How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - S6, Ep2 How to Fail: Alain De Botton

Episode Date: October 2, 2019

This week on How To Fail, we are doing something slightly different. I know, I know, we don't like change, but sometimes IT'S GOOD FOR US. It's especially good for us when it comes in the form of Alain de Botton, one of the most intelligent, eloquent and thoughtful people on the planet.And because it's Alain de Botton, modern philosopher, founder of The School of Life and bestselling authors of life-changing books such as Essays In Love, I decided to allow him a little leeway. Instead of choosing personal failures, Alain wanted to talk about three philosophical 'failure concepts' and I'm so glad he did, because it led to one of the most fascinating and enlightening discussions I've ever had on the topic.We discuss the idea that we can be good people and yet fail, and the concept (which I'm forever banging on about) that failure is the norm, and that we should find contentment in the average rather than constantly expecting the exceptional. He also has brilliant insights into why romantic break-ups are not, in and of themselves, tragic, because each relationship teaches you something you need to know, and when the time is right, it is ok to move on. Along the way, I also ask him about X Factor, so fear not, I'm there to pepper his brilliance with my usual lowbrow content, as per.It was such a delight to meet Alain. An hour in his company left my brain fizzing with new (and reassuring) ideas, and I hope it has the same effect on you.*The new book from The School of Life, co-authored and introduced by Alain de Botton, is out now and available to buy here. *I am thrilled to be taking How To Fail on tour around the UK in October, sharing my failure manifesto with the help of some very special guests. These events are not recorded as podcasts so the only way to be there is to book tickets via www.faneproductions.com/howtofail* The Sunday Times Top 5 bestselling book of the podcast, How To Fail: Everything I've Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong by Elizabeth Day, is out now and is available here.*This season of How To Fail With Elizabeth Day is hosted by Elizabeth Day, produced by Naomi Mantin and Chris Sharp and sponsored by Sweaty Betty. Sweaty Betty are offering listeners 20% off full-price items with the code HOWTOFAILTo contact us, email [e-mail]* Social Media:Elizabeth Day @elizabdayAlain de Botton @alaindebotton Sweaty Betty @sweatybetty        Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. This season of How to Fail with Elizabeth Day is sponsored by Sweaty Betty. Sweaty Betty is a fabulous activewear brand designed by an all-female team. And you can really tell that especially with their power leggings. I love their power leggings they make me feel I can do anything. They sculpt,

they're squat proof, they're high-waisted and it's a bit like wearing a second skin. Pulling on a pair of power leggings motivates me to be more active and to move, even at 7am when I really just want to crawl back into bed. I'd love for you to have the same experience as me with Sweaty Betty, and so they're offering 20% off full-price products with the code HOWTOFAIL. Thank you very much to Sweaty Betty. Hello and welcome to How to Fail with Elizabeth Day, the podcast that celebrates the things that haven't gone right. This is a podcast about learning from our mistakes and understanding that why we fail ultimately makes us stronger, because learning how to fail in life actually means learning how to succeed better. I'm your host, author and journalist Elizabeth Day,

and every week I'll be asking a new interviewee what they've learned from failure. Alain de Botton is a philosopher and author. His best-selling books cover everything from love and religion to travel and architecture via contemplations on the quality of original sin and melancholy. In 2008, he co-founded the School of Life, a global organisation helping people lead more fulfilled lives. de Botton was born in Switzerland to a banker father who was also an art collector and the only person ever to be painted by both Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. His grandmother was a former Israeli intelligence officer who operated in post-war Egypt. At eight, de Botton was sent to boarding school in England. Later, he read history at Cambridge before studying for a PhD

in French philosophy at Harvard. He quit academia to write his first book, Essays on Love, published when he was just 23. Global success followed with How Proust Can Change Your Life, although de Botton himself would no doubt question what the phrase global success truly means. In The School of Life, An Emotional Education, a book for which de Botton has written the introduction, and Emotional Education, a book for which de Botton has written the introduction, he writes, the single greatest enemy of contemporary satisfaction may be the belief in human perfectibility. The key, he continues, is to accept life as a hospice rather than a hospital, but one we'd like to render as comfortable, as interesting, and as kind as possible. Alain de Botton,

welcome to How to Fail. Thank you so much. So how is your hospice today? The hospice is doing well. That does sound rather grim, doesn't it? But I think it's a charitable way of looking at life. I think that the notion of perfectibility sounds wonderful, to be told that you can do anything with your life, that your life is this glorious opportunity just waiting for you to act, sounds like a wonderful thing, but it's got a really cruel sting in the tail because it breeds enormous inadequacy. And I think that as our societies have become places of immense opportunity, they've also become places of immense shame and feelings of inadequacy. Because if you tell someone that they can be anything, and they turn out to be merely ordinary, that's a pretty crushing fate. Broadly speaking, I'd say we've got a problem with the ordinary.

The ordinary sounds terrible. You know, I have an ordinary life and an ordinary marriage and an ordinary car. It sounds terrible. And that's odd because that's the statistical norm. So what are we doing to ourselves if we equate the statistical norm where most people are going to end up with failure? That's an odd way of looking at it. So we've, I think, hugely overprivileged the peak of achievement in a few rare fields over the more everyday qualities and virtues. And this idea of perfectibility, has it been a long-lasting one, or do you think it's specific to the culture that we live in? If you look back in history, many societies had at their heart a very opposite idea, which is human imperfectibility, that in fact we were deeply flawed. So if you look at the ancient Greeks, they had burnt into their culture the notion

that life is tragic. In other words, that human success and failure takes its place amidst all sorts of machinations of the gods, which are outside of our control. And therefore, if ever you see a so-called success or a so-called failure, a lot of the responsibility for that's going to lie outside of their own actions and that there's no such thing as, you know, a perfect human. That's why we've invented the gods and Buddhism tells us much the same thing. Life is suffering, a human is imperfect. Christianity, of course, one of the very successful religions which has right at its heart the notion that we are fallen creatures, that we cannot be made perfect, indeed that it's sinful to ever aspire to perfection. All of that's been lost largely because of a scientific worldview which kicks in in the 18th century and tells us, no, we can channel our energies and create Jerusalem right here on earth now.

