March 8, 2017 • 39 mins
Modern day philosopher Alain de Botton has become world renown for his ability to provide compelling real world answers to some of life’s biggest questions. For this episode of The Psychology Podcast, we cover the philosophy and science of a range of topics, including what it means to have a “normal” relationship, the origins of the desire for religion, the pervasive lack of systematic thinking about happiness, how the illusion of perfection creates problems, existential crises and much more. We get a bit cheeky with a high brow discussion of the human condition. Fair warning that this episode does include some discussion of sex and pornography as they relate to well-being.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello and welcome to the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott
Barry Kaufman, where we give you insights into the mind, brain,
behavior and creativity. Each episode will feature a new guest
who will stimulate your mind and give you a greater
understanding of yourself, others, and the world we live in.
Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into human possibility. Thanks
for listening and enjoy the podcast. So today I'm really
(00:40):
excited to have Alan de Bautan on the show. Alan
is a writer of essayistic books that have been described
as a philosophy of modern life. He's written on love, travel, architecture,
and literature. His books have been bestsellers in thirty countries.
Alan also started and helps to run a school in
London called The School of Life, dedicated to a new
vision of education. Alan's latest book is The Course of
(01:02):
Love and Meditation on Modern Relationships. Thanks for chatting with
me today, Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Well,
I don't even know where to begin with someone like you.
The topics you study are about as striking to the
core of human existence as possible. Like you don't really
mess around, do you? Like? Oh, I'm going to do
you know, study like this one archaic philosophical idea and
(01:24):
nitpick it to death. Instead, you're like, I'm going to
pick the grandest questions of human existence and give people
insight into them. Yeah, that's a nice way of putting it.
I mean, I guess I feel that we're all short
of time, and I'm quite practical guy, and I want
the questions that I look at to have real world applications,
and they often come in me from pretty urgent questions
(01:48):
that I'm wrestling with. You know, I'm trying to understand myself,
the people around me, the world I see around me,
and there tends to be often a problem that I
want to try and solve. You know, why is this
thing so painful? Why is this so confusing? Why? Is
dangerously vague. It's the opposite of an academic exercise. So
even though I deal with a lot of material that
academics deal with, my emotional motivations are entirely different. I am,
(02:13):
you know, putting myself and humanity and the planet on
the couch and I'm out for answers. So that explains
a lot of the way in which I go about
my work. You know, I'll not spend too long on
one topic, I'll rove around, I'll keep it focused, I'll
keep the main question in view pretty much all the time.
That sort of thing. Sure, that makes a lot of sense.
(02:35):
But what were you like as a kid. Did you
used to sit in your bed at like age ten
and think about death religion? Not at all. But what
I did used to do was to tidy things up.
I was a kind of tidy kid and a builder kid,
So I love nothing better. I was had a huge
imagination and was always building worlds out of lego, and
(02:55):
I love lining up the trees in precise symmetry and
writing books where you know, everything was kind of neatly
laid out. And I think for me it was a
way of controlling anxiety. And as I look back on it,
and I think that it grew out of that that
I became interested in ideas, and I saw ideas and
the life of the mind as the ultimate way of
(03:16):
arranging trees in a neat row. I really resonate with that. Actually,
I wonder if it has anything to do with OCD. Probably,
I mean, sure, why not? You know, I think you
can sort of divide humanity by what people do with
their anxiety. After all, we all carry a lot of
anxiety with us. What are you going to do with it?
You know? Do you take it on the stage, Do
(03:36):
you go jogging with it? Do you get drunk with it?
Do you sing it out? You know? What do you
try and do? And for me, mastering things intellectually is
my way of dealing with anxiety. So it's really not
coming from any particularly noble or you know, pure place.
It's a survival strategy. It's a way of dealing with
a kind of mental disorder. You know. Yeah, I think
(03:59):
I really the way you put that. So before we
get to things like sex and religion, and I would
like to start with Love. That is your most recent book,
and I really did find it to be quite profound,
you know, per capita sort of thing, Like every page
was like a new insight that I got about human nature.
And what perplexed me about that is that, I you know,
(04:22):
I'm a psychologist. I'm a scientist. I've studied I wrote
a book on the science of well sex of meeting.
But I reviewed that literature and love, and I thought
I understood the science of love. I read your book
and it just really gave me such profound insights. How
can your sort of writing and the kind of evidence
that you bring to bear on the topic and insights?
How's it given me so many more insights than I've
(04:44):
gotten from being one hundred peer of your journal articles.
Well that's very moving and touching. What you say. Well,
I mean it, I do mean it. Yeah, Well, I mean, look,
I think at the end of the day, your job
is much harder than mine because I can go off
and just have theories and h pothesies, and I don't
need to test them tall stringently. I just need to
(05:05):
you know, float them. And the ultimate sense of you know,
approval is going to be whether they ring a bell
with the reader. But we don't have to do, you know,
peer reviewed tests. So in a way, philosophers and writers
and essayists have this kind of freedom to run ahead
of science. And you know, I like the view that
essentially science always catches up because of the burden of
(05:29):
proof that scientists put upon themselves. Thank god. It means
that sometimes you know, we look sometimes you know, I'm
shure this hame to you. You'll read a paper by
a psychologist and an aspect of love, and you'll think, huh,
I knew that already, but you won't think that. But
for some people might think that, to which the answer is, well,
of course, you know it felt true already, but the
(05:50):
point of the experiment was to prove it beyond certain,
to actually properly prove it. And I don't need to
do that, so I can use very kind of fly
by night techniques. I can use myself as my first
and only test case, you know, so I can just
go into my own heart and soul and fish things
(06:11):
out and try them out. That's a kind of freedom,
sort of the irresponsibility of the creative writer next to
the scientists, which is from where you're staying, I canly imagine,
you know, both liberating and a bit madden. Then you
kind of think, oh, what are these guys, you know,
having all the fun, but you know, there's a price
on every side. I appreciate that. But this idea that
(06:32):
sciences catches up with what we have known, what you know, literature,
these common themes that are in literature and poetry and
philosophy thousands and thousands of years. It's almost like who
are science is to think that, you know, we'll ascertain
the truth in one generation. Almost like, maybe we need
to be more humble as scientists when we read poetry
or great literature that have these themes because the themes, look,
(06:54):
I mean, let's be honest, the themes obviously, the themes
in the Course of Love are new. But you know,
what I think is so interesting about and what I
really tugs at my heartstrings when I read this story
of this couple that forms the main narrative of your
book is just how relatable. It's almost like you've identified
this like temp you call it the chorus of love,
but it's like a template that is in our DNA
(07:16):
that almost like we as humans were kind of like
destined to unfold. It's like destined to unfold. But when
we're in it, we don't have that perspective to really
see it that way, do we. Yeah, I mean, look,
you know, maybe another way of looking at it is
to say that it's not just what you say, it's
how you say it. And you know, I came from
an academic background, and I was always struck by the
(07:36):
way in which you know, it seemed to me that
there were great truths in a lot of academic books,
but they weren't getting out there. They weren't hitting home
because of the way they were expressed. And in a way,
that scene is an incidental issue by most scientists, definitely,
but even by many scholars in the humanities. You know,
the line is, it doesn't really matter how you're putting
it down, so long as the idea is solid, that's
(07:59):
what matters. But of course the audience is emotional and
is responding with their senses. And in a way it
strikes me as a communicator, you've got to make sure
not just that what you're saying is correct, but that
it's delivered in a form which will hit home and seduce,
you know. And that's the word seduction is kind of
(08:19):
a word that's under suspicion in a way. It seems
like you would only ever try to seduce with a falsehood,
But of course you can also try to seduce with
the truth, just as importantly. And I guess what I
try to do with this book. You know, it's interesting
you mentioned that it's not a psychological treatise. I could
have written it as a psychological treatse. I could have
written it as an essay. It seemed to be important
(08:40):
to write it as a novel so that it could
have an emotional impact on the reader, so that there
wouldn't be a need to you know, tick various you
know boxes that are company nonfiction and that what could
just get sort of straight to the point. And so
you know, often as a writer, I'm asking, what's the
book book four? What's it really trying to do? And
(09:01):
I guess, you know, I don't see myself as a scientist,
so I'm not in that game. So really I'm in
the game of trying to make the ordinary reader think
and feel. And I've succeeded if I've done that. So
it's just I guess it's just sort of underlying priorities, really,
and I think we often don't think enough as writers
(09:22):
about what our implicit or explicit goals are with our work.
