Alain de Botton is a Swiss-born British internationally bestselling author and philosopher. He is a cofounder of The School of Life, an organization with branches around the world offering educational programs helping individuals with life issues.
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Emotional Education is at the core of what we need to lead a fulfilled life - and is what The School of Life teaches online and in physical branches around the world. In this film, founder of The School, Alain de Botton discusses what emotional education is - and why we so badly need it.
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Alain De Botton's Essays in Love makes the whole process of falling in love much more logical and hence less mysterious. There is profound insight into the addiction of falling in love and the difference between love and the transitory feeling of being in love.
Romanticism has been unhelpful to us; it is a harsh philosophy. It has made a lot of what we go through in marriage seem exceptional and appalling. We end up lonely and convinced that our union, with its imperfections, is not “normal.
Alain de Botton lays out his ideas on love in the modern world. He states that Romanticism is the single greatest enemy we face against love. As with most things in life, balance is key.
Alain de Botton combines two unlikely genres; literary biography and self-help manual in the hilarious and unexpectedly practical How Proust Can Change Your Life.
We expect love to be the source of our greatest joys. But, in practice, it is one of the most reliable routes to misery. Few forms of suffering are ever as intense as those we experience in relationships.
What aspects of religion should atheists (respectfully) adopt? Alain de Botton suggests a "religion for atheists" -- call it Atheism 2.0 -- that incorporates religious forms and traditions to satisfy our human need for connection, ritual and transcendence.
Increasingly, it seems like anxiety about social media is as much a hallmark of modern life as social media itself. It’s filling our short lives with meaningless clutter.
Alain de Botton examines our ideas of success and failure -- and questions the assumptions underlying these two judgments. Is success always earned? Is failure? He makes an eloquent, witty case to move beyond snobbery to find true pleasure in our work.
In these pages, some of today’s most wonderful culture-makers—writers, artists, scientists, entrepreneurs, and philosophers—reflect on the joys of reading, how books broaden and deepen human experience, and the ways in which the written word has formed their own character.
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Photo Credit: Bohdan Cap / Contributor / Contour / Getty Images
