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Summary

Core Philosophy: Writing as a Tool for Therapeutic Control

Alain de Botton posits that the writer’s primary impulse centers on processing two fundamental dimensions of human experience: pain and pleasure. Writing functions as a deeply therapeutic mechanism of control. By transposing chaotic internal sensations into structured linguistic ideas, a writer can mitigate the intensity of pain and preserve fleeting, fugitive moments of beauty. This act of naming emotions provides profound psychological relief.

De Botton suggests that humanity can be categorized by how individuals process their suffering—whether through distraction, physical exertion, achievement, substance use, or writing. True writers belong to the latter group, using empirical self-observation to mine their own minds. This stands in sharp contrast to the traditional academic system, which discourages introspective self-analysis in favor of dissecting historical authorities like Cicero, Socrates, or Foucault.

The Creative Process: "Cooked" Feelings and the Archaeology of Fragments

A writer cannot immediately translate every raw emotion into art. De Botton describes a maturation process where thoughts must be fully "cooked" before they are coherent enough to introduce to a stranger. He illustrates this with an observation of a happy couple in a restaurant: he realized that the beauty of their evening was actually storing up a heavy emotional debt that would amplify their future pain if the relationship ended. This fragmented insight took weeks to settle in his mind before it crystallized into a coherent essay on the toll of pleasure.

For de Botton, writing begins with fragments rather than complete narratives. He compares the process to archaeology, where one discovers a tiny shard of pottery and must patiently excavate the surrounding soil to reconstruct the vessel. An entire book often starts as a single fragmented scene—such as a man emerging from a dental office in a state of despair—acting as a magnet that slowly attracts related ideas over time. Consequently, the standard "book" format is merely an arbitrary industry construct; human thought naturally occurs in sentences, aphorisms, and brief images.

Suffering, Loneliness, and Freud’s Sublimation

Genuine creative work requires the writer to step away from the desk to think, walk, and feel. Drawing on Marcel Proust, de Botton explains that suffering is the ultimate catalyst for deep insight. When life runs smoothly, individuals feel integrated with society and have little reason to challenge conventional wisdom. Desperation, dislocation, and the threat of existential collapse force writers to read life against the grain, stripping away polite societal scripts to reveal raw truths.

This dynamic aligns with Sigmund Freud’s concept of sublimation, where artistic expression serves as a vital alternative to madness or self-destruction. Facing the conflicts of existence, the artist channels their distress into creative work to integrate their shattered mind. Writing is born out of a sense of fundamental loneliness—the feeling that no one in one's immediate environment truly understands. In this light, art serves as a life raft. For example, Vincent van Gogh's paintings of irises are not mere aesthetic studies of flowers; they are desperate graspings for beauty painted through a lens of profound agony.

Resisting the "Supposed To": Art, Politics, and the Illusion of the News

De Botton strongly critiques the invisible scripts of what humans are "supposed" to do, think, or feel. This artificial conditioning impairs creative businesses, results in sterile social rituals, and limits personal relationships, which only become authentic when individuals drop their polite facades and reveal their inherent "weirdness."

Similarly, political frameworks reduce the immense nuance of human nature into simplistic left-or-right binaries. In reality, human beings are highly contradictory; even the fierce military conqueror Napoleon Bonaparte wrote incredibly sweet, desperate love letters to Josephine.

The modern obsession with news consumption further standardizes our inner lives. Drawing on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, de Botton notes that modernity has elevated the news to the place once held by religious liturgy. Rather than offering wisdom, the news prioritizes surface-level novelty. True wisdom, by contrast, lies in identifying timeless archetypes and myths. Art works in opposition to the news by stabilizing dislocation, helping us see past routine habits to appreciate the true mystery and gravity of existence.

The Inner Reader, Childhood Trauma, and the Legacy of Comfort

Effective writing requires an appeal to the "inner reader." Bad writers fail to ask how their observations will fit into and serve the life of another person. Good writing bridges authentic self-expression with structured communication that the audience can digest and metabolize.

De Botton shares that his own writing style was shaped by two contrasting childhood figures: his highly academic, pedantic father and his uneducated, nature-loving Swiss nanny. His work seeks to bridge these two worlds, aiming to be rigorous enough for the academic and accessible enough for the nanny. Furthermore, his venture, The School of Life, is an extension of a childhood coping mechanism. Shipped to an English boarding school at age eight, he coped with the trauma by inventing a teddy bear, acting as a loving father to the toy and comforting it through imaginary hardships. The School of Life continues this exact mission, translating complex psychological distress into comforting, digestible wisdom for a wider audience.

AI, Art, and the Future of Writing

Though a trained psychotherapist himself, de Botton admits to occasionally using artificial intelligence as a therapeutic sounding board, noting its proficiency in parsing interpersonal dynamics. However, he warns against using it to generate creative writing. Because AI compiles and averages what has already been written, it cannot capture the unique, lived sensations of an individual.

The rise of AI challenges human writers to abandon generic formulas and double down on absolute honesty and self-exploration. True geniuses, as Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, do not have thoughts different from our own; they simply possess the courage and fidelity to express the quiet, embarrassed thoughts that the rest of humanity neglects.

Transcript

Interviewer: You've written so many books, and then also with The School of Life, you have almost 10 million YouTube subscribers. As I was thinking about what you do, what gives you joy as a writer, and what gives us—the viewer of a School of Life video or the reader of your books—a sense of relief, it is this joy of capturing sensations and emotions in words. So much of the world is not concrete, and writing makes it concrete. In doing so, it gives us clarity, peace, or whatever else we need.