And so, you know, maybe the historian has been laboring
for twenty years on a large tone might think, oh,
why is my book not in the best seller list,
to which my answer would be, well, did you really
want it to be? Really? Really, is that really what
you were doing? And they might after a moment of
reflection and think, well, actually, maybe not really, So you
(09:44):
can it's good to clarify ultimately what you're trying to
do with work. I think it's a really great point,
and I'd like to let's use an example. You know,
John Alaia wrote a book about love recently. There was
supposed to be kind of like the latest scientific Summary
of love. But the major ricism of that book was,
you know that it wasn't I didn't tuget anyone's heart,
made it made love dry. I mean, there is a
(10:06):
particular danger of sounding dry right around love. And there's
also you know, because moments of love are moments when
we encounter our own irrationality most intensely, there can be
something a little grating about a you know, from thirty
thousand feet view of the dynamics of the heart that
(10:26):
doesn't in any way acknowledge that this is a sort
of you know, folly that befalls us all. And I think,
you know, it's just almost a rhetorical move that if
one allows oneself to as the creator, to admit that
one's kind of crazy with everybody else, you know, along
with this, it can just create a very useful feeling
of identification. So yeah, that's a very clear thing I
(10:51):
got from your book, is that we're all crazy that
the love is picking the best of the most suffering options, right, Yes,
I mean, look, I'm strung by the way. You know,
when I was younger, I'd see lots of relationship problems around,
but there was a lot of hope always in me
and in other people that you know, it would just
take a little bit of time to sort itself out.
And obviously, the generation of one's parents, I mean they
(11:13):
were crazy, but then they were old, so obviously they
were kind of crazy, like like old cars and went
very good, and so old people weren't very good. So
you know, we were the modern people, and so you know,
what we needed to do ultimately was find the right person,
and then soon as we found the right person, then
things would fall into place. And then, of course, like
every generation, what you discover is hut's a little bit
more complicated. And the conclusion is that there really doesn't
(11:35):
seem to be anyone having a normal relationship out there.
So we've got this idea of what a normal relationship is.
It's a very strong idea, marked by mutual respect, satisfying sex, life,
you know, great passion, forgiveness, all these things, and we
have it in our minds. And yet you know, you
hunt for it in vain, and at the end of
the day, you know, that has to force the kind
(11:57):
of reflection on our hopes. And so, you know, I've
come to the conclusion that really everyone is unbalanced in
one way or another. It's not a question that somebody
is not unbalanced, they just all are. That the human
makeup is, you know, really quite perverted. And you know,
when I was thinking about religion, I've read quite a
lot of stuff by Saint Augustine, and Augustinism starts with
(12:20):
this unusual idea that we are all sinners, and you know,
we've been marked since the time of our births by
original sin Now I'm a totally secular Jew and at
the standard at first completely very eccentric, but in a
way it's a very warm hearted philosophy because ultimately it says, look,
it's not just you, frankly, it's all of us. All
(12:42):
of us are a bit broken in one way or another.
We will have all have come through the gauntlet of childhood,
We'll all been navigating our emotional lives with quite a
lot of trouble, quite a lot of baggage. And so
the issue isn't to try and aim for perfection but
to try and understand imperfection and within a couple, explain
it to one in a way that is comprehensible, is
(13:03):
not offensive, and is early enough, comes early enough in
the relationship or particular moments as not to cause you know,
lasting damage, because human beings can forgive each other a
huge amount. I think, so long as it's explained in
a certain way. You know, if you arrive on a
date and say, well, I'm perfect, and I hope you're
perfect too, you know you'll be in for trouble. But
if two people say, look, obviously I'm kind of crazy,
(13:25):
you're kind of crazy too, I think that was a given,
and you know, in what way are you crazy? I'm
going to come on to me in a minute, But
you know what about you that's an excellent starting point
for a more realistic and you know, properly ambitious relationship.
I completely agree. I think that. I love that you
call out things about us humans that are It's like
(13:47):
you're like calling it, you know what I mean? I
like it. But let me play Devil's advocate for a second.
So I've done some research on attachment styles, and you
talk about attachment styles in the book In Kind of
your penultimate chapter or so. Could it be I'm just
a person thing out there, and then just tell me
if I'm right or wrong. Could it be that your
book really is the course of love parentheses when you
have a couple that's avoidant insecure, Do you see what
(14:10):
I'm saying? Could it be that your book is really
just the course of love a particular combination of attachment styles,
because when you actually look at secure secure, they actually
don't really have that as much drama as you think. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely,
I mean attachment theory is a big underlying part of this.
At the same time, I'd say you'll know much better
(14:31):
than me about how much secure, secure love there is
out there. I guess I don't see too much of
it around if there is, you know. I mean, look,
I do make a claim that this is an ordinary relationship.
I think, you know, avoidant and anxious still qualifies as
normal enough. So it's maybe I'm looking at a relationship
(14:52):
that is an everyday neurotic relationship that is not, you know, dramatic,
but that you know, it's not totally healthy. And I
guess I wanted to write a book that I wanted
to focus on a couple where things are not brilliant,
but they're not terrible. They are you know, interestingly and
you know, almost in a banal way tricky. And I
wanted to tease out the issues that and you did that.
(15:14):
I want to make a very clear you did a
very good job of that. And I might even sure
what I said is true. I wanted to throw it
out there, and I just want to throw that idea
out there because you know, it's funny. A lot of
people with like avoidant or anxious attachment style will report,
you know, being very uncomfortable around secure attachment style individuals
if they're in a relationship. It's like very far into them,
you know. Yes, I mean I think I find that fascinating.
(15:36):
I find it fascinating how people will say things like,
you know, I went on a date with so and so,
and you know, they're great, and you know they're they're
really you know, good looking. But I just felt and
the language is interesting, you know that people say things
I'm you know, I felt they were a bit boring,
And that word boring is often used to explain health, yes,
like exactly who were not very healthy emotionally or less healthy.
(16:00):
And I think the way, it's it's true. I mean,
you know, maybe that's a correct word boring, but it's
a lovely kind of boring. It's it's like Switzerland is boring. Yeah, great,
and we want more of that, especially US Americans right now.
But here's the thing, like that's almost the conclusion of
your book, is that, like these two individuals with these
(16:21):
attachment they went through this counseling and they almost like
the thing that's kind of saved the relationship in a sense,
or that I think, not that they were really seriously
I don't think seriously on the verge of divorce. But
the thing that really kind of contented them, I should say,
is kind of moving towards more of a secure attachment style. Yes,
I mean, ultimately, what saved them, I think is a
kind of understanding, and understanding requires, you know, a drop
(16:45):
in levels of anxiety, an increase in safety. You know,
they gradually acquired the courage to sort of face up
to how tricky they were, how their own first responses
were really pretty unhelpful, or how their analysis of what
the other one was doing was involving them in some
(17:06):
pretty bad patterns of behavior. So I don't think they
you know. Look, I think it's enormous progress. If someone
can go, look, I have a tendency to feel quite abandoned,
and when I do, I get quite controlling. If somebody
can know that about themselves, oh my god, that's an advantage.
Or if somebody can go when I feel hurt, I
(17:27):
just want to be alone and not tell anyone what
the problem is. Again, if you know that, if that
information is circulating within the relationship, it is the most
romantic thing in a way, to be able to give
someone a present, to give your lover, the present of
an insight into your own flaws, that is an enormous gift. Absolutely,
(17:48):
And you do talk about how intimacy, real intimacy, real
love really comes. It's almost like a linear correlation with
how much you feel like you're under fully understood by
the other person or accept did yes and understood any
that's right. And the problem is that we're always, of course,
so hard on the other person's you know, bad behavior,
(18:12):
and what we call bad behavior is you know, usually
a kind of trauma, a kind of immaturity. But both
parties tend to be so ungenerous towards each other's frail
teams that what could be a journey of growth becomes
stuck in a cycle of complaints. And you know, it's
heartbreaking because so often arguments between couples, for example, are
(18:33):
desperate attempts by two people to teach each other things
about each other, things that are very legitimate and quite sensible,
but the way in which the lesson is delivered is
so hysterical, so mad, so doomed to failure, that you know,
you end up in kind of cycles of nagging on
one part, shirking on the other, and that sort of thing. Yes,
(18:56):
I mean, look, I have a slightly tragic view of life.
