Where do you think self-esteem comes from? Gosh, I wish we knew. I mean, I think the first thing to say is a bit of a mystery. If we knew how to bottle this stuff, you know, if you look at the differences between what human beings achieve, it isn't easily explained by intelligence.
Everything shows that that broadly speaking, you know, intelligence accounts for the smaller portion of the massive differences in achievement. And that's calling. It's, it isn't what the school system is really about. And I think, you know, a lot of achievement is about imagination and is about breaking through obstacles to dreaming of a better world, a more interesting world, et cetera.
Self-esteem is somewhere in that story because I think self-esteem is about saying, it might happen with me. This thing could be, I could be in charge of this thing, whatever it is. And I think class plays a role here. One of the great injuries of a working-class background is that it tends to give you a sense that other people are controlling the world and you have to negotiate the obstacles they put in place, but you don't get to remove those obstacles.
You just have to work your way around them. So middle class, middle class in the UK sense, you know, you get imbued with a feeling that human beings like you make the world. And that raises your self-esteem. You know, traditionally, it's an enormous difference to, you know, if your uncle happens to be, you know, the guy in the civil service who does whatever.
And you're slightly annoying second cousin, you know, works in the treasury or something. This changes your sense of reality because you think, well, of course I can do something because there's not that impressive people. I want to soar around the kitchen, et cetera. So a lot of that stuff is thinking, how do I stack up next to other people?
Is the world shaped by gods or broadly speaking by people like you and I? I know we're in a religious place and you must be seeming godly to the audience. But the good thing is you're not. And I think that's one of the good things about modern technology is that it's helped to show the world.
Because it's given a very granular close-up sense of people in social positions of power, authority, et cetera. And that's helped to kind of imaginatively level the imaginative playing field in a way. So you feel closer to them. You see that they're humans too.
And that can be inspiring. There was an incident that a friend had when recording a podcast, which I needed a name for. And we've come to call it a yogurt lid moment. So he was sitting down to record with a very famous author.
And he's idolized this guy for a very long time. You know, titan of literature, sitting down, his camera team rolls, setting everything up. And in the guest house, I guess, would you mind if I went and got a yogurt? And he's like, well, is your house, your yogurt?
Please continue. The guest walks away, goes to the fridge, opens it up, gets a yogurt out, sits down, opposite my friend. Everyone's still pottering around. And my friend sat opposite this guy that he'd revered for decades.
You know, just saw as this sort of untouchable demi-god, watched him look at the yogurt, take the lid off, put it up to his face, and then lick the lid at the yogurt. And he said, at that moment, the veils fell from my eyes, and I saw him as a fallible human. And it's that yogurt lid moment, this sort of weird, mortal trip. Because of the way that we're introduced to life, really.
You know, we start off very small and we're surrounded by very large people who seem to know how to do extraordinary things. You know, they can throw a ball over a tree. They know how to speak a foreign language. They can do very complicated maths, et cetera.
And we are tiny. And it takes such a long time to think, actually, these gods, these colossi, are just human. So, you know, the number one sort of class differentiator is childhood, as it were. Because we all start in this very subordinate class, which is the child.
And we look up to the adult. I mean, think of those times when, I don't know if you had this, but you're at school and then it's the weekend and you go to the shops. And suddenly you see the French teacher in the aisles of the shop and you think, what's that person doing there? Mr Gregory?
He's buying cereal and you think, that guy is just, you know, comes back to your yogurt point. That guy's human. And we're always catching up with that idea. X or Y is human.
And it's interesting that very basic thought is still always a bit of a surprise. We're always on the back foot with that insight. Why is that related to self-esteem? Why is self-esteem not contained within our own system?
Because we've got this very unfortunate thing that we know ourselves from the inside and we know other people only from what they choose to tell us. And so we've got this massive imbalance of data and we are so weird to ourselves and so embarrassing and so flawed. And anyone with a modicum of self-awareness is going to have, if they're honest, should have, a slightly hard time tolerating themselves. Because the stuff that goes on in our minds, the stuff that goes on in our minds is, you know, if it was published, I mean, we'd all be, you know, excommunicated immediately.
That's not a sign necessarily that we're so degenerate. It's just a sign that we're having still a very hard time admitting what it is to be human at an interpersonal level. We're still, despite all these ways, we have sharing data. It's still a sort of surprise.
I mean, you know, it's like in a relationship or close friendship when, you know, later night, you're able to go to your new pal. You know, do you ever have that thing when? And they go, yeah, yeah, yeah, that thing. No one's ever mentioned it.
No, you know, there's still a societal silence. And then the intimacy that grows from being able to say, we're a bit weird. Now, the truth is, we're a bit weird, like everybody else, but there is still an imbalance of knowledge and a sense. I mean, you know, I think where kids say things like, my family's so weird.
Other people's families are so normal. You know, I went to Billy's family there. You know, his mum's really normal. Why are you so weird?
