The Love Expert: The REAL Reason We’re Lonely, Loveless, Depressed - Alain De Botton, School Of Life

These are very valuable lessons that we need in our relationships. So, lesson one. Alain de Botton Best-selling author The modern philosopher of love His goal To help you live a better, more meaningful life. The average human has 70,000 thoughts a day. The problem is that we don't know how to use them. For example, we tend to believe we'll find the one, but that belief has led to more rage, more disappointment, cuz we're not free to love just anyone. What's problematic is that we're drawn to love stories that are echoing our childhoods. And this is something that troubles so many people because our past was not necessarily happy. We are all confused about love. You know, the most romantic sentence [music] that people will say is, "I met this person and we didn't even need to speak. We just felt on the same page." Well, this leads to a catastrophic outbreak [music] of sulking. They say to you, "Is anything wrong?" Of course there is, but you're not going to tell them. And the reason is that you're a romantic and you believe that your partner should have alien capacities to look into your wounded soul to understand what the upset is, but of course they can't because they're just human. So, what would you say are the core habits of two people who have a really successful relationship? What we need is Let's talk about sex. Goodness me, does it cause problems. 26% of people in relationships are having sex less than 10 times per year. So, the question is, what are we getting wrong? One of the leading answers that neither party knows is there is that Ding ding, that's normally a sign of a problem. Quick one. This is really, really fascinating to me. On the back end of our YouTube channel, it says that [clears throat] 69.9% of you that watch this channel frequently over the lifetime of this channel haven't yet hit the subscribe button. I just wanted to ask you a favor. It helps this channel so much if you choose to just subscribe. Helps us scale the guests, helps us scale the production, and it makes the show bigger. So, if I could ask you for one favor, if you've watched this show before and you've enjoyed it and you like this episode that you're currently watching, could you please hit the subscribe button? Thank you so much, and I will repay that gesture by making sure that everything we do here gets better and better and better and better. That is a promise I'm willing to make you. Do we have a deal? [music] Alain, you write about so much. You produce content about so many different subject matters, but what is the overarching mission that you are on? I'm trying to look almost systematically at a variety of causes of unhappiness created by the world we live in. Um you know, obviously the world we live in has solved many, many problems, but it's also generated in a host of areas, particularly um difficult challenges that have not really struck humanity before. And I like to think, both personally and on behalf of others, um about what these problems are and how we might steer through them. The average human has 70,000 thoughts a day, right? Not huge elaborate ones, but just stray little fragmentary thoughts, 70,000 of them, pass through consciousness every day. And the problem is that we don't know how to process them or use them. It's part of the reason why we end up with such, you know, busy and troubling minds. We haven't stepped back in order to ask ourselves, at the end of the day, some of these questions that can calm us down, like, you know, who am I angry with? Who What am I excited by? What's really happened today? You know, we let experiences rush past us. And then, of course, experiences that haven't been digested properly have a nasty habit of coming to sting us in the tail. Um and I think you can look at a lot of mental troubles as essentially the outgrowth of unprocessed emotion. Um you know, depression is often sadness that hasn't understood itself. Anxiety or irritability is worry that doesn't know its own cause. And so, often what we need, particularly in the modern world, is occasions on which we can get to know our own minds. It's It's a It's a strange thing. Surely we know our own minds. Surely we No. No. The way that we're built is obviously not prioritizing a full awareness of ourselves. We're outward-facing creatures. We're action-focused creatures. Which is all to the good and has many advantages. But, because of the way we live now, more sedentary lives, lives that call upon us not merely to be active, but also to be fulfilled, um those lives require periods of introspection that our routines often don't allow for. So, I'm always trying both for myself and advising others, you know, take that time in the evening and just sit down in a semi-darkened room and just ask yourself, what's coming up for me? What's really happened inside me? Because it can take a little while to realize what you're really upset by, what you're really excited by, etc. We're not obvious to ourselves. And as I say, so many of things that we call mental disorders or mental illnesses are really stored emotion that hasn't found a way out. Emotions that haven't been acknowledged have a nasty habit of um stirring our conscience, demanding to be heard. They might want to tell our spines. They might want to tell our stomachs. Uh you know, and again, a useful exercise so's not to be struck by so many of these psychosomatic disorders is to ask the body what it's trying to tell you so that it doesn't need to tell you in the more dramatic forms that end up as illnesses. So again, if you, you know, if you lie down you simply say to yourself, "If my back could speak, what