The United States was founded on a kind of utopian religious, but a very peculiar strand of religion, a sort of religion utopianism, which said, you know, we can build a city on the hill here right now. Whereas previous incarnations of Christianity said, no, you can't do it here. It's in the next world. The next world will be right. This world is a world largely of failure. And America did away with failure, banished it, put it in a corner and said, we can make this life perfect. A lovely idea, an inspiring idea, and a deeply cruel idea from which many millions of Americans continue to suffer. And it's been one of America's greatest exports, this notion that this life is set for great fulfilment. And as we all know, fulfilment can be counted in minutes rather than in years in most people's lives. Just that's the

way we're wired. We're not wired particularly for enduring contentment. We're wired for anxiety, for longing, and for noticing that the glass is half empty. We can, with huge effort, cheer up, and we do. And those moments are glorious. The ancient Greeks would call them epiphanies. You know, they're brief moments when the clouds break and everything is beautiful, but they're brief. I think our age has a real problem with the notion of the brevity of satisfaction. We want to lay claim to this stuff for years. And you notice this in our attitudes to relationships. We've taken the notion of ecstatic love, which all societies have known, and rather than saying that's a fantastic, amazing thing for a hot summer, and it will be wonderful in memory, but you're not going to be able to carry this on

throughout your life. We've exported that across whole lifetimes, whole marriages. That's why daily people turn around to each other and go, why aren't we deliriously happy and get divorced as a result? Sometimes for good reason, but sometimes tragically not for such good reasons. And actually, I think that if we were deliriously happy all the time, it would be really exhausting. And one wouldn't have the loveliness of acknowledging that life is texture and that you can only really value one thing by having also experienced this opposite. Look, I'd take enduring bliss if it were available, but it just isn't. So we have to make our peace. But yes, I agree. You say in the book, The School of Life, that actually a better

aspiration rather than undiluted enduring bliss is consolation. What do you mean by that word? It's a rather lovely word. It's interesting. We've got bad relationships with certain words that at the School of Life, we're quite keen to rehabilitate. So one word is consolation. If you say to somebody, I can't offer you a solution, but I could offer you a consolation. Most people will go, oh, that's horrible. Give me the solution. I don't want a consolation. But actually, most of the really big problems in life, including death, have only got consolations available. And so we'd be better off putting some of our energies into consolation. The other word that we have a horrible time with is the word compromise.

If you said, I'm in a job really in a way out of compromise, or I'm in a relationship and, you know, all things being equal, it's kind of a compromise. People would go, that's tragic, that's awful. And we just can't live with that. And in fact, in many good lives, there are huge areas of compromise, and that may be okay, given what we're like and who we are. Now, you've done something rather brilliant with this podcast appearance, which is you're going to talk about three concepts of failure rather than three personal failures, which I'm tremendously excited and not a little intimidated by. But why did you choose to do that? Look, partly it's because

as a thinker, I always aim to be intimate, but not necessarily personal. And I always look for the kind of universal in the particular. And so it felt more appropriate to slightly zoom out. You know, your podcast is brilliant and many people come on and say their own personal stories. But I suppose the challenge was, can we, we'll see whether it works, can the listener have a sort of intimate relationship with a set of ideas and that sort of thesis without a personal story having been told? So that's the sort of challenge. And, you know, I think that part of the school of life is, for me as an author, about letting go of my own ego. I now work with colleagues. We're a team.

And, you know, when I was a younger writer, creative, I was desperate for my own name to be in lights. And now I've discovered the real virtues of not having a personal-based approach, personal personality-based approach to things. So I'm part of a team and this book is a team effort. And so I want to reflect that it seems only right that we talk in more general terms. It's so interesting that because it directly dovetails to what you've just said about compromise not being a bad thing. This act of collaboration and of erasing the ego. And it also ties into things that you talk about and we'll get onto about romantic love placing too much importance on the individual. And maybe as a society we do that too much, do you think?

And maybe as a society, we do that too much, do you think? I think it certainly places a very heavy burden to expect that the person that we get together with will be all the things we want them to be. Our best friend, our ideal sexual partner, our perfect co-parent, our business manager, our travel companion, our confidant, our co-host, et cetera, et cetera, to start the list. And if we knew that, in fact, we could rely on some of these functions from other people, it wouldn't necessarily be a betrayal. It would, in fact, be deeply loyal to the reality of another person. So often we're trying to tug the people that we're with to be slightly different so as to match what we want them to be, but that's doing them a disservice. So if we were able to take the pressure off and go, you know what? I mean, take going on holiday with somebody else. In most

couples, the notion that one might take off and go off with a friend while with somebody, seen as sort of shocking, like, oh, this could be the beginning of the end. In fact, it might be the beginning of something marvellous, but we don't allow ourselves that kind of freedom. Because again, it's a sort of an impatient perfectionism. For someone to be right, they must be right across all areas. We have a terribly hard time saying simple things like, I love this person, but sometimes I hate them. Sometimes I loathe them and want them dead. People go, oh my goodness, this is the end of the relationship. That might be the beginning of a kind of relationship where ambivalence is allowed to circulate. And it's tremendously helpful to be able to say to somebody that broadly you care

for a lot. Sometimes you annoy me so much, I wish you'd be run over. And if somebody else is able to take that, what a bond that creates, how liberating, what love that can create. So I think that, again, it's a sort of, when it comes to imperfection, the ability to admit to ambivalence within a romantic couple can really cement two people together. And I love couples, being around couples that are able to let off steam in each other's presence, express dissatisfactions within an envelope of love, not bitterness, because that's something else. But broadly, they're on each other's side, but they're able to say, oh, you're kind of annoying me today, or that's absolute nonsense. I don't agree with that, you know, rather than letting it out in a massive