I think that there are some very dark things right
at the center of existence, starting with the fact that
we're going to die at a time not of our own,
choosing in a manner of potential, you know, calamity and horror,
and that our loved ones are always at risk. You know,
that's just the kind of starting point. And then on
(19:17):
top of that, you add, we've got very little understanding
of ourselves. We're forced to make big decisions way before
we really have the data necessary. We have to choose
a job, a vocation, a lover in situations of real vagueness,
and uncertainty, so we make lots and lots of wrong
choices naturally inevitably, and on and on it goes. We're
(19:39):
you know, we're fragile human beings. We're trying to navigate
with this faulty walnut between our ears, and we've got
only that to interpret everything reality, and it's you know,
it's a very flawed instrument. Speak for yourself, Speak for yourself, absolutely.
And what's more, it's an instrument that has a really
hard time recognizing that it is flawed. It thinks it's
(20:01):
giving us accurate and accurate picture of reality, and yet
it actually is constantly you know, So we'll go you know, no,
it's all your fault. Way before we realize, hey, my
blood sugar is much too low. You know, we'll have
a very well worked out hypothesis about why it's you know,
what is going on, you know, irrespective of reality, which
is incidentally speaking to you as a scientist. You know
(20:24):
why science is such an amazing piece of emotional maturity,
you know, way before it's anything else. It's a kind
of it represents the discovery and the development of the
scientific method, is the kind of maturity of the human mind.
Because it requires so many things that don't really come
naturally to us. The capacity to admit that we're wrong,
(20:45):
the capacity to accept reality even when it's very unpleasant,
the patience required, et cetera, et cetera. I couldn't agree more.
Have you writ any of irv Alum's work? No, No,
you create this feel I think you would resonate with
it a lot. He created this field, a big part
of the field, existential psychotherapy. He wrote the text, the
(21:06):
main textbook on the outlines the givens of existence in
the introduction, and basically, I mean that's he starts with,
you know, these existential facts as the starting base for psychotherapy.
So it's really cool, interesting, very interesting. So tell me
more about your academic background then, well, I mean, when
I was a young guy, I dreamt of being a
(21:27):
professor of something, and I loved the idea belonging to university.
This is when I was like seventeen or something, and
I loved the idea. And then I studied at Cambridge.
I did a history degree, which was really a history
of ideas and it was sort of fulfilling. And then
I'm bought on various misshaping PhDs and gave them up,
and I realized ultimately that my mind was not going
(21:50):
to fit in with the kind of academic demands. But
I loved You know, there's a broad sway that people,
I'm sure you've come across them, who'll say things like,
you know, there'll be twenty two, there'll be good students,
they'll be curious about the world, they'll be curious about themselves,
and they won't know what to do with their lives
because they've loved the kind of material they've studied as undergraduates.
(22:11):
But they can see what academics doing for their whole
lives and that's not quite right. And then at that
point they sometimes think of becoming journalists or whatever, and
they are I know, this tribe. They write to me
every day asking me what they should do, and you know,
I feel for them, and there isn't thank you. There
isn't really necessarily a place there should be. You know,
in past ages those people might have joined the church maybe,
(22:34):
But today they start podcasts. They start podcasts, or they
become like a therapist, or they try a bit of
this and a bit of that, and you know, maybe
that's fine. That's the liberation of our times. In a way.
But that's where I was, certainly, and you know, I
felt my way towards doing what I do now, But
it was I think I was in an agony of
anxiety pretty much every day in my twenties, just questioning
(22:57):
what I was doing, feeling very very isolated, writing books,
but outside of any structure, just it was a horrible
time in many ways. Yeah, I totally resonate with a
lot of what you're saying. There's many things I would
have to talk to about it, and I want to
be respective of your time. So let's move on to sex.
Is that okay? Can we talk about sex? Yeah? So
(23:17):
you make this interesting argument in one of your books
about sex, saying that it's really we're kind of thinking
about it in the wrong way. Is that right? Look,
I think one of the things that's missed is, you know,
Freud made this move where he taught us to think
that a lot of things that seemed quite innocent were
in fact quite sexual, that the sex motive was kind
(23:37):
of everywhere, and that kind of invigorated and frightened a
lot of people. I make it a way a sort
of different claim. What's the opposite claim, which is that
a lot of sex looks like it's about sex, but
it's out of fact not, It's about everything else that
we care about in life. And that you know, if
you analyze a lot of the pleasure of sex, a
lot of it is very continuous with our pleasure in
(23:59):
others areas. So we don't become somebody completely different in sex.
We're exploring our interests, our desires, our longings in other ways.
And so you know, for example, I look at kind
of lingus, what is that? Like? What the hell you know?
Why does that exist? Obviously, you know, darwinists that a
slightly hard time understanding what it is. Might do turtles
(24:22):
not do come the lingus? I don't know, maybe maybe,
But you know, the way I analyze it, along with
other things, is it's all about trust. In other words,
here is this pretty far out so called inverted com
is a disgusting thing that the people are doing, but
it symbolizes an unbelievable degree of acceptance. So the normal
(24:43):
dichotomy that we suffer so much from between dirty and clean,
you know, and who is a good boy and a
good girl and all that that is kind of erased
in oral sex, where suddenly everything about a person is
deemed acceptable, and that involves an enormous kind of increase
(25:03):
in pleasure and satisfaction, which is not really a kind
of a sensory pleasure, it's a psychological pleasure. It's, oh
my god, this really is acceptance. You know, this really
is a little moment of paradise because of what it symbolizes.
And so I think, you know, similarly, kissing, you know
what is kissing about? I mean, kissing is not that
fun looked at purely sensorily. It's the idea of privacy
(25:26):
that somebody has allowed us into the most private zone.
And it's an idea of acceptance. So it's that sort
of thing that I like to locate in sex. Similarly,
take another thing, take the idea of being able to
be quite rough with a lover again, Like, what's that doing?
What's that again? That's to do with trust. In most
of life, we've got to be so gentle, so careful
(25:48):
around other people. We've got to withhold our aggressive impulses.
Imagine again the feeling of a trust and of mutual
loyalty that's built up, and one person can say something
very so called add to another can behave in a
rougher way with them that is normally allowed. So all
of these things deliver psychological pleasures via a physical medium. Wow,
(26:11):
that's really a great, a great insight. And yeah, I
just like to think about, you know, contrasts with other animals.
You know, once evolutionary psychologists study mating. I think that
that's left out. I really do think what you're describing
is left out of a lot of the evolutionary psychology
accounts of human meaning. Although David Buss do this interesting
paper where he outlines like over one hundred reasons why
(26:31):
humans have sex, and he did fight male and female
differences sex differences, but nevertheless, there's quite a bit of
overlap and variability. The point there is variability that you
don't see in other animals because of the psychological dimension.
So I just love that you, I really do love
you brought that up. You do talk about pornography in
your book. I want to say, I heard a rumor
yesterday actually that you are creating a pornography site. Is
(26:55):
that correct? Well, the school of life that I run,
we yes, we did a pornography site called porn as
therapy dot com. I tell you the starting point. The
starting point was so we run a psychotherapy division at
the School of Life, and we started to see an
unbelievable amount of people coming through where pornography was an
issue in a couple or an individual life addiction, et cetera,
(27:17):
et cetera. And so you know, what do you do
about that? So one of you is pornography is fine,
it is actually no problem with it. It's great, just
leave it be. And the other view is it's terrible,
ban it, block it, censor it, et cetera. And neither
the impulse seemed particularly great, And so we were just
trying to think about an answer, and I guess our
feeling was the things that are wrong with pornography is
(27:39):
that pornography excites the sexual impulse in ways that are
then quite unhelpful to the rest of life. It disconnects
sex from other things, other responses, patterns of thinking, ways
of looking at the world that are then quite important.
It cuts it off from communion with another person with intelligence,
with sensitivity, et cetera, et cetera. And so we just
(28:00):
wanted to kind of recontextualize sexuality in pornograpy and make
a slightly different kind of pornography which has nothing to
do with it being light or it can still be
quite extreme. In fact, some of the we basically we
worked with a porn photographer and some actors and just
shop a variety of scenarios as still images. What we
like to do a life is not just theorized, but
also inact and demonstrate. And so we were just trying
(28:23):
to say, what would it be like to think of
a better kind of pornography to try and correct some
of the problems that we see in existing pornography. Not
to ban it or escape it or run away from it,
but to try and somehow work with the impulse that
we have and train it in a kind of more
fruitful direction. I mean, as a positive psychologist, I can
say that's a topic that has never really been studied scientifically.
(28:45):
Is the extent to its porn can increase well being?
It's a tricky thing, but I mean, of course it can.