And then of course, in time you realize Billy's family's not normal. You just don't know them. You know, we don't know other people as well as we know ourselves. And so we tend to think that those close to us are a bit more mad than anybody else.
We go, my mum's really mad. My ex are really mad. I mean, this goes on in the dating world, relationship world, where, you know, men will go women so crazy. You know, women are really crazy.
And then in a female camp, women are going, oh, men, they're just really, you know, and you want to go, oh, guys, it's both. It's everybody. It's not men. It's not women.
It's not the young. It's not the oldest. It's everybody close up. It's just that we often have the privilege of not knowing people close up enough.
And therefore we still retain illusions. You get this in travel, right? People go, oh, the Greeks. Well, they're really better than us.
We've got all these laws. The Americans, they have a certain one. And then, once you're inside that society, you go, it's the same everywhere. But anyway, we've got to have illusions and bless us.
So the closer the people get to you, the more you see their flaws. But unfortunately, no one is ever going to be as close to you as you are. And you have this huge asymmetry, a million to one of the bit rate of data that you're able to see of yourself and the vacillations that self-doubt as you ping pong back and forth. Should I go, I don't know if I should go and buy that.
I don't know if I should get that pair of shoes. I should get that pair of shoes. I'm not going to get that pair of shoes. I might do.
I go to sleep. I spent last night staying awake wondering about whether I was going to buy a pair of shoes. And knowing that that is the sort of thought that even you wouldn't tell your spouse, I didn't sleep well last night. Why?
I was thinking about this pair of shoes. It's so mundane and boring that you don't even share that sort of thing. The other thing is, from the inside, it's very hard to know who you are. One of the interesting things is how people go a bit mad when they spend too long alone.
And if you spend a long time alone, you sort of, you don't know certain thoughts go a little too far. And one of the great things about company, why do we need other people? Just to be able to hold a slightly in check in small ways and large. They kind of go, no, that thought is getting a little too extreme, whatever.
They define us. But also, the other thing that people help us to do, other people, is give us a compact sense of who we are that eludes us. So I see you and I go, there's Chris. Now, when you're alone, you don't think you're Chris.
You just think, I'm consciousness in a universe. I'm just a giant net that's capturing thoughts and impressions that you don't know that you have a name, a beginning, a middle or an end, et cetera. And when we're in a company, people go, oh, you're that guy who does this. So other people's caricatured vision of us is actually quite helpful to us.
Because you think, oh, I'm that relatively simple soul. Unifers us gives us a sense of story. Yeah. I also, because if I look at you, you look unified and got two eyes and nose and mouth and mouth, you're relatively compact, but inside you.
So I feel like that. It's a vast, shapeless landscape. Is this self-esteem related to imposter syndrome? I think imposter syndrome was already something that I was seeing a lot of.
And now I'm seeing more about increasingly this sense that the world expects something of me that maybe I've even actually done previously, but I'm scared about whether or not I'm going to be able to deliver it. Look, I think it's, I know imposter syndrome causes people problems, but I'm reassured if somebody suffers from imposter syndrome. It's a sign of honesty. It's a sign of self-awareness.
And of course, it has its extreme versions, which causes people a lot of pain. But if someone is aware that they might be a charlatan or might be putting off a confidence trick, that's honesty. That's great. That's a starting point.
It's just like somebody who knows they might be evil is a good person. Evil people don't worry. They might be evil. So you're likely to be authentic and genuine if sometimes you think, am I fake?
That's a good sign. It's a good starting point in the same way as identifying that you're a bad driver is a good starting point. They're not driving fast, but it doesn't necessarily make you better on the roads. So where do we go to?
Where is becoming a better driver? Okay, my imposter syndrome. Thank you, Alain. You've told me that I'm not so up my own ass that I can't see my own flaws.
Hooray. What about starting to work through that? What about starting to get a better sense of our own capacities and capabilities? Look, a lot of it is bouncing against the world and testing yourself against reality.
It's very hard to know your talents until you've had to go at something. And I think we all have this sense sometimes that something's come more easily to us than to others. I don't know how great tennis players start, but they must have a sense. I'm going to hit that ball and that worked quite well.
A great right to everything. I was able to pull off quite a nice little sentence there. And that's the beginning of a growing confidence. And you need that kind of start.
I think a good life doesn't require you to do everything. It requires you to do the things that you feel you're capable of and that you're especially good at. It's no humiliation for me that I can't play tennis, for example. If somebody goes, you know, you're terrible.
Because I don't sense a talent, but I do sense talent in that tiny area of assembling words. That's the area that, you know, but maths I can't do, you know, architecture I can't really do, so many things I can't do. So it's about finding those little sweet spots. One of the great puzzles in life is how do people find their vocation?