divorce 10 years down the line when the steam has built up. So I'm all for relationships that are, you know, at the school of life, and we write an essay on this in the book. One of our favourite phrases comes from the English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who talks about the notion of a good enough parent. He initially used that phrase good enough in relation to parenting. Now, parenting is an area where we've got immense perfectionist ambitions. And Winnicott said a child doesn't need a perfect parent, they need a good enough parent. And it sounds simple, but my goodness, that was a shift in our attitudes towards parenting, because it allows for a lot of things to go wrong within a child's life, and still things can be okay. Psychotherapists talk about the notion of a rupture and a repair, that in any

good relationship, there are constant moments of rupture. In other words, disagreements, misunderstandings, etc. What counts is not how many ruptures you have, but how good you are at repair. And a good relationship, be it a parental one or a romantic one, can deal with an awful lot of rupture so long as there's a capacity to repair. And I think that too many people go into relationships with a brittle attitude of like, this is lovely, this is lovely. If there's a crisis, my goodness, we can never fix it back together again. So that notion of repair, tremendously important. Have you ever said to your wife, I love you, but I really want you to be run over by a car? Not yet. I'm still practicing.

But it might be. Look, it doesn't have to be exactly those words, but I think it's a capacity, as I say, to express ambivalence, which I think belongs to love. And it's very helpful when a small child is able to turn around to their parent and go, mummy, I hate you today. Or daddy, I wish you were dead. And a healthy parent should laugh at those moments and think, my goodness, I'm doing something right. Because if my child feels safe enough to express those feelings, then they're in good territory. And when children become teenagers, again, if things are going right, the child should, the teenager should be able to turn around to the parent and go, you're a complete idiot. I wish that you were dead. And that's not

the beginning of pathology. That's the beginning of a kind of independence of spirit. You know, one should worry. If children are very, very good, you should worry a bit. Very good children are an alarming thing because they're too compliant. I think a certain amount of moodiness, a certain amount of dissatisfaction belongs to a good relationship. Again, be it parental or romantic, you'll see that I'm always connecting the two because one is a sort of mirror of the other. I mean, as soon as you talk about adult

love, you've always got to go, what was going on in childhood? How does that relate to the childhood story? Do you ever watch reality television? I have done. I don't watch it too often. I'm just wondering because you speak with such insight about human relationships, and I do watch reality television, and I do watch Love Island and all those quote-unquote trashy programmes, because I find them fascinating from an anthropological perspective. And they teach me a lot about romantic love and marriage and friendship. Yeah. I mean, look, I think the material from which you get ideas can be tremendously diverse. I mean, the notion that

good ideas are only to be found in very so-called good books is ridiculous. I mean, you can go to a school playground and observe all sorts of interesting things. You can look at daytime TV, reality TV, whatever it is. So I think, yeah, there's no need to be unnecessarily snobbish about what areas you get the biggest insights from. Why not? What's the trashiest thing you've ever imbibed on a cultural level? I'm suddenly thinking of food and my addiction to Jaffa cakes, but you don't mean that, do you? You mean something else. My children keep reminding me I've got very bad taste in music. I mean, I like Phil Collins. It's that bad, right?

I mean, yes, I'll take that. You'll take that. So that's where it begins. And it could get worse. Okay, let's get on to your first failure concept. These are all just so fascinating. And I feel like I've learned so much just from what you've written about them. The first one is the idea that you can be good, yet fail. And that relates to what you were describing about ancient Greece and the idea that the fates are sometimes in control and you can be a good person and still you're going to fail. So explain a bit about that. Well, it's really the notion of a tragic fate.

So one of the weirdest things about the ancient Greeks is that they built theatres near their cities or on the sides of their cities. Almost all of them did. And in these theatres, an odd thing went on. They put on these things called tragedies, which were depictions of stories of failure, dramatic failure, I mean, big failure on the part of people who were quite highborn, quite noble, maybe the king or a duke or some aristocrat or a wealthy person. And it followed their story from success to ignominy, failure, disaster, often death, blood all over the floor. And they lasted, you know, an hour, two hours, three hours, and the audience would watch these things. And why on earth did they do this?

So Aristotle observes this and comes to various theories about why people watch tragedy. And he famously, his famous word is that it's cathartic, that somehow watching the story of somebody else's failure is cathartic. And the reason is twofold. Firstly, because it allows you to see the connections between yourself and somebody else, and to see the way in which your own failure, your own setbacks might turn into catastrophe if the gods so will. So in other words, it brings you close to certain dark possibilities which are normally out of view in daily life. And then what it does is it teaches you, very importantly, compassion and fellow feeling for the person who's lying in a bloody heap on the floor by the end or has gouged out their eyes or mistakenly killed their child or slept with the wrong person or whatever. So really, the innovation of the ancient Greeks was

to tell stories of disaster with compassion, complexity, and that by the end of a play, you're putting your head in your hands going, oh my God, poor X or Y, poor thing. How could they have known how awful it is? And you're filled, as I say, with sympathy, fellow feeling, and a sense of, you know, there but for the grace of God, go I, or the gods, go I, which makes you usefully humble and non-judgmental. If you've got tragedy at one end of the spectrum of sympathy and complexity, at the other end, you've got the modern one end of the spectrum of sympathy and complexity, at the other end, you've got the modern media. And the modern media is essentially, or at least in large part, a collection of stories of people's failure. This footballer did that,

