Alain De Botton: Why Status is Making You Miserable & Why Parents Want Their Kids to Fail | E1227

(instrumental music plays) A marker of good parenting is that your child doesn't have any wish to be famous. There's tremendous envy in- within families and within people. Envy is one of the key motivators, and people are envious of their children. The problem with modern society is that everybody wants to be big. Everybody wants to matter. If you don't have a plan, you'll fall prey to the plans of others. And what goes wrong often in people's lives is they don't really have a plan. When companies start talking about loving their employees and being a family, et cetera, they've tied themselves in a knot. They've borrowed the language of private life in order to foster a short-term sense of togetherness.

Ready to go? (instrumental music plays) Alain, I'm so excited to make this happen. I am probably one of the biggest fans of your work. So thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

Now, I would love to start, we live in this kind of social media-driven world.

Mm-hmm.

And I also live in this financial-driven world.

Mm-hmm.

And at the core of both is status.

Mm-hmm.

And so I wanna start with, how do you define status?

Mm-hmm.

And why do we want it so much?

Mm-hmm. Well, let's start with the second bit. I think we want status, um, if this isn't, doesn't sound too weird, for love. Uh, I don't mean sexual love or romantic love. I mean love in the broad sense: esteem, um, friendship recognition. Um, you know, we live in a world where what you do defines who you are. Um, that's a relatively modern way of doing things. It wasn't always the case. But, you know, nowadays, first time you meet somebody, they will immediately ask you, "What do you do?" According to how you answer that, you'll either be acclaimed and, you know, "Oh, that's very interesting," or you'll be left behind by the peanuts and you'll be made to feel that you don't really exist. You will become an invisible, uh, person. So we want status for, you know, I mean, very often material ends. But it's not really the material ends that we want. It's the, it's the, it's the love and respect and esteem that comes with those ends. I mean, if you said to somebody, "Right, you got a choice. Either we give you, you know, £400 million a year, but everyone who looks at you will treat you like a pariah, will treat you with, you know, ignominy, you'll, you'll, you'll feel, you'll feel shame, et cetera, but £400 million a year, or you can live on £15,000 a year and whenever, wherever you go, people will greet you with warmth, with adulation, with love, with respect, ta-da. Which one do you want?" I think the, uh, vast majority were gonna want the second option. So we, you know, people often say, "We're very materialistic nowadays." We're not particularly materialistic. What we are is we're hungry for status, for love, respect, dignity. And we live in a world in which, um, that status is available via the acquisition of material goods. It's not really the material goods. I mean, y- you know, I'm sure you've had people sitting in this chair who will tell you again and again, "I'm not doing it for the money." And of course they're not. They're not. They're not doing it for the money. They're doing it for the love.