Alain de Botton: Work and Emotional Intelligence

[Music] thank you well it's a real pleasure to be here I think we should begin by just seeing who in the room among the people who are married who in the room got married primarily to please their parents to pass on livestock and farm implements to the next generation and generally to fit in with the community put your hands up as if you've got a goat or yeah one person anyone else else no that's that's remarkable ok another another question who here is working primarily just to pay the bills so it doesn't matter if you're enjoying it you're just you're working for money who here's working for money one person's just working for money I'm sure ok so you guys should get together after business because you are both pre-modern and what I mean by that is what I what I mean by that is you are pre an enormous shift that entered Western consciousness and has now become global in around 1750 we're not an academic audience so let's say 1750 when suddenly both in the realms of love and work something momentous happened when it came to relationships we were no longer supposed to merely endure the person we were together with marriage cease to be a contract entered into primarily for the sake of children and property and respectability and became something that was to be entered into for reasons of love who here loves their partner we were gonna then comes work an analogous shift happens in work which is work ceases to be merely seen as drudgery and comes to be seen as an arena in which to exploit and explore talents for the benefit of humankind an idea that started in probably the Renaissance in Italy in the lives of a few select artists starts to become a global ambition everybody nowadays starts to think that the purpose of their life is twofold firstly to find somebody whom they love with whom to build a life together perhaps lead on to the next generation build a unit together to face the world and then the other great source of meaning and purpose is to find a job that not only generates money but also creates purpose no longer no one that we're all fairly unhappy at least once or twice a day as one or other of these ambitions creaks and we no longer feel that we are exactly doing what our society tells us is both normal and a Jew aspiration so we've taken a lot on to be a modern individual is to be weighed down by these two beautiful ideals of successful love and successful work that are at the same time hugely punishing never before in the history of humanity have people expected so much from themselves and from life more broadly and no wonder therefore that we are frequently sometimes disappointed now I've already used the word meaningful in the introduction you heard the word meaningful what on earth does it mean to say that a job or an occupation is meaningful now traditional studies of capitalism tell us that we make money and enter the workforce primarily in order to increase our holdings to increase our power to spend our capacity to be economic agents in the in the economy that's why we work but of course as we know we don't only work for that we work for meaning what does it mean for a job to be meaningful I think that a job becomes meaningful when in some way or other that job leaves you feeling at the end of every day that you have in some ways either helped to reduce the suffering will increase the pleasure of another human being the increase in the satisfaction of others and the decrease in the suffering of others is at the core of what we would describe as a meaningful job so far from always seeking to maximize our economic potential what we're also trying to do is to maximize the capacity for a job to feel meaningful now why do we have such a problem nowadays with jobs not feeling meaningful enough I'm sure you will have lost staff you would have observed people saying I'm quitting and you've tried to give them more money it's not the money that the counts it's somehow a problem of meaning why are so many jobs not meaningful enough according to the Italian 19th century economist vilfredo pareto the modern economy should feel fairly meaningless if it's going right let me explain when you when you are all children what it is they want to do right they'll the kind of jobs that they come up with and the kinds of jobs that we don't dream about when we think of the ideal job tend to have one thing in common see if it tallies up with what what you're thinking in the back of your head I mean everyone's got a sort of dream job it tends to be a job where you see the effort of your Labor's on a sustainable timescale in other words not within 30 years but within you know a few years or even a few months or even a few weeks you see that you have made a difference to somebody else's life and you see it tangibly literally you could see it but you could feel it there is some indicator perhaps you're dealing with another we wants to the school referee was did a survey with people's top meaningful jobs and there was a very high it was a multiple-choice and one of the options we just threw it in was to run a small B&B small bed-and-breakfast that's called the second highest right next to being a doctor what on earth I mean anyone who knows anything about the world of B&B they're not area B&BS