this politician did this, this business person did that, and boom, the whole thing fell down. The house of cards fell down, and now they're in disgrace, and now they're awful, and now they're a failure, and we're going to say how they are. These are stories told with great harshness. And I think that there's a lot of room for compassion and greater compassion that we generally bring to bear. I think the modern world is so harsh on failure because it essentially sees both success and failure as deserved. So just as we applaud the so-called success and go, how wonderful and clever they are, and never really go, well, was it luck? Was it circumstance? Was it, you know, did they have a fair wind? What happened? So too, when we see stories of failure, we rarely stop and go, is it really all their fault, et cetera. So unlike other societies,

we've done away with the notion of luck. Ancient societies believed in luck. I mean, the ancient Romans believed in Fortuna. Fortuna was a goddess, and she was worshipped all over the Roman world. Tens of thousands of statues have been found of Fortuna. And whenever something went right, or you were trying to ward off something that might go wrong, you'd go and give a little offering to Fortuna in the nearest sort of Fortuna temple. And that was a way of everybody knowing that their life was only partially in their hands, that a lot of what was going to happen to them was in the hands of somebody else. And Fortuna is always depicted holding a cornucopia in one hand, filled with grapes and fruits and all sorts of lovely things. And in the other hand,

a tiller, so she can change people's lives with just a light touch. The ship of your life can go into the rocks or head for lovely waters. And it can happen at any moment. And I think in the modern world, we're constantly surprised. We'll go like, oh, I saw this person on Tuesday. It's so tragic that they got run over on Wednesday. You know, we've got no space for it. How freakish, how strange, or it looked like their life was perfect, but they went bankrupt. How did that happen? You know, there's no awareness that we are all on extremely thin ice. And therefore, there can, at the worst moments, be a lack of compassion, really, for stories of failure. So the ancient Greeks were doing something pretty sophisticated. They were trying to educate our moral sentiments in a more

compassionate direction. And doing that, not by delivering a dry lecture, like I'm trying to do now, it's very boring. But by doing so through art, through a work of art that was going to grip you and keep you excited, but was going to leave you going out of theatre thinking, gosh, I should probably be nicer to that guy who's just lost it all in the farm or that politician who just said the wrong word and now they're finished or whatever it is. And as I say, I think we've lost sight of that tragic background. I mean, you know, the other great tragic figure in Western culture is Jesus. You can read Jesus as a tragic figure. He's good, he's pure, he's the son of God, and he gets spat on and seen as a lowlife and a criminal, and he meets his terrible end. Big tragedy. Now,

Christianity takes the edge off the really tragic thing because it assures us a perfect future. But there's a lot of tragedy in Christianity, and it took hold in soil that had been prepared by the ancient Greeks. So that's where we've come from, but we've slightly forgotten that background. And as you mentioned there, the ancient Greeks had the idea of the gods and the fates. Christianity has the concept of God and an afterlife. Now, we're living, many of us, in a sort of post-God world. And I know that you've spoken very eloquently about atheism, but how then do we cope with that notion? Because presumably, if someone isn't looking out for us, or the universe isn't unfolding according to some miraculous plan that we can't yet understand, then it's all just random chaos. Is that what you believe? People's fates are not entirely random. We have agency, we can

control aspects of our lives. But where we end up is, at least to some degree, and maybe often a very large degree, somewhat unfair, in one way or another, somewhat unfair. And I think that love properly understood, that word love, which gets bandied around in all sorts of ways, often in a sexual romantic context, but in a deeper way, to look at another human being through the eyes of love is to look at them with a proper awareness of the many different reasons why they may have ended up as they've ended up. Why is that person bitter and angry? What was it that produced this person? Why is this person nasty? Why is this person sad? We can't do it all the time. It's very hard to look at somebody else with love. We've got this idea that to look with

love is simply to admire somebody, to find somebody great. That's one notion of love. But there's this other notion of love, which is a kind of Christian notion at base, that to love is to understand somebody's weakness and sympathise and ultimately love them for that weakness and that imperfection. It's a very odd idea. You know, if we were inventing a Christian Tinder or dating app, you'd be scrolling through looking for your perfect person, and actually the screen would freeze and it would show you a leper. And it would go, now you've got to love this person. And you'd be going, no, no, but I want a more perfect person. And you'd go, no, no, no, you've misunderstood love. Love is about trying to look at someone, however imperfect, through the eyes of love and completing the picture and seeing the good in them and what's noble in them.

no, no, no, I don't want a leper. I want someone who looks like a model or something. So we're very impatient with imperfection. We don't have that much tolerance for the failed aspects of ourselves or of other people. This leads to an impatient and shame-filled culture. And I think just as we flex our muscles, we need to flex our love muscle more generally and generously. And we don't tend to do that. And how do you know when to quit? So this idea that you can be trying your hardest at something and still failing. And if we're divorcing the idea of failure to some extent from the individual's ability to overcome it, how do you know when to quit? We tend to have a very single track view of success. We even say, you know, so-and-so is a success or so-and-so is a success, or so-and-so is

a failure, as though it could ever be one thing. But the word is by its very nature complex. So there is never anyone who is merely a success or merely a failure. It's only ever sort of topic based. So if you show me someone who is a fantastic success at business, this person is probably, I mean, it's a cliche and maybe not, but probably it's a bit of a failure at contemplating the evening sky or writing Zen poetry or being that present for their kids. It may be that they are, but probably not. And similarly, the great contemplators of the heavens have not tended to be fantastic generators of wealth. And that's just a choice, but we tend to think that success might be just one thing. So there are constantly trade-offs and choices being made.

