One of the reasons I love Alain de Botton
There are actually quite a lot of reasons. He expresses things that I would have expressed myself if I’d actually known I thought them. It’s always relieving to find one’s almost inexpressible thoughts laid out neatly on a page. He also enables my students to write much better essays, since I do believe he is among the very few intellectuals who want to be understood rather than having the partial agenda of maintaining a boundary between academia and the rest of the world. And he is quite funny, which brings me to this passage from his book The Art of Travel (which was my favourite of his before I read The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. Now I’m not sure.)
Here he is speculating about the origin of the underlying sense of anxiety that gnaws away at people like myself, who actually have every ostensible reason to be content (even blissfully happy).
‘It was as if a vital evolutionary advantage had been bestowed centuries ago on those members of the species who lived in a state of concern about what was to happen next. These ancestors might have failed to savour their experiences appropriately, but they had at least survived and shaped the character of their descendants; while their more focused siblings, at one with the moment and with the place where they stood, had met violent ends on the horns of unforeseen bison.’
I love him.