How do people find their core identity, their talents? And I sort of think of it as you're passing a metal detector over the ground and very occasionally something will let off a little beep, beep of intensity of interest, heightened thoughtfulness. And you think there's a fragment here below the ground of my true self. Now my true self was shattered or it came in disassembled form.
It's buried, it's scattered over a vast area. And the task of life is to recreate it from hints. And I think that, you know, one of the challenges, I think one of the big, big challenges, it happens to every young person is what should I do with my life. It's one of these central questions of philosophy away because unless you're a very rare person, you will have to assemble a vision of your future.
It's not going to come ready made. And there won't be a voice from this guy going, you know, you are an accountant or you are downhill skier. It's going to be something you have to assemble and you'll assemble it in bits. You'll have to recreate the original statue of you that was shattered a long time ago and that lies across a vast area.
So like an archaeologist of a self, you have to build it up and you have to build it up out of little beeps of interest. And I think a good thing there is envy. People speak very, very low and embarrassed way about envy. They're not supposed to feel envy.
I think very often when you feel a beep of envy, it's because there's a fragment of your true ambition and your true self in the life of another person. Rather than go, I must run away from it. Go, no, this is a clue. What is there that you are envious of?
And often envy is a very inaccurate emotion. We envy the whole of someone when actually it tends to be a part of them that we want. So we go, I'm the best of that singer, actor, business person, etc. You don't go, hang on, hang on.
It won't be the whole thing. Drill into it. What really is core here? You might be, it's actually not their fame, they might say.
It's that they work with their hands or it's that they live in a log cabin somewhere far away from other people or whatever it is. So the best thing to do with envy is to see it as a guide for your own ambition, not a sign of your innate jealousy and inadequacy. It's a clue. I always think about envy as the only one of the seven deadly sins that doesn't feel good.
Remind you of the other, seven deadly sins, gluttony, sloth. Sloth doesn't feel good. You don't think sloth feels good? You're not good Sunday afternoon watching some horrible TV show on TV.
Think of the self-discussed that sloth often brings, right? You're lying on the sofa and you know that you're scrolling and you know that your better self is being eroded. And so there's guilty sloth. Good sloth and guilty sloth.
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The imposter syndrome thing I think when it gets turned up too high, especially with low self-esteem, can turn into this sort of very loud, critical in a voice, this sort of self-hatred thing. I wonder whether there's better ways, given that we're already quite critical of ourselves. How do you come to think about handling external criticism? You're an adult now.
You're a big boy. Maybe this is in your professional life. Maybe it's a personal comment on the way that you showed up at dinner. And yet, at least in my experience, there are very few people who are psychologically healthy and still able to cope with criticism about something they care about in a way that doesn't really hurt.
How do you think about dealing with criticism? Look, I think one of the most galling things is criticism when it's warranted, when you have actually made a mistake. And one of the most awful things about being human is that you're constantly hurting others. We are constantly hurting others in small ways in large, often through stupidity, exhaustion, narrow-mindedness, etc.
And then, if we're moral people, and most of us are, it then hurts. It hurts that we have hurt someone. How do we move on from that? How do we not sink into a hole?
How can we live to see another day? We need to forgive ourselves for the sake of ourselves and those who depend on us. And this is where broadly speaking friendship comes in. We need trusted others in whom we can confide.
And we're sitting in this religious space. Confession has a long history. We need to be able to confess to a loving audience that can say, I know that you have done bad, but your heart is good. And that's a complex manoeuvre of the mind.
And also something difficult to do in solitude or solo. I think we can't do it solo. We can't do it solo. I think this is one of the reasons why solitude is very challenging because we simply cannot bring to ourselves the self-compassion that we need to keep going.
And we are social creatures. If we began well in childhood, someone would have looked at us through the eyes of love. And to look at someone through the eyes of love is to see that though they may have done ill, they mean well. It sounds simple, but all of life is in there.
And of course, then to be able to pull off that manoeuvre for other people. It's no coincidence that the great religions all circle this. They all circle this business of confession, forgiveness, charity to others. I don't mean financial charity though as a role, but it's really charity of spirit.
It's something we desperately need, very bad at, and yet without it society's student gums up. We can't go on. And we can't provide it to ourselves, which is why it's so important. You need to be told that it's important for you to do it to other people because there's this odd sort of co-philanthropy that's occurring.
I am going to pay into the pot and you are going to pay into the pot and everybody is going to withdraw from the pot. It's sort of the council tax, I suppose, of human goodness. That's beautiful. And many of us are lonely.
This is one of the great secrets of life that we don't have enough of these people. We're surrounded by people. But how many of those are really the people who in a middle of the night at Crisis Moment is going to be able to deliver that kind of, broadly we could call it reassurance, a confessional ear and a sense of that we are worthy of forgiveness. Do you think this is a challenge that particularly men face this having someone that is a sympathetic ear, the troubles of being tied up in your fragile male ego, et cetera?