So when you say, you know, how much should one keep trying in a certain field? It's perhaps more about saying which of the many areas in which I operate could be the one that ultimately I invest my sense of worth in. And it could be one that isn't particularly privileged by our society,

which absurdly overemphasizes certain skills and neglects others. And, you know, you don't need to be either a hippie or a romantic or a Christian to say that we dramatically underemphasize the virtues of charity, friendliness, kindness, patience, tolerance. These things are not particularly, you know, we pay them lip service, but they're not really, you know, but to say, well, this is what I want to be a success at. That's my chosen area of success. That might be an interesting enough ambition. You know, the notion of ambition is very interesting. It can sometimes seem as though, unless you start your own business and use a bit of technology in an interesting way, your life may have failed. And there are so many alternative

ways to live. And we were talking about tragedy and art. And one of the things I think that artists have traditionally done is to slightly widen our picture of who in a society deserves kindness, respect, and honour. And if you look at many, many books, many, many novels, say, they'll be trying to apply a kind of a new moral lens and just tweaking our sense of who's a success. So take something like Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilyich, you know, this little beautiful novella about the death of a very prominent judge in, I think it's St. Petersburg, and he develops a disease and he's a so-called success, but actually his heart is rather crooked

and narrow and his perspective is not what it should be. And only towards the very end of his life does he realise that it's other values that matter most to him, but he's neglected them. Kindness to his children, a sense of empathy with those who have less than he has, etc. That these are the things that matter. And so, you know, that's Tolstoy, a great artist, just tweaking our sense of, okay, who here deserves the gong, the medals, the honour? You know, in Britain, we've got the honours system, and that's honouring certain people for doing certain things. That is only capturing a very narrow glimpse of who in a society really deserves honour. In fact, everyone deserves honour just for making it through the day, quite frankly. You were talking there rather brilliantly about

a Christian Tinder, which would present you with a leper, which brings us on to another of your failure concepts. And I'm so glad you're going to talk about this, which is that breakups, romantic breakups are not a tragedy. Yes. So it's the idea that a relationship ends not because it's gone badly, but because it's taught you what you need to learn, which I think is such a beautiful and helpful concept. Please explain more. Well, we tend to imagine that the only viable relationship is one that lasts forever. So that the real success of a relationship is its longevity, which is very peculiar. I mean, we wouldn't apply that standard to other things. You know, the best holiday is one that goes on forever, or the best meal goes on forever. There are obviously things that can be valuable, but more short-lived.

And I think one of the ways to look at relationships is that they are opportunities for us to learn from another person. And we tend to believe that that means that that lesson's going to go on forever. And the notion of outgrowing someone is again seen in very dark terms. If I say, you know, I've outgrown my partner, people say, oh, how awful. could be immensely important in one's life and yet not there forever, that they might not be the central person forever. Because in the same way that a child outgrows their family, that's not a tragedy. If a parent, the whole basis of parenthood is, my child's going to outgrow me, and that's okay. They should outgrow me. There will be a time when my 10-year-old or 12-year-old or 17-year-old is going to find another kitchen to sit in, another group of friends to be with. And that's the way it should be. They'll come back and we'll always have what we had, but they won't be quite the way it is today. And that's not a tragedy. So I think that we can apply the same view to romantic relationships. And there are so many

people who torture themselves unnecessarily going, I spent 22 years with somebody. And then, you know, awfully, it just ran out of steam. And you want to say, hang on a minute, 22 years, that's an awfully long time. Most people, you know, for most of human history didn't live longer than 22. You spent 22 years with someone. That's amazing. Presumably, you saw and you learned and all these things. Yes, yes. So does it need to be, again, a tragedy in the terrible sense? And it doesn't need to be. So much of what we define as a failure is an interpretation of facts. Psychotherapists love this phrase, fear. Your fear is not a fact. It's a way of saying that if somebody's terrified of something, just check in. Does that actually have to be that noise that you're thinking is a burglar? Is it actually a burglar? That argument, does it necessarily mean the beginning of the end or whatever? And I think that we too often apply to situations, interpretations which are really punitive and make us feel terrible for no particular good reason. that relationship was a failure. They were only together for X time, or they never had children together, or it didn't work out in the end for whatever reason. And that's too punitive. So let's stop torturing ourselves. My problem is, is that I completely agree with everything that you're saying. And yet, because I am imperfect and flawed, and everything we've been talking about, I bear a grudge. So if someone has broken up with me, for what I feel are unjust reasons,

So if someone has broken up with me, for what I feel are unjust reasons, I feel a tremendous amount of grief, a rage and self-loathing over that. And if that person then goes on to find someone and finds that that person is quote unquote better than me and has a quote unquote more successful relationship that lasts longer, I find that very hard to deal with. And it feels like even though I can make the effort to do everything that you're saying and to think that way, it feels like I'm the one making the effort again. And the other person is just sailing off with a lack of consciousness. Look, I think an important thing to bear in mind in those situations is they're going to be miserable lots of the time. Great. That's all I need to say. No, no. I mean, it's a very important thing. When we're in situations of envy, if I can be brutal and say this, we often envy other people, rich people, successful people, famous people, but also people in other relationships. And we just imagine that their life is perfect. And we're very good at that. We have this muscle in our brain that is just fantastic at conjuring up images of the happiness of others. And I think it's tremendously helpful to keep in mind that

almost certainly their level of happiness will be closer to our level of ambivalent mixture of good and bad than it is to some ideal of flawless perfection. And in whatever area it is, the CEO who's riding high, they'll be anxious about a whole host of things. The couple who's just fallen in love, they'll be worried about all sorts of things. We don't know what the details are, but they're human. And I think we just forget often that we are made of the same stuff as other people. We only have access to our own minds. This is a fundamental feature of life. We don't know through direct experience what other people are going through. We only know what we're going through. So we end up feeling that we're very weird because from the inside, all sorts of weird stuff goes on in our minds. Our minds are intermittent. Often they're sort of in a daze.