Alain de Botton: That’s beautiful. I think you've got it there. Let’s end it there.

Interviewer: End of the podcast!

Alain de Botton: I mean, yes. It is all about two things in particular that interest me: pain and pleasure. Anything that is painful, I want to put words to it. Anything that is very beautiful, I want to put words to it. It is about capturing and—to use a slightly strange word—controlling the experience. Controlling pain in order to lessen it, and controlling beauty in order to keep a hold on something that is fugitive.

The idea is that the more I can do this—it is broadly therapeutic. It is why people journal. I began as a writer as a teenager, trying to master emotions that felt bigger than me. I felt a basic sense of relief, which has not changed to this day, at turning an emotion into an idea, at putting words to feelings. Once you do that, they lessen, and that brings enormous relief.

I think you can divide humanity by what people do with their pain. Some people drink their pain away. Some people talk their pain away. Some people exercise their pain away. Some people achieve their pain away. And some people want to write it away. I'm one of those, and it is all about processing difficult feelings.

I wrote my first book, which in the United States was called On Love and in many other parts of the world was called Essays in Love. That was an attempt to understand sensations around love that had been very painful and mysterious. I gained relief from writing it, and in a rather magical process, it ended up in the hands of other people who would say things like, "How did you know that about me?"

And of course, I would say, "I have no idea about you. I'm just keeping track of myself." If I am doing that faithfully, then it may have an echo in somebody else. It’s very strange how that happens. Sometimes people say to me, "What research have you done? What is your authority base? What are you claiming this on?" And I go, "Just empirical observation of me."

I think that all of us are this incredible library of sensations, this incredible data source. Yet so often, particularly in the academic world, the feeling is: let's ignore ourselves as a source of data. Let's go and find out what Cicero said, what Socrates said, or what Michel Foucault said. While that can be helpful, it is far better to mine your own mind. But there's not much encouragement for that. The whole school system is based on trying to get you to find out what other people thought, rather than going into what you might think.

Interviewer: What do you do when there's a pain or an emotion that you're grappling with, but you can't quite name it? You know there's something there. I've always struggled to feel my emotions; this has been a lot of what I've learned over the last five years in particular. A lot of writing for me—and actually the pain of writing—is to almost force myself to feel the thing, to stop the resistance, and then to somehow name the thing to constrain it. Once you've constrained it, now you can look at it as almost an object separate from you. But it's remarkably painful. How do you do that?

Alain de Botton: There is definitely a moment when certain feelings are not ready to be turned into literature or words. It's not ready; it's not "cooked." Partly, that has to do with not understanding what it is sufficiently. After all, a piece of prose has to obey certain rules of coherence. You have to be able to understand it well enough to put yourself in the shoes of somebody who doesn't know it. You have to be able to introduce a stranger to a feeling, and in order to do that, you have to know it a little bit yourself.

Let me give you an example. I am writing about love again at the moment. For about three weeks, I was toying around with an idea. I saw a couple in a restaurant having a lovely meal. It was summertime in London, and they looked really happy. I had a thought: if their relationship breaks down, it is an evening like this that will cost them dear. This beautiful evening will be the locus of pain. Let's say the man is abandoned, or the woman is abandoned—they will return to that memory of the lovely meal when the future looked beautiful.

I became interested in how a pleasurable experience later turns into a nightmare. Observing my own life, I've seen how, when a relationship breaks down, you don't really sit around lamenting the arguments you had or the bad times with their siblings. Your mind turns toward the beautiful times: that holiday you took, or that amazing walk you enjoyed one evening. These are the moments that cause pain because they were beautiful.

I thought, "Isn't it a dark thought that beautiful things are storing up a cost that the participant isn't yet fully aware of?" It’s really the ideology of mourning and loss. You only lose what is beautiful and good. Therefore, while achieving anything beautiful and good, if you're a wiser, older person, you think, "Wow, this is what I might have to pay for later on."

These thoughts were in my head, but for a while, they were tangled. Then yesterday, it all came to me. Often it does come in a sudden moment of, "Right, this is cooked. This is bubbling; it's at boiling point." I was looking through my notes and thought, "Okay, I know what this is. This is a little essay on the debt that we may have to pay for our pleasures." It emerged as a little piece. That is a journey from fragments to something more complete. You have to be able to name it and see it because, as you were hinting, sometimes you don't know what a feeling is or where it belongs. If you imagine our minds as giant libraries with index and stack systems, sometimes you get some words and think, "I don't know what book this is or where it would go on the stacks." It takes a while, and then eventually, you find a location for it in your intellectual worldview.

Interviewer: Tell me about that word "fragments." I think that's where so much of writing starts.

Alain de Botton: Absolutely, and I think it should start there. Novice writers often get this wrong. They say things like, "I just don't know where to start with my book. I don't know what the story is." I always compare it to archaeology. In archaeology, you come across a little broken bit of a pot. You know there are other bits of that pot somewhere in the area, and you have to dig through the dirt to assemble them into a plausible pattern. It takes a long time. You can panic and think, "I'll never get this." But many books start with a fragmented idea or image.

I'm working on a book now, and I just have an image of a man emerging from a visit to a dental hygienist in Wimpole Street in London. He has gone there in a moment of despair and inner turmoil, had his teeth cleaned, and is now emerging into the street. I'm slowly assembling fragments from all over, marshaled by that scene. It’s like a powerful magnet that draws in filaments from elsewhere. For a long time, the magnet is not switched on, so the filaments are just lying around.