Male friendships and male support seems to be a tough thing, tough needle thread. It's a really tough needle to thread. I think that being a man comes with all sorts of challenges, but one of them is masculinity is presented as a kind of achievement. You know how boys taunt each other in school playground and they'll go, you're a girl.
As though there's a kind of slippery slope. The top of the slope is manhood and that bottom is girlhood. And if you're not careful, you'll become a girl again as it were. There's a sort of sense of when you were a baby and that's the other taunt, baby.
When you were a baby, you were in a feminine camp and then through effort you became a man. But that achievement is precarious. So men are always feeling the precarity of their identity. And that's a very unstable business.
Look, I think the best men are those who've been broken by life and have pulled through, have come out the other end. Why? Because they've been forced by circumstances to drop the illusion of their strength and power. They've known that they couldn't keep that going.
They've hit rock bottom and they've had to reach out and say, I can't cope. I am in infantile position. Help me. Men become rather glorious when that's happened to them because that's when there's true humanity, sympathy, etc.
But they never get there. It's posture, posture, it's defensive, posture all the way. So, and I can spot them out of the way. They've maybe been broken.
What do they look like? It's not you just sense that there's a modesty, deep down as a modesty. And you just feel, I think people give off. I've noticed it.
A sense of how much you could tell them and how much they'd be able to bear. Often it's picked up with little things. People say, how was your weekend? Was it great?
Was it good? You go, wow. That person really needs my weekend to have gone well. They don't have much space.
My weekend has gone badly. Someone goes, how was your weekend? There's space in that space in that. You feel the space.
They're like, oh, I might have been crying in the bathroom floor. That could happen. I might have wanted to take my life on Saturday, but Sunday, things cheered up. There's room for the extremity of what it is to be human.
And those are the people you want to watch out for. I read an article a couple of weeks ago talking about how lots of men say, they need to be more room for men to open up about their emotions. We should have that in the real world. And when the rubber meets the road, personally for them, a lot of the time, guys still struggle to receive weakness and vulnerability from other men.
So they're saying, I want the world to be able to accept my vulnerability while not really being that comfortable with accepting it from other people myself. And I don't think that there's many asymmetries. And women have got it bad in some ways. I've got it bad in others.
But I think this is a particular asymmetry that men deal with more, that women are good at doing the nurturing thing, especially to other women. I think that men are bad at doing the nurturing thing generally, especially to other men. And there are already enough challenges of men opening up to women. How am I going to be seen?
My fragile masculinity will be shattered. Maybe she'll tell her friends or maybe it's my partner. She won't be attracted to me anymore. I just think that was, I never seen it put that way previously, that guys want to be able to be vulnerable.
And yet when they see other male vulnerability, it makes them very, very uncomfortable. They'll quote, tweet it online, mocking it, or they won't reach out in the way that's needed. And a couple of the reasons that we're put forward are, well, maybe it highlights where you might be weak too. This is somebody being vulnerable and that throws into sharp contrast to the fact that, hey, guess what?
You've got vulnerabilities as well. Another part of this, a little bit of an evolutionary psychology explanation that we have coalitions. We've got hunting. And a guy that's not that strong and stoic might not be a great coalitional partner.
What if we get to the end of the hunt and he can't be bothered to turn around and go back? So many, many other reasons. But yeah, I think that's an angle that guys, especially guys who want to be integrated to transcend and include in Wolverine language, you know, you should take a good look in the mirror in not just being able to talk about your emotions, but in paying into the pot, right? Not just withdrawing from the taxes, but also, hey, I'm going to be here.
And I'm going to be here even to people maybe that I don't know. This random guy on the internet is opposed to saying, ha, ha, ha, this person's going, ha, this person's really hurting. And fuck, if I was hurting, I probably want someone to be there for me. So maybe I should try and do the same for them despite not knowing them.
I think you're bullying, you know, it's a strange word and it's an embarrassing word, but it exists, you know, the impulse to bully the weak. What is it? I mean, anyone who's been through school, everybody knows about it, right? Which is you see somebody who's, you know, the typical target for bullying is somebody in a school whose life seems softer, more indulged than yours.
They still seem stuck at a, you know, at a privileged level, you know, their mother picks and biscuits or packs their teddy bear in their school bag or whatever it is. And you think, hang on a minute, I've had to be tough, I've had to grow up, I've had to, I've not been indulged and I'm going to punish in another person, not just the weakness, but the privilege, the emotional privilege that I see, they get to walk around thinking that it's okay to be a bit weak and a bit soft. Well, that's not okay for me. So I resent this privilege and I'm going to make sure that their life gets a bit miserable.
And that's how you end up bullying. And you know, parents bully their children. I mean, this is great to boo, but they do. It's a real challenge for a parent to see somebody having a life that's softer than one they had.
And there's a real impulse to say, hang on, you know, I resent you for your privilege, not emotional, not financial, emotional, emotional privilege. Why do you get to be indulged in a way I wasn't? It's very hard to bear that asymmetry. How do people overcome that?