Often they're quite unhappy. Weird stuff goes on and our thoughts are odd. We feel quite perverted. We feel weird. We feel odd. And we think, what's up with me? I just met with my mates and there wasn't any evidence of any of that. And the reason is that we always edit ourselves for other people. Without meaning to show off or deceive anyone, we're constantly presenting edited images of ourselves to other people and seeing edited images of other people in our interactions with them, which gives us a highly distorted picture of how odd we are and how lovely and perfect other people might be. So I think if you want the clearest indication of what another human being is, take it from yourself. They're probably more like, even though they don't let off that many signs of it, they're probably more like

you than they're like anybody else. I've often found it's a good thing to do when you're hosting someone. When you invite people over for dinner and you're in host position, in other words, you're trying to anticipate and guess what another person wants to do, people, they lose all sense of reality and they start to cook things that would never eat themselves and try and entertain in ways that they would never feel as entertaining. People do this when they give presents as well. They just forget about themselves. They're forgetting to use themselves as the most accurate guide to somebody else. So the biggest indication of what's going on in the life of an ex, or the life of a CEO, or the life of a famous person is you. They're probably a bit

like you. More than anything else, they're like you, even though the outer circumstances might be a bit different. So the chances of your ex now finding blissful happiness with somebody else are almost zero. They will have all the moods that you have with your own new partner, let's say, moments of ambivalence, moments of jealousy, moments of longing for other people. All this thing will continue because that's the way in which life goes. So we need to stop torturing ourselves with idealised images of what the lives of other people are like. The lives of other people are basically like your life, and that means a bit up and down. Do you think the earliest men and women fell in love? I think yes, but the interpretations they put on those feelings

would have been very different. So they would, I think, have not seen this as an indication that their whole life was going to be dominated by this person. It might just be a very pleasant feeling that surrounded them one summer with somebody, or it might be an indication it would be a good idea to try for a child with that person. But I think that romanticism, what we know as romanticism, which is a whole set of ideas embodied in poetry and songs in our sort of cultural language, which crops up in the mid-18th century and has now dominated the world, places romantic love at its centre and gives it a very particular spin. It's seen as the pinnacle of what humans are capable of. A huge downgrading of friendship. What's interesting is before

romantic love, people spoke about friendship in ways that are totally alien to us now. The notion of being just a good friend, which nowadays seems like a horrible compensation price. I went out for dinner with somebody and I took them home and they said that they thought we should remain just good friends. This is seen as a terrible disappointment. Like, oh, poor you. In a sort of pre-romantic age, this would have been fantastic. It's like you've been spared the nightmare of sexual jealousy and love and all those sort of terrible things that go on in a relationship. Somebody's offered you friendship, you've got the prize of the century. We'd see it as a consolation prize. So total shift in the evaluation of friendship versus love.

I love this thing. I heard you on a podcast, it was a recording of a speech that you gave in Sydney, and it was about the notion of romantic love. But curiously enough, a lot of romantics died very young. So therefore, it's easier to have this notion of romantic love lasting a lifetime when your life is comparatively short. Yes. I mean, we were talking about how long happiness should last, how long a so-called success should last. And we do think of these things in increments of decades. And I think that it's better and more accurate to think of many moments of happiness as moments, precisely that, moments, not years. It shouldn't detract from their intensity. I think genuinely one should be able to say, I had a fantastic summer with

somebody and that was amazing. The things we shared were amazing. It didn't last 10 years, but it was a fantastic summer. And that is as valid. In the same way that we might say, I looked at a painting and it was one of the most wonderful things, even though I didn't look for hours and I didn't own the painting, but it spoke to me and it did marvellous things with me. So I think we're quite possessive of certain states of mind. We want to own them forever. Whereas I think that just as we're mostly made of liquid, so a lot of our moods are essentially fugitive in nature. They are things floating down the river of our own consciousness. We should get better at appreciating the passage of them and not try and hold onto them. This is the thing that Buddhists are always telling us,

for example, and others too. We need to remind ourselves of this constantly. So you're married. Why should we get married if love is like the rest of life, fluid and impermanent? Why are we trying to make a container to hold it? I think it depends what you're trying to contain. So if somebody came to me and said, look, I'm thinking of getting married because we've had a fantastic couple of weeks in Venice and I want this feeling to go on for a lifetime but I'm also looking to settle down in a London suburb and raise two and a half children and pick up my life as an accountant I would go well steady on you may not be approaching things from the right way so I think there are all sorts of reasons to get married and very sound reasons,

partly, I think, to liberate oneself to get on with other things other than try and achieve a certain pitch of romantic intensity, which by definition is only going to be possible for certain increments of time. So one of the reasons to get married is to stop thinking of love. Could be a good thing sometimes. Your third and final failure concept is the seemingly straightforward and simple notion that failure is just the norm and that our schools, such as they are, not the school of life, but our education system is singularly ill-equipped to teach us about that. So tell me a bit about that and why you were inspired to launch the School of Life. So look, we're very bad at statistics. We just don't keep in mind the statistical realities

ahead of us. And on that basis, become very impatient with ourselves and very judgmental of others. The statistical norm is that you will be earning an average salary and having an average level of happiness, probably getting divorced once, and dying statistically in your 70s of something quite horrendous. And of course, there are happy people at 90 who are still going on jogs and having a lively time. And of course, there are delightful people who've risen to immense fame and made a huge amount of money, etc. But these are outliers. And we need to stop generating societies that are essentially focused on the outliers. You know, we were talking before this show began about our Swiss heritage. I'm also half Swiss. Yes, our common Swiss heritage. I'm half Swiss. And,

you know, one of the things about countries that come from essentially have a kind of Christian democratic politics is that these are societies based around ordinariness and averageness and not making these things seem freakish and awful. So an ordinary Swiss school, and an ordinary Swiss hospital, and an ordinary Swiss train are really quite nice. They're not amazing amazing, but they're really very nice. An ordinary American school is terrible. A great American school is amazing. What society do you want to live in? Do you want to live in a society where the winner takes all, or actually where the statistical average is pretty nice? And if we thought more about where we're likely to end up, most of us would go, I'll take the one where there's

a good average, where there's a good enough average setup. And certainly Anglo-American societies are winner-takes-all societies. And that's a very peculiar way of running a society, given what's likely to happen to most of us. What do you think of TV programmes like The X Factor? I don't have a big problem, but there's a little bit of a problem there. It's this notion that an ordinary person from a so-called ordinary background will be rescued from the horrendous fate of being ordinary through the delivery of an amazing talent and out of this spectrum, out of the normal spectrum, normal talent, and that their life will go on to be very, very special. And that really says it all about the problems that we've got, which is, you know, imagine if you're trying to redesign that program as an ancient Greek or a Christian philosopher might want to try and do it, which is really that an ordinary life is not transformed and left behind, but is revealed to have all sorts of qualities that have been neglected, that the light of love shines on the ordinary house.