No one thinks in "book" terms. A book is an arbitrary construction dictated by the publishing industry—it’s a certain number of words glued together. No one naturally thinks in terms of books. We think in sentences, images, and fragments, and gradually we may end up with this thing called a book. But it is always a slightly artificial construction.

This is why I began by being interested in aphorisms and maxims—the tradition of the short, pithy statement. The original tweets, right? I remember reading the 17th-century French writer François de La Rochefoucauld, who wrote The Maxims. It is a beautiful book of about 200 fragments. For example: "To say one never flirts is itself a form of flirtation." Another is: "There are some people who would never have fallen in love if they hadn't heard there was such a thing." Or: "We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others."

I remember reading this book and thinking, "I love this." It's not a novel, biography, or poem. It’s a psychological glimpse of a truth, just two lines long. That’s how I began writing. I wrote a selection of aphorisms for friends at university, and we would laugh because some of them were about people we knew. Shakespeare said, "Brevity is the soul of wit," and there is a distinct wit and humor in a maxim. I’ve always found it really hard to fit into a pre-existing form, so my books tend to be quite odd.

Interviewer: Before we go further, I think you're saying something really profound. There's that line: "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time." How do you write a book? One sentence at a time. It’s fine to just think in sentences, paragraphs, and stories. You don't have to carry the weight of the giant project, let alone the identity of "being a writer." Often, people get blocked by the weight of that giant concept.

Alain de Botton: Yes, and also by the modern expectation of genre. For a long time, to be a writer meant to write a certain kind of realistic 19th-century novel with characters in a realistic setting, where a disembodied, offstage narrator tells you what everybody is thinking. Action is prioritized over reflection. I remember thinking, "This is not for me. I don't love this kind of book." It took me a while to discover books that I actually liked.

The Czech writer Milan Kundera was extremely important to me. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, along with his essay The Art of the Novel, were immensely significant texts because they had an incredible freedom. He was messing around with the rules. Kundera would tell a bit of a story, stop, and give you a reflection on tonal music and Beethoven. Then there would be another bit of narrative, followed by a reflection on three words from a dictionary. I thought, "Wow, why not?" This opened up a whole new horizon.

Interviewer: It’s like a collage.

Alain de Botton: Yes. I was also really inspired by modern visual artists like Joseph Cornell, Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Agnes Martin, and Christo. These were all people who, in different media, were playing with form and conveying a unique sensibility.

I ended up writing books that don't really fit standard definitions. I've written a couple of novels, Essays in Love and The Course of Love, which are very inspired by Kundera in their mixture of narrative and psychological analysis. I've also written collages and books that rely heavily on images. I’m very interested in using pictures in intriguing ways so that the text and the picture bounce off each other.

Interviewer: How do you think about what it means to live like a writer? So little of the work actually happens with your fingers pecking at a keyboard. Most of the work happens when you're thinking—whether you're in the shower, on a walk, or traveling. How do you view that part of the process, which actually takes up the majority of your time?

Alain de Botton: It is paradoxical. It takes writers a long time to realize that if they are not doing anything at 9:00 AM on a Monday, it doesn't matter. The really good work could be happening on a Sunday night at 4:00 AM. As you say, real work is feeling and thinking, and it may not happen in standard office hours.

I used to be a "good boy" who wanted to be a proper member of society, thinking, "I must sit at my desk; I can't go to the park." But now I think, if the park is where you think, go to the park. If going on holiday is where you think, go there.

Marcel Proust, the great French novelist who wrote In Search of Lost Time—which is a mixture of essay, novel, and philosophy—talked about creativity and suffering. He said if you had a magical choice for an evening between meeting a great mind like Plato or Descartes, or going out with someone who will make you suffer, you should choose the person who will make you suffer. He believed that suffering is the great catalyst of insight.

We know this from music. Think of the great breakup albums: Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks or Phil Collins’ Face Value. These great pieces of music emerge from being torn apart. Good writing is often on the side of madness, death, dislocation, and chaos. If things are going well for you, you harmonize with the world. You feel kinship with the way things are, and you aren't a rebel, a revolutionary, or a tragic figure. You like the world because it is treating you well. But when you are desperate or reading life against the grain, you are more likely to find the great truths that lie outside the normal, satisfied, smug consensus.

Interviewer: Let me add to that. When reason disappears, emotion and the animal within us take over, and we escape preconceived language. If you get really angry at someone and start yelling, you will say things you've never said before—deep feelings that suddenly burst out. A lot of writing feels trite or contrived when we are just rearranging words and thoughts that other people gave us. In suffering, anger, sadness, and grief, our conventional wisdom disappears, and the raw animal within us comes out.

Alain de Botton: That’s right. In a way, you have to have nothing left to lose. You say, "Fuck this," and you are just there with certain truths because you've given up lying, deceiving, or offering sentimental reassurances. Great works of literature often have a relationship to desperation. It could be driven by death—the sense that your time is coming up and asking yourself, "Is there something I still want to tell the world that I didn't dare to say before?"

Someone once said, "Good thinking is good feeling." But what good feeling really means is not caring to subscribe to the normal bromides that we live by.

Interviewer: It hit me the other day that sometimes you read someone's writing and think, "I want to write like that." But then you realize you can't just write like that; you have to think like that. And to think like that, you have to live like that.

Alain de Botton: That's right. We aren't necessarily talking about the clichéd image of a writer in a black cape escaping bourgeois society. You could be wearing a t-shirt. It’s not about outward signs; it’s about where your soul is.

