Alain de Botton is the author of more than 17 books about life’s biggest questions: How should we live with pain and pleasure? What is meaningful work? What does it mean to be happy? What is romantic love? What does it mean to think for oneself? Why do we travel? From his first novel, On Love, published in 1993, to his internationally acclaimed, How Proust Can Change Your Life in 1997, to his latest productions with UK based School of Life, including the 2023, A Therapeutic Journey: Lessons from the School of Life, de Botton’s work is a philosophical balm for human souls.

De Botton read history at University of Cambridge, completed an MPhil in Philosophy at King’s College London, and earned a PhD in French philosophy from Harvard University. Seeking a life where being an academic could involve a mixture of teaching, exploration, and involvement in the world, de Botton founded the School of Life in 2008. As he tells it, the School of Life was inspired by the idea that the philosophers of ancient Greece ran little philosophy shops. In this spirit, the School of Life began as a book shop in central London, and it has developed into a publishing house, a school, a shop, and a YouTube channel with about 10 million subscribers.

As we developed an issue around the theme of joy, it became clear that discussions of joy reverberate with many of the fundamental questions that Alain de Botton has dedicated his life to exploring. We sat down with him for an expansive discussion, which has been edited for length and clarity.

Suzanne Shanahan: Welcome. We’re so pleased you can join us. I was introduced to your work when How Proust Can Change Your Life came out, and I still carry with me that first sentence: “There are few things humans are more dedicated to than unhappiness.” Can you talk a little bit about the moment that you started to engage in questions about what it means to have a meaningful life and how to address our daily challenges?

Alain de Botton: Thank you. It is lovely to be here. I should say that, always and foremost, my project was a personal one. By that, I mean, I didn’t ever really sit back and think, what does the audience want? What does the moment want? I took myself as my first patient and reader, and I used the word patient accurately. I do see writing and thinking as an attempt to be in dialogue with often troubled or pained versions of myself. For example, my first book On Love, was a series of essayistic digressions about emotional relationships. And that’s because at that time and still today, love and emotional relationships are a source of great difficulty, as well as hope and excitement, and curiosity.

I find it comedic, but also touching, when people say to me, “How did you know that about me?” The truth is, I have no idea. I’m just talking about myself. Isn’t it a lovely thing if it turns out that a dilemma or situation that’s very personal also turns out to be something that has an echo, or precisely maps onto a situation in somebody else.

It is one of the great mysteries and wonders that one could, by paying great attention to oneself, also come to know very private parts of a stranger. Differences between people often exist at the relatively superficial levels. But once you get to the more emotional marrow, the kind of stuff that people don’t share publicly–the fears and longings–there is an astonishing degree of private, secret congruence. This is what makes poetry and art function. In each, people are quietly recognizing bits of one another and bits of themselves in the works of each other.

SS: I wonder how you arrived at this way of working through the personal as a public intellectual. Your style is rich, yet very accessible.

AB: One of the writers who deeply inspires me is the French 16th-century philosopher Montaigne. Montaigne lived in the countryside and believed he learned quite a lot from ordinary life around him, and he liked to speak in a plain and unadorned way about things. Montaigne takes a calculated risk with a kind of ordinariness. I also see this in Emerson, who says, “In the minds of geniuses, we find our own neglected thoughts.” This is such an astonishing and wonderful quote. Emerson is not saying genius is some sort of strange, abstract thing. Rather, it is just about paying attention to neglected bits of oneself. Genius is remaining open to neglected sections of experience.

Across my work, I’m trying to imagine a reader who’s also a part of me. And there are autobiographical roots to this too. Rather interestingly, I had a very erudite and scholarly father with whom I had a distant and not particularly congenial relationship. My chief maternal figure was a nanny who didn’t have a formal education, but was, in my eyes, extremely intelligent—though she didn’t fit the model of intelligence that I was growing up around. I didn’t really know what to make of this. I
felt an urge to defend someone whose way of looking at the world didn’t fit into books and didn’t fit into the educational structure that I was succeeding in. A wise person once said to me, “I think you’re trying to write for your father and your nanny at the same time.” And I thought, that’s possibly right.

