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Arnold Bennett on Why We Should “Use” Our Free Time

“Life feels so mundane,” my college friend confessed the other day, “I just go to work and pay bills.”  Sadly, as we get older, every day comes to seem the same: wake up, have your morning coffee, wait for the (yet again) late 8:30 train, do monotonous, meaningless work under the harsh fluorescent lights of a grim office that is relentlessly gray, come home, repeat.  Little— if anything— breaks up the tedium of our days.  “Adulting” is living in an eternal Groundhog Day. 

In his 1908 masterpiece of self-help How to Live on 24 Hours a Day, Arnold Bennett prescribes a potent medicine for the mundanity of modern living.  According to Bennett, the greatest tragedy of our times is that we regard 8 hours— a whole third of our existence— as simply something to “get over with.”  Though a great fraction of our time is spent working, few approach their jobs with a sense of fervor or eagerness.  As Bennett writes, “In the majority of instances he does not precisely feel a passion for his business; at best he does not dislike it.”

Worse still is the fact that we treat the other 16 hours of our day as “free time” to waste.  Of course, 8 of those 16 hours are spent sleeping but what about the other 8?  After work, we fritter away these precious moments in some trivial activity: relaxing but ultimately random reading, zombified scrolling, superficial conversation, T.V.  And so runs the unfortunate course of our finite lives: 1/3 spent sleeping, 1/3 spent working at a profession we find divorced from a transcendent cause or greater meaning, and 1/3 spent in trifling activity.  

Bennett believed our gravest mistake was making our jobs the focus of our day.  Though many of us dislike if not outright despise our jobs, we organize our lives around what we do for a living.  For most— Bennett claims— the hours from 9 to 5 constitute the day: “the ten hours preceding them and the six hours following them are nothing but a prologue and epilogue.”  We use the hours before and after work like money in a foreign country: we insist this time doesn’t “count,” so we spend it frivolously.  After all, it’s easy to spend extravagantly in Greece if the concept of a euro means nothing.

Rather than squander our finite time on Earth, Bennet argues we should use time wisely.  The forefather of self-help recommends we devote an hour and a half every other evening to some “important and consecutive cultivation of the mind.”  

But why only an hour and a half every other night?  Certainly we have more free time.

If we work a traditional 9-5, we probably have around 5-6 hours every day of “free time.”  However, we must account for our other obligations.  After commuting and grabbing our morning coffee, grocery shopping and going to the post office, making cereal for our kids and reading them bedtime stories, we probably have less than 3 hours of free time. 

So why still only commit an hour and a half every other night?

As with any worthwhile endeavor, we must start small.  An hour and a half every other night is a manageable amount.  After a few weeks of dedicated practice to our “cultivation of mind,” most of us will spend several evenings a week engaged in our activity and prefer it to the hollow pleasures of social media and T.V. watching.

But what, exactly, constitutes a “cultivation of mind”?  What should we use our hour and a half every other night for?  

Watch AFI’s 100 Greatest Movies of All Time.  Read all of Leo Tolstoy’s works.  Train for a half marathon. 

Our goals may be physical or intellectual, spiritual or emotional, the only important thing is we have a goal and that goal personally resonates with us.  We can work to realize a lifelong ambition (write a novel) or revive a long neglected hobby (collect midcentury furniture).  We can learn to speak Italian or play the piano or master the art of Szechuan cooking or aim to expand our knowledge of 18th century literature.  The only requirement is we choose something meaningful.           

Why is learning a skill or cultivating a passion or taking up a hobby so crucial?  As Bennet so eloquently explains, if you learn, say, how a symphony operates, the next time you go to a concert, you’ll have an “astonishing intensification of interest in it.”  That is the beauty of hobbies: they renew our fascination and rekindle our zest for existence. 

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 2 Comments

Olivier Burkeman on the Reality that You Never “Have” Time

Much of our mortal lives is a struggle against the clock.  We’re obsessed with managing time, with breaking it down into concrete, controllable blocks.  We streamline our lives and regiment our schedules with military precision.  We treat our days like assembly lines, something to be made more efficient.  We pencil and plot and plan.  We book doctor’s appointments, write agendas on the boards of our classrooms, schedule coffee dates with our friends three weeks in advance.  A date scribbled in our calendars gives us the illusion of certainty: if it’s written in ink— we believe— our plans will unfold accordingly.

However, as most of us know, life almost never goes according to plan.  Though you “plan” to go on a coffee date with your friend, Olivier Burkeman writes in his philosophically-minded masterpiece 0f self-help Four Thousand Weeks, any “number of factors [can] confound your expectations, robbing you of the…hours you thought you had.”  You might get a flat tire on the way to the coffee shop.  Your friend might cancel because she’s sick.

Despite our hubristic belief that man can move mountains and has dominion over all beasts, time is one thing man cannot control.  No matter how neurotically we try to squeeze the events of our lives into predictable schedules, we can never force Father Time to submit to our will.  The vet’s appointment that was supposed to take a quick 50 minutes will become an interminable 3 hours.  The languid summer afternoon we “had” to spend working on our novel will get rudely interrupted by the unwelcome sound of the doorbell.