Let's say that you are a parent and you did grow up in a household that was perhaps not as emotionally forgiving as it should have been, you didn't feel quite disappointed. And I imagine this is a really complex emotion to feel, which are my favorite ones. I grew up in a household that didn't have room for my emotions. I did a lot of self work in order to be able to understand that and then try and wipe that slime off me so that I can give a better life to my kids.
My kids come along. They start to have this better life and somehow in seeing the better life that I designed and tried to overcome in order to be able to make happen, resentment has now come in. And now I feel shame at my resentment and I feel bitterness at my shame about my resentment and anxiety about my bitterness about my shame about my resentment. There's infinite regress of emotions that you made happen in a positive way.
Congratulations, Hooray. You overcame this. You were a circuit breaker in this sort of weird, you know, serial of a string light. And you feel bad about it.
I mean, I'm laughing, right? Because this is where we're hitting kind of the tragedy of human, which is you try so hard to get it right and you're trying to get this right. And something else goes wrong. And I mean, you know, we do need a warm, rich laughter.
This is not merely the icing on the cake. It is one of the great solutions. I mean, we're juggling here with the incompatibilities of raising children. It's maddening.
If you avoid one problem, you set off another one. I think that, yes. So look, I think we do so much work on ourselves and still wear a square one. There's an old Jewish saying, man thinks God laughs.
In other words, you know, we're thinking that we can master something. We can master it. It's so difficult. But I want to talk about, I want to think about sadism because we don't have bullying.
It's really weird word, sadism. What is that? Maybe it's a sex king or it's something that really weird people. All of us carry a sadistic impulse.
I want to say in other words, an impulse to turn our own suffering into a desire to punish or give suffering to another person. It always comes from pain in ourselves and we want to pass it on. And you see low level, low level, minuscule, very hard to observe sadism in daily life and all sorts of areas. You see in relationships, you know, people are sadistic to their partners.
I mean, what, you know, again, if they were angels, they would be weeping as they looked at human nature and what are we doing to ourselves and to each other. But there's an economy of suffering. All meanness is inherited. All impulse to be mean is coming down the generations from somebody else.
And we keep playing past the puzzle with our suffering. We go, oh, I've got some suffering. Oh, do you want some? Because I'm just going to make me feel better.
And that's how we end up, you know, that guy stole my foot. I'm going to take their eye. Oh, that person hacked off my left finger. Well, I'll chop off their ear and then, you know, I'll take a side of their skull.
And on and on and on it goes. I remember saying a marker of good parenting is that your children don't have any wish to be famous. Yes. There might be a few exceptions to that rule, but I think the, an outsized desire to shine in the eyes of strangers to be known by people you don't know is a sign of pathology, I believe.
And we're sitting here, you and I in front of lots of cameras. In front of lots of strangers. So something's gone wrong for us. I mean, and it's so basic.
I don't know if I could childhood. I know a bit about mine. You would have felt invisible. I mean, why become a little bit more visible than everybody else?
If you don't carry within you, a deep sense of home being invisible and unheard. Is there not a natural poll for that generally that's kind of written into the source code of humans? Oh, I suppose actually, yes, there is. And it's everybody else.
And the fact that you are an outlier within that suggests that you are different. Right. Okay. I've answered my question.
Thank you. Yeah. So I think there's a compensatory business going on. And I think the ability to have a so called ordinary life is a massive achievement.
It's if you can put it this way, an exceptional achievement. It's like, it's like comedians, you know, people who have an outsized need to make others laugh. Almost always children who were facing something not funny at all that they needed to find a way through. They learned to make jokes because there was something pretty sad around that they learned to manage.
And in all of these, you know, when dealing with those people or those sort of people are listening now, you know, the response should always be, what? How did the way in which I grew up figure as a solution to a problem that I was facing? And therefore, could I now, whatever age you're at, cut myself some slack and try something else? I needed to laugh in order to be tolerated.
What would it mean to be serious? I needed to be famous in order to survive? What would it mean to think about obscurity? Or indeed, I needed to be painfully modest and always underperform in order not to spark jealousy?
What happens if I tried something different? These are the major break points, turning points in a life. When you think the things I needed to do to get me through childhood are now hampering my possibilities in adulthood. Those situations that require that behavior are no longer in existence.
What happens if I tried something different? But in order to do that, you have to see the pattern that you would set by your childhood. Mark Marin, comedian, says, the monster I created to protect the child inside of me is difficult to manage. Beautiful.
Love it. I'm looking at how impressive I am. Status anxiety is going to be there. I think no matter how enlightened you are, I want to feel like I'm needed by the people respected and admired by people I admire.
That's a pretty big one. Is there a good way to deal with state? Is there a healthy way to sort of deal with status and status anxiety? It's funny you mentioned judges.
