The Cycle You Don’t Realise You’re In - Alain de Botton (4K)

Alain de Botton, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much.

Where do bad inner voices come from?

(inhales deeply) Well, (sighs) the way I like to think about it is that an inner voice is always an outer voice that got internalized. You know, we're very porous people. The way in which we're spoken to becomes the way in which we speak to ourselves. I mean, if that d- if that sounds too weird, think of language, right? All of us, um, arrive in the world not speaking any language, and by the age of three, four, five, six, seven, you know, we'll have learned a lot of words. But the fascinating thing about human beings is, um, we don't know we're learning. So we can be doing other stuff, like, you know, doing handstands in the garden or drawing buttercups in the kitchen, and we're becoming expert grammarians. Hundreds of words are entering our minds. Complex, um, grammatical constructions are entering our minds. Now, the way I like to think about it is that that language analogy, um, holds true for emotional life as well. So at the same time as we're learning a language of, you know, words and declensions, we're also learning a language of emotions. Um, we're learning things like, what's a man like? What's a woman like? What happens if you give someo- something to someone? What happens if you're vulnerable? What happens if you want to play? What happens if you say no? What happens if you say yes? All of these are the syntax, th- they comprise the syntax of our emotional lives, and, um, it's an invisible syntax just as our grammatical syntax is invisible. But it's there, and it will operate throughout our lives, and it will be immensely hard to change. I mean, you, you know what it's like if you're. You know, if you grew up speaking English and then you wanna s- learn a foreign language, you suddenly wanna learn Italian, well, good luck to you. You're gonna be- you're learning a long time. It's not impossible, can be done, but I think it's helpful to think of how hard it is because sometimes people get very impatient in their attempts to change things about themselves.

Mm.

They go things like, you know, "I wanna change how I relate to people, um, in relationships," say. "Uh, and I've read a book, and I've, I've been to three therapy sessions, and, um, I'm really annoyed. Nothing works." You wanna go, okay, imagine this was Italian.

(laughs)

So you've, you've, you've, you've looked at a book in Italian, you've taken three classes, and you don't speak fluent Italian, and you're complaining. So, we do need some modesty here, uh, just in order to be properly ambitious. I mean, as you know, you know. The, the, the, the root cause of sort of early despair and early retirement from things is a, a false picture of what success demands in an area, and I think in the area of emotional improvement or maturation, we sometimes let ourselves down by thinking it's gonna have an ease which it won't have.