It must be. You know, look, most people, we know
that it's an enormous release from anxiety. I mean that's why,
like anything that's a essentially the root of the addiction
is in the capacity to release anxiety. So you know,
(29:06):
it can be so good at doing that that it
then becomes a problem in itself, but it must have
that role. And also I think, you know, to be
benevolent towards it. You know, our relationships are incredibly burdened
by emotional consequences, by feelings of responsibility, of duty, by
feelings of guilt. And I think that pornography for men
(29:27):
and women can be an encounter with a kind of
guilt and responsibility free moment of sexuality, and that has
a role to play perhaps in a life. Sure it
could also of course have darker, sort of not as
conducive elements as well. So I guess it's just like
humans as well. We're very complex people. Sure, and I
(29:49):
think it's look oddly, it's not received that much creative attention,
you know, given the fact that this enormous industry, you know,
it's probably fifty percent of the Internet. Maybe I'm exact rating,
but it's an enormous proportion. You know, it deserves ongoing
serious thought. I mean, there are few people doing this,
and you know, we wanted to, We wanted to join
in that debate and that investigation. Well, from an intellectual perspective,
(30:11):
I had to say, it's extremely interesting you have porn
as a cure for a willingliness, authority, seriousness, responsibility. I mean,
these are topics that I appreciate you're doing this. These
are topics that probably could get a lot more scientific
attention than it currently does. So I think that's great,
sounds good. So let's move on to religion. Yeah, you
argue that there's kind of this middle we kind of
(30:31):
put up this perifrication of an argument that the religion
is either all nonsense or it's all not nonsense, that
it's all true sort of thing. And you say, you
call us a quote boring debate. Is that right? Yeah,
I mean it's boring for me, and I think it
ultimately doesn't get to the root of the problem. The
really interesting topic is where the hell does this come
from inside human nature? You know, where does the impulse
(30:52):
to believe come from? I take it as a fact,
and for granted that the whole thing's not true, but
it's deeply emotionally true. You know, so long after we've
you know, discounted the idea that that there may be
a father in the sky, I want to think about
that longing for a father. And I think this is
why the debate with atheism is so sterile because atheists
will spend their time going, oh no, and there is
(31:14):
no God and you know, by the way, there is
no angel, et cetera. And I think only you're fine,
you know there is actual But I want to go
onto the other question, which is, why did we invent angels,
Why did we invent sacred days, why did we invent
you know, feasts of atonement, et cetera. Where does this
stuff come from inside of us? And also where's it
gone now in a secular culture? So those are the
themes that interest me. Yeah, and then sort of what
(31:37):
are the secular themes of religion that everyone would benefit from?
You know, we're studying this topic are in our lab
you know, awe, and it seems to be that seems
to be like the friendly the religion for a seculars
you know, is odd, do you know what I mean?
I think that's right. It's a very well, it's a
very good work. Good first it's sort of something that
(31:57):
everybody can agree on without getting from of it. It's like, oh, yeah,
you know, I went to walk in the Arizona desert
and felt or you know, so yes, it's it seems
like a very useful starting point. Yeah, and I love
you know, your book about religion, Friligion for Atheists, how
you talk about all these benefits of religion like building
u since community, making relationships, last, overcoming the feelings of
(32:17):
envy and inadequacy, et cetera, et cetera. I always like
to look for broader themes in my guests, you know,
writings and things and and it really, you know, a
lot of these things you're talking about are really lie
at the heart of human existence also really contribute to
well being. You know, religion, sex, you are you, Sex
in a lot of ways can contribute to well being
in ways we don't think about love. All these things
are simultaneously complicated and also conducive to well being. So
(32:41):
that leads to the last topic today, happiness. You know,
you have also written specifically about the architecture of happiness.
And is there some way, you know, something we can
kind of end on. We can talk about what would
be the best way to architect society so that these
a lot of these things which are taboo. You talk
about a lot of things that are taboo, or a
lot of things that bring us pain in life can
(33:02):
also bring us the greatest joy. Well, I think that
we are not systematic enough in our search for happiness. So,
you know, we tend to believe that we're you know,
we're all out for our own happiness, and we're you know,
we're doing everything we can, and we sometimes feel a
bit guilty that we're only out for ourselves. But I
think we're you know, we're surprisingly slack in the way
we go about it. You know, philosophy begins in ancient
(33:25):
Greece with the idea that our impulses are probably wrong
and that we need to submit to them to reason.
And I think that you know, take our two leading
impulses around love and around work. So we want fulfilling
work and we want fulfilling relationships. But the way we
go about trying to find fulfilling work and fulfilling relationships
is incredibly haphazard. You know, we don't this thinks systematically
(33:48):
about you know, our psychees, the choices between us, et cetera.
And therefore we get it wrong. And life's very short
and we make big, big, big, big mistakes. And I
think that you know, progress is all about trying to
increase the amount of kind of reliable data on which
people are basing their big life decisions on and it's
(34:09):
sort of heartbreaking in a way when you think about
how alone people are with their romantic lives, with their
career choices. Despite all the chat et cetera. You know,
we're still quite alone. And you know, one of the
things I've tried to do with my books and also
with this organization I set up called the School of Life,
is to try and give a kind of first port
(34:30):
of call for you know, a lot of the hurdles
that we're going to hit in our lives. These are
unashamedly first world problems. In other words, they are the
problems that you have when food and shelter have been
taken care of. Now, most of the planets still struggling
with those, but you know, most of the United States
and Western Europe has you know, has passed that stage.
But we are still in the age of unbelievable emotional confusion,
(34:53):
which spills out into politics. You know, what we call
politics is really just you know, emotional life, you know,
evaporate it and concentrated over a you know, over the
whole land mass. But it's the same dynamics. And and
here we're, yeah, we're pretty confused, and I see it
as my kind of life's work to just try and
figure out a few insights in this area. I love it,
(35:15):
and do you There's a quote you say, furnishing your
life is an art. Yes, where I said that or how?
But that's how familiares No. I don't know. But I've
said a number of things at the moment that over
the years that I don't really can't really remember them.
But do you agree with it? I do you agree
with that? I'm not sure what it means. Maybe it
(35:37):
was part of a longer sentence, is the beginning I've left.
But look, I think that what we can try and
do is, you know, create a sharper beam of consciousness
over lots of parts of our mind. You know, most
of our mind are sunk in darkness. This is the
original idea of the sort of the mind as a
dark cave. Mostly it is a dark cave, and we
(35:59):
need as much which is possible to kind of shine
the light of reason. But we also need a great modesty.
This is where humor comes in. Humor is deeply important
because it's the most gracious acknowledgment we can make of
our incapacity, of our flaws, of our difficult sides, et cetera.
So you know, a sincere and ambitious life is never
(36:20):
going to be far from a joke, because you know,
that's all we've been, Allie. You know, we haven't been
allowed to understand very much. We can't understand very much. Mostly.
You know, there's that old expression God love that man
thinks God laughs. In other words, you know, man's thoughts
are kind of, you know, very petty things when looked
(36:40):
at from a sufficient height. It's so true, and your
work does allows us to get out of that perspective.
I just want to follow for a second. Isn't the
subtitle of the book, The Architecture of Happiness though the
Secret Art of Furnishing Your Life? Isn't that your subtitle?
It may have been added on by my then naughty
American publisher. Oh no, I think it may have. It
(37:01):
may have. I think it's not a title I like
or what have identified with. So I know that sounds weird,
but you know, authors are fragile beings twisted by the
corporate machine who whack on all sorts of things. Look Ultimately,
the book The Architecture of Happiness is not about happiness
per se. It's about the dependence of our moods on
(37:24):
our physical environments our homes more narrowly, but then also
more broadly, our streets, our cities, and the natural landscape.
It's the way in which where we are influences how
we feel. And this was a very sort of personal book.
I live in London, which I know tourists like London,
but basically it's one of the world's really ugly cities.
(37:44):
And I was living one time I wrote the book
in a really ugly part of town, and I was
just struck by just how much and happiness was caused
by the shape of the streets and et cetera. And
I wanted to try and understand what's a well designed space,
what's a space that can facilitate our better moods. And
that's what the book is about. I love that. Where
(38:05):
do you get your insights? Do you'd rely on your
intuition a lot, your own personal experiences? Are you married,
for instance, I'm married, and yes I do. I mean, look,
I'm my own best first observer, and yeah, I get
the stuff mostly from problems. Really like it always starts
with a problem. It's like, I'm unhappy here, I'm unhappy there,
I'm anxious about this. I'm anxious about that. My wife
(38:27):
jokes that, you know, we have an argument, and you know,
twenty hours later it's an article in a YouTube film.
So yeah, that's the line. I love it. Well, look,
thank you so much for res Jennerius your time, and
it really was such a delight for me to chat
with you today. Oh it's a pleasure for me. Thank
you so much, and congratulations on your work. Thank you.