I mean, the really helpful thing about religions is that they tend to tell their believers that someone really knows them and really cares about them and is looking at them. And if you think about the impulse to be rich and famous and esteemed, it's really a desire that gets soaked up by religions. Religion is saying everybody in Christianity, every hair on your head is numbered. In other words, someone's really looking at you.
Someone knows you in the way that a parent, a good parent, knows a child. The great thing about early childhood, good and loving family, is that child is a superstar. They come in, they sing a song, everyone claps, they're happy in the morning. The little prince has arrived, the princess is doing a pirouette, etc.
That doesn't make a child entitled. Entitlement comes from deprivation. The ability to absorb an ordinary life comes from early emotional privilege. If the child is able to be the center of the universe in the early years, they will be able to accept without too much psychological damage, a subsidiary position in adult life.
That the need to be always at the center and always important is a compensation. It's not a sign of health. And therefore a good childhood is connected up with the ability to give your child that charge of specialness so that they can go on to do that much more important thing, which is to be ordinary, to accept ordinariness, which is a massive challenge. And all of us are in the end, ultimately, ordinary.
And that's okay. And to not feel shame. And not feel shame. And to accept that there are limits on your power, you will need to die, you will accept your finitude.
I wrote a little essay about shame. I wanted to read to you. That's okay. So I've been thinking about the shame of simple pleasures.
This is a quote from a friend. I have not yet grown wise enough to deeply enjoy simple things. We are all terrible accountants of our own joy. Most of us only accept deposits when the transaction is sufficiently large.
The day we get married, the night we play the main stage at Glastonbury, the moment the business sells for $100 million, anything less, and the entry doesn't even make the ledger. We treat small pleasures like counterfeit currency. Oh, that thing made your day that small moment made your week. How feeble, how desperate, how limited your life must be to be thrilled by something so unimpressive.
You must not have a lot going on. We roll our eyes at the time events that get excited as though joy must be proportionate to scale. And yet, life is made up of little things, exactly like this. Not once in a while, but always.
Your life is constructed out of moments so small they wouldn't even register as an event on anyone's calendar. So why can't something small be something great? Well, sometimes I feel things more deeply than I should do, including the shame at feeling things more deeply than I should do. Also including the shame of being delighted by little things, more than I think I should, as if taking pleasure in something tiny reveals the smallest of my life.
But perhaps that's exactly backward. Maybe the true richness of life is how much joy you can harvest from the smallest possible patch of soil. And here's the payoff. When you lower the threshold for joy, you don't just get more of it.
You get it now. Who is truly the more impressive person, the one who requires a huge cathedral of bullshit, fanfare and galactic accomplishments in order to get the slightest ficker of pleasure. Like some masochist, a sex party demanding car batteries get clamped onto his nipples before he even gets started. Or the person who can do it with a good coffee and a fresh breeze.
Love it. I mean, because it makes me think that we're incredibly easily led in our sense of what matters in life. We're really bad judges, independent judges of significance. So somebody says, you know, that artwork on the wall, that's really expensive, that's really famous, that used to belong to a king or a queen.
We think, oh, that's marvelous. And if we don't know who the painter was or what it is, we think, oh, that can't be any good. So it's almost comedic, isn't it? How how supine and dumb we are in deciding for ourselves what matters?
So, you know, you do get this in culture. If a book wins a prize, everybody decides that book's amazing. But before it won the prize, everybody thought it was boring. And the book hasn't changed.
I think about this in terms of I'm a great fan of flying. I love flying. I wouldn't have guessed that about you. I love it.
I love it. I love the technology. I love the, you know, all sorts of things. The beauty is set.
I'm always stuck by the way in which flying has nowadays very low prestige in the world compared at say to art. So if you say to somebody, I'm going to a gallery and I'm going to look at some pictures and there's all that's very noble thing to do. I'm going to take a flight and on the flight, I'm going to open the window and look at the clouds and I'm going to really delight in them. I'm going to marvel at them.
I'm thinking, oh my goodness, this is better than any painting by Leonardo or Pusar or whatever. This is just striking, right? People are thinking a big deal. I'm trying to watch a film.
So it's not that prestigious to look out the window. And that's just a tiny example of how bad we are at finding significance by ourselves. I think this is true creativity. Creativity is when you have a sense that your pleasure could be legitimate wherever it lies.
So if you happen to like pebbles, go for it. That's going to be your pleasure. Or if you like the way that sunlight hits a window blind or concrete, that's going to be the thing for you. And I think it's small children have it more naturally.
That's what makes small children delightful to adults. You know, it is. If you take a small child to a park, it's hilarious. You can't even get to the swings because they will stop.
The child will stop. Maybe by wall. There was a notice, you know, a piece of chewing gum in a rock and you think, and you go, come on, let's go to the swing. They don't want to go to the swing because they just come.