Writing is an act of communication. If your communication with the people around you is already perfect, what is the point of writing? Loneliness and a loneliness of experience are absolutely key—the sense that no one around you understands.

What is writing? Socrates was interesting on this. He believed we shouldn't write books because books were born out of a despair over human communication. He thought the true way to do philosophy was not to write it down, but to engage a group of people in a dialogue. He lived in a small, golden-age city where he could have those conversations. But many of us can't, so we become writers because no one is listening and no one is speaking properly in our immediate lives.

Freud used the word "sublimation" to describe the origins of artistic activity. The artist is faced with an acute version of all the dilemmas that afflict people: the conflict between duty and pleasure, life and death, money and creativity. Freud saw the artist as someone compromised by these conflicts, with their artistic work arising as a way of reconciling fantasy and reality. When the world cannot be as you wish it to be, you can either go mad or create a work of art. The work of art is the best thing you can do with your dislocation and distress. It is an alternative to losing your mind; it focuses the mind when disintegration is in the air.

Interviewer: This has me thinking about pleasure and pain. When I'm riding high, I think, "Wow, we get to live in this world, explore, meet people, and travel. It's so vast and magical." But in moments of pain, the tragedy of it all hits. You get this one life, and you're just stuck on this earth, wondering how you're going to cope.

Alain de Botton: Absolutely. Every life has moments of severe distress. You would have to be extremely unimaginative or incredibly lucky not to run into regular distress. Even in the privileged West—without even talking about geopolitical tragedies—living in a relatively peaceful, prosperous, and well-ordered society, you are going to hit so many walls. Someone you love will not love you back, or they won't love you in the way you need. Someone will betray you. Welcome to aeons of suffering.

Then you will face the conflict between who you are, how you want to be seen, and how others actually perceive you. You will be misread and misrepresented. There will be conflicts around money, status, and achievement—the pull between income, happiness, respectability, and fame. You can look at a baby in a cradle and know that this person is going to hit these walls. That is before anything major even goes wrong. Talk to anyone over 30, 40, or 50, and you will find evidence of incredible scars.

It is from this suffering that our receptivity to art is born. Look at Vincent van Gogh's Irises. The man was in pieces. He was suffering like a religious saint—lonely, desperate, misunderstood, and aching for love. Today, he is one of the most famous people of the 19th century, but in life, he was abjectly desperate. When he looks at flowers, he isn't just showing us a plant; he is showing us a flower seen through the lens of agony. When you look at beauty through the lens of agony, it becomes a life raft. He wasn't just painting; he was painting a last reason to live. In the end, he didn't make it, and that is what lends his work such poignancy. Some of the most beautiful things humans have created were born out of a negotiation with something appalling.

Interviewer: It’s easy to think, "I want to produce something beautiful." But the image that comes to mind is a rubber band. As you stretch pain on one side, you get beauty on the other. Truly beautiful and astonishing work seems to require a sacrifice—not just in work ethic, but a sacrifice of what we have gone through to get there.

Alain de Botton: Yes, but we don't need to go hunting for suffering. It will find you. Just sit still. If anyone is sitting there wondering when their great suffering will arrive, don't worry. Life is cooking it up.

Consider the abstract painter Agnes Martin. She painted regular, minimalist lines across canvases. Her life was filled with pain; she suffered from a severe psychiatric disorder and lived alone in New Mexico. Her highly orderly, calm canvases were a desperate attempt to hold onto stability in a chaotic world. They are moving because you sense the chaos that the painting is resisting—the other side of the rubber band.

Interviewer: Tell me about the things you love and hate, because you've said before that you are inspired not just by beauty and wisdom, but also by ugliness and cruelty. I’d never heard anyone put it that way.

Alain de Botton: Let's look at the visual environment. London, where we are, has some really ugly parts, like all modern cities. Why are they so ugly? What went wrong? How can humans build beautifully in one era, and then, when the world has even more resources, build in such an ugly way? Ugliness in architecture is a physical translation of the visual blindness of the human animal.

It enraged me, so I wrote a book called The Architecture of Happiness. It was born out of living in a horrible, ugly part of London because I couldn't bear my surroundings and thought, "This is so unnecessary."

There are psychological examples, too. I want to protest against mean-mindedness, sentimentality, cruelty, and humiliation. A lot of writing is about revenge—the silenced person finally having their say on the page. Many writers are meek in person; you meet them and think they wouldn't hurt a fly, but then you pick up their text and it's incredibly sharp. They do it because they aren't good at hitting back in real life, so it all comes out on the page.

Writing can be revenge against the people who didn't believe in you, didn't understand you, or trampled on you. Look at book dedications; they aren't just dedicated to loved ones, but sometimes implicitly to hated ones or those who doubted the author. Writing is revenge, writing is a cure, writing is a memorial—it falls under many different headings.

Interviewer: What is so cool about the written word is that it is the closest medium we have to translating human consciousness. I found it interesting that at the end of the day, you will come home and download your thoughts. I imagine different levels of consciousness: "What do you think about right now?" versus "What did you think about today?" As you sit in stillness and jot things down, you realize there are so many layers. The first thoughts we have when someone asks what we are thinking often don't capture the core of what is actually going on.

Alain de Botton: Music does this directly, too. If you asked people whether they would rather have an extraordinary facility for music or for words, most of us would choose music. There is something incredibly direct about it. Music represents the movements of the soul with minimal intellectual intervention, which is why it speaks across ages and cultures. Would you rather have written Hey Jude or War and Peace? In a way, you'd want Hey Jude, wouldn't you?

