🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

1. We should learn to understand our emotions better.
2. Romanticism has failed.
3. Sometimes it is good to be bad.

🕵🏼Who Should Read It?

The book is generally written for a wide audience since improving ourselves and understanding ourselves should be the goal of every person and firmly implanted in our school system. However, I would say that if some knowledge is already present in these specific areas, the book can feel repetitive and lengthy.

☘️ How the Book Changed Me

I learned a lot of concepts in the subject of emotional maturity and improved my understanding of the importance of learning these subjects in school. As the author Alain mentions in the introduction, we sadly pay too much attention to scientific matters and principles and neglect the emotional side of life. It would be wrong, on the other hand, to dismiss all scientific learnings from school, but we should find a better balance between these two subjects.

✍️ My Top 3 Quotes

“We need to become better friends to ourselves.” Alain de Botton

“Contented people have no need to hurt others.” Alain de Botton

“Our degree of satisfaction is critically dependent on our expectations.” Alain de Botton

📒 Summary + Notes

The book has set itself a challenging goal since catching up in emotional education with just one single book is quite a big task. Nonetheless, the book manages to achieve this by structuring the content into five topics, which are then explained in greater depth.

I. Self

Alain mentions in this chapter how strange it is that we have so little knowledge about our inner selves. Although it seems like we are the owners of our skulls since we carry them with us all the time, most of the time we remain strangers to what unfolds within them.

The author mentions the importance of having fundamental emotional skepticism. Skepticism comes from the Greek word “skepsis” which means questioning. I find this an immensely important concept as questioning your own thoughts can make a huge difference. In this lies the concept of Socrates, who says, “I am wise not because I know, but because I know I don’t know,” which couldn’t be more true.

Further, Alain mentions the relevance of understanding his own past since every person has their own primal wounds, as he calls them. Primal wounds are experiences that were made in childhood which have strongly shaped our emotional side and our character. There is always a logic and a history behind another person.

It is interesting that a child who suffers at the hands of an adult almost always takes what has happened to them as a reflection of what is wrong with themselves. This then takes a lot of effort to reflect on oneself to acknowledge that most of the mistakes were not made by the child but by the adult instead.

One really interesting thing that Alain mentions in this chapter is a list which consists of things that can be expected of an emotionally healthy childhood. This list, as he said, can help to check for dislocations that happened. The list is pretty long, which is why I am unable to provide the whole list in this summary, but I nonetheless want to list the most important things that stuck with me:

• In an emotionally healthy childhood, someone will put themselves profoundly at our service.
• In an emotionally healthy childhood, we’re given the benefit of the doubt.
• In an emotionally healthy childhood, we aren’t always required to be wholly good boys or girls.
• Importantly, in an emotionally healthy childhood, plenty goes wrong.
• In an emotionally healthy childhood, the child can see that the good career isn’t either entirely good or wholly bad and so isn’t worthy of either idealization or denigration.

II. Others

Our society is much more interested in winners than it is in losers. In addition to that, you get what you are, which means that there is no such thing as bad luck. If you failed, you just did not do enough, and it is solely your fault. Because of this, the suicide rate in our modern world is so high, as we judge failing so harshly. But in ancient Greece, there was another alternative: you can be good even if you have failed.

Also in this chapter, the concept of the weakness of strength is mentioned. This means that the very same character trait that we approve of will be inseparable from tendencies we end up regretting. This is why we should understand that there is no person with only strengths. This leads to the importance of kindness, which Alain explains as follows:

“Kindness is built out of a constantly renewed and gently resigned awareness that weakness-free people do not exist.”

This is something I struggle with a lot because I try to get rid of all my weaknesses. This then leads to myself having goals and expectations of myself which are very hard to meet. Also, it diverts my energy into multiple directions which makes it hard for me to become very good in just one thing and accept the lack thereof in another area.

In this chapter, Alain also mentions something important. It is the formula of self-esteem:

$\text{Self Esteem} = \frac{\text{Success}}{\text{Expectations}}$

The quest of building self-esteem can be easy since you can just lower your expectations, but in my opinion, this is not the right way to do it. But this can lead to a problem since although tremendous success cannot lead to any self-esteem because the expectations are set so high. Finding the balance between having high expectations and allowing oneself to build good self-esteem is a challenge one has to solve for oneself, and it is something I personally struggle with since I always set myself high expectations.

III. Relationships

When we Western people talk about love, we talk about Romanticism. It’s the only thing we love, and it’s what we have always watched as children when we watched the newest Disney movie. Romanticism has managed to display the concept of love in an enjoyable and beautiful manner. They were extremely talented at displaying their hopes and longings. But Alain states that Romanticism has failed miserably. Romanticism told us things like:

• We should meet a person with extraordinary inner and outer beauty.
• We should have no secrets.
• We should understand each other intuitively.
• We should raise a family without any loss of sexual or emotional intensity.

All these things were advertised by Romanticism. The problem is that finding partners that check all these boxes is nearly impossible, which is why a lot of relationships fail because we always think about the things our partner does not check. Alain suggests replacing Romanticism with a much more mature vision of love which says:

• It is normal that love and sex do not always belong together.
• Discussing money early on, up front, in a serious way is not a betrayal of love.
• Realizing that we are rather flawed, and our partner is too, is of huge benefit to a couple in increasing the amount of tolerance and generosity in circulation.
• We will never find everything in another person, nor they in us, not because of some unique incapacity, but because of the basic operations of human nature.
• We need to make immense and often rather artificial-sounding efforts to understand one another because intuition will never be enough.
• Practicalities matter—so, for example, there is special dignity around the topics of laundry and domestic management.

IV. Work

In this chapter, Alain talks about the danger of being a so-called good boy or girl. This is the sort of person that is happy all the time, that tries to make it right for everyone, and is just generally the person that our school system tries to “produce.” The problem, though, is that these people suppress their emotions so badly that they feel strong side effects after. They have sudden outbursts of anger, they become bitter and harsh, and much more. Also, it can lead to us becoming timid when we are overexposed to other people’s good sides.

Another thing that happens in our childhood is the building and experiencing of imposter syndrome. From an early age on, we experience our parents as very different from us since we don’t have the same hobbies, capabilities, and so on. This then leads to us thinking that we are not the type of person to be successful and happy. In that regard, there is also the fact that we know ourselves from the inside and from the outside, and we experience every thought and emotion we have. But from other people, we only see what they do and what they tell us, which is a far narrower source of information. This leads to us feeling much freakier, stranger, and less competent. We have to start to acknowledge that other people have the same strange thoughts that we do and that they make the same mistakes.

V. Culture

This is the chapter where Alain talks about the values we have in our culture. He compares Romanticism with Classical Culture in different aspects. Because of the number of differences discussed, I will not be able to list them here without making this summary unpleasantly long, but I want to mention one thing. Why do we value price so much? It seems that in our culture, price is the only thing that matters to us. It is not the quality (look at Louis Vuitton and Gucci with their exceptionally bad quality), it is not the emotional value, it is just the price. This is something where we should go back to the mind of a 4-year-old who does not understand the concept of price and chooses things based on their instinct.

Because of the sheer amount of things to learn from this book, it was very difficult to choose which things to add to this blog. This is why I apologize for the length of this blog and hope that it was interesting nonetheless. I strongly advise everyone to read this book as it holds very interesting concepts that I believe everyone should have heard of. With that, I thank you for reading this blog, and

I look forward to seeing you reading my next blog post and wish you all the best.

Regards,
Devin Hasler