A tuft of grass growing out of a concrete ledge or whatever it is. They are independent arbiters of significance. If you think they are like, what did Drake like? What's X telling me to allow its source their sense of taste?
Exactly. And that's so tedious. I mean, bless them. Everybody does it.
But ideally, by the time you get to full maturity, you become a bit weirder once more. And that's what makes certain adults really delightful. They go, doesn't matter what everybody thinks. For me, I'm liking this thing.
I sometimes think about it in terms of entertaining. I don't know how much entertaining you do. What people say, I'm going to give a thin part. I'm going to invite some friends for dinner.
They get into such a mess thinking, how am I going to organize this dinner? I must have a starter and maybe it's a melon. Or maybe it's, I don't know, prawns or something. And then I'm going to have a single main course, which might be chicken or something.
And then they've got dessert. And they're just overflowing with anxiety, etc. And if you are said to them, what do you actually enjoy? If it's suppetent, I'm like opening a can of tuna, putting on a table, getting some homos, dipping that, putting my feet up.
And you're like, okay, why don't you just do that with your mates? Why don't you just drop the pretense? Have the courage to think what's touching me might touch another person. And your dinner party is going to be a lot more fun.
This is ultimately what great artists do. Great artists have a sense that what's fun for them, what's meaningful for them, will probably be meaningful for other people even though right now there's quite a lot of silence about that area. So they're kind of, they're taking, they've got a faith that we started talking about stuff with them. They've got a faith that the things that turn them on are likely to turn other people on as well.
And that's a beautiful confidence. And that's what leads to great art. Great art is really the courage to define the pleasure for yourself. Lovely quote from Emerson.
He says, in the minds of geniuses, we find our own neglected thoughts. In the minds of geniuses, we find our own neglected thoughts. In other words, geniuses, so-called geniuses don't have thoughts that are completely different from those of other people. What they do is they take the thoughts that we all have and they give them the significance they deserve.
Some of them, some of those thoughts. And so that's why when you pick up a really great book, it's often you think, wow, I've always thought that, but I've never known how to say it. And really what we mean is I've never had the courage to give that thought it's due because I'm lacking self-esteem. There is a really sort of wonderful blend between bone-headed self-belief, which is kind of rebellious.
It feels a bit spiky, sort of a knot to that. And a much more sort of warm, cozy sensation, which is, I like what I like and I like myself for liking it. Does that make sense? There is this rejection of entropy outside and this sort of containment of structure inside.
And immediately I'm thinking about the background that would have made the second version possible. I'm imagining a parent who says, do that thing that you like doing. That's fine. You can be slightly weird.
We don't think that's weird here. You can just pursue your own pleasure in a non-britill way. As you say, it's a gentle acknowledgement of your individuality. We are in a place that's got some really wonderful...
Is stained glass art? Is that glasses art? I don't imagine. Let's play it really loose with the concept of art.
Art is anything that excites us. It seems beautiful. You often talk about art. In a lot of your books, you have images of different paintings, of different sculptures, stuff like that.
How can people become better at appreciating art? The white belts at looking at a gallery and they want to have a better appreciation of it. They feel like there's something that they're missing. They don't understand.
They don't understand where the painting came from or where they were at at that point in life. One thought is people tend to think in order to be a decent person who likes art. I've got to like everything. I've got to go into a museum.
I've got to go into a museum. I've got to just delight in everything. Think about it in music. People are much saner when it comes to music than it comes to visual arts.
People have really hung up on visual arts. I always say, take your cue for music. You know when you like something musically. You don't care that there's loads and loads of other stuff that doesn't touch you.
You don't mind. You make your own playlist. So make your own playlist of the artists that touch you. It might be 3% of the art that's produced by the world.
It might be not any of the famous names. The famous names are on the whole chosen by all sorts of bizarre ways and find your own way to things that delight you. You know, have the courage. Also when walking through a museum, you can't eat it all at once.
These museums are bizarre. They're like archives of everything that's happened over a thousand years. And you're supposed to spend an afternoon and like it. We can't absorb it.
We can't metabolize it. So I always think, good museum. If you find two things that you like to ideally nick and put in your house. It's going to be very personal.
People are really normal in a museum gift shop. When they get to museum gift shop, they're like, right, what postcard should I buy? Then they're thinking, that's the way to love art. It's like, what car should I send my granny?
That's the beginning of art appreciation. Because it's like, what do I like? What might they like? Go for it.
All the rest is nonsense. You don't need to get caught up. I wonder what the difference is between music. I completely agree.
I'm very unequipping about the stuff that I like in music. And yet when I go and imagine myself sitting in front of a painting, I'll be looking to either side to work out. Oh, this thing is very melancholy. This must be a melancholy.
It must be sombre. That's the way to do it. And I wonder what it is about the medium that makes it a little bit more difficult, a little bit more hard to define your own taste. There's an ancient Greek myth about the origins of painting.
