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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Conversations · Special Collection: Alain de Botton on the true hardwork of love and relationships · 22 May 2026 podcast

So there was a sort of embarrassed, and eventually people put up their hands, and I said, you guys are so remarkable, because for most of human history, the idea that you would love the person that you were raising kids with, doing the farming with, I mean, it would have been inconceivable.

You know, maybe tolerate them, but love them?

That's a new idea, and it's a troubling idea.

Well, there was lots of nervous, you know, nervous giggling.

No, I think, look, pessimism is normally seen as the enemy of good things.

If I was a pessimistic mountain climber, you'd kind of think this was a bad idea or pessimistic pilot.

But I think that strategic pessimism really means that in some areas of relationships,

we're not going to be able to necessarily have everything that we want.

I mean, the key area for this is around sex.

You know, there are two things that we really want around sexuality that are deeply incompatible.

We want loyalty, familiarity, trust on the one hand.

And on the other hand, we want excitement, novelty, a new person.

And we keep trying to find ways of reconciling these two things.

You know, in the 60s, there was free love.

Nowadays, there's people who argue for polyamory.

Always an attempt to kind of have the two things.

My view is that in a relationship, you really have to decide what variety of suffering you really want to go for, because each of these good things has a really negative associated with it.

So, you know, do you want to have loyalty, in which case you also have boredom?

Or do you want excitement, but in which case you'll also have chaos and you'll hurt people and there'll be jealousy, etc.

I was giving another talk in California and I said to the audience, you know, sometimes there are choices to be made.

Showing 321–340 of 1,037 · page 17 of 52