Interviewer: I don't know! That’s an interesting conversation. Would you rather have painted the Sistine Chapel, written Hey Jude, or written War and Peace? That would be a fun bar conversation.

Alain de Botton: The Sistine Chapel doesn't do it for me, but Van Gogh's Irises does. Because I can write, I am naturally attracted to what I can't do, so I envy songwriters and artists. But perhaps if I were a songwriter, I would admire writers.

Interviewer: The reason I bring up consciousness in writing is that when I read David Foster Wallace, I feel like I'm putting on his glasses and stepping into his brain in a way that no other medium can replicate. A painting can show me how someone saw something, and music can make me feel something directly, but writing is unique in capturing the precise contents of the mind.

Alain de Botton: We need all of these mediums. Gustave Flaubert wrote a line: "We are all mute bears banging desperately on a drum as we look at the beauty of the stars." We are trapped, articulate-starved animals aware of living in a vast universe, and we don't know what to do other than mutely bang our fists.

All of us go to our graves with most of our experiences still locked inside us. When someone dies, millions of unique impressions, thoughts, and sensations are permanently deleted. Every now and then, in the history of culture, a few things are rescued from this burning library. Think of every person as a library of millions of books being tipped into the ocean, and occasionally someone rescues a book or two, giving us a fragmentary impression of what it was like for that person to think. But this is just a fraction of what humans have actually thought and felt.

Writers are scribes for the thoughts that most humans have no time or inclination to write down themselves. That is why readers will say, "That was my life you were describing; that was my thought." We bathe in this wider community of shared thoughts. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "In the minds of geniuses, we find our own neglected thoughts." Geniuses do not have thoughts that are fundamentally different from other people; they simply have a unique fidelity to their more neglected thoughts—the thoughts that are pushed aside due to habit, embarrassment, shame, or social convention.

Interviewer: How much of your experience as a writer has been about discipline—sitting down at 9:00 AM and waiting for inspiration to find you—versus channeling something from beyond?

Alain de Botton: It’s like sailing. You have to be out on the lake with your ship, and you must have your sails unfurled, hoping for a prevailing wind. Or it’s like holding a butterfly net; you have to be out there with the net, otherwise you won't catch anything.

But what does it actually mean to be out on the lake with your net? Does it mean sitting at your desk at nine o'clock? It means keeping your brain switched on and being attentive to your own sensations and thoughts. That is the real work. If you are scrolling endlessly on your phone, you are lost; your mind is not with you.

Interviewer: I love that. I’ve been sitting down for 20 to 30 minutes at the end of the day, trying to fill an index card with my thoughts, focusing on being "attentive to my own sensations and thoughts." I am blown away by how many sensations and thoughts exist within me that I completely ignore during the hustle and bustle of everyday life.

Alain de Botton: Yes. We would need hours of processing just to pay attention to what happens in a single minute. The human perceptual mechanism is purposefully dampened down. George Eliot wrote: "If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."

What she is saying is that you are hearing it anyway, but you repress it to function. To be fully alive to all that resonance would cause you to lose your mind. Even as I speak to you now, I am pushing away so many thoughts. Every time I construct a sentence, I am sacrificing other potential sentences in order to sound logical. But I am dimly aware that I am also thinking of what I have to do later, what happened earlier, and so on. Because I am not yet mad, I can maintain a coherent thread.

Our minds are incredibly rich instruments. I can look at you, but I'm also looking at those books on the shelf and thinking about the shape of their spines. Our minds have evolved a triage system over thousands of years to determine what is important right now. This is why very old people, small children, or those experiencing psychosis are fascinating but maddening to talk to; they cannot keep a coherent thread. You ask a child what they did in the garden, and they say they were playing, but then they point at the table and forget the question because they cannot triage their thoughts.

A good artist or writer borrows from the art of triaging, but they triage according to a more diffuse, associative sense. They go outside the normal bounds of what is considered "important." If you put David Foster Wallace on a cruise ship, he doesn't just notice the bar; he is alive to other resonances outside the normal purview.

Interviewer: I had an experience recently while working on a documentary in London. On the first day, we stood on Waterloo Bridge for five hours. I was responsible for holding some caution tape to guide pedestrians. Thousands of people walked past, and not one of them looked at the embankment or the architecture; everyone was just rushing from point A to point B. But because I had to stand there and stare at the same view for six hours, the details came alive. I noticed the subtleties in the architecture and how the changing sunlight altered the buildings. I realized I had never actually looked at the world.

Writing is like taking handcuffs and tethering yourself to an idea, forcing yourself to look. Painting is the same. I am mesmerized by the details that reveal themselves in hour three or four that I completely missed in hour one. When you share that, people ask, "How do you see so deeply?" And the answer is just, "I looked at it longer than you did."

Alain de Botton: That’s right. Small children are excellent guides to this. When you take a toddler to the park, you might be focused on getting to the destination. But the child doesn't care about the park; they are waking up to the mysteries of existence. They see a brick wall and want to run their hand along the mortar, or they spot some moss and want to stroke their cheek against it. The artist is someone who, when everyone else is rushing to the park, is detained by something unusual, and turns that observation into a work of art.

Interviewer: What has been the role of poetry in your life, both as a reader and a writer?

Alain de Botton: From an early age, I felt on the back foot with poetry. I felt like I had missed some early class on the subject. I would read poems and think, "What is going on here? Why are they using this weird language?" At the same time, I noticed I had a poetic turn of phrase.

