Insight
De Botton: Most parents subconsciously resist their children having better lives
“You have to be fairly settled in yourself to allow a child to have a better life than you had. I know the cliches that every parent wants that. No. I don't, I mean, I, experience does not bear that out.”
Insight
De Botton: Believing in Meritocracy Means Believing Failure is Deserved
“Because if you really believe in a world in which everyone who gets to the top deserves to get to the top, you have to believe in a world in which those who get to the bottom deserve to be at the bottom.”
Insight
De Botton: People should not bring their full selves to work
“I don't think you should bring your full self anywhere, because if we really think about what your full self is, it includes, you know, infantile bits of you when you were two, bits of you that are full of rage, bits of you that are full of envy and bitterness…”
Insight
De Botton: Parents are often envious of their own children
“Envy is one of the key motivators, and people are envious of their children.”
Insight
De Botton: Human nature remains unchanged despite advancing technology
“The human animal doesn't change. Our constitution is the same now as it was, you know, thousands of years ago, and that Puts a cap, really, on the amount of novelty that we're able to build. We build a lot of new tools. We are tool builders. We always have bee…”
Opinion
De Botton: Social media should be banned for adults, not children
“I think it should really be banned for adults more, you know.”
Insight
De Botton: Children raised well lack the desire to be famous
“A marker of good parenting is that your child doesn't have any wish to be famous.”
Opinion
De Botton: Corporate 'family' rhetoric creates problematic contradictions
“When companies start talking about loving their employees and being a family, etc., they've tied themselves in a knot. They've borrowed the language of private life. In order to foster a short-term sense of togetherness.”
Insight
De Botton: Believing modern times are unprecedented is false and exhausting
“One of the ills of the modern age is this belief that we are always in unparalleled, uncharted waters, and that's an exhausting, and I think untrue you know perspective on things.”
Insight
De Botton: The evolutionary function of adolescence is filtering generational knowledge
“Looking at it through an evolutionary biological lens, that's maybe the function of adolescence is to act as a sieve between sort of generational knowledge.”
Insight
De Botton: Holding individuals solely responsible worsens psychological consequences of failure
“We hold people much more tightly responsible for their fates, and therefore if people mess up, The psychological consequences are harder than ever.”
Opinion
De Botton: Religion naturally encourages authoritarianism and dogmatism
“Religious ideology is terribly prone to engaging a side of human nature which is really unfortunate which is around authoritarianism, dogmatism black and white thinking you know, friend or foe thinking.”
Insight
De Botton: Industrial processes, not higher expectations, drained meaning from work
“So it's not so much that we want more meaning, it's that quite naturally, without anyone meaning to, modern industrial processes have drained many jobs Of their meaning.”
Insight
De Botton: Career identity must be assembled from fragments, not external callings
“It's not going to come ready made like a sort of, as an external voice. You have to assemble from fragments, a whole working identity and mission.”
Insight
De Botton: Office work provides relief through professional inauthenticity
“Sometimes people have spent a concentrated period with their friends and family, normally family of Christmas or whatever they may be aching to get back to work because the true self of themselves and of those around them is just slightly unbearable and they'r…”
Assertion Supported
De Botton: GDP counts psychotherapy and handguns identically for economic growth
“From purely economic perspective, it doesn't matter if people are buying psychotherapy lessons or buying handguns. Same thing for the economy. You know, the economy will grow. It doesn't matter what the product or service is.”
Insight
De Botton: Every human unhappiness represents an unfulfilled business idea
“Every time encounter any kind of unhappiness, you're encountering, ah, something that's a business idea that might not have come to fruition.”
Insight
De Botton: The faculty to spot entrepreneurial opportunities exists in everyone
“I think that entrepreneurial opportunity, and to be able to see entrepreneurial opportunity, is, is a faculty that exists in a latent form inside everybody.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
De Botton: Tech companies hack human biology to exploit weak self-control
“And what happens in modern society is these companies hack into our biology in order to exploit our lack of self-control.”
Insight
De Botton: Lacking a plan leaves people prey to others
“If you don't have a plan, you're full prey to the plans of others. And what goes wrong often in people's lives is they don't really have a plan.”
Insight
Alain de Botton: Society Pursues Wealth for Respect, Not Materialism
“People often say we're very materialistic nowadays. We're not particularly materialistic. What we are is we're hungry for status, for love, respect, dignity, and we live in a world in which that status is available via the acquisition of material goods.”
Insight
De Botton: Adult independence stems from unconditional childhood love
“And, you know, and on the whole, psychologists would argue, you know, I think it's almost common sense, that the amount of independence that you're capable of in adulthood is directly related to the amount of love and esteem you were given as a child from peop…”
Insight
De Botton: Modern society is richer yet more anxious than ever
“It's the paradox of modernity. We are richer than ever before, but more restless and anxious than ever before.”
Insight
De Botton: Great leaders inhabit the position of not knowing without shame
“People who are leaders in their field often have about them a courage in asking the so-called obvious question, which isn't obvious at all. They're able to put themselves in the shoes and they're able to inhabit without shame the position of someone who doesn'…”
Alain de Botton