Thanks for listening to The Psychology Podcast with actor Scott
(38:49):
Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just to
start provoking and interesting as I did. If you'd like
to read the show notes for this episode or hear
past episodes, you can visit the Psychology Podcast b
Hello and welcome to the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott
Barry Kaufman, where we give you insights into the mind, brain,
behavior and creativity. Each episode will feature a new guest
who will stimulate your mind and give you a greater
understanding of yourself, others, and the world we live in.
Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into human possibility. Thanks
for listening and enjoy the podcast. So today I'm really
(00:40):
excited to have Alan de Bautan on the show. Alan
is a writer of essayistic books that have been described
as a philosophy of modern life. He's written on love, travel, architecture,
and literature. His books have been bestsellers in thirty countries.
Alan also started and helps to run a school in
London called The School of Life, dedicated to a new
vision of education. Alan's latest book is The Course of
(01:02):
Love and Meditation on Modern Relationships. Thanks for chatting with
me today, Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Well,
I don't even know where to begin with someone like you.
The topics you study are about as striking to the
core of human existence as possible. Like you don't really
mess around, do you? Like? Oh, I'm going to do
you know, study like this one archaic philosophical idea and
(01:24):
nitpick it to death. Instead, you're like, I'm going to
pick the grandest questions of human existence and give people
insight into them. Yeah, that's a nice way of putting it.
I mean, I guess I feel that we're all short
of time, and I'm quite practical guy, and I want
the questions that I look at to have real world applications,
and they often come in me from pretty urgent questions
(01:48):
that I'm wrestling with. You know, I'm trying to understand myself,
the people around me, the world I see around me,
and there tends to be often a problem that I
want to try and solve. You know, why is this
thing so painful? Why is this so confusing? Why? Is
dangerously vague. It's the opposite of an academic exercise. So
even though I deal with a lot of material that
academics deal with, my emotional motivations are entirely different. I am,
(02:13):
you know, putting myself and humanity and the planet on
the couch and I'm out for answers. So that explains
a lot of the way in which I go about
my work. You know, I'll not spend too long on
one topic, I'll rove around, I'll keep it focused, I'll
keep the main question in view pretty much all the time.
That sort of thing. Sure, that makes a lot of sense.
(02:35):
But what were you like as a kid. Did you
used to sit in your bed at like age ten
and think about death religion? Not at all. But what
I did used to do was to tidy things up.
I was a kind of tidy kid and a builder kid,
So I love nothing better. I was had a huge
imagination and was always building worlds out of lego, and
(02:55):
I love lining up the trees in precise symmetry and
writing books where you know, everything was kind of neatly
laid out. And I think for me it was a
way of controlling anxiety. And as I look back on it,
and I think that it grew out of that that
I became interested in ideas, and I saw ideas and
the life of the mind as the ultimate way of
(03:16):
arranging trees in a neat row. I really resonate with that. Actually,
I wonder if it has anything to do with OCD. Probably,
I mean, sure, why not? You know, I think you
can sort of divide humanity by what people do with
their anxiety. After all, we all carry a lot of
anxiety with us. What are you going to do with it?
You know? Do you take it on the stage, Do
(03:36):
you go jogging with it? Do you get drunk with it?
Do you sing it out? You know? What do you
try and do? And for me, mastering things intellectually is
my way of dealing with anxiety. So it's really not
coming from any particularly noble or you know, pure place.
It's a survival strategy. It's a way of dealing with
a kind of mental disorder. You know. Yeah, I think
(03:59):
I really the way you put that. So before we
get to things like sex and religion, and I would
like to start with Love. That is your most recent book,
and I really did find it to be quite profound,
you know, per capita sort of thing, Like every page
was like a new insight that I got about human nature.
And what perplexed me about that is that, I you know,
(04:22):
I'm a psychologist. I'm a scientist. I've studied I wrote
a book on the science of well sex of meeting.
But I reviewed that literature and love, and I thought
I understood the science of love. I read your book
and it just really gave me such profound insights. How
can your sort of writing and the kind of evidence
that you bring to bear on the topic and insights?
How's it given me so many more insights than I've
(04:44):
gotten from being one hundred peer of your journal articles.
Well that's very moving and touching. What you say. Well,
I mean it, I do mean it. Yeah, Well, I mean, look,
I think at the end of the day, your job
is much harder than mine because I can go off
and just have theories and h pothesies, and I don't
need to test them tall stringently. I just need to
(05:05):
you know, float them. And the ultimate sense of you know,
approval is going to be whether they ring a bell
with the reader. But we don't have to do, you know,
peer reviewed tests. So in a way, philosophers and writers
and essayists have this kind of freedom to run ahead
of science. And you know, I like the view that
essentially science always catches up because of the burden of
(05:29):
proof that scientists put upon themselves. Thank god. It means
that sometimes you know, we look sometimes you know, I'm
shure this hame to you. You'll read a paper by
a psychologist and an aspect of love, and you'll think, huh,
I knew that already, but you won't think that. But
for some people might think that, to which the answer is, well,
of course, you know it felt true already, but the
(05:50):
point of the experiment was to prove it beyond certain,
to actually properly prove it. And I don't need to
do that, so I can use very kind of fly
by night techniques. I can use myself as my first
and only test case, you know, so I can just
go into my own heart and soul and fish things
(06:11):
out and try them out. That's a kind of freedom,
sort of the irresponsibility of the creative writer next to
the scientists, which is from where you're staying, I canly imagine,
you know, both liberating and a bit madden. Then you
kind of think, oh, what are these guys, you know,
having all the fun, but you know, there's a price
on every side. I appreciate that. But this idea that
(06:32):
sciences catches up with what we have known, what you know, literature,
these common themes that are in literature and poetry and
philosophy thousands and thousands of years. It's almost like who
are science is to think that, you know, we'll ascertain
the truth in one generation. Almost like, maybe we need
to be more humble as scientists when we read poetry
or great literature that have these themes because the themes, look,
(06:54):
I mean, let's be honest, the themes obviously, the themes
in the Course of Love are new. But you know,
what I think is so interesting about and what I
really tugs at my heartstrings when I read this story
of this couple that forms the main narrative of your
book is just how relatable. It's almost like you've identified
this like temp you call it the chorus of love,
but it's like a template that is in our DNA
(07:16):
that almost like we as humans were kind of like
destined to unfold. It's like destined to unfold. But when
we're in it, we don't have that perspective to really
see it that way, do we. Yeah, I mean, look,
you know, maybe another way of looking at it is
to say that it's not just what you say, it's
how you say it. And you know, I came from
an academic background, and I was always struck by the
(07:36):
way in which you know, it seemed to me that
there were great truths in a lot of academic books,
but they weren't getting out there. They weren't hitting home
because of the way they were expressed. And in a way,
that scene is an incidental issue by most scientists, definitely,
but even by many scholars in the humanities. You know,
the line is, it doesn't really matter how you're putting
it down, so long as the idea is solid, that's
(07:59):
what matters. But of course the audience is emotional and
is responding with their senses. And in a way it
strikes me as a communicator, you've got to make sure
not just that what you're saying is correct, but that
it's delivered in a form which will hit home and seduce,
you know. And that's the word seduction is kind of
(08:19):
a word that's under suspicion in a way. It seems
like you would only ever try to seduce with a falsehood,
But of course you can also try to seduce with
the truth, just as importantly. And I guess what I
try to do with this book. You know, it's interesting
you mentioned that it's not a psychological treatise. I could
have written it as a psychological treatse. I could have
written it as an essay. It seemed to be important
(08:40):
to write it as a novel so that it could
have an emotional impact on the reader, so that there
wouldn't be a need to you know, tick various you
know boxes that are company nonfiction and that what could
just get sort of straight to the point. And so
you know, often as a writer, I'm asking, what's the
book book four? What's it really trying to do? And
(09:01):
I guess, you know, I don't see myself as a scientist,
so I'm not in that game. So really I'm in
the game of trying to make the ordinary reader think
and feel. And I've succeeded if I've done that. So
it's just I guess it's just sort of underlying priorities, really,
and I think we often don't think enough as writers
(09:22):
about what our implicit or explicit goals are with our work.