knows that it's a nightmare I mean who wants to do that job however as a fantasy job it takes all the boxes because someone comes weary and sad and lonely and they come into your bed and breakfast you give them a bed for the night you transform their health and well-being and off they go the next morning and you have made a difference or another top fantasy people who want to run a bakery right or a cake stand or something where you are taking somebody you're fulfilling a need and sending them off on a short timescale that feels that you are working a transformation now the problem of the modern economy is people are constantly transforming each other's lives but a huge part on an enormous time scale and we tend to be only a tiny cog in a vast machine Pareto argued that the more advanced an economy the more the jobs within it will be keyword specialized now specialization is a wonderful thing Adam Smith was already on to this all economists will tell you that specialization is a wonderful thing when it comes to the productivity of the workforce that's fantastic except for in the area of meaning because if you're very very specialized you don't get a sense of your impact on the lives of other people you are one cog and you are very separated from the end user of your efforts and this leads to so many people by the way you can tell that an advanced economy whenever you go to a party and you say to somebody what do you do and if that person tells you something you don't understand you're an advanced economy in a very basic economy people say I'm a bricklayer I'm a butcher I'm a farmer etc nowadays you know I'm a logistical specialist for the Eastern southeastern reaches of you know what is that and if you don't know it means that economy is very advanced it's fantastic economically and it's a disaster from the point of view of meaning so this is something that we're all up against but I want to take you back to the birth of capitalism in Britain in the early 18th century and let me take you to the work of a man who was a London physician called Bernard Mandeville who wrote a very famous book in some ways it's the key text in modern economics even though it was in Britain as poetry it's a poem in verse about economics and it's called a fable of the bees and it was published in 1723 by Bernard Mandeville and this it's an extraordinary book because basically it is a celebration of superfluous expenditure it is the world's first gleeful celebration of spending money on nonsense right and let me give you a little quote from a bird at Mandeville basically what do you what he tries to point his audience to he was arguing against Christian moralists now Christian moralist we don't think about them much but if you were writing in 1723 they'd be big on your mind now Christian moralist were arguing the big question was how do you help other people okay and the standard Christian answer so how do you help other people and you know the Bible is full of these stories stories told from the pulpit I've repeated this again and again what you do is you take some money and you give it to the poor until you have almost no money left for yourself you give charitably and that is the best way to help people Bernard Mandeville looks at this with a kind of beautifully sarcastic eye and he argues that if you keep doing this you will go bankrupt and anyone you're trying to help won't be helped what you need to do is to go shopping you need to spend money on nonsense new hairdos some exotic snuff from the Indies carpets from Persia ice cream that were being pioneered from France he has a whole long list if we spend as a society more and more of our wealth on nonsense the national wealth the GDP will increase right this is the first observation of the way that it doesn't matter so much what people are spending money on so long as they spend a lot of it and given the fact that we are creatures of appetite we have needs and desires and our desires or appetites are endless and that's fantastic news for capitalism it means that you can rev up the Machine and you can excite people to want all sorts of extraordinary things and Mandeville argues these are the heroes the people who go shopping for nonsense the people who make nonsense these are the people who indirectly are helping the most vulnerable in society in other words the moral basis of capitalism does not depend as many people had previously try to argue on the fulfillment of essential needs capitalism is not the only system to fulfill essential needs however its glory is its ability to excite superfluous needs which generate an enormous surplus with which the poorest and most vulnerable in society can be helped and it's on that basis the capitalism is moral right not on the basis that it directly sells anyone anything they particularly need and therefore anyone who tries to stop luxury and excess is simultaneously hurting the most vulnerable this is a little quote from a Mandeville he says it is the sensual courtier who sets no limits to his luxury the fickle strumpet who invents new fashions every week and the profuse rake and lavish air who most effectively help the poor he that gives most trouble to thousands of his neighbor's and invents the most opa rose manufactures his right all wrong the greatest friend to