In the cleverly titled chapter “We Never Really Have Time,” Burkeman calls into question the very idea that we “have” time in the first place.  Though we worry and obsess, project and plan, our “plans” are intentions for the future— nothing more.

Our calendars offer consolation in a chaotic world: when we pen an appointment in poised cursive in our planners (doctor’s appointment @ 2pm), we feel in command.  We don’t have to confront the disturbing, rather distressing fact that much of life lies outside our control: how and when we’ll die, whether democracy collapses across the globe, the rise of the alt-right, the rate at which polar ice melts, the rise and fall of the Dow Jones.

In many ways, we’re not the directors of our lives: we can’t force our marriage-wary on-again, off-again boyfriend to propose, nor can we cast our ceaselessly critical older sister into a less nitpicking role.  Life is a movie, but we can only partially write the script.  If we want to lose weight, we can eat bananas and granola, we can exercise 3-4 times a week, we can drink water instead of soda and other sugary drinks, but ultimately we can’t change our body’s fundamental shape.  If we’re naturally more curvaceous, we’re never going to be Kate Moss-skinny— even if we do 100 crunches a day.

Our obsessive planning deludes us into thinking we can control the future.  When we assert that our doctor’s visit will— in fact— occur at 2 pm, we feel we can assert other things with confidence: that we’ll drive to work without getting into an accident, that our troubled son will graduate high school and not fall victim to drug addiction, that that the lump in our breast is benign, not malignant, that we’ve been silly to lose sleep over a possibly terminal cancer diagnosis.  Like William Ernest Henley in his rousing poem “Invictus,” we insist we’re “captains of our souls.”  But we’re not captains of our fate— we’re more like helpless life rafts bobbing in a storm-tossed sea of forces beyond our control.  

Posted on by Asia Lenae

Oliver Burkeman on the Myth of “Doing it All” & the Secret to Making the Most of Your Harrowingly Short Life

We live in a time-obsessed age.  We want to control it, to conquer it, to use it wisely.  If you’re a reluctant self-help enthusiast like me, you’ve tried everything to streamline your schedule and increase efficiency: read books like The Checklist Manifesto and The 4-Hour Work Week, used apps to track your calories and your sleep, been convinced by tech bro podcasts that the key to success was to emulate billionaires’ morning routines.

Sadly, most self-help convinces us we can optimize our lives as if humans were nothing more than yet-to-be-perfected machines.  In his part how-to guide, part philosophical treatise Four Thousand Weeks, British journalist Oliver Burkeman rallies against such misdirected self-help and suggests there’s more to life than crossing items off a to-do list in the name of productivity.  

The New York Times observes Burkeman’s work can sit comfortably on the “shelf next to the books published by Alain de Botton, literary-flavored advice on love, friendship, work and other conundrums.”  The comparison to Botton is apt: both are British, both are charmingly cynical, and both fuse together the wisdom of the ages into how-to guides for modern mortals.

Though its premise (life is short— we should make the most of each day) seems unbearably commonplace, Four Thousand Weeks manages (for the most part) to escape self-help’s empty cliches.  In fact, I dare say Burkeman will inspire you to look at time in a whole new way.

A self-proclaimed “productivity geek,” Burkeman was at one time a devoted believer in the religion of productivity: he used highlighters to color code his planner, broke down his day into 15 minute increments, and tried countless efficiency systems such as Inbox Zero and the Pomodoro technique.

Then one winter in 2014, he had an unsettling epiphany: he was never going to scale the mountain of all his “to-do” tasks and blissfully arrive at the summit of “being on top of everything.”  

According to Burkeman, the problem with most time management philosophies is they rest on the erroneous premise that we can do everything.  If only we could find the most efficient way to structure our day/tackle our inbox, we could launch our 6-figure business, have a happy marriage and regularly run marathons.  If only we could find the most aesthetically-pleasing Pinterest-worthy planner, we could systematically prioritize our to-do list and “get it all done.”

But the reality is we can’t do it all.

Staying late at the office means we can’t have game night with our family.  Opting to go with our friends to a bar Friday night means we most likely can’t go running early Saturday morning.  If we only have 2 weeks of vacation a year, we can’t possibly go to every one of our “must-see” destinations: we have to choose between the endless excitement of New York and the majestic turquoise waters of Bali.

The problem with the be/do/have it all mentality is it encourages us to say “yes” to every opportunity: social invitations, networking events, more and more responsibility.  The result?  We have full calendars of other people’s priorities.  Because we said “yes” to Sarah’s dinner party, we spend our Saturday night nibbling on quiche instead of working on our 3 act play.  And because we said “yes” to yet another project at work, we can no longer take a romantic holiday to wine country.

Ultimately, time management isn’t about “doing it all” (which is impossible)— it’s about coming to terms with the fact that you’re never going to.  You’re never going to have a bustling social life and work 60 hours a week.  You’re never going to have the picture-perfect marriage and a high-powered career.  You’re never going to be a world-class pianist and a Harvard PhD.  Perhaps a few super humans among us can do many things, but the rest of us mortals must make choices.  Time management requires you face your finitude: as Burkeman asserts, “your time is finite, doing anything requires sacrifice— the sacrifice of all the other things you could have been doing with that stretch of time.”