And so, you know, maybe the historian has been laboring
for twenty years on a large tone might think, oh,
why is my book not in the best seller list,
to which my answer would be, well, did you really
want it to be? Really? Really, is that really what
you were doing? And they might after a moment of
reflection and think, well, actually, maybe not really, So you
(09:44):
can it's good to clarify ultimately what you're trying to
do with work. I think it's a really great point,
and I'd like to let's use an example. You know,
John Alaia wrote a book about love recently. There was
supposed to be kind of like the latest scientific Summary
of love. But the major ricism of that book was,
you know that it wasn't I didn't tuget anyone's heart,
made it made love dry. I mean, there is a
(10:06):
particular danger of sounding dry right around love. And there's
also you know, because moments of love are moments when
we encounter our own irrationality most intensely, there can be
something a little grating about a you know, from thirty
thousand feet view of the dynamics of the heart that
(10:26):
doesn't in any way acknowledge that this is a sort
of you know, folly that befalls us all. And I think,
you know, it's just almost a rhetorical move that if
one allows oneself to as the creator, to admit that
one's kind of crazy with everybody else, you know, along
with this, it can just create a very useful feeling
of identification. So yeah, that's a very clear thing I
(10:51):
got from your book, is that we're all crazy that
the love is picking the best of the most suffering options, right, Yes,
I mean, look, I'm strung by the way. You know,
when I was younger, I'd see lots of relationship problems around,
but there was a lot of hope always in me
and in other people that you know, it would just
take a little bit of time to sort itself out.
And obviously, the generation of one's parents, I mean they
(11:13):
were crazy, but then they were old, so obviously they
were kind of crazy, like like old cars and went
very good, and so old people weren't very good. So
you know, we were the modern people, and so you know,
what we needed to do ultimately was find the right person,
and then soon as we found the right person, then
things would fall into place. And then, of course, like
every generation, what you discover is hut's a little bit
more complicated. And the conclusion is that there really doesn't
(11:35):
seem to be anyone having a normal relationship out there.
So we've got this idea of what a normal relationship is.
It's a very strong idea, marked by mutual respect, satisfying sex, life,
you know, great passion, forgiveness, all these things, and we
have it in our minds. And yet you know, you
hunt for it in vain, and at the end of
the day, you know, that has to force the kind
(11:57):
of reflection on our hopes. And so, you know, I've
come to the conclusion that really everyone is unbalanced in
one way or another. It's not a question that somebody
is not unbalanced, they just all are. That the human
makeup is, you know, really quite perverted. And you know,
when I was thinking about religion, I've read quite a
lot of stuff by Saint Augustine, and Augustinism starts with
(12:20):
this unusual idea that we are all sinners, and you know,
we've been marked since the time of our births by
original sin Now I'm a totally secular Jew and at
the standard at first completely very eccentric, but in a
way it's a very warm hearted philosophy because ultimately it says, look,
it's not just you, frankly, it's all of us. All
(12:42):
of us are a bit broken in one way or another.
We will have all have come through the gauntlet of childhood,
We'll all been navigating our emotional lives with quite a
lot of trouble, quite a lot of baggage. And so
the issue isn't to try and aim for perfection but
to try and understand imperfection and within a couple, explain
it to one in a way that is comprehensible, is
(13:03):
not offensive, and is early enough, comes early enough in
the relationship or particular moments as not to cause you know,
lasting damage, because human beings can forgive each other a
huge amount. I think, so long as it's explained in
a certain way. You know, if you arrive on a
date and say, well, I'm perfect, and I hope you're
perfect too, you know you'll be in for trouble. But
if two people say, look, obviously I'm kind of crazy,
(13:25):
you're kind of crazy too, I think that was a given,
and you know, in what way are you crazy? I'm
going to come on to me in a minute, But
you know what about you that's an excellent starting point
for a more realistic and you know, properly ambitious relationship.
I completely agree. I think that. I love that you
call out things about us humans that are It's like
(13:47):
you're like calling it, you know what I mean? I
like it. But let me play Devil's advocate for a second.
So I've done some research on attachment styles, and you
talk about attachment styles in the book In Kind of
your penultimate chapter or so. Could it be I'm just
a person thing out there, and then just tell me
if I'm right or wrong. Could it be that your
book really is the course of love parentheses when you
have a couple that's avoidant insecure, Do you see what
(14:10):
I'm saying? Could it be that your book is really
just the course of love a particular combination of attachment styles,
because when you actually look at secure secure, they actually
don't really have that as much drama as you think. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely,
I mean attachment theory is a big underlying part of this.
At the same time, I'd say you'll know much better
(14:31):
than me about how much secure, secure love there is
out there. I guess I don't see too much of
it around if there is, you know. I mean, look,
I do make a claim that this is an ordinary relationship.
I think, you know, avoidant and anxious still qualifies as
normal enough. So it's maybe I'm looking at a relationship
(14:52):
that is an everyday neurotic relationship that is not, you know, dramatic,
but that you know, it's not totally healthy. And I
guess I wanted to write a book that I wanted
to focus on a couple where things are not brilliant,
but they're not terrible. They are you know, interestingly and
you know, almost in a banal way tricky. And I
wanted to tease out the issues that and you did that.
(15:14):
I want to make a very clear you did a
very good job of that. And I might even sure
what I said is true. I wanted to throw it
out there, and I just want to throw that idea
out there because you know, it's funny. A lot of
people with like avoidant or anxious attachment style will report,
you know, being very uncomfortable around secure attachment style individuals
if they're in a relationship. It's like very far into them,
you know. Yes, I mean I think I find that fascinating.
(15:36):
I find it fascinating how people will say things like,
you know, I went on a date with so and so,
and you know, they're great, and you know they're they're
really you know, good looking. But I just felt and
the language is interesting, you know that people say things
I'm you know, I felt they were a bit boring,
And that word boring is often used to explain health, yes,
like exactly who were not very healthy emotionally or less healthy.
(16:00):
And I think the way, it's it's true. I mean,
you know, maybe that's a correct word boring, but it's
a lovely kind of boring. It's it's like Switzerland is boring. Yeah, great,
and we want more of that, especially US Americans right now.
But here's the thing, like that's almost the conclusion of
your book, is that, like these two individuals with these
(16:21):
attachment they went through this counseling and they almost like
the thing that's kind of saved the relationship in a sense,
or that I think, not that they were really seriously
I don't think seriously on the verge of divorce. But
the thing that really kind of contented them, I should say,
is kind of moving towards more of a secure attachment style. Yes,
I mean, ultimately, what saved them, I think is a
kind of understanding, and understanding requires, you know, a drop
(16:45):
in levels of anxiety, an increase in safety. You know,
they gradually acquired the courage to sort of face up
to how tricky they were, how their own first responses
were really pretty unhelpful, or how their analysis of what
the other one was doing was involving them in some
(17:06):
pretty bad patterns of behavior. So I don't think they
you know. Look, I think it's enormous progress. If someone
can go, look, I have a tendency to feel quite abandoned,
and when I do, I get quite controlling. If somebody
can know that about themselves, oh my god, that's an advantage.
Or if somebody can go when I feel hurt, I
(17:27):
just want to be alone and not tell anyone what
the problem is. Again, if you know that, if that
information is circulating within the relationship, it is the most
romantic thing in a way, to be able to give
someone a present, to give your lover, the present of
an insight into your own flaws, that is an enormous gift. Absolutely,
(17:48):
And you do talk about how intimacy, real intimacy, real
love really comes. It's almost like a linear correlation with
how much you feel like you're under fully understood by
the other person or accept did yes and understood any
that's right. And the problem is that we're always, of course,
so hard on the other person's you know, bad behavior,
(18:12):
and what we call bad behavior is you know, usually
a kind of trauma, a kind of immaturity. But both
parties tend to be so ungenerous towards each other's frail
teams that what could be a journey of growth becomes
stuck in a cycle of complaints. And you know, it's
heartbreaking because so often arguments between couples, for example, are
(18:33):
desperate attempts by two people to teach each other things
about each other, things that are very legitimate and quite sensible,
but the way in which the lesson is delivered is
so hysterical, so mad, so doomed to failure, that you know,
you end up in kind of cycles of nagging on
one part, shirking on the other, and that sort of thing. Yes,
(18:56):
I mean, look, I have a slightly tragic view of life.
I think that there are some very dark things right
at the center of existence, starting with the fact that
we're going to die at a time not of our own,
choosing in a manner of potential, you know, calamity and horror,
and that our loved ones are always at risk. You know,
that's just the kind of starting point. And then on
(19:17):
top of that, you add, we've got very little understanding
of ourselves. We're forced to make big decisions way before
we really have the data necessary. We have to choose
a job, a vocation, a lover in situations of real vagueness,
and uncertainty, so we make lots and lots of wrong
choices naturally inevitably, and on and on it goes. We're
(19:39):
you know, we're fragile human beings. We're trying to navigate
with this faulty walnut between our ears, and we've got
only that to interpret everything reality, and it's you know,
it's a very flawed instrument. Speak for yourself, Speak for yourself, absolutely.