There was apparently a shepherd boy who was in love with a shepherd girl. And the shepherd girl was going to go away. And that night on the last night together, they were in a cave, and there was a shadow on the cave wall of the shepherd girl. And the shepherd boy took up a piece of chalk and traced the outline of the shepherd girl's form.
And that's supposed to be the lot's paintings of art. In other words, the imposter make art comes when something precious is going to vanish. An art could be thought of as a bucket in which you preserve something valuable. And we need art because we can't hold it all in our own fingers.
We can't absorb it all. And so we outsource it to something that can stabilize it and hold it for us. And we're going to take the imposter picture. When you go to a beautiful place and you go, I like it.
There's always a fear of loss and you think I'm going to lose it, so I must take a picture of it. Same thing goes on in art. And so the art that you love is almost always that the art that contains within it a bit of your true home, your true happiness, that is in danger of slipping away. And it's going to be different for everybody.
I think one of the most interesting questions is why you touch by the art that touches you. And it tends to be because that art captures something that the person doesn't have enough of a secure hold on and they need to preserve it. So for example, I love calm art. I love beautiful empty spaces, linearity, dignity of form, etc.
I love it. Is my life like that? No, that's not where I live. I live in chaos.
But I love that because that's my true home. But I'm not there often enough. So it's a memento saying, come back to this place. That's where you need to be in order to be your true self.
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Do you think that humans have always been plagued by the need to keep themselves busy? Or is this a hustle and grind culture as much of a modern phenomenon as you two best days would have us believe? I think it's very hard to sit with yourself because there's panic about what you might discover. You know, what the fascinating things is.
Why are we so easily distracted? Why can't we sit with our thoughts? The reason is there's so much about our thoughts that is mixed up with sadness regret fear, etc. And it takes courage.
It literally takes courage, which is why the best places to think are often those with a little bit of distraction and a possibility for introspection. Have you got any places that you do that yourself? Trains. We think we invented railways to go from London to Manchester or New York to Philadelphia.
We didn't. We invented them as places to think because in a half empty carriage, what better place than to get to know not the destination but yourself? You're looking out of the window and there's enough distraction from telegraph poles going by or birds overhead. There's enough to kind of take your imagination to kind of tether the more anxious sides of you.
But there's also enough encouragement to keep going and keep making discoveries. It's really hard to think when thinking is all you're meant to do. If you want to terrify somebody, put them in a blank room and give them a sheet of paper and go right out who you are and what you're really concerned about. That's panic-inducing.
If somebody, you know, why do our best thoughts come to us in the shower? You're not supposed to be thinking in the shower. Your mind is loose from an agenda. That's when the good thoughts come through.
Good thoughts are charged with anxiety. Thinking is an anxious process. And so we need to give ourselves a little bit of comfort. That's why people often like to work in a cafe.
The reason is it's all a bustle around. That bustle is absorbing the nervous energy and allows sometimes a good thought to come through. I think much better if I have a pen in my hands and from 18 years of full-time education, you know, just sitting in lectures and class and toiling a pen through my fingers. It blows off just that additional bit.
For me, my favourite place for thinking is doing the washing up dishes. Because you're not supposed to be doing the thinking. And also dishes are so amazing because you go from real mess to real tightiness in three-and-a-half seconds. It's so quick.
And the problem with the modern world is that so many of the things we want to do take so long. And, you know, the great thing about pre-industrial world is that we used to be able to achieve things within a handy timescale. You know, you run a bakery and in the morning you add the flour and you put it together and the yeast and then it would risen and then you sell it. And then, you know, on and on it goes and in a 24-hour cycle you've gone through the whole thing.
Nowadays, most people work in organisations, 1,000-2,000 people. They're working on projects that will take years to come to fruition. As I'm saying, why do people love sports? Yeah, and sports take place within a concentrated time period.
You know, football is 90 minutes, within 90 minutes. They will be in objective, a goal, a victory, a defeat, et cetera. It's manageable. Most of us have lives in which the pitch is 8,000 kilometres long.
The game takes 20 years. There's 25 balls, there's 18 goalposts. You don't know what's going on? You lose the thread of your own life and of the game that you're meant to be playing.
So many of us have crises. We think, hang on a minute, what am I supposed to be doing? Because we're within complex organisations. But the niacess, that clarity of the earlier pre-industrial world.
What is an existential crisis, in your opinion? I mean, it's a word that sometimes people reach when they feel that the building blocks of their life have ceased to make sense, that for all sorts of reasons, the place they find themselves in no longer feels like it makes sense anymore. You might have a sense of, why am I in this relationship? Why am I in this job?
Why do I live in the country I live in, et cetera? And existential crises are good things. We should have them. They are positive things.
They often happen on a Sunday evening. Sunday evening is that moment in a week when there's a gap to question, why am I me? What's this assumption that I have about what I should be doing? And to regularly submit yourself to a complete existential audit as it were, to go, could I be someone totally different?