that the light of love shines on the ordinary house. And it's seen as very lovely. I mean, again, I speak as a secular Jew, by the way, I have no Christian affiliations, but I'm interested in Christianity because it says so many things that are so unfashionable nowadays. But a lot of Christian art shows that Christ and the kingly family who are in the stable and Christ is born in the stable. So the king of kings is there on straw. And this is an immense moment in sort of Western culture that, you know, a divine being, divine beings normally lived in palaces. Here's a religion that says our divine being was born among animals and grew up in very humble circumstances. That's properly revolutionary. And I don't think we've kind of fully assimilated just how revolutionary it is. It really means that amazingness is all around. Amazingness is

in the everyday. And if you look at, you know, one of the things I really love is Dutch art of the 17th century. Now, what goes on in Dutch art in the 17th century is that Christian message is sort of assimilated and it leaves Christianity behind. And it just starts inhabiting the everyday world. So you get people who are sweeping the yard, or preparing lunch, or doing ordinary things, and you sense a loveliness. And anyone who's been to these Dutch museums and have seen, you know, the Milkmaid, or the Little Street, or any of these sort of masterpieces of the Dutch 17th century, what's amazing is, it's like today, here we are on Ordinary Street in London, etc. But the artist is looking with a

particular focus, with particular sensitivity and appreciation. It's sort of what we all do, let's say, when we've been struck by an illness, we've been lying in bed for five days, and maybe we were really sick on day three, and we sort of thought we wouldn't make it. But actually, we're rallying around, it's day four, and we've gone to the window, and it's just amazing the world still exists. And for the first time, we noticed a flower. And, you know, we notice the kid across the street playing with a ball. And we think, my God, the world is beautiful. And in a way, that perspective of the convalescent is something that we should try. And it's an effort that we have to make to import even into our more vigorous moments,

because I think there's a profound truth that's sort of lurking in there. And too often, we forget it. So, you know, one of the standard pieces of interior decoration of traditional times was a skull, that you need to have a skull on your desk, somewhere where you could look at a real life skull of somebody, and you go, you're going to be like that soon. This shouldn't panic you, this should be the wellspring of compassion for others, appreciation for your own circumstances, and a proper savouring of

anything that goes well in an average day. So we need more skulls, and we need what the skull stands for in all of this, to counteract this sort of impatient perfectionism that we're otherwise living amongst. God, I need a skull on my desk right now. You also talk in the School of Life book about Dutch paintings of ships at around the same period or slightly later? No, around the same period. And ships sailing through terrible thunderstorms. And the idea that that taught at the time the notion of endurance and that even though the seas were rough, the ship was going to make it through. Yes, I got very fascinated by this genre because it sort of struck me wandering around the Rijksmuseum a few years ago.

There were just so many ships, like what on earth? And I picked up a book and it was basically saying that this is the birth of the Dutch Republic. And it was an incredibly risky and shaky birth. There were enemies all around. The nation might not make it. And at the same time, the seafaring nation got very fascinated in depicting boats in extreme situations. Sort of thing where you think that ship's not going to make it. It's lying almost on its side, et cetera. But they were all stories and pictures of endurance.

And I think that one of the things we're quite bad at, and I'm obviously not the first person to say it, is we can survive a lot. The human animal is both very fragile and pretty tough. We get through all sorts of things. We have to digest death. We are sort of biologically made to be able to withstand the thought of our own death and the thought of the deaths of loved ones. So that takes a lot of toughness and we can all do it. We start off crying over the death of a rabbit when we're a child. And by the time we reach an advanced age, we might've seen our parents die, many of our friends die, et cetera. And we're a child. And by the time we reach an advanced age, you know, we might have seen our parents die, many of our friends die, etc. And we're still keeping on. We're tough old beasts. And that's nothing to lament. It's something to celebrate and to be aware of. And sometimes we

lie on our beds sobbing, going, I'm not going to make this, you know, I'm not going to get through this. And the answer, which isn't a kind of cold or stoic in the bad sense answer is yes, you will, you know, you will see the dawn. And there's always a plan B and a plan C and a plan D, you know, so maybe that thing you were desperate to get hasn't worked out. Maybe you never will write the novel. Maybe you never will be the prime minister. Maybe you will always be living in a slightly substandard accommodation, etc. But we're ingenious. There isn't only one script for success. And I think there can be a lag in which plan A hasn't worked and we haven't found our plan B, C, D. And we need to flex that muscle to find those other plans because they do exist.

You know, sometimes you see, again, older people and they've only got one leg and their kidney's been taken out. And you think, how on earth is that person managing? And they are, because that's how the mind works. It takes immense blows and then it heals and it finds water flowing past a problematic area. It finds a way through. Do you think endurance and emotional resilience and the notion of failure as the norm should be taught in our mainstream schools? There's so much wrong with our education system. I wouldn't say that all education goes on in schools. We keep learning way past schools. We need a kind of a more global sense of what education is. Education is everything you're taking in every day. You can be in your 90s and still at school, as it were. The whole world is a school. So we tend to try and fix all social problems by looking at, you know, this thing

called broadly secondary school. And that's really only, you know, this thing called broadly secondary school. And that's really only, you know, 12 to 18 or something. So there's a lot of time for other things, you know, television educates, podcasts educate, etc. Education is always ongoing. But do I have a problem with education? Oh, my goodness, yes. Broadly speaking, we're not taught most of what we need to be taught to get through this life. We have to discover it very painfully.