Posted on by Asia Lenae

Schopenhauer on Art as an Antidote to our Greatest Affliction

What is philosophy for?  For many, philosophy is a lofty subject only meant to be studied by tweed-jacketed professors in the university hall.  The word “philosopher” conjures images of men in ancient Greece or Rome who have white beards and wear long, flowy robes.  Philosophy isn’t for ordinary people like mailmen and school teachers— it’s reserved for great intellects like Nietzsche and Socrates and Plato.  Philosophers are a privileged class who have the time to ponder life’s big questions (who am I?/what am I meant to do?).

However, in his charming The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton argues just the opposite: philosophy is simply the study of how to live well.  A delightful little volume organized by afflictions such as “heartbreak,” “unpopularity,” and “not having enough money,” The Consolations of Philosophy rests on the premise that philosophy is a form of medicine.  The words of a great thinker can have restorative properties.  In this 2000 classic, the irresistibly intelligent Botton sifts through thousands of years of collective wisdom to find the wisest minds’ remedies for our most common problems.  

Do you only have $5 in your bank account, but long for luxurious pleasures such as Birkin bags and champagne-soaked meals at Michelin star restaurants?  A dose of Epicurus will remind you that happiness isn’t always found in the extravagant excesses of materialism.  Have you been driven to the brink of insanity by such tragic events as losing a loved one or such petty frustrations as losing your car keys?  Dr. Botton would write you a prescription for the Stoic philosopher Seneca.

Of all the difficulties in the modern world, loneliness is probably our most widespread problem.  In a recent national survey of American adults, 36% of respondents reported feeling lonely “frequently” or “almost all the time.”  More Americans are spending time alone than ever before.

Why do rates of loneliness run rampant?  Some blame our modern alienation on the advent of social media (after all, why bother with complicated, occasionally dull human interaction when TikTok provides dizzying dopamine-fueled hits of cheap entertainment?); others blame the capitalist rat race for money and status.  Certainly, our sense of isolation only worsened during the pandemic.

Luckily, there is a cure for our loneliness.  If we’re lacking connection in real life, we can find companionship in the fictional worlds of art and books.  Books are medicines for our maladies, slings for our spirits, salves for our wounds.  To read a book— or observe a painting or contemplate a poem— is to see our own lives reflected back to us.  By expressing their particular experience, the artist illuminates an aspect of the greater human experience.  Though Tolstoy wrote Family Happiness using his own experience of marriage, the modern woman who finds herself disenchanted with domesticity can still see herself in Masha’s tale.  Books remind us other people have felt our feelings and thought our thoughts, even if it was many centuries ago.  Referencing the great German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, Botton notes:

“We do have one advantage over moles.  We may have to fight for survival and hunt for partners and have children as they do, but we can in addition go to the theatre, the opera and the concert hall, and in bed in the evenings, we can read novels, philosophy and epic poems— and it is in these activities that Schopenhauer located a supreme source of relief from the demands of the will-to-life.  What we encounter in works of art and philosophy are objective versions of our own struggles, evoked and defined in sound, language, or image.  Artists and philosophers not only show us what we have felt, they present our experiences more poignantly and intelligently than we have been able; they give shape to aspects of our lives that we recognize as our own, yet could never have understood so clearly on our own.  They explain our condition to us, and thereby help us to be less lonely with, and confused by it.  We may be obliged to continue burrowing underground, but through creative works, we can at least acquire moments of insights into our woes, which spare us feelings of alarm and isolation (even persecution) at being afflicted by them.  In their different ways, art and philosophy help us, in Schopenhauer’s words, to turn pain into knowledge.”  

Ultimately, art dispels the illusion that we are alone in our struggles.  The dispirited can discover hope in the Letters of Vincent Van Gogh; the love sick can find solace in sonnets written by a Renaissance man nearly a half millennia ago.  Or as Botton writes, a snubbed suitor can find consolation in Goethe:

“By reading a tragic tale of love, a rejected suitor raises himself above his own situation; he is no longer one man suffering alone, singly and confusedly, he is part of a vast body of human beings who have throughout time fallen in love with other humans in the agonizing drive to propagate the species.  [By reading], his suffering loses a little of its sting.” 

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 1 Comment

Alain de Botton on Permission

In childhood, we have no concept of permission.  If a tube of Elmer’s Glue looks interesting, we squeeze it on the floor and put it in our mouths.  If we want to be a princess, we put on our frilliest dress and steal our mother’s pearls.  If we want to build a blanket fort, we grab sheets from the linen closet and pillows from the couch.

However, as we get older, we learn the proper conduct of the adult world.  We can’t simply get up in the middle of class to go to the bathroom; we must ask first.  Similarly, we can’t speak whenever we feel the urge; we have to raise our hand.  If we disobey these rules, we get an “oops” slips and detention.

Much like school, home is governed by rules.  We must call our parents and ask permission before we can go to our best friend’s house after school.  We must get their signature before we can attend a field trip.  We must ask before opening our dad’s tools.

Growing up means becoming intimately acquainted with the most demoralizing word in the English language: “no.”  

“No, you can’t eat ice cream before lunch.”  

“No, you can’t go to your friend’s house.”  

“No, you can’t put aside studying for your geometry test because you’d rather scroll through Facebook.”

