The Harmful Lies We’ve Been Taught to Believe - Alain de Botton (4K)

I'm never going to get through this podcast when I have to pause every ten minutes to write something down. Pure gold.

"The highest ranks of society are not reached by climbing, but by making others believe you were always standing there."

"Loneliness is a kind of tax you have to pay to atone for a certain complexity of mind." – Alain de Botton

Alain is the most underrated thinkers of our time. History will judge him as one of humanity’s best.

I’ve wanted to record this episode for 10 years. Alain de Botton joins me today on Modern Wisdom 🚀 During the lowest points of my life, Alain’s voice and lessons have probably been the first place I’ve turned to get some clarity and reassurance. He genuinely sees the human condition with a level of transparency that no one else does. He’s helped me through breakups, grief, depression, jealousy, loneliness, injury, surgery and so much more. Getting to sit down with him was a dream. Expect to learn where bad inner voices come from, why we struggle to connect with our emotions, if there is a danger of intellectualising feeling problems for smart people, Alain’s advice for obsessives who want to let go a little more, advice for an anxious person dealing with an avoidant one, why we get stuck in unhappy relationships, how to improve your self worth and much more... I think I did justice to the completely obsessive one-sided parasocial relationship I’ve had with this man and his words over the last decade. It’s a special episode for me. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. It’s live now x Here's the timestamps: 00:00 Where Do Bad Inner Voices Come From? 08:22 Healing a Negative Inner Voice 22:31 Why Do We Struggle to Fully Connect With Our Emotions? 28:14 The Danger of Intellectualising Emotions 36:01 Letting Go as an Obsessive Person 43:06 Openness & Transparency in Relationships 52:13 Advice for People in an Anxious-Avoidant Relationship 58:37 How Malleable Are Attachment Styles? 1:08:42 Embracing Playfulness in a Serious World 1:12:26 How Childhood Impacts Adult Relationships 1:16:02 Why People Get Stuck in Unhappy Relationships 1:22:33 Our Tendency to People-Please 1:29:59 Taking Ownership of Your Patterns 1:37:12 Are Deep Thinkers More Lonely? 1:41:05 What Drives Alain? 1:51:51 Where to Find Alain

I'm convinced Alain is better than any antidepressant available. My anxiety dissipates when he talks.

Chris's automatic assumption that your mum by default is a person who can bear you being as "small, boring or petty" as you like speaks to the fact that he was fortunate to have experienced that. For many of us, our mother was the first person we had to perform for.

“ we don’t need people to be perfect, we need them to understand how they are imperfect “ 💎

that is why humour is so important, because it is the place where happiness and unhappiness can live together, without the need to get rid of one or the other.

Only Alain de Botton can talk about the “worst parts” of ourselves and still make it feel oddly comforting. No shame, no sugarcoating- just thoughtful, honest insight about being a deeply flawed (and still lovable) human. This hit in all the right places.