Alain de Botton at TED

Notes:

• Career crisis hit generally on a Sunday evening.

• It’s easier now than ever before to make a good living. It’s harder than ever before, to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.

• We are surrounded by snobs. A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who your are. the dominant snobbery nowadays is job snobbery. Therefore the iconic question: “What do you do?” The opposite of a snob is your mother: someone who doesn’t care about your achievements.

• We are not materialistic per se, we just want the emotional rewards pegged to those things. It’s not the material goods we want, it’s the rewards we want. “The next time you see someone driving a Ferrari, don’t think this is somebody who’s greedy, think this is somebody who is incredibly vulnerable and in need of love.”

• Never before have expectations been so high about what humans can achieve within their lifespan. Anyone can do anything (wrong).

• We are all basically equal. The problem with this is envy. The closer people are, the more there’s a sense of envy. Modern society has turned the whole world into a school: everyone’s the same, which makes it very stressful. It’s very unlikely that you’ll reach the position bill Gates reached, but it doesn’t “feel” that way.

• There are two self-help books today. One tells you that “you can do it”. The other one deals with low self-esteem. Quite a correlation here.

• We like to believe in meritocracy. The problem is that if you really believe in a society that those with merit to get to the top, get to the top, then you also believe by implication that those who deserve to get to the bottom, also get to the bottom, and stay there. Your position in life comes merited and deserved, which makes failure seem much more crushing.

• In the middle ages, a poor person was unfortunate. Nowadays, a poor person is a loser.

• There are more suicides in individualistic countries that in the rest of the world. This happens because people take what happens to them extremely personal. They own their success, but they also own their failure.

• Meritocracy is an impossible dream. There are simply too many random factors. Hold your horses when it comes to judging people, you don’t necessarily know what someone’s true value is.

• We fear failure because of the judgment and ridicule of others. The number one organ of judgment nowadays is the newspaper, full of people who has messed up their lives.

• One alternative is tragedy, tragic arts. We should learn sympathy from tragic arts. It would be insane to call Hamlet a loser.

• We have nothing that it’s centered that it’s not human. We worship ourselves.

• We think we know what success means. You can’t be successful at everything. Work-life balance is nonsense, you can’t have it all. Any vision of success has to admit what is losing out on.

• Our ideas of success are not our own. We are highly open to suggestion. We should not give up on our ideas of success, but we should make sure they are our own.

• It’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want, and find out at the end of the journey, that it isn’t in fact what you wanted all along.