us, what it takes to be good, what it means to be a boy, a girl, gender, roles, et cetera.
All of this is encoded in us unconsciously.
And we need to understand the language we've learned in order to become self-aware and question, because bits of it are going to be balmy, really, really strange, really distorted.
There will be an excessive focus on some areas and not on others.
And ultimately, the goal of adulthood is to become your own arbiter of your own value and of your own mission and of your own joys, et cetera.
It used to belong in other people.
A child looks up at its parent and goes, who am I?
What am I worth?
And the answer comes back from the parent's face.
And that answer is loaded with prejudice and bizarre stuff.
And after a certain age, you think, that happened to me in the past.
Showing 181–200 of 1,037 · page 10 of 52
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