We learn that the things we desire are wrong, inappropriate, inexcusable.  It’s wrong, for example, to indulge in ice cream before a meal.  It’s wrong to scroll through social media when we have homework.  Our parents, our society, and our school teach us that our dreams and desires are meant to be delayed, if not indefinitely postponed.  We can only have the decadent hot fudge sundae after we eat our chicken and kale.  We can only update our status after we find the missing angle of a triangle.

In many ways, delaying the gratification of a desire is an important life skill.  If we want to achieve any worthwhile goal, there will be times when we have to be patient and exercise self-control.  We could never lose weight, for example, if we succumbed to every urge to eat chocolate cake instead of stick to our meal plan of lean proteins and vegetables.

However, as we get older, we become too skilled in the art of self-denial.  Rarely— if ever— do we indulge in our wants.  We become too strict, too stern, too punitive with ourselves.  Obsessed with a lovely winter coat we always see in the department store window?  Oh no, we could never treat ourselves to something so unnecessary and expensive.  Daydream about strolling through Provence’s rolling lavender hills?  No, we could never spend thousands of dollars on something so frivolous as a single vacation.

Over the years, we come to believe that what we want is fundamentally wrong:

It would be “wrong” to leave a marriage of twenty years, even though most nights our “marriage” consists of two sorrowful strangers sitting in silence at the dinner table.

It would be “wrong” to date the out-of-work actor with nothing financial to offer when we could date a man with an impressive job and six-figure income.

It would be “wrong” to leave our stable job to join the PeaceCorps.

It would be “wrong” to abandon our family and friends to become a Buddhist monk.

It would be “wrong” to take a watercolor class just for fun.

Though we look like adults, in many ways, we’re still scared little children.  Despite our suits and brief cases, home mortgages and our 401k’s, we long for someone wiser to give us permission, to tell us what we want is “ok.”

It’s ok to leave the job, the city, the relationship.

It’s ok to pursue an unconventional career as a sculptor or photographer or filmmaker or freelance writer or multimedia artist.

It’s ok to risk everything and start your own business.

It’s ok to change careers at 35 and fall in love again at 57.

But as Alain de Botton writes in What They Forgot to Teach Us in School, his delightful new addition to his part-practical, part-philosophical series the School of Life, “There won’t ever be signs that completely reassure or permit us around a majority of courses of action in adult life.  There is no cosmic authority to allow or frown, to get angry or to punish us.  We are on our own.”  There’s no one who can give us definitive answers to life’s mysterious questions: “Yes, you should leave your girlfriend.”/ “No, you should not enroll in medical school.”  We’re no longer in school: there’s no ringing bells to tell us when to head to class, no teachers to give us lessons, no advisors to inform us what classes we need to fulfill graduation requirements, no lectures and assignments to give meaning to our ultimately meaningless existence.  Though this is terrifying on the one hand, it’s also liberating.  As Botton writes, “We’re answerable only to our best understanding of ourselves, to our self-knowledge and to our noblest intentions.”

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Alain de Botton on Why We Should Set Boundaries

What is a boundary?  We hear the word all the time in psychology but few of us truly understand its meaning.  Boundaries are standards for how we expect to be treated.  Setting a boundary means clearly and confidently communicating what we need to feel happy and respected.  At home, setting a boundary might look like a parent telling their child that— after a quick snack of apple slices and peanut butter— it’s time to do their homework.  At work, setting a boundary might mean saying a strong, definitive “no” to our boundary-less boss.  In love, it might mean telling our significant other that— though we appreciate how close they are with our sister— we felt it was inappropriate to reveal so much intimate information about our latest fight with her.

If someone crosses our boundaries, there are consequences for their behavior.  Say, for example, we catch our child playing Fortnite instead of doing their homework.  “I don’t want to do long division!” they might whine as we take out their textbooks and turn off their computers.  A consequence might be banning them from video games for the rest of the week or limiting their screen time for the year.  Enforcing a consequence isn’t about retribution or punishment— it’s about teaching people how we want to be treated.  By disciplining our child in this instance, we’re sending a message: we will not tolerate tantrums or misbehavior and expect to be respected.

Though boundaries are essential to our happiness, most of us haven’t been taught how to set limits.  In the modern era, we’re more educated than almost any other generation: we can use the Pythagorean theorem to identify the length of a triangle’s sides, we can examine the themes of Anna Karenina, we can recite the fourteen points of the Treaty of Versailles.  Yet we remain woefully ignorant of crucial life skills such as how to understand ourselves, how to deal with depression, and how to express our true feelings and remain loving and respectful during a fight.

To remedy this serious shortcoming of our education, Alain de Botton, whose books I write of often, founded the School of Life, a global organization dedicated to developing emotional intelligence.  In the latest addition to the series, A More Exciting Life, Botton explores why we don’t set boundaries— and why we absolutely have to.

So why are so many of us hesitant to utter a firm and forceful “no”?