Prose is usually about summarizing broadly to reach a destination; you don't care as much about the specific words, as long as the information is conveyed. That’s why safety manuals are written in prose. Poetry takes a more meandering, associative route, focusing on making things resonant, beautiful, and thoughtful.

I was interested in that as a writer, but I didn't know the formal rules of meter and syntax. However, poetry can exist within prose sentences; there is a hybrid called the prose poem. Charles Baudelaire wrote prose poems, abandoning formal poetic structure while retaining its resonance.

The poets I favor are those who are easy to read—poets who don't fry your mind with mythological figures like Achilles or Ajax, but who use ordinary words in ordinary situations in fresh ways. Philip Larkin is a poet for people who don't understand poetry; he is very easy to comprehend. W.H. Auden is another.

Interviewer: For me, the rules of poetry don't help. The only way I get anything out of a poem is to read it, find a line that strikes me, and then memorize it. Only then does it come alive.

Alain de Botton: That’s very interesting. It suggests that poetry is meant to be spoken and shared, which is how poetry began. Memorizing and speaking it is a wonderful way in.

Interviewer: What moved you to spend so much of your career distilling the works of other writers? In the early days of The School of Life, you did guides to Nietzsche, Sartre, and others.

Alain de Botton: I wrote a book called The Consolations of Philosophy focusing on six philosophers, and another called How Proust Can Change Your Life. I’ve always been interested in how we talk about other thinkers. I never wanted to be an academic. Academics claim to be perfectly faithful to the original texts. I was less interested in being strictly faithful and more interested in charting what a writer made me think—where they took me. It becomes a personal interaction. I don't ask, "What did Nietzsche actually say?" but rather, "What can he say to us now? What resonances exist between his ideas and our lives?"

I prefer a more flavored, personal response. If you close a book by Nietzsche and ask yourself, "What really stayed with me?" the answer is often different from a Wikipedia page. That is why my books and videos have resonated with so many people; they aren't academic exercises.

Interviewer: It strikes me how much writers get bogged down by what they feel they are "supposed" to write. In school, we are pushed in a certain direction. It’s probably a good thing you didn't take that formal poetry class because academic analysis of poetry is so left-brained and analytical, focusing on iambic pentameter rather than just appreciating the art. We get weighed down by rules.

Alain de Botton: This rule of what you are "supposed" to do is one of the great problems of life. Let’s look at business for a moment, which is a highly creative enterprise. Consumer businesses get this wrong all the time because they try to guess what will please the customer based on conventional rules, rather than what would actually be delightful. The same fakeness and sentimentality enter business as they do into creative works.

Think of a bad restaurant that wants to be elegant but doesn't actually think about what elegance means. Do they really need those flowers? Do people actually want to start their meal with melon?

Or think of hosting a dinner party. When people reach a certain stage in urban life, they invite a colleague over to break bread, and suddenly they panicking: "I have to host a dinner party, so I have to buy chicken and serve a formal first and second course." They are hampered by convention instead of thinking, "What do I actually want to do?"

Why not just serve crisps and a can of tuna, lie on the sofa, and chat? Or turn out the lights and look at the stars, go for a walk between courses, cry together, or do the washing up? Let's just be weird, because life is weird. There is what you are supposed to do, and then there is the truth, which is the weirdness of life.

This happens in relationships, too. When you start dating someone, you ask, "How are you?" and they say, "I am very well, how are you?" Then, three months down the line, you find out they hate ice skating and only went to impress you. You suddenly emerge as a much more complicated, lovable, and weird person, and that’s beautiful.

Interviewer: It’s so interesting that the writers we love, we love for their idiosyncrasies. They bend grammar and structure in weird ways, but it feels true to who they are. Yet, when we sit down to write, we freeze and think, "I'm not supposed to do that."

Alain de Botton: This is why it is helpful to ask yourself: "If there were no rules, if I couldn't fail, and if I were going to die tomorrow, what would I actually say?" That is the thing you should write.

Early in my career, I thought I had to write standard novels based on 19th-century structures. Eventually, I threw out those rules and produced Essays in Love, which was much weirder and more original, and people liked it. Now, I am a spoiled boy—I only do what I want. I know that if I am getting bored while writing, the reader will get bored, too.

Every morning, I wake up and write whatever I feel like writing. I no longer think in terms of books; I write prose pieces that are about 800 words long. I write in the early morning when other people's agendas are not yet on the horizon. It is a protected, personal space right after sleep. I write what pleases me, and then I find a place for it later. I have about 22 books on the go, and I think, "Oh, I'll slot this piece in there, or it will belong somewhere else one day." It is written from the heart, and I have given up the old way of working where I had to knit the next logical section of a tapestry.

Interviewer: My friend Jeremy Gowan once told me: "If you're ever struggling with writer's block, remember three words: be more honest."

Alain de Botton: Yes, that is exactly what writer's block is. It is a conflict between shame and the desire for honesty—a tension between what you are supposed to feel and what you are actually feeling. It is a very useful rule of thumb for relationships, too. When a relationship gets stuck in game-playing and double-guessing, ask yourself, "What do I really want to tell this person?" It may not always be possible to say it, but keeping it in view is incredibly helpful.

Interviewer: I have to credit you with changing my mind on the news. There is a part early in your book where you quote Hegel, who said that a society becomes modern when it elevates the news to the level of what religious faiths used to be. It made me realize how obsessed the modern world is with the constant consumption of news—obsessing over people we will never meet and places we will never go. It shapes our mental horizon, telling us what we are "supposed" to think about.