does it want to tell me? If my shoulders could have their say, what are they trying to say? If my stomach could have a voice, what might it be trying to utter?" Can you apply that same rationale to things like anxiety? Absolutely. You know, if you think of take something like insomnia, right? You wake up at 3:00 in the morning. The way I like to think of it is insomnia is if you like a kind of revenge for all those thoughts that you were so careful not to have in the day. You very carefully schemed not to have those thoughts in the day because of our emotional conscience, they want to be heard. And if you're not hearing them at 3:00 p.m., you're going to be hearing them at 3:00 a.m. And so, you know, one of the best ways to sleep is to make sure you're having a little bit more of an in-depth conversation with yourself before you enter sleep because that will allow you that kind of deeper rest. So, as I say, we have this emotional conscience that requires that the key things about us have a chance to be heard. And look, let's not forget, I mean, this is the whole theory of trauma. You know, what psychotherapists have very usefully over the last 20, 30 years informed us about is that um events in our past, especially in our early childhood, that we have not had a chance to properly understand, and how much can a three, four, five, six-year-old understand? Events that we can't understand, um it doesn't mean that they haven't registered. They've registered all the more deeply, and they haven't had a chance to be processed. You know, I I was thinking, friend of mine recently lost a parent. He's in his 50s, well-educated, got resources, got friends, spouse, etc. He was telling me he was laid low by depression. He just couldn't get out of bed, completely stunned by his loss. And I was thinking, in a way he's lucky because he's got all those resources of adulthood. Imagine a five-year-old child who suffers a bereavement. They've got no friends that they can have those sort of dialogues with. They've got no books that they can reread about this. They've got no capacity to process. They've got no understanding of time, etc. Um emotions that can't be had lodge themselves in us and gum up our systems. And um I think so much of the work that we need to do on ourselves is to process pain that has not been properly understood. Not because anyone's evil, but because we've lacked the resources to do so. You got me thinking about this concept of happiness as you're speaking and whether it's a natural thing for our species to be aiming at or whether it's a new more modern thing that we've decided to focus upon. And are we causing ourselves immense distress in this pursuit of this thing that maybe our ancestors didn't didn't ever think about. This whole you know, we think about self-actualization and they were probably thinking about survival and reproduction more. Look, these all belong to the sort of paradoxes of modern times. Modern times have obviously brought us enormous advantages, but they've also brought us particular complexities that I think we'd be wise to to realize. And one of them is the disappearance of religion. I mean, we are still among the first generations in many parts of the world to be um trying to live good lives without the support of religion. Think of how religion structure time and human experience in time. As a religious person, you immediately feel that the present moment is not as important as a hundred, two hundred, two thousand, million-year history that has come before and that will continue after. The present moment is a speck in time. And and there's a whole narrative of which you're part of that immediately diminishes you in scale. Now, nowadays, all of us want to be rather large, don't we? We want to be big big people. We want to make a big impression. But, um arguably, this is a fast route to mental illness because the graceful acceptance of your minuscule position in the cosmos is the gateway to calm and harmony. And when people say, you know, "I went into this hotel, you know, the person made me feel small." That's a bad way of being made to feel small, but there's a good way of being made to feel small. Pick up an ancient text, read words that were written by someone in a foreign tongue 3,000 years ago. That'll make you feel small. Go into the desert, notice the the age of the rocks inscribed in, you know, time inscribed in sand. That'll put you in your place. Um spend time with an animal that has no concern for your status, your sense of importance, your foiled narrative of your own success. All these things that drive modern humans mad. These are not present in an older kind of religious sphere. And as I say, what religions do is they tell us you're part of a bigger story. They also tell us, many faiths tell us, that life and you particular are imperfect. Um you know, think of Catholicism and its notion of original sin. Now, lots of lots of bad stuff associated with original sin. I'm not, you know, a huge fan of many aspects, but let's look at the good side, right? What it what Catholicism tells us is that everybody's broken. Everybody is flawed. It's quite a helpful starting point, right? Because, um if you think, well, all right, I'm a bit broken, but so somebody else, so somebody else. So, we're all doing our best. That's the gateway to vulnerability, to friendship, if you like. Lower expectations. Lower expectations, but also to to connection with others, you know? So often people who become successful find it really hard to make friends. Why? Because they associate success with invulnerability, and the more successful they get, the harder it is for them to admit to the real truth about being human, which is that we're