And what's more, it's an instrument that has a really
hard time recognizing that it is flawed. It thinks it's
(20:01):
giving us accurate and accurate picture of reality, and yet
it actually is constantly you know, So we'll go you know, no,
it's all your fault. Way before we realize, hey, my
blood sugar is much too low. You know, we'll have
a very well worked out hypothesis about why it's you know,
what is going on, you know, irrespective of reality, which
is incidentally speaking to you as a scientist. You know
(20:24):
why science is such an amazing piece of emotional maturity,
you know, way before it's anything else. It's a kind
of it represents the discovery and the development of the
scientific method, is the kind of maturity of the human mind.
Because it requires so many things that don't really come
naturally to us. The capacity to admit that we're wrong,
(20:45):
the capacity to accept reality even when it's very unpleasant,
the patience required, et cetera, et cetera. I couldn't agree more.
Have you writ any of irv Alum's work? No, No,
you create this feel I think you would resonate with
it a lot. He created this field, a big part
of the field, existential psychotherapy. He wrote the text, the
(21:06):
main textbook on the outlines the givens of existence in
the introduction, and basically, I mean that's he starts with,
you know, these existential facts as the starting base for psychotherapy.
So it's really cool, interesting, very interesting. So tell me
more about your academic background then, well, I mean, when
I was a young guy, I dreamt of being a
(21:27):
professor of something, and I loved the idea belonging to university.
This is when I was like seventeen or something, and
I loved the idea. And then I studied at Cambridge.
I did a history degree, which was really a history
of ideas and it was sort of fulfilling. And then
I'm bought on various misshaping PhDs and gave them up,
and I realized ultimately that my mind was not going
(21:50):
to fit in with the kind of academic demands. But
I loved You know, there's a broad sway that people,
I'm sure you've come across them, who'll say things like,
you know, there'll be twenty two, there'll be good students,
they'll be curious about the world, they'll be curious about themselves,
and they won't know what to do with their lives
because they've loved the kind of material they've studied as undergraduates.
(22:11):
But they can see what academics doing for their whole
lives and that's not quite right. And then at that
point they sometimes think of becoming journalists or whatever, and
they are I know, this tribe. They write to me
every day asking me what they should do, and you know,
I feel for them, and there isn't thank you. There
isn't really necessarily a place there should be. You know,
in past ages those people might have joined the church maybe,
(22:34):
But today they start podcasts. They start podcasts, or they
become like a therapist, or they try a bit of
this and a bit of that, and you know, maybe
that's fine. That's the liberation of our times. In a way.
But that's where I was, certainly, and you know, I
felt my way towards doing what I do now, But
it was I think I was in an agony of
anxiety pretty much every day in my twenties, just questioning
(22:57):
what I was doing, feeling very very isolated, writing books,
but outside of any structure, just it was a horrible
time in many ways. Yeah, I totally resonate with a
lot of what you're saying. There's many things I would
have to talk to about it, and I want to
be respective of your time. So let's move on to sex.
Is that okay? Can we talk about sex? Yeah? So
(23:17):
you make this interesting argument in one of your books
about sex, saying that it's really we're kind of thinking
about it in the wrong way. Is that right? Look,
I think one of the things that's missed is, you know,
Freud made this move where he taught us to think
that a lot of things that seemed quite innocent were
in fact quite sexual, that the sex motive was kind
(23:37):
of everywhere, and that kind of invigorated and frightened a
lot of people. I make it a way a sort
of different claim. What's the opposite claim, which is that
a lot of sex looks like it's about sex, but
it's out of fact not, It's about everything else that
we care about in life. And that you know, if
you analyze a lot of the pleasure of sex, a
lot of it is very continuous with our pleasure in
(23:59):
others areas. So we don't become somebody completely different in sex.
We're exploring our interests, our desires, our longings in other ways.
And so you know, for example, I look at kind
of lingus, what is that? Like? What the hell you know?
Why does that exist? Obviously, you know, darwinists that a
slightly hard time understanding what it is. Might do turtles
(24:22):
not do come the lingus? I don't know, maybe maybe,
But you know, the way I analyze it, along with
other things, is it's all about trust. In other words,
here is this pretty far out so called inverted com
is a disgusting thing that the people are doing, but
it symbolizes an unbelievable degree of acceptance. So the normal
(24:43):
dichotomy that we suffer so much from between dirty and clean,
you know, and who is a good boy and a
good girl and all that that is kind of erased
in oral sex, where suddenly everything about a person is
deemed acceptable, and that involves an enormous kind of increase
(25:03):
in pleasure and satisfaction, which is not really a kind
of a sensory pleasure, it's a psychological pleasure. It's, oh
my god, this really is acceptance. You know, this really
is a little moment of paradise because of what it symbolizes.
And so I think, you know, similarly, kissing, you know
what is kissing about? I mean, kissing is not that
fun looked at purely sensorily. It's the idea of privacy
(25:26):
that somebody has allowed us into the most private zone.
And it's an idea of acceptance. So it's that sort
of thing that I like to locate in sex. Similarly,
take another thing, take the idea of being able to
be quite rough with a lover again, Like, what's that doing?
What's that again? That's to do with trust. In most
of life, we've got to be so gentle, so careful
(25:48):
around other people. We've got to withhold our aggressive impulses.
Imagine again the feeling of a trust and of mutual
loyalty that's built up, and one person can say something
very so called add to another can behave in a
rougher way with them that is normally allowed. So all
of these things deliver psychological pleasures via a physical medium. Wow,
(26:11):
that's really a great, a great insight. And yeah, I
just like to think about, you know, contrasts with other animals.
You know, once evolutionary psychologists study mating. I think that
that's left out. I really do think what you're describing
is left out of a lot of the evolutionary psychology
accounts of human meaning. Although David Buss do this interesting
paper where he outlines like over one hundred reasons why
(26:31):
humans have sex, and he did fight male and female
differences sex differences, but nevertheless, there's quite a bit of
overlap and variability. The point there is variability that you
don't see in other animals because of the psychological dimension.
So I just love that you, I really do love
you brought that up. You do talk about pornography in
your book. I want to say, I heard a rumor
yesterday actually that you are creating a pornography site. Is
(26:55):
that correct? Well, the school of life that I run,
we yes, we did a pornography site called porn as
therapy dot com. I tell you the starting point. The
starting point was so we run a psychotherapy division at
the School of Life, and we started to see an
unbelievable amount of people coming through where pornography was an
issue in a couple or an individual life addiction, et cetera,
(27:17):
et cetera. And so you know, what do you do
about that? So one of you is pornography is fine,
it is actually no problem with it. It's great, just
leave it be. And the other view is it's terrible,
ban it, block it, censor it, et cetera. And neither
the impulse seemed particularly great, And so we were just
trying to think about an answer, and I guess our
feeling was the things that are wrong with pornography is
(27:39):
that pornography excites the sexual impulse in ways that are
then quite unhelpful to the rest of life. It disconnects
sex from other things, other responses, patterns of thinking, ways
of looking at the world that are then quite important.
It cuts it off from communion with another person with intelligence,
with sensitivity, et cetera, et cetera. And so we just
(28:00):
wanted to kind of recontextualize sexuality in pornograpy and make
a slightly different kind of pornography which has nothing to
do with it being light or it can still be
quite extreme. In fact, some of the we basically we
worked with a porn photographer and some actors and just
shop a variety of scenarios as still images. What we
like to do a life is not just theorized, but
also inact and demonstrate. And so we were just trying
(28:23):
to say, what would it be like to think of
a better kind of pornography to try and correct some
of the problems that we see in existing pornography. Not
to ban it or escape it or run away from it,
but to try and somehow work with the impulse that
we have and train it in a kind of more
fruitful direction. I mean, as a positive psychologist, I can
say that's a topic that has never really been studied scientifically.
(28:45):
Is the extent to its porn can increase well being?
It's a tricky thing, but I mean, of course it can.