society mercer's upholsterers tailors and many others would be starved in half a year's time if pride and luxury were at once banished from the nation right so more or less have been arguing he Manville pity's words with care pride and luxury there was an immense moral emphasis on trying to banish pride and banish luxury and here's a guy saying no we need this these are absolutely crucial to the well-being of the country now many economists on D in the 18th century were deeply impressed by this David Hume famously in his essay call of luxury wrote in a nation where there is no demand for superfluities and luxuries men's sink into indolence lose all enjoyment of life and are utterly useless to the public which cannot maintain or support its fleet's its armies and its hospitals right so you need a nonsense economy in order to be able to provide for your fleet and that's pretty important in the 18th century it could provide a fleet your army and your hospitals okay absolutely key who listens to this above all we know his name Adam Smith right Adam Smith comes along and he and it's his debt to Mandeville is often not known but he basically takes the whole lot of the essential argument in Wealth of Nations about the hidden hand of capitalism it's all taken from Mandeville and basically what he argues is if you want to try that the moral basis of capitalism depends on capitalism's ability to turn selfishness and personal greed into something that benefits everyone you don't need to be very nice in capitalism to have a very nice effect on others right and this is a very striking claim but a person we had a chance to discuss it in a minute but but that is the basis of 18th century economics which travels across the Atlantic as absolutely key impact on American 19th century thinking and then becomes the global thoughts so it starts with Mandeville and has now become modern orthodoxy there is one guy who stands out against this in the 18th century he's a Swiss I'm Swiss too and his name is Jean Jacques Rousseau and he's living in Geneva and he has a direct attack on Mandeville and and later on David Hume and then there's a back and forth with Adam Smith as well and basically jean-jacques Rousseau wants to go back to simple times he visits up and sell the Appenzell region of Switzerland and there he sees peasants and he realizes they have only one cloak and often only one cow and only one farming implement and they sleep sometimes under the stars or in a hot and he is amazed and wondrous and he compares this to the luxury of decadent Geneva where he's based and he says we need to famous phrase go back to nature to reacquaint ourselves with the simplicity of our forbearers he looks with admiration to ancient Sparta right and he thinks but the Spartans knew how to live they were manly very important for Rousseau they were manly they fought a lot they had no diseases they lived largely outdoors they wrestled naked they rubbed their bodies with all rusev thought it was terrific and he what any thought that people with wigs and taking snuff and wearing elegant clothing this was decadence and so there's a back and forth with the 18th century economists of mostly the anglo-saxon world and Rousseau is saying let's go back to nature and have a simple life these would nowadays be people who maybe belong to the green movement and say it's decadent to keep spending money etc and he has a big Russo has a big argument with these economists and essentially says to Mandeville and Smith and Hume you're on the way to decadence and corruption and they say back to him you're on the way to starving the poor good luck and this is the exact same argument basically that then morphs into communism versus capitalism in the 20th century that's exactly that argument right what is capitalism good for calories ultimately is not good for producing coca-cola it's good for helping the weakest in society the most vulnerable in a society were more helped by the capitalist system than they were by the communist system interesting little by way Karl Marx writing in middle the 19th century he does his PhD thesis on a Greek philosopher called Epicurus Epicurus is sometimes falsely remembered as it was an adjective epicurean suggesting luxury but Epicurus was really one of the world's first critics of excess spending and he argued that if you know what you really need you don't desire so many things his psychology is based and it later influences even Sigmund Freud that the more you know what you really need the you desire in other words when you start desiring all sorts of things and he thought particularly power and sex and and material goods this is almost always a reflection of the fact you don't know what you really need and what you really need Epicurus thought was three things good to make a list if you're in the mood he thought very touching things first of all you need an analyzed life you need to be able to make time to trace the origins of your emotions to unpack your anxieties and to calm your mind number one absolutely crucial needed the curious was on this way before headspace in the car map the other thing he thought you needed was freedom independence from Authority he was an anti-authoritarian he himself moved out of Athens and started what we were now as days described