all helpless children some of the time at least, frightened helpless children. And it becomes harder to make to keep up the contact with that, let alone admit that to somebody else. So, again, religions handily reduce our expectations and our sense of ourselves. We are merely flawed humans. There is a perfect world. It doesn't exist in Beverly Hills. It doesn't exist in, you know, the fancy parts of Singapore or or Sydney. It exists up there in a in another world. In other words, um the human realm is inherently imperfect. Quite a good starting point. I mean, even if you went on a date, right? Imagine two characters you might go on a date with, right? First one tells you, "Yeah, I'm kind of perfect, and I'm achieve I'm aiming to achieve total perfection." Think, "Wow, good for them, but slightly scary." Next is somebody else who goes, "I'm kind of flawed, but I'm sort of managing my flaws, and I'm interested in how to get to know my flaws and work with them." Instantly one thinks, "Hmm, life might be easier around such a person." There's There's something about the pursuit of perfection which makes day-to-day life extremely hard, and religions, slightly by the by, tick that box. They were able to reduce us in our own eyes while raising us in the eyes of, you know, a divine being. Um and [clears throat] and that has helped us to have an have an easier relationship with with ourselves. And And the notion also was, "You cannot perfect this life." You know, life becomes perfect in another realm. We'll build Jerusalem somewhere else, not on this earth, in the next world. Again, it takes the pressure off us. We moderns, we modern people, we think the present moment is supremely important. Now is important. Everything that's going on right now is supremely important. It doesn't matter remember 100 years ago or 1,000 years ago. now is the only criteria of time. You are perfectible, right? So, if there's something wrong with you, you're failing against an ideal of perfection. Again, very, very hard. Um and that you are made I mean, the biggest the biggest challenge of all, you're made to be happy as you suggested, that the true goal of every human is happiness. Not fulfillment, not uh you know, the realization of a grand scheme, not living for others, your own happiness. And again, it's a beautiful idea, but goodness me, does it cause problems. Goodness me, you know, think of Emile Durkheim. Beginning of the 20th century, French sociologist, writes this book um so contrasting the differences between ancient societies and modern societies. And he identifies one troubling difference between ancient societies, the pre-modern agricultural village-based societies where religion plays a role, and modern urban technologically driven success-oriented individualistic societies, and that's the suicide rate. He realizes in his book on suicide, published in 1900, that modern societies, for all their advantages, leads their members of a share of their members, often the most ambitious of their members, to take their own lives. Why? What's going on? And this becomes Well, it's the birth of modern sociology, really. It's It becomes a major inquiry into what modern times does to the soul. And I'm deeply fascinated by that. I can't let that one go because what's this paradox? What's this paradox of suffering amidst plenty, of regress amidst progress? This fascinates me. I spoke to the CEO of Calm, Campaign Against Living Miserably, Simon Gunning, and he shared some stats with me about exactly what talking about about suicide. He said someone dies by suicide in the UK every 90 minutes. 76% are male. There's 25 attempts for every death. Um the single biggest cause of death for men under 45 is suicide. Single biggest cause of death for 15 to 49-year-olds is suicide. That 19 to 35-year-old category are twice as likely to report being in crisis than any other group. And 16 to 24s is the fastest growing group in history to exhibit suicidality. And more recently, there's a big conversation emerging now around young women and suicidality, which is um a fairly recent unfortunately exploding trend. This trend of young women now experiencing suicidality. And look, people don't just commit suicide when things are bad. People commit suicide when things are bad and they think it's a delicate point. They think it's their fault. They cannot disassociate the trouble they feel from an intense sense of responsibility, which then also entails shame. Now, what's going on there? You see, when I say that we live in a individualistic world, what that really means is we live in a world where people feel that they control their own narratives. That that what happens to them is very tightly a reflection of who they are and what they've done. And this was not always the case. You see, for long periods of history, um people were not necessarily tightly held to the observable outcomes of their lives. This happened with money, for example. Um in Old English, a poor person was known as an unfortunate, right? Um what is an unfort- Let's unpack that word unfortunate. There's the word Fortuna in there. What was Fortuna? For the Romans, Fortuna was the goddess of luck, the goddess of fortune. And the Romans were therefore all the time sacrificing things to the goddess of fortune as a way of saying, you know, please, you know, it's not me, it's, you know, this outside agency. Nowadays, this sounds completely weird. I mean, what do we call in the most individualistic country in the world, United States, what are poor people called? It's not a nice term, they're called losers, right? You say, that's a loser. So, we've gone from unfortunate to loser. That's a trajectory of 400 years. What's happened in that time