SS: I love that story of your father and your nanny: it would be wonderful to think that they could actually have a conversation about this work and fully embrace it. It’s offering a depth of understanding to our daily existence that is accessible across educational spectrums, which is really extraordinary.

I once heard you say that you thought happiness was a coercive concept, which I absolutely loved. How do you conceive of happiness now, the importance or lack thereof?

AB: You’re right to pick up on the coercive bit. I really have in mind occasions where happiness seems mandatory. I mean, we start with birthdays, but it could also be holidays or vacations. I wrote a book called The Art of Travel because travel is often an occasion when being content is very high up on the agenda. But there are all kinds of complexities.

I’m somebody who can’t really be happy until I’ve at least had a chance to explore the opposite. Could we be miserable here? I’d like to at least have the possibility that it’s all going to go a bit wrong. Once we’ve done that, then we might be able to laugh and have a nice time. A certain kind of modesty about our potential to be content feels wise.

I’ve observed that our minds are frustrating in their relationship to happiness. They give us a sense that if we only achieve the right thing or reach the correct place, it will make us happy forever. But it lasts 15 minutes, because we tend to be visited by newer longings, newer aspirations, and newer sources of things to be unhappy about as soon as we reach a certain stage. So, I think of happiness in terms of moments, not days or years.

SS: It strikes me that much of the literature on happiness, and indeed the expectations of many young people, is that happiness is a lingering state. So, you achieve happiness, and then you have it, you own it, you use it, you deploy it, and when you go on vacation you are bringing that state with you. Or, your friends all have it, and you’re required to enact it so that you don’t ruin their state of bliss and their fixedness. How do you think about communicating, especially with young people who are really trying to achieve a state of happiness?

AB: It’s a beautiful idea. It is profoundly wrong, but beautiful.

Every single Greek story, every anecdote is about someone who thought they had happiness in their possession, but the gods had other plans. The more you think it’s yours, the less the gods are going to leave you in peace. There’s something there for us, something that’s particularly useful for our own times. Precisely because it’s so foreign.

“Call no man happy till he dies,” is a phrase that captures this. I mean, wow. If we really are alive, the resonance of that line–that beautiful, somber, very compassionate line–is asking us to reassess a lot. It’s asking us to tread very lightly on the ground and to be very cautious around anything that looks like stable happiness.

SS: I’m teaching a group of first-year students here at Notre Dame who believe that getting into Notre Dame is a pathway to extraordinary lifelong happiness. How might one interrupt that belief in a thoughtful and effective way?

AB: I would want to give them a crash course in the great thinkers of pessimism. What does it feel like to read Arthur Schopenhauer? What does it feel like to read Blaise Pascal or Samuel Beckett, and to immerse oneself in the darkest pronouncements of some of these people? And why is this not depressing? Put up on a screen the Seneca quote: “What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.” And another quote that says, “Enjoy today because it’s so beautiful.” Ask students which one they like best. Which sentence gives greater pleasure? Why are we having a good time with this? Why is there humor here?

Humor accomplishes something very important. It’s roping together the painful and the joyful. It’s creating a joyful experience around something dark. And that’s a real gift. Normally, we’re stuck with this dichotomy: either you’ve got to be smiling or you’ve got to be weeping. But there is this kind of strange humor where it’s drawing on the insights that you might be immersed in when you’re weeping. It’s marrying them up with this strange thing called laughing.

With your students, I would also want to look at laughter. What makes us laugh? Why are some of the things that really make us laugh quite dark? We are all on a journey to the gallows, ultimately. If we can make some jokes along the way, that seems pretty significant and pretty important.

SS: I think that for students who are 18 years old, that provides extraordinary relief, because happiness has come to mean that you have to be successful, you have to earn a living, you have to have a wonderful relationship, you have to be talented in all dimensions, and you have to be in a perennial state of happiness.

AB: There’s a term I very much like, which is melancholy. It’s a fascinating word, which doesn’t really have a place in the modern lexicon. If someone said to you, “How are you feeling?” Melancholy would be a strange answer. And yet, what a good answer, I think. Melancholy is situated somewhere between total despair and a naïve joy. It means that you’re engaging with loss and grief and the darkness of existence, but you’re not letting it subsume you. You’ve got it under control more or less. It is perhaps the wisest way to move through the world, especially with age and loss. It’s a wonderful bridge to others as well; to exchange melancholy thoughts is a great thing to do.