As with most psychological topics, the answer lies in our childhood.  According to Botton, those who have trouble setting boundaries in adulthood were not allowed to assert themselves as children.  Perhaps an alcoholic father didn’t much care if he had to pick us up from school or a mother with a violent streak and explosive temper didn’t allow us to oppose her.  Maybe our dad hit us when we refused to get him another beer.  Maybe when we asked our mother why she didn’t help us with our homework after school like Susie’s mom, she got mad, called us an ungrateful brat and sent us to our room.  Maybe when we asked our sisters to stop calling us names, they refused.  “You’re too sensitive,” they’d say, “It’s just a joke.”  Saying “no” to an abusive or otherwise dysfunctional family member meant being physically, emotionally, or psychologically abused.

Our formative years are the blueprint for adulthood.  Because setting boundaries in our past often led to conflict, we avoid expressing our needs as adults.  We’re scared that if we set a limit with someone, they’ll be angry, maybe even hate us.  Say, for instance, our partner invites us to a movie after work.  Though we want to decline his invitation because we’re exhausted, we go because we’re afraid a gentle, politely-phrased, perfectly-poised “no” will cause friction in the relationship.  “What if,” we worry, “he gets mad at us?”  “What if he wants to break up?”  

Though it seems ridiculous to think someone would break up over something so stupid, the boundary-less person is this irrationally afraid of confrontation.  Because of their upbringing, they fear that setting a boundary will lead to dismissal, rejection, or abandonment.  They were taught that being a good girl or boy meant obeying Mom and Dad and putting other people before themselves.  If they do find the courage to deliver a diplomatic but decisive “no,” they feel a terrible sense of guilt.  After all, who are they to assert themselves?  

Despite these qualms, we can set a boundary and still be kind, selfless, and good.  A boundary isn’t a cruel, heartless “no” to someone else— it’s an affirmative “yes” to ourselves.  We decline our partner’s movie invitation, not because we want to hurt his feelings or because we don’t love or value him, but because we’re tired from a long week of work and would much rather be luxuriating with a good book in bed.  We say no to our boss’s request to come in on a Saturday, not because we’re lazy and don’t take our career seriously, but because we deserve rest and value our time with friends and family.

Regardless of what we’ve been taught, we have a right to have our own needs and wants.  As Botton would say, “we are not a piece of helpless flotsam on the river of others’ wishes.”  Rather than ride the currents of other people’s preferences and opinions, we must remember we are our own ships: we can use our rudders to change course and steer us in our desired direction.  Drifting aimlessly and following any wind doesn’t make us happier or promise conflict-free relationships— it only leads to exasperation and bitterness.  Imagine you say “yes” when your friend invites you to a rowdy New Year’s Eve party though you’ve been dreaming of having a quiet evening in.  Do you take pleasure in the rollicking revelry of the blaring party horns and confetti?  No, you spend the seemingly endless evening simmering with resentment and secretly hating your friend.  And therein lies the irony: by making other people happy, we often make ourselves miserable.

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Alain de Botton on How to Argue More Honestly

There are several stages of a fight.  In the first stage, we present our perspective with logic and rationality.  Much like a lawyer, we marshal evidence to support our case.  For example, if we find our husband guilty because he forgot to pick up our son from soccer practice, we’ll call witnesses to the stand, present proof of our claims.  Exhibit A: we left a note in bright bold letters on the family calendar which clearly said “Dad picks up James from practice @ 4:30.”  Exhibit B: we even texted to remind him 2 hours before.

At this point, our husband will respond with a rebuttal.  “But you usually pick him on Thursdays,” he might mutter in an attempt to defend himself.  Or he might deflect and simply say, “He just had to walk home.  What’s the big deal?”

Now we arrive at the fight’s more explosive second stage: confrontation.  When our partner refuses to acknowledge the indisputable logic of our case, things usually devolve into an argument.  The more our husband refuses to see our perspective, the more we get angry and vindictive.  We might exploit each other’s insecurities, use our partner’s self-doubts as ammunition.  Soon the civility of the courtroom gives way to a brutal kind of warfare.  We scream, we shout, we slam doors.  We call each other horrible, unforgivable names like “asshole” and “bitch” and “cunt” and “whore.”  We regard our significant other— not as someone we’ve devoted our life to— but as a hostile enemy to be overpowered.  At times like these, it can feel impossible to leave the battleground and actually talk like two people who love each other.

In his endlessly enlightening A More Exciting Life, Alain de Botton suggests if we ever want to reconcile and reach an understanding, we have to be courageous enough to say what we truly mean.  Ultimately, every argument has two layers: the surface and the substratum beneath.  At the surface, a quarrel is usually about petty things: we might battle about age-old resentments (the fact that we stayed in our home town for our husbands though we’ve always yearned to move to a new city) or squabble about sex (why we’re not having any).  We might bicker about how our wife never hangs her coat in the closet or how our husband is always 20 minutes late.  We might squander our Saturdays quarreling about dirty laundry and PG&E.

However, these things only symbolize the more serious issues lurking beneath.  We’re bickering so bitterly about the coat our wife leaves out— not because we actually think she’s an inconsiderate slob or because we’re such neat freaks that we can’t stand the sight of a single coat strewn across the sofa— but because her refusal sends us one heartbreaking message: you don’t value me.

In an argument, we only want one thing from our partner: reassurance.  Though we hurl grenades of bitter accusations and hurtful names, we don’t hate our partner or want to “win” exactly— we want them to remind us that we do matter, that we are important to them.  We want to be acknowledged, heard, seen.  We bring up the fact that we remained in our hometown and sacrificed our dream of living in the city because we worry our relationship lacks reciprocity: that our partner loves us less than we love them.  Will our partner ever make such a sacrifice for us?  Or will the reminder of our relationship require us to compromise who we are and what we truly want?  Behind our indignation lies insecurity.  