And if we can only spare ourselves a little bit of time, sometimes, to pick up a lesson from somebody else. Look, I mean, part of what makes this podcast so useful is we don't tend to talk about our failures, and therefore the transmission of experience is blocked by essentially a taboo around vulnerability. The more you can be vulnerable around failure and reversal, the more time you're going to save other people. It's an act of singular generosity to be able to say, I messed up here. You know, if you listen to me carefully, you might not make that mistake, you probably make another one, but at least not that one. And, you know, we made progress in science because we're very good at recording

the lessons that science teaches us in certain areas, we're in the humanities and in psychology more broadly, we're incredibly bad at recording our failures and our successes in the ways in which they need to be. And so we keep falling into error. I mean, you know, we were talking before the show started about divorce and how many stories of divorce are not really out there in the public eye. Most of us go into relationships without any real sense of how it's going to work, how it's not going to work, etc. So we think we're drowning in information about the key challenges of life. I think we're not. We're still very hard to find out what's really going on in other people's lives, the failures

and challenges that they face, and to be able to draw the right conclusions from those things. We're still, if I can put it this way, lonely. We're still lonely with an awful lot. It sounds odd because there are millions of us, billions of us, and we're all chattering away on social media, etc. But broadly speaking, there's still a lot of loneliness. So there's still a lot of work for, and I include you in this, artists to do. Because what art really is, is holding up a mirror, going out there to try and find the inner life of people, putting it out in ways that are digestible for others. There's a lot of work to be done because there's still so much, broadly speaking, failure that's taboo. And history, which I know you studied at university, as did I, is only ever written

by the victor. So there needs to be a way of assimilating those historical stories of all the losers as well. Absolutely, yes. And those are qualitative terms, we probably need to get better language as well. Yes. We're all just people. Yes. And I think it's only in the last minute of history writing that people woke up to the thought that it wasn't all kings and queens, it was actually the guy sweeping the yard and the guy tending the animals, that they were also part of history. So we're very slowly waking up to the kind of totality of experience. So my final question, I'm actually going to quote you back to yourself, which is a nauseating thing that interviewers do. But you wrote this highly influential piece in the New York Times in 2016, which I read, and it really changed a lot of my thinking around

love. And the piece was entitled, Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person. And you wrote in that, that in a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be, and how are you crazy? So, Anna de Botton, how are you crazy? I mean, just to explain that, because this could sound like a very odd suggestion to make, I think that if we hunt for perfect people in dates and friendships, etc, we'll never find them. The goal shouldn't be to try and find the perfect person. I think the goal is to find somebody who can talk with a measure of insight, patience, tolerance about their flaws. I think that if I was dating now and somebody said, you know, if I said, how are you crazy? And they couldn't answer that

question. If they said, I'm not crazy at all. What about you? What's wrong with you? I would think, oh, that's a massive, massive alarm bell. If somebody was able to go, you know what, I'm impatient or I'm often too sad or I can be selfish, I would think, this is somebody I can trust. Because somebody who's able to talk about their crazy is somebody you can feel safe around. The person who can't talk rationally and calmly about their irrationalities and their losses of calm is someone to worry about. So to answer your question, I mean, look, we need a whole other show. But I spend a lot of time trying to think of what emotional health and emotional balance is, largely because this is not native to me.

I'm so aware of the pull in the other direction, the losses of perspective, the inability to make sense of things, the pull of confusion and error, etc. And so I'm tremendously drawn to qualities which I can't lay claim to generally. I might go, oh, that's a hypocrite. I saw this guy delivering a talk about how to be calm. And then I saw him at Heathrow kicking a suitcase or something. What a hypocrite. And I'd be the first person to go, no, no, no, no, no. There's an absolute continuity between... The person I want to hear on the notion of calm is the person who really understands anger. The person I want to hear about emotional maturity is the person who's had real

moments of emotional immaturity. These are the people to kind of trust and to go to. So I'm your average, very average, very flawed, very stupid person. One of the great things about having children is they will directly remind you on a daily basis that you are ridiculous. And so I'm fully in touch with my own ridiculousness and ever more in touch with my own ridiculousness. And I think that that when they're trying to teach you to be confident. And it's all things like believe in yourself, you're beautiful inside, look at yourself in the mirror and tell yourself you deserve success, all these things. And we thought, oh my goodness, there's something really wrong with this approach. This doesn't feel right at all. So we came up with a very different approach, which is if you want to try and feel confident, make yourself fully at home with the notion that you're an idiot. Fortunately, everybody else is an idiot as well. We live in a world of idiots. There are 7 billion, how many people are in their world? 7 billion?

Yes. 7 billion idiots walking around the earth. And that's okay. You're just one of them. So you may walk into doors and stumble in things and say the wrong thing. And that's okay, because everybody does. And that should be the wellspring of your confidence, not the notion that you're some superior being who's destined for an amazing future. But then actually, you, like everybody else, is a bit of an idiot. And that is actually the birth of compassion for yourself and a certain lighthearted, humour-filled confidence as you go forth and sail forth into the world.

So welcome to all the idiots out there listening. This was me, one idiot, talking to another idiot. Can I say that? That sounds rude. You absolutely can. But it shouldn't be rude, right? I'm thrilled. It shouldn't be rude. So it's a show about idiots for idiots,

but in the best and noblest sense. Alain de Botton, you're very stupid. You're an idiot, but you're very stupid in a very enlightening way. And I cannot thank you enough for your eloquent insights today. Thank you so much for coming on my podcast. Thank you. Thanks so much. If you enjoyed this episode of how to fail with elizabeth day i would so appreciate it if you

could rate review and subscribe apparently it helps other people know that we exist