Leading modern day philosopher, Alain de Botton has revolutionised attitudes towards the study of philosophy. His books like How Proust Can Change Your Life, The Consolations of Philosophy, The Art of Travel and The Architecture of Happiness, have successfully shifted philosophy from the inaccessible realm of academia to practical everyday life. With his wit and sensitivity, Alain de Botton skillfully distils the essence of philosophy and places it squarely within a modern context, allowing it to enrich our lives. In 2008, de Botton helped start the School of Life in London, a social enterprise determined to make learning and therapy relevant in today’s demanding world.
His latest book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work explores the joys and anxieties of working life. He talks to Mashaal Gauhar about what prompted him to write a book on the workplace.
As a philosopher, what drew you to study the workplace?
“My goal in writing The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work was to write about the world of work in a way that an economist or business journalist would not. I wanted to bring out the drama and humanity of the workplace. I was challenged to write as a novelist might.
My goal was to shine a spotlight on the sheer range of activities in the working world from a feeling that we don’t recognise these well enough. And part of the reason for this lies with us writers. If a Martian came to earth today and tried to understand what humans do from just reading most literature published today, he would come away with the extraordinary impression that all people spend their time doing is falling in love, squabbling with their families – and occasionally, murdering one another. But of course, what we really do is go to work… and yet this ‘work’ is rarely represented in art.
“In the course of writing my book, one of the more consoling ideas I discovered was just how rare and historically ambitious is the modern idea that our work should deliver happiness to us on a daily basis. The strangest thing about the world of work isn’t the long hours we put in or the fancy machines we use to get it done; the most extraordinary aspect of the work scene is in the end psychological rather than economic or industrial. It has to do with our attitudes to work, more specifically the widespread expectation that our work should make us happy, that it should be at the centre of our lives and our expectations of fulfilment. The first question we tend to ask of new acquaintances is not where they come from or who their parents were, but what they do – presuming thereby to discover the core of their identity.
When work is not going well, it’s useful to remember that our identities stretch beyond what is on the business card, that we were people long before we became workers – and will continue to be human once we have put our tools down forever. As an entirely secular person, I’m struck by St Augustine’s injunction that it is a sin to judge a man by his status or position in society. In other words, when work is not going well, we need to remember to distinguish our sense of worth from the work we do.
“I think we have to put our own personal, private anxieties into context: the more we can see our private sorrows as part of broader political and economic currents, the less persecuted we will feel. It is very easy to feel that our anxieties are the result of things that we did wrong. But while this is sometimes true, in most cases our professional setbacks and disappointments take place in a deeply terrifying, haphazard and competitive working environment which pays very little attention to true merit.
Also, it is worth considering just how ambitious many educated people are today. For thousands of years, work was viewed as an unavoidable drudge and nothing more, something to be done with as rapidly as possible and escaped in the imagination through alcohol or religious intoxication. Aristotle was only the first of many philosophers to state that no one could be both free and obliged to earn a living. In Europe, a more optimistic assessment of work as a whole had to wait until the eighteenth century, the age of the great bourgeois philosophers, men like Benjamin Franklin, who for the first time argued that one’s working life could be at the centre of any ambition for happiness. It was during this century that our modern ideas about work were formed – incidentally, at the very same time as our modern ideas about love and marriage took shape.
That’s why I started the School of Life (www.theschooloflife.com). It has a passionate belief in making learning relevant – and so runs courses in the important questions of everyday life. Whereas most colleges and universities chop up learning into abstract categories (‘agrarian history’ ‘the 18th century English novel’), The School of Life titles its courses according to things we all tend to care about: careers, relationships, politics, travels, families. An evening or weekend on one of its courses is likely to be spent reflecting on such matters as your moral responsibilities to an ex partner or how to resolve a career crisis.
Then again, not everything is light hearted. The School has a division offering psychotherapy for individuals, couples or families – and it does so in a completely stigma-free way. For the normally reserved British, it must be a first to have an institution that offers therapy from an ordinary high street location and moreover, treats the idea of having therapy as no more or less strange than having a haircut or pedicure, and perhaps a good deal more useful.
In a culture where anyone who attempts a serious conversation is at once accused of belonging to the ‘chattering classes’ and where anything too intellectual is in danger of being called pretentious, I feel proud of a place that attempts to put learning and ideas back to where they should always have been – right in the middle of our lives.”
“A wonderful book called THE TEA CEREMONY, which takes you through the Zen Buddhist history and philosophy of tea drinking. I am fascinated by the idea that an everyday action like drinking tea could be raised into a philosophic/ religious ritual.”