We lash out angrily at our partners when they don’t want to have sex— not because we’re selfish, sex-obsessed nymphomaniacs— but because we feel hurt and rejected.  Do our partners no longer find us attractive?  Though we never admit it, their lack of interest in sex makes us worry that we’re unlovable and repulsive.

We get irrepressibly irritated when our husband is (yet again) late for an event— not because being 20 minutes late to our daughter’s choir performance makes much difference— but because his perpetual lack of punctuality communicates a lack of respect.  If our husband loved us, we think, he’d value our time.  He knows how much we despise tardiness.  Why can’t he just make an effort to leave a few minutes early?  Is it really that hard to get dressed and out the door?  to account for traffic and parking?  The fact that he continues to do something that upsets us just shows how little he cares for our feelings.

If we are to become better at fighting, we have to fight more honestly.  Rather than remain at the surface and squabble about dirty laundry and PG&E, we should communicate what is genuinely bothering us.  Instead of make a bitchy comment when our husband leaves his dirty boxers on the bathroom floor, we can say what really ails us: “When you leave your boxers on the floor after I’ve asked you to put them away, I feel unheard and unseen.”  

Why is it so hard to communicate in this way?  Why— rather than simply demonstrate emotional maturity and express how we feel— do we resort to schoolyard antics like tantrums and name-calling?  Botton argues that many of us avoid expressing our feelings because doing so requires a vulnerability we find terrifying.  To say “I miss you”/”You hurt me” is to essentially admit that our partner has the power to hurt us profoundly.  The idea that we so completely depend on another human being, that— with a few cruel words— our lovers can shatter our hearts and irreparably damage our dignity— is petrifying.  Therefore, when our partner hurts us in some way, our first impulse is to go on the defensive.  The moment we feel attacked, we counterattack; we fortify our walls and strengthen our fortresses.  But as Botton so eloquently expresses, “in love we will be much safer (that is, much more likely to be a recipient of affection and atonement) if we manage calmly to reveal our wound to its (usually unwitting) perpetrator.  The best response is not to make ourselves more impregnable, but to dare to be a little less defended.”

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 4 Comments

Alain de Botton on How to Deal With Depression

What is depression?  In her exquisite memoir, Wintering, Katherine May defined depression as “a season in the cold.”  In a harrowing image, Sylvia Plath compared her depressive episodes to suffocating in “a dark, airless sack.”  Van Gogh, yet another genius who didn’t survive his dark season of the soul, told his brother his depression was like “lying bound hand and foot at the bottom of a deep dark well.”

In his latest edition to the School of Life library, A More Exciting Life, Alain de Botton attempts to better understand this malaise of the soul.  Though depression is widespread (it’s estimated that over 16 million people suffer from depression in America alone), the condition remains deeply misunderstood.  In many ways, depression resembles sadness: much like the sad, the depressed cry easily, isolate themselves, struggle to sleep, and generally feel hopeless.

However, according to Botton, there is one major difference between depression and sadness: the sad person knows why they’re sad, the depressed person doesn’t.  Sadness is usually associated with an external event: a job loss, a break up, a bereavement.  Depression, on the other hand, has no clear causes.  While a sad person can easily explain why they haven’t been able to get out of bed— their boss berated them in front of the whole team, their wife recently left them— a depressed person doesn’t possess the same self-awareness.  There’s no reason why life feels empty and pointless.  The despair of the depressed person is made all the more devastating because it can’t be explained with logic.

Though the melancholy can’t explain their low spirits, there is a reason for their depression— it’s simply been forgotten.  Something in their past was too tragic and traumatic for them to process, so their minds pushed the event beyond the outer regions of consciousness.  As Botton writes, “Depression is sadness that has forgotten its true causes.”

Perhaps as children the depressed were abused or neglected or perhaps their parents just didn’t pay much attention.  While their friends came home to chocolate chip cookies and a series of curious questions, their parents rarely asked them how their day went.  No one checked to see if they’d done their homework.  No one took them to soccer games and ballet classes.  Rather than confront a devastating truth (that their parents were selfish in many ways and weren’t always there for them) and all its attendant implications (their parents didn’t love them; therefore, something is fundamentally wrong with them), they feel depressed.

So how can we dissipate the dark black cloud of depression?  Botton argues what the depressed person needs more than anything is the chance to process past traumas and grieve their unmourn losses.  Ideally, this can be done with the support of a trusted, trained psychologist.  In some cases, medication can momentarily lift the fog of despondency so the sufferer can find some relief from their condition.

However, Botton warns that brain chemistry is not where the problem either “begins or ends.”  In our instant gratification culture, we want fast and easy solutions.  Depressed?  Take some Prozac and be back to your old self again!  We like to imagine depression is a common cold: it can be cured with a pill and a few days in bed.  But depression is far more complicated than that.  If anything, medicine is a band-aid solution: it doesn’t get to depression’s root causes.  The depressed person doesn’t need the medical miracles of Big Pharma— they need to be allowed “to feel and to remember specific damage, and to be granted a fundamental sense of the legitimacy of their emotions.  They need to be allowed to be angry and for the anger to settle on the right, awkward targets.”

