Alain de Botton

We live in a world partly driven by the ideology of the United States that is very forward-looking, very optimistic, very much placing the emphasis on individual achievement and the possibilities that are open to everyone so long as they work hard, which is a beautiful philosophy of life but also a very punishing one. It places huge responsibility on the individual to perform and leads to deep shame if there is failure. And with failure—well, we worship success but we also implicitly punish failure, very harshly, psychologically speaking. … And I think that the answer to this is really some kind of collective consolation and recognition of the difficulty of the task, and that it’s not any one person’s fault. At the end of the day, we live under this philosophy of success which is going to leave most people feeling that they’ve underperformed. Only a very narrow elite will feel that they’ve done what that society wanted them to do. So I think it’s important to recognize the psychological pressures rather than meet them only in the middle of the night as frightening characters that are chasing just us and instead to see them as actually written into the contract of modern society. To recognize that you may be suffering it personally, but realize it is a social and historical phenomenon.

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