is a story about who's responsible for people's fate. And nowadays, you know, if I said to you, "Stephen, things have not been going so well for me. I just been sacked. Uh, you know, my my book hasn't sold, you know, there but it's not me. I've just had a bit of bad luck." You, very nice [clears throat] person, but a modern person, inside of you you'd be thinking, "Hmm, he must have done something wrong." Right? You'd be thinking he must have done something wrong because that's how we think. We don't allow people the benefit of luck, right? Similarly, if you said to me, "Oh, you know, my podcast be doing brilliantly. We now got 8 million million million billion I don't know how many you've got nowadays. Um, um, and you and you said and you said to me, 'Oh, I just just a bit of good luck.'" Right? I think, "Oh, Stephen's really, you know, he's very modest, but, you know, it's not true. He's done something." We believe that people do things and that that action leads to results or failures. And that's why people take their own lives because in extremis, people think there is nothing other than me to explain what happens to me. Of course, the reality is much more complicated. I'm not saying that's the truth, but that is the perceived truth. You know, look, we live in a world that is meritocratic, right? That word, meritocracy, is on everybody's lips. If you take politicians, left and right, in the United States or of the world, everybody wants to create a world that is meritocratic. Some people think we've already got there. What does that word mean? I don't know. Meritocratic is the concept of meritocracy is a world in which um people's outcomes are dependent on their merit rather than on who their parents were, um some corrupt class in society, the influence of whatever. So, you know, a left-wing politician and a right-wing politician say, "We want to make a meritocratic world where your kids will go to where they deserve, where if you work hard, you can get there, and um you know, where everyone has a chance to succeed." We You know, you know that kind of rhetoric, yeah? It's It's the rhetoric of modern times. Now, it sounds great, and in many ways it's an enormous advance, but again, let's just focus on the psychological toll of that, because if you really believe in a world in which those who get to the top deserve to get to the top, by implication, you are also positing the existence of the world in which those who are at the bottom deserve to be at the bottom. In other words, a meritocratic worldview turns success and failure from chance to a necessary fate. And that's why it makes the winners quite hard, potentially quite heartless, because they're thinking, "Well, I got there on my own. You You know, don't need to thank anybody. Might not need to pay many taxes. Why Why pay taxes, you know? It's It's fine." And similarly, those at the bottom are kind of crushed. So, we've we've created this very complicated ideology where um there's a hidden toll. What is love? Let's If we're talking about Let's talk about romantic love. What is that? [clears throat] Well, can I just first start by saying we're a bit confused about it? And and so I can't give you an immediate answer, but I want to register that not just me, but the whole of the current world is confused about love. And I think we've been confused for about 200 years. And and let's let's go easy on ourselves here because the way in which we approach love now is a never-before um approached philosophy. You know, for about the last 250 years, we've been loving under the aegis of a philosophy we could call romanticism. And romanticism is is a vision of love with very particular assumptions. Let me run through a few of them. Um there's one soulmate for everybody. You're going to find this soulmate. Um you're going to find them through slightly mysterious ways. Possibly through almost something almost quasi-divine. Like you'll feel pulled. You'll meet them at the supermarket checkout line, the and without even knowing too much about them, you will sense that they're your destiny. So you'll feel impelled towards somebody that you don't necessarily know too much of. A force will pull you and you will feel this is the one. And they will be an angel, literally a sort of descended being from from another another world. Um the romantics were very very keen on the notion that you didn't have to know someone too well to understand them. Even speaking not very much, the connection will be even deeper. Um the romantics also thought that love and sex absolutely belong together. And that that that you couldn't have a millimeter of disjunction between the two. Love and sex had sometimes drifted apart in the old world and that'd been sometimes a problem, but it became a tragedy. So adultery moved from a difficulty to a tragedy. That's why all modern novels and films are all about the tragedy of of of adultery. So look, these are some of the difficulties that the modern world has created. We we tend to believe nowadays that love is an emotion that we should feel, never a skill that we should learn. You know, for example, if I said to you, "We should probably study love. We should probably go to a school of love." You know, "That's not very romantic." Now, every time every time that someone says, "That's not very romantic." Ding ding, that's normally a sign of a problem. Like most things that don't sound very romantic are a good idea, and most things that are romantic, like marrying in Vegas after you've met someone for 5 minutes, is not so great. Now, what are we getting wrong? One of the things we're getting wrong is this whole business of instinct, right? So, we tend to believe that love will pull us instinctively