But we do have this coercive kind of happiness everywhere. I was just writing a piece about resort hotels. You can imagine the sort of place—large buffets, swimming pools, sun loungers. Luxury resorts make this claim to the audience: “You will be happy here. Pay us thousands of dollars a week, and you will have a nice time here.” They’re such curious establishments, be­cause nowhere else directly forces us to acknowledge this kind of materialist, non-tragic view of contentment as these hotels.

Their essential diagnosis of the human condition is that if you have 17 different fruits for breakfast and a sun lounger, you will then be content. An enormous industry supports this. It’s not just the hotel. It’s the banking job that will buy you access to the hotel. It’s the vision of success. It’s the college degree that will get you into that place. These establishments stand relatively close to the pinnacle of our understanding of what life is about, if I can be grand. But of course, if you’ve got to call up the reception in the middle of the night and go: “I’m having an existential crisis. I don’t know what meaning is. I’m unhappy with my partner,” despite the seven pools and 12 buffets, they couldn’t help you. They would be utterly at a loss. They wouldn’t even have the beginnings of an answer. And yet, they are what an ambitious 18-year-old aspires to gain access to.

It’s very much the purpose of an education to work counter to the dominant narrative of society and prepare students for a more nuanced vision of how they might lead their lives in a world that doesn’t subscribe to this neat vision of where happiness will live.

SS: I want to transition through happiness to joy, because I think that a lot of people confuse joy and happiness. In your thinking, what is joy?
AB: I’m terrifically interested in the possibilities of joyful moments. They’re so important because fear and loss and regret are haunting all the time. And I think it’s a really contrastive thing.

When you’re an adult reading to a child, let’s say the child is three, and you’re reading them a book about something very sweet and tender. Maybe a mother owl has gone into the forest, but she’s come back. She really loves her baby owl, and it’s all going to be lovely. I remember reading this to my children; it was so lovely that what I wanted to do was start crying. I wanted to sob at something in this book, and my child had no interest in sobbing at all. He was like, “Well, it’s just a pleasant story, I guess.” I think some of the reason why he was pretty sanguine about the whole thing is that his mother had always come back. His mother was present, and his home was safe, and life seemed relatively simple and coherent and good. For him, this little moment of sweetness and delight held no particular charm because there was nothing to contrast it with. But if you’ve gone through a succession of rather challenging things, then this kind of experience moves from being quite nice to being incredibly moving, and it might make you cry.

It’s a very rare 20-year-old who would be stopped in their tracks by a bunch of daffodils, but it’s a very rare 70-year-old who won’t. It’s literally the diametric opposite. What is it about spring flowers that makes an older person stop? It’s time and suffering. The young person thinks, why would I stop at a bunch of flowers when I may conquer the world and happiness is going to be mine, not just for five minutes, but for decades. But with time, you learn it’s really tricky. And so, appreciation increases.

There is this curious debt that joy owes to suffering.

SS: Can you say more about that?

AB: The first dictum of Buddhism is, life is suffering. What an extraordinary statement. And how totally at odds with modern American thought. How does life start to look if you have as your first principle that life suffers? Buddhism is not a joyless religion. It places great emphasis on joy.

I’m going to go on to a slightly risky ground. There’s been a huge increase in the language of mental illness and mental health. Many young people report afflictions like anxiety and depression, and I think it’s almost as though we’ve boxed ourselves in. We’ve defined health as being equated with happiness, with well-being, and with an absence of anxiety.

Because we’ve defined it like this, the only way in which states of despair and loneliness can find their way into the psyche, a legitimate way, is by defining them as illnesses. It’s good that despair and loneliness are on the agenda. But this way of thinking creates a slightly brittle division between health and ill health, one that pivots on contrast between joy and suffering. 

If the acceptance that we’re suffering creatures has a prestige, that really changes things. It gives us permission to be sad, permission to be out of sorts.

Experience with the so-called simple joys, such as moments in nature, moments with food, moments in company, with friends, moments of beauty, and relation to architecture, certain kinds of light, certain kinds of art, all of these things have a tendency to get more and more significant with time and difficulty, and loss—that is, with permission to be out of sorts.