It must be. You know, look, most people, we know
that it's an enormous release from anxiety. I mean that's why,
like anything that's a essentially the root of the addiction
is in the capacity to release anxiety. So you know,
(29:06):
it can be so good at doing that that it
then becomes a problem in itself, but it must have
that role. And also I think, you know, to be
benevolent towards it. You know, our relationships are incredibly burdened
by emotional consequences, by feelings of responsibility, of duty, by
feelings of guilt. And I think that pornography for men
(29:27):
and women can be an encounter with a kind of
guilt and responsibility free moment of sexuality, and that has
a role to play perhaps in a life. Sure it
could also of course have darker, sort of not as
conducive elements as well. So I guess it's just like
humans as well. We're very complex people. Sure, and I
(29:49):
think it's look oddly, it's not received that much creative attention,
you know, given the fact that this enormous industry, you know,
it's probably fifty percent of the Internet. Maybe I'm exact rating,
but it's an enormous proportion. You know, it deserves ongoing
serious thought. I mean, there are few people doing this,
and you know, we wanted to, We wanted to join
in that debate and that investigation. Well, from an intellectual perspective,
(30:11):
I had to say, it's extremely interesting you have porn
as a cure for a willingliness, authority, seriousness, responsibility. I mean,
these are topics that I appreciate you're doing this. These
are topics that probably could get a lot more scientific
attention than it currently does. So I think that's great,
sounds good. So let's move on to religion. Yeah, you
argue that there's kind of this middle we kind of
(30:31):
put up this perifrication of an argument that the religion
is either all nonsense or it's all not nonsense, that
it's all true sort of thing. And you say, you
call us a quote boring debate. Is that right? Yeah,
I mean it's boring for me, and I think it
ultimately doesn't get to the root of the problem. The
really interesting topic is where the hell does this come
from inside human nature? You know, where does the impulse
(30:52):
to believe come from? I take it as a fact,
and for granted that the whole thing's not true, but
it's deeply emotionally true. You know, so long after we've
you know, discounted the idea that that there may be
a father in the sky, I want to think about
that longing for a father. And I think this is
why the debate with atheism is so sterile because atheists
will spend their time going, oh no, and there is
(31:14):
no God and you know, by the way, there is
no angel, et cetera. And I think only you're fine,
you know there is actual But I want to go
onto the other question, which is, why did we invent angels,
Why did we invent sacred days, why did we invent
you know, feasts of atonement, et cetera. Where does this
stuff come from inside of us? And also where's it
gone now in a secular culture? So those are the
themes that interest me. Yeah, and then sort of what
(31:37):
are the secular themes of religion that everyone would benefit from?
You know, we're studying this topic are in our lab
you know, awe, and it seems to be that seems
to be like the friendly the religion for a seculars
you know, is odd, do you know what I mean?
I think that's right. It's a very well, it's a
very good work. Good first it's sort of something that
(31:57):
everybody can agree on without getting from of it. It's like, oh, yeah,
you know, I went to walk in the Arizona desert
and felt or you know, so yes, it's it seems
like a very useful starting point. Yeah, and I love
you know, your book about religion, Friligion for Atheists, how
you talk about all these benefits of religion like building
u since community, making relationships, last, overcoming the feelings of
(32:17):
envy and inadequacy, et cetera, et cetera. I always like
to look for broader themes in my guests, you know,
writings and things and and it really, you know, a
lot of these things you're talking about are really lie
at the heart of human existence also really contribute to
well being. You know, religion, sex, you are you, Sex
in a lot of ways can contribute to well being
in ways we don't think about love. All these things
are simultaneously complicated and also conducive to well being. So
(32:41):
that leads to the last topic today, happiness. You know,
you have also written specifically about the architecture of happiness.
And is there some way, you know, something we can
kind of end on. We can talk about what would
be the best way to architect society so that these
a lot of these things which are taboo. You talk
about a lot of things that are taboo, or a
lot of things that bring us pain in life can
(33:02):
also bring us the greatest joy. Well, I think that
we are not systematic enough in our search for happiness. So,
you know, we tend to believe that we're you know,
we're all out for our own happiness, and we're you know,
we're doing everything we can, and we sometimes feel a
bit guilty that we're only out for ourselves. But I
think we're you know, we're surprisingly slack in the way
we go about it. You know, philosophy begins in ancient
(33:25):
Greece with the idea that our impulses are probably wrong
and that we need to submit to them to reason.
And I think that you know, take our two leading
impulses around love and around work. So we want fulfilling
work and we want fulfilling relationships. But the way we
go about trying to find fulfilling work and fulfilling relationships
is incredibly haphazard. You know, we don't this thinks systematically
(33:48):
about you know, our psychees, the choices between us, et cetera.
And therefore we get it wrong. And life's very short
and we make big, big, big, big mistakes. And I
think that you know, progress is all about trying to
increase the amount of kind of reliable data on which
people are basing their big life decisions on and it's
(34:09):
sort of heartbreaking in a way when you think about
how alone people are with their romantic lives, with their
career choices. Despite all the chat et cetera. You know,
we're still quite alone. And you know, one of the
things I've tried to do with my books and also
with this organization I set up called the School of Life,
is to try and give a kind of first port
(34:30):
of call for you know, a lot of the hurdles
that we're going to hit in our lives. These are
unashamedly first world problems. In other words, they are the
problems that you have when food and shelter have been
taken care of. Now, most of the planets still struggling
with those, but you know, most of the United States
and Western Europe has you know, has passed that stage.
But we are still in the age of unbelievable emotional confusion,
(34:53):
which spills out into politics. You know, what we call
politics is really just you know, emotional life, you know,
evaporate it and concentrated over a you know, over the
whole land mass. But it's the same dynamics. And and
here we're, yeah, we're pretty confused, and I see it
as my kind of life's work to just try and
figure out a few insights in this area. I love it,
(35:15):
and do you There's a quote you say, furnishing your
life is an art. Yes, where I said that or how?
But that's how familiares No. I don't know. But I've
said a number of things at the moment that over
the years that I don't really can't really remember them.
But do you agree with it? I do you agree
with that? I'm not sure what it means. Maybe it
(35:37):
was part of a longer sentence, is the beginning I've left.
But look, I think that what we can try and
do is, you know, create a sharper beam of consciousness
over lots of parts of our mind. You know, most
of our mind are sunk in darkness. This is the
original idea of the sort of the mind as a
dark cave. Mostly it is a dark cave, and we
(35:59):
need as much which is possible to kind of shine
the light of reason. But we also need a great modesty.
This is where humor comes in. Humor is deeply important
because it's the most gracious acknowledgment we can make of
our incapacity, of our flaws, of our difficult sides, et cetera.
So you know, a sincere and ambitious life is never
(36:20):
going to be far from a joke, because you know,
that's all we've been, Allie. You know, we haven't been
allowed to understand very much. We can't understand very much. Mostly.
You know, there's that old expression God love that man
thinks God laughs. In other words, you know, man's thoughts
are kind of, you know, very petty things when looked
(36:40):
at from a sufficient height. It's so true, and your
work does allows us to get out of that perspective.
I just want to follow for a second. Isn't the
subtitle of the book, The Architecture of Happiness though the
Secret Art of Furnishing Your Life? Isn't that your subtitle?
It may have been added on by my then naughty
American publisher. Oh no, I think it may have. It
(37:01):
may have. I think it's not a title I like
or what have identified with. So I know that sounds weird,
but you know, authors are fragile beings twisted by the
corporate machine who whack on all sorts of things. Look Ultimately,
the book The Architecture of Happiness is not about happiness
per se. It's about the dependence of our moods on
(37:24):
our physical environments our homes more narrowly, but then also
more broadly, our streets, our cities, and the natural landscape.
It's the way in which where we are influences how
we feel. And this was a very sort of personal book.
I live in London, which I know tourists like London,
but basically it's one of the world's really ugly cities.
(37:44):
And I was living one time I wrote the book
in a really ugly part of town, and I was
just struck by just how much and happiness was caused
by the shape of the streets and et cetera. And
I wanted to try and understand what's a well designed space,
what's a space that can facilitate our better moods. And
that's what the book is about. I love that. Where
(38:05):
do you get your insights? Do you'd rely on your
intuition a lot, your own personal experiences? Are you married,
for instance, I'm married, and yes I do. I mean, look,
I'm my own best first observer, and yeah, I get
the stuff mostly from problems. Really like it always starts
with a problem. It's like, I'm unhappy here, I'm unhappy there,
I'm anxious about this. I'm anxious about that. My wife
(38:27):
jokes that, you know, we have an argument, and you know,
twenty hours later it's an article in a YouTube film.
So yeah, that's the line. I love it. Well, look,
thank you so much for res Jennerius your time, and
it really was such a delight for me to chat
with you today. Oh it's a pleasure for me. Thank
you so much, and congratulations on your work. Thank you.
Thanks for listening to The Psychology Podcast with actor Scott
(38:49):
Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just to
start provoking and interesting as I did. If you'd like
to read the show notes for this episode or hear
past episodes, you can visit the Psychology Podcast b
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