The goal of treatment, then, should be to help the sufferer gain some sort of self-awareness.  Why were they depressed?  What distressing thing had happened to them in the past?  What misfortune have they failed to mourn?  What decades-old tragedy have they repressed?  

An impossible-to-please father.

A narcissistic mother.

A shattering divorce.

A miscarriage.

Is it painful to revisit these disappointing childhood figures and traumatic events?  Of course, but if the depressed person resurrects the ghosts of their past, they can finally put them to rest.  

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 4 Comments

Alain de Botton on How to Listen to Your Boredom

Insatiably curious, children have a hard time concentrating on any one thing for too long; if you sit with a child and try to teach them long division, for example, you’ll most likely be met with the disgruntled complaint “I’m bored!!!”  After a single problem, your restless pupil will want to play his saxophone, pretend to be an astronaut, or draw stick figures on the board.

In many ways, the goal of education is to teach children to withstand such boredom.  From 8:30 in the morning to 3:00 in the afternoon for twelve years of their lives, children have to resist the urge to write stories and build blanket forts so they can learn how to add two digit numbers, compose neat, orderly paragraphs, and locate the atomic mass of elements on the periodic table.  To excel academically, they must endure long periods of boredom.

On one hand, there is obviously value in this educational model.  School teaches the discipline and steadfastness to stick with a subject even when it doesn’t immediately interest us.  If we couldn’t occasionally tolerate doing things we disliked, we’d never be prepared to enter the adult world.  After all, much of adulthood is doing things we don’t want to: going to long meetings, listening to maddening elevator music while waiting on the phone with Comcast, having dinner with our in-laws to name a few.

The problem is as we grow up, we become too good at ignoring our boredom.  Because school requires us to suppress our natural curiosity and essentially disregard our interests and enthusiasms, we stopped listening to our boredom.  But boredom— like all emotions— has something valuable to teach us.  Boredom is a sign that something is amiss.  If we feel wearisome, whatever we’re doing is lacking interest and engagement.  

Rather than be a strict school master to ourselves and demand we do things we find dreadfully dull, we should find what truly exhilarates us.  In his edifying A More Exciting Life, Alain de Botton makes the compelling claim that the average human life is only 26,000 days, far too short to squander on occupations we find boring.  Ultimately, Botton gives us permission to stop being such dutiful “good” students.  Instead of obey our inner school teacher and do things out of a dreary sense of duty and obligation, we should be like children and value our own penchants and predilections. 

Pick up the latest bestseller only to find it so yawns-worthy you couldn’t get past the first five pages?  Don’t demand that “you finish what you started.”  Find a book that absorbs your attention and keeps you turning pages.

Go to an art museum only to struggle to stay awake?  Ditch the MOMA and go see a movie.  There’s no reason to make yourself appreciate Van Gogh if you find reading placards and staring at paintings all day woefully uninteresting.

Force yourself to read the morning paper every day even though you dread the exercise?  Stop trying to “be informed” and read something you find fascinating, whether that’s children’s literature or 19th century poetry.  

When we listen to our boredom, we learn what we like and dislike, what we love and what we loathe; we discover what sort of books we prefer, what kind of music stirs our souls; we define our aesthetic, our sense of humor, our taste in clothes.  In other words, we become like all great artists and develop a “late style.”

What, exactly, is a late style?  According to Botton, as artists get older, they tend to create far better works.  Take Picasso.  A child prodigy, Picasso exhibited extraordinary artistic talent from a young age.  In the masterful “Study of a Torso” (depicted below), he had already grasped the fundamental principles of painting.  Remarkably, he made this work when he was only 14.

Though Picasso’s early work demonstrated considerable technical skill, his later work was far more original.  Take the below oil painting “The Dream” as an example.  Painted in a single afternoon in 1932 when Picasso was 50, “The Dream” is a revolution of color and form.  No longer bound to traditional ideas of how to depict reality, Picasso experimented with distorted shapes and bold, contrasting colors. 

The titan of 20th century art once said that it took him four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.  What he meant was that it took him decades to unlearn all his instruction and instead paint like himself.  In school, he learned to paint “properly”: how to proportion a face, how to depict a beautiful woman sitting on a sofa.  He mastered the principles of line and shape, unity and harmony, color and form.  The result?  He produced many expertly-crafted paintings, but they were paintings we’d seen countless times before.

However, as he got older, Picasso became less afraid of breaking from convention and more devoted to pursuing his own pleasure.  Rather than “ignore [his] inborn ideas and impulses,” he listened to his boredom.  He didn’t want to paint faithful-to-life representations— he wanted to paint in a way that reflected his own perspective.  So he abandoned the traditional rules of composition and started painting like he wanted: with a playful disregard of reality, with a passion for the phantasmagorical, with expressive brushstrokes, with strong, striking colors.

Like Picasso, we should develop a “late style” and pay attention to what truly excites us.  What kind of work do we find most fulfilling?  What qualities do we most desire in a romantic partner?  How do we want to spend our time?  Where would we travel if we could go anywhere?  Botton reminds us we don’t all have to paint classical Greek torsos— we can paint surreal women on bright red sofas.