Alain de Botton: It is incredibly powerful. People will routinely say, "We are living in a very sad age." But compared to what? The fourth century in Abyssinia? The twelfth century in Syria? They think this way because CNN alerted them to something that happened in a specific place.

Our inner lives have been industrialized and commercialized, which is toxic for authentic, free thinking. You aren't really a mature adult until you choose to remain ignorant of certain things that everyone else deems important. If there is a popular singer or movie that you know nothing about, congratulate yourself. You are preserving your mental energy for your own experience. We don't need to know everything that everyone else knows; we need to know the interesting parts of our own minds.

Interviewer: The word "new" is right there in the "news." Knowing all the new things seems like the antithesis of the pursuit of wisdom, which is about cultivating the small percentage of old truths that have stood the test of time.

Alain de Botton: Yes, or spotting the archetypes—realizing that the so-called "new" is just a repetition of the old. It’s the story of a tyrant who forgave his enemy, a society that became decadent, or greed getting in the way of goodness. The news wants us to think that every event is an anomalous novelty, whereas art pulls us in the opposite direction.

Consider Théodore Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa in the Louvre. It depicts a real 19th-century shipwreck where the passengers ended up on a raft and resorted to cannibalism. Victor Hugo or another writer remarked, "The people on that raft—that is France." The painting became a metaphor for the state of the entire nation.

All large-scale events have a metaphoric quality. The ancient Greek myths of Troy, Odysseus, and Penelope were once news items, but they became myths because they speak to eternal aspects of the human condition. The story of Odysseus returning to Penelope is your story, my story, and everyone's story. But the news wants to direct us only to surface-level novelty. It is much healthier to think in a mythic way rather than a media way.

Interviewer: Politics is also deeply woven into the news, and politics is a mind-killer. If we discuss Van Gogh's paintings, we can look at them fresh. I might like one, and you might not, and we can discuss the colors. But if we discuss a politician, we come to the topic with pre-packaged scripts and word traps. It immediately creates divisiveness and team-based thinking, whereas we can look at ancient Greece with fresh eyes because we don't carry those modern political biases.

Alain de Botton: Political structures give you a map of what you are supposed to think. If you are on the left, you are supposed to have certain loves and hates; if you are on the right, the same. But once you go beyond politics and get to know people, you find immense complexity.

I remember playing a game with friends where we tried to reduce shame by confessing which politicians we found sexually attractive, despite completely disagreeing with their politics. We ended up giggling because there were such striking discrepancies between what we were supposed to feel and what we actually felt. No one actually thinks in a purely left-or-right way; they just think they are supposed to.

Consider ideas of masculinity and femininity; a real man does not think or feel like a simplified archetype. Look at Napoleon’s letters to Josephine—this fierce military conqueror wrote the sweetest, most desperate love letters. A true picture of human nature is highly nuanced, and politics is a massive, crude abbreviation. When people argue about politics, they are often trying to make the world simpler than it actually is. Inside every right-winger, there is a left-winger, and vice versa. Whenever we encounter a simplified version of humanity, we know deep down it isn't true.

Interviewer: I am surprised by how much you have referenced paintings today. I want to hear more about how you pull from visual art in your creative expression.

Alain de Botton: Many paintings represent a piece of who we are. If you want to understand me, look at certain paintings. The work of Cy Twombly is very important to me—his chalk-like writing on dark canvases looks like a portrait of what thinking actually feels like. He is making mental maps of the inner state.

Abstract artists are wonderful at this; you can look at a Mark Rothko painting and see what melancholy, dejection, or humiliation looks like. Or you can look at a realistic painting and see representations of hope, courage, or serenity. The visual environment is constantly communicating values to us.

Stendhal wrote: "Beauty is the promise of happiness." When we find something beautiful, it isn't just an isolated aesthetic experience; it is promising us a happy way of living. It is always worth asking someone who loves a certain house or landscape, "What is the way of life you imagine there? What values do you associate with it?"

In a Rainer Maria Rilke poem, the poet looks at an ancient Greek bust of Apollo in a museum, and the statue beams a vision of life to him, challenging him to change his life. Every object suggests how to live. This chair suggests a certain way of being; it has a vision of life. If your car, your chair, or the font in your book turned into a person, what kind of person would they be? Things have character, and we are very good at making those connections once we allow ourselves to do so.

Interviewer: As writers, how should we think about our readers? In what ways should we serve them, and in what ways should we write solely for ourselves and worry about the reader later?

Alain de Botton: You must have a reader inside you. We are all readers as well as writers. What makes people boring conversationalists is that they have stopped wondering how their words sound to someone else. They don't ask themselves the crucial question: "How does what I am saying fit into someone else's life?"

We all know people who tell boring travel stories, focusing on airport bureaucracy that was stressful for them but is completely useless to the listener. But a skilled storyteller takes that same material and connects it to a universal theme, saying, "You know how bureaucracy has a certain sadism to it?" Suddenly, they have prepared the material so the listener can digest it.

A good writer thinks about where their words will land in the reader's mind, but they must first be faithful to themselves. It must start with you and what you want to say, and then you find a bridge to what the reader can absorb.

A very perceptive friend of mine once looked at my writing style and my history. I had a highly academic, pedantic father who spoke in a solemn, professor-like way. I also had a nanny who raised me because my parents were away for long periods; she was uneducated but very clever, loved nature, and grew up in a rural Swiss village. My friend told me, "You are basically trying to write books that can be understood and liked by both your academic father and your nanny." That is exactly what I am doing—trying to speak to two very different audiences.