as the world's first commune living among friends generating enough wealth just to live but not in order to thrive or go and buy luxuries and the third thing I've already mentioned the word friendship friends Epicurus thought that if you're surrounded by friends and if you have time to think and if you're free of authority you're not gonna need all the other stuff the other stuff is symptomatic of a person who doesn't know themselves the more you know yourself the more you're targeting your actual needs the less you will fire fancy things now these are debates that haunt the development of modern capitalism let's stay a little deeper into one particular section which is advertising advertising advertising has got a very bad name an advertising gives capitalism rather a bad name and let me try and explain why a few years ago in the UK there was a very big advertisement for Campari and the tagline was Campari and Friends and it showed groups of very beautiful good-looking healthy-looking people smiling holding hands while drinking this little red drink of Campari and the tagline to say Campari and France now what capitalism wants you to do is to go out and buy lots and lots of Campari thing is you're gonna end up back in your flat with seven crates of Campari very lonely and with no friends and and simply a bit drunk in fact and this is not not going to be any good so by following the advertisement you will end up in in trouble think of a soap advertisement that ran again in the UK a few years ago by so company dove and it showed a woman looking extremely relaxed and calm in a bath and the tagline was dove the route to calm okay now again the problem is you're gonna buy that soap and you're gonna think it's gonna make you calm and it won't it'll make you smell momentarily nicer it will not buy you the peace of mind that incited you to buy that bar of soap just as the Land Rover Group a few years ago brought out a car called Freelander and it showed a huge desert and a guy with a car and it said freedom okay now we all want freedom don't we it's wonderful but that cars it's going to end you up in traffic on conduit Street in the middle of Tuesday afternoon it's not the route to freedom however advertising is so brilliant and beautiful and clever because it knows what we need it just refuses to sell it to us so it's high it clicks on to our genuine needs and it connects these on to a variety of superfluous things and then we end up with the consumer good and not the thing that incited us to buy the thing that we really need and if you want to feel critical of capitalism the argument is we're constantly made to buy things we don't really need we're encouraged to forget the things that we really need and the way in which we solve the things that we don't need is through a skillful dangling in front of us of our genuine needs which are not for sale and therefore the whole thing is a scam now I don't necessarily want to go there I think there are optimistic routes that we can have but you know you might disagree but look you know let's think about Abraham Maslow and its famous pyramid of needs and this is an optimistic pyramid for capitalism you know you REM how it goes down at the bottom needs for food shelter the basic needs and at the top the more spiritual needs for belonging for a self-actualization for self-realization for meaning we would say for purpose okay now if you try to map the modern economy onto that triangle what do you get if you're trying to map let's say the you know footsie 100 index in UK of companies onto that pyramid where does everything cluster of course at the bottom right most of the world's largest corporations are almost universally down at the bottom of the pyramid in other words a Martian who came down to earth and had been given a basic manual on human functioning would be astonished that our largest corporation which really means what most of us get up and do every day is spent fulfilling our very basic needs whereas the higher needs which are really the ones that we crave once those basic needs have been fulfilled are left unattended largely in the hands of gurus charlatans inspirational figures you know the odd poet the odd singer the odd whatever but these things are not benefiting from what the Industrial Revolution tortoise which is the large cohorts of people acting in concert with the disciplines of you know a financial system produce amazing results under a common brand okay so these higher needs are outside of capitalism as currently conceived here's the hopeful bit I believe that we're gonna get better at this then if you look over the next hundred years we are going to get corporations moving up the pyramid but we are going to get billion-dollar companies who are able to fulfill some of our higher needs in other words the swindle that we've been operating under that somehow higher needs are outside of Commerce to be dangled in fancy advertisements but never actually sold to us this very sharp distinction between the useless things we desire that we spend our money on but they don't really bring us their satisfaction and the things what we really need but that are not really for sale that distinction could disappear for all sorts of reasons I know some of you in the tech world it could be