towards marvelous people that will be correct for us. You know, the old world, people were set up in relationships. You'll marry this person because of this reason, you know, that person goes well with with what my family, blah blah. In other words, nothing to do with you. You you're put together with somebody. Nowadays, we're nominally free to choose anyone. Hooray! Fantastic! Aren't we going to make great choices? Uh no. Why don't we make great choices? Cuz we're not free. Why are we not free? We need to go to a psychotherapist to tell us why we're not free. We're not free to love just anyone. We love in tracks laid down for us by our childhoods. Adult love sits on top of tracks and a script laid down for us in childhood. You might go, "What's wrong with that? So what?" Well, what's problematic is that many of us had childhoods in which affection was mixed in with more problematic dynamics. That maybe in order to derive love in childhood, we also had to encounter somebody who was in a rage, someone who was violent, someone who was depressed, someone who put us down, someone who preferred another sibling, whatever it was. And we go into adulthood and we find that we're drawn to love stories that feel familiar because they're echoing some of childhood dynamics, but they don't necessarily for that matter lead to happiness. And you know, sometimes we have situations where yeah, you set up a friend, let's say. You have a really good friend and you know another friend. You think these people would really go well together. Set them up on a date and then you call them up afterwards. You say, "So, how did it go?" You know, it must have gone really well. They say, "I'm not sure. Maybe something was lacking, a little spark." What they're really trying to get at is they're not going to put it this way, "Your friend, this date, did not show me signs that they would make me suffer in the way that I need to suffer in order to feel I'm in love." In other words, this relationship threatened to be happy. That's why I had to go away. So, we are paradoxical creatures because our past was not necessarily happy. We're not necessarily that happy that our future romantic lives should be happy either. And this is something that, you know, they they weren't thinking about that when love was reinvented 250 years ago. When people say they have daddy issues and things like this, are you saying then that there's often truth in that because they had a early experience with a father figure, a male figure in their life that might have left them or might have, you know, created a anxious attachment style or something. So, they then end up pursuing dysfunctional men and relationships because that's the suffering that they associate with love. Sure. I mean, we repeat what we don't understand. And so long as we're unaware of the stories that we've grown up with, we will enact them in our adult lives. So, we're not compelled to do this forever, but and and look I think a lot of us have a desire to give the stories of our childhood a different ending. Our father might have been a distant and you know, mean-spirited creature, but also had some good qualities. The dream is to find somebody a bit like that, but to make sure that the story has a good resolution. So, it's not merely a desire to repeat, it's a desire to repeat and give a better ending. But frequently, you know, we don't get there. And I think that look, the thing about psychology is we see all around us people doing so-called crazy things. You know, falling in love with people who are not going to make them happy, sabotaging their careers, not able to open up to people, and we think we can step back and go, "Why are they doing that stuff? What's going on?" Now, one way to look at it, and it's a kind of compassionate way to look at it, a lot of the stuff that looks crazy now, once made a lot of sense. It was once, probably, a really clever thing to do. If you were growing up, let's say, in an environment in which, let's say, a parent was suicidal, right? A parent was suicidal. And you shut down your emotions totally and decided you would never trust anyone. Fantastic. That's a fantastically clever thing to do when you're 5 years old and you've got a suicidal parent, right? Because that will get you through to the next stage of life. If you open your heart at and there's a parent who's suicidal, it'll tear you apart. So, good for you. You're you're doing something brilliantly clever, right? Or imagine somebody who um is a becomes a clown as a child because there's a very sad atmosphere and there's a depression and all they can have time for is jokes. They're just a manic joker, right? Brilliant. What What a fantastic thing for a kid to work out that they need to be quite a kind of manic joker. But what happens 10 years later, 20 years later, 30 years later, is that what used to be a fantastic defense against an intolerable situation has turned out to more or less ruined people's chances because the person, you know, with that difficult father will end up never being able to open their heart to anyone, even a very safe person. They won't even know their heart's closed. But they will be acting out the same defensive strategy. Or the person who, you know, it was a great idea to be a bit of a joker early on, but now they have no time for anything serious and their friends feel that they're a slightly plastic person, can never connect with them. That's a real toll in in in the in the adult world. So, you know, very often what we need to do is to say thank you to our younger selves for having devised strategies that really work clever. But at the same time say, "Thank you. It's enough. I want to I want to live in a different way