Posted on by Asia Lenae · 3 Comments

Alain de Botton on Why We Should Be More Pessimistic

Is there anything we worship as much as optimism?  In America, the land of the perennially positive, we tend to be hopeful: we believe— sometimes beyond reason— that anything is possible.  Unhappy in love?  We can find our soul mate.  Despise our jobs?  We can quit and start our own business.  Too poor?  We can work hard and be as rich as the wealthiest man on Wall Street.

But the problem with being too optimistic is it inevitably leads to high expectations and, thus, disappointment.  Take the romantic arena for example.  Most of us have ridiculously high expectations of our partners: we expect them to understand us in every way, to make us laugh, to share our passion for The Great Gatsby and French new wave.  When our otherwise loving, supportive partner says just the wrong thing or does something thoughtless or inconsiderate (which he invariably will….after all, he’s a human being), we become bitter and despondent.  This isn’t how love is supposed to be.  Our lover is supposed to decipher the secret language of our souls and always know the exact right thing to say— he’s not supposed to eat our last chocolate chip cookie or note that the waitress’s breasts are quite big.  Our lover is supposed to share our every intellectual interest— he’s not supposed to like football and video games.

And therein lies the problem: because we have an impossible, idealistic vision of how love is “supposed” to be, we remain perpetually dissatisfied with reality.  In his indispensable volume A More Exciting Life, which taught us how to deal with depression, overcome the pressure to be exceptional, prioritize small pleasures, gain self-knowledge, lengthen our lives, and listen to our boredom, charmingly cynical British philosopher Alain de Botton suggests we’d be happier if we regarded life with more pessimism.  The reality is no matter how sweet our partner, he will occasionally say something insensitive or downright stupid.  In the same way, no matter how compatible we are as a couple, commonality will not extend indefinitely: though we might share a fondness for Freddie Mercury, we might passionately disagree about which is better, heavy death metal or indie.  As Sylvia Plath once said, two partners are more of a Venn diagram: two circles that have overlapping but ultimately independent identities.

In one of the book’s most consoling chapters “Getting Expectations Right,” Botton introduces us to Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto’s 80/20 rule.  In 1905, Pareto made a startling discovery: 20% of the pea pods in his garden were responsible for yielding 80% of the peas.  Interestingly, this principle was also true in economic productivity: in Italy, 20% of citizens generated 80% of the wealth.  Pareto later found this was also true of other country’s economies.  The Pareto distribution, or 80/20 rule, states that “80% of effects will come from 20% of the causes.”  For example, 80% of a business’s revenue will come from 20% of its clients; 80% of a record company’s profits will come from 20% of its artists, etc.

Though we usually see the 80/20 rule in economics, Botton argues it’s equally applicable to our day-to-day lives.  “80% of positive elements can be traced back to 20% of causes,” he writes, “or to put it more negatively, 80% of all inputs are likely to be partly or substantially suboptimal.”  In other words, most of the time— indeed, more than half of the time— our lives will be less than ideal.

Rather than imagine we’ll always be cheerful and content, we should expect to endure dark seasons of depression, go through difficult periods where we seriously question all our life choices, feel hopelessly behind our more accomplished college friends, get in petty squabbles with our husbands, lose our car keys, and get lost on the way to our destination.  It might seem bleak to anticipate that the worst will happen; however, if we adopt some of the gloominess of the pessimist, when life doesn’t go as planned— we lose all our life savings in the stock market, we get divorced, we get our dream job only to realize we hate it— we won’t become so bitter with disappointment.

Father of psychology Willam James had a simple formula for happiness: happiness = reality meeting our expectations.  If we want to be content, Botton suggests, we only have two options: change reality or change expectations.  Because it’s futile to change the facts of our existence, we have no choice but to lower our expectations.  

Instead of hold an idealistic view of life, we should remember the pillars of the pessimist’s philosophy:

          1. life generally goes wrong

          2. most sex will not be the stuff of our filthy, pornographic fantasies— it will be unimaginative, awkward, and boring

          3. despite our desperate desire for connection, most social interaction will leave us feeling misunderstood and even more lonely

          4. the people we love most will often be the most maddening

          5. the holidays are never Hallmark cards of poinsettias and sugar cookies— most often, they’re hellish affairs of stress and screaming

          6. New Year’s Eve can only ever be one thing: disenchanting

          7. most of our work will involve meaningless tasks and pointless meetings

          8. most days will be uneventful and uninteresting 

          9. it’s normal for life to be defined by anguish and anxiety 

When we accept that 80% of life doesn’t go as planned, we can more deeply appreciate the other 20%.  The days when are husbands notice our new haircut, when our children make it through an afternoon without shoving and screaming, when we discuss a normally contentious topic calmly and rationally without resorting to our normal unhealthy patterns of blaming and stonewalling, when a family dinner doesn’t devolve into passive-aggressive poking and name-calling, when we make it to work on time, when we feel our work has purpose and meaning: these are the exception— not the rule of living.  Because so much of life is exasperation and misery, we should cherish those uncommon moments when things run smoothly.  A More Exciting Life reminds us there is great wisdom in seeing the glass half empty.