fashionable to mention tech at this point but I do believe the technology gives us the ability for the first time to get inside our minds not merely to stay outside the body but to get inside our minds and to create products and services that properly start to understand some of our higher needs I'm no fan of Facebook particular but I do notice that it is the first said over a hundred billion dollars company that is exploiting one of the key elements at the top of Maslow's pyramid of needs directly not in the way that Campari does but directly in other words friendship and community it may not do it well it may be selling as Russian politicians along the way etc but it is having a go at the top bit of the pyramid which is very fascinating because never before has any systematic large organization had a go at that you know sometimes people say well surely we've got everything we need in in in modern capitalism surely we've exploited all are genuine needs and therefore what we need to do ticket given the environmental crisis we're facing is the rollback habit isn't quieten down on these we surely have got enough fridges and computers etc capitalism is only just getting going in 400 years time we'll look back as we look back another 400 years and feel sorry for people who didn't have dental floss or the ability to travel with the ability to send email and we feel sorry for these people so - we will feel sorry and so to our forebearers will will feel very sorry for some of the things that we had to endure where are these opportunities going to come like if you want to look at the future of capitalism or any of you looking for a business idea we're looking for a business idea here's a quick way to think about what's still missing right what's still missing think of an average day and try to imagine everything that is missing in that average day and whenever you find something missing jot it down that's a new business probably billion dollar business waiting to be born so you get up in the morning and you're a little hungry so you go down to the kitchen and you open the cupboard doors and you've got 16 types of cereal is there a problem there no there's no problem there humanity has cracked the pane of cereal lack right so please don't anyone go into the cereal business alright we have solved that one we've cracked it okay but there's lots and lots of things maybe you're with your partner and you're sitting there eating your cereal but there's something that they said that sounds a little sarcastic a little odd a little somehow passive-aggressive you can't analyze it and you feel the stuff what do you do who do you call what's that what's that large billion-dollar company that you call in order to try and understand the slight passive-aggression or the slight resentment that is in your back there's no one there's no one you can't call anyone so this is one of them maybe it's only maybe 8:30 in the morning and already you've got a massive problem and there's no corporation out there to solve it okay that's a business opportunity who's going to solve passive aggression between couples that is a huge opportunity it's far more important than mobility it's far more important than breakfast cereal but it's unattended why we don't yet have the full range of insights we're on the cusp of it you know we're on the cub neuroscience is on the cusp of it psychology on the cusp of it but we haven't yet to have people organizing it so and honor on it were only 8:30 but it would go on there are so many things you know made by 11 o'clock your feeling that your job though enjoyable is somehow not tapping into your deepest talents who do you call you don't know you don't know who to call now call the school of life but it's too small when your call right so as yet there is still so many needs at the top of that pyramid that are lying outside of capitalism we need to get to grips with them we need to eradicate that tension that the 18th century philosophers opened up between a horrible choice between either you're gonna help the poor by selling nonsense stuff ice cream puff pastry cakes that no one needs etc right either you do that or you're gonna let the poor staff so either capitalism has to be essentially meaningless but very good for the poor or you focus on economy of morality and economy of virtue in which you're only focusing on what you strictly need or which one everyone goes bankrupt everyone is only one cloak and it's mass starvation in East Germany in 1950 right that should not be the choice in front of us there should be a way of harnessing the curiosity and the energy and the inventiveness of capitalism towards solving our genuine problems our problems around meaning and purpose and that ladies gentlemen is the challenge for you over to you thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Founders Pledge

Views: 194,517

Rating: 4.9096045 out of 5

Keywords: Alain de Botton, School of Life, Philospohy, How to choose a job, Career advise, startups, technology, finding meaning, meaningful technology, emotionally intelligent technology, consolations of philosophy, anxiety, pressure around work, entrepreneurship, work, speech, presentation, live

Id: NZLvjleeR0U

Length: 26min 31sec (1591 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 29 2019