I also had a teddy bear when I was small. I had a lot of problems as a kid, and I processed them by pretending my bear had the same life as me, and I was its father. I was shipped to an English boarding school at age eight, and to cope, I imagined my bear went to boarding school too. I would talk to it gently every evening, comforting it and promising that the holidays would come. Someone once told me that The School of Life is just a continuation of that teddy bear—I am doing for a wider audience what I did for that toy, translating difficult experiences into digestible comfort.

Religions do this beautifully, too. I am not a believer myself, but I have immense respect for religious belief. Religion is a fantastic way of externalizing and metaphorizing our inner lives, ascribing wisdom and kindness to a supernatural figure. I say this with respect, not like Richard Dawkins, who dismisses it as immature. Religions are incredibly complex and beautiful structures that help humans cope with the pain of existence by reifying our mental processes. There is a common thread between children's imaginative play, the creation of art, and the formation of religions.

Interviewer: What else can we take from the faiths you’ve studied? You’ve spoken about the difference between a lecture and a sermon—that a lecture provides information, whereas a sermon provides information and a story to change behavior.

Alain de Botton: Yes, I am firmly on the side of the sermon. Many people have been deeply hurt or traumatized by religion, and we must honor their experiences. But even for atheists, there is so much to learn from religious structures.

Religions are the most sophisticated attempts in history to influence and shape the human inner life. Art tries to do this, but it is much weaker today because modern artists work as lone creators. They aren't trying to build a church or a movement; it is just them against the world. Today, we have massive corporations amplifying commercial messages, and lone creators who are tiny in comparison. At their peak, religions used art, architecture, poetry, music, fashion, and scents to amplify a unified message. I find that fascinating.

Interviewer: One word that comes to mind regarding your work is enchantment. We live in an age of disenchantment, where we only value logic, reason, and literal cause-and-effect. I think your work resonates so deeply with non-believers because they feel that sense of enchantment. The tools of enchantment slip past the analytical gates of the rational mind.

Alain de Botton: The most wonderful thing about religion is its openness to the numinous or the mystery of existence—what theologians call the mysterium tremendum. We all have intimations of this. The night sky is there every night, yet we rarely pause to feel its weight. If we truly took on board what the clear night sky is telling us, we would have to lie down and question everything.

As the children's nursery rhyme goes: "Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are." Kids feel that wonder. We have let scientists take over that territory, and they build planetariums to tell us how many moons Saturn has. That is great work, but most of us don't care about the stars from a mathematical perspective. We care about the night sky because it reorients us as human beings, reminding us that our immediate, daily priorities are only a tiny part of a vast existence.

Every time we travel and land in a foreign place, we think, "The world is so strange and beautiful." We are temporarily jolted out of our routines. But most of the time, we live under the numbing influence of habit. Art is a stabilized form of dislocation—a way of looking past habit to see the true mystery, beauty, and pain of everything.

Interviewer: How does artificial intelligence factor into your writing and reading process?

Alain de Botton: I don't use it in my writing, but I do use it as a therapist. That might sound strange because I am actually a trained, practicing psychotherapist myself; I see clients one day a week. But I find AI is actually quite good at taking fragments of interpersonal psychology and, if prompted correctly, teasing out helpful insights.

Any creative person today has to ask whether the game is up or if they still have something to contribute. The good news is that AI forces us to do what we should have been doing all along: stop doing what we are "supposed" to do, and be completely honest. We must explore our own experiences with deep authenticity, because AI only provides a summation of what has already been thought and said. It can recombine data elegantly, but it ultimately delivers standardized answers. To survive, creative people must deepen their self-exploration to stay ahead of the machine.

Interviewer: Why don't you use it in your writing?

Alain de Botton: I might use it for quick research, like finding a painting or a specific type of cafe. But if I asked AI to write an essay on nostalgia in my style, it would do a decent job, but it wouldn't capture why I want to be a writer. I don't write just to produce a certain word count; I write to honor specific personal feelings. AI cannot know those feelings because it isn't me.

If I gave my writing over to AI, it would crush my unique intuition. I would rather write the essay myself, and perhaps afterward ask the machine if I missed any major historical points. But normally, I can't be bothered. I am not trying to write a definitive reference article; I am trying to do justice to my own state of mind. It is a more personal, selfish project.

Interviewer: If I invited you to teach a semester-long writing class at a university, how would you structure the curriculum? What would you tell the students?

Alain de Botton: First, I would want to challenge their preconceptions of what it means to be a writer and what kind of books they think they are supposed to write. I would also explore why they want to be writers in the first place, because writing is not a very fun career, and perhaps they would be happier doing something else.

I would run introspection exercises, like the index card exercise you mentioned. We would all go to the park, look at the same view, and then write two different pieces: one describing what we think we are "supposed" to say about a park, and another describing what was actually going on in our minds, which might have nothing to do with the park at all. This would show the contrast between conventional expectations and authentic inner thoughts, flexing that introspective muscle. I would want to help students connect with their unique inner voice and those neglected thoughts that Emerson spoke of.

Interviewer: It’s striking that in your answer, you didn't mention grammar, syntax, or any of the technical things we learn in school. You focused entirely on emotional authenticity, the difference between what we feel versus what we are supposed to feel, and examining your motivations. That is not how most people teach writing.

Alain de Botton: Yes. It is probably no surprise that I have never been asked to teach!

Interviewer: Thank you so much, Alain. This was such a joy and a pleasure.

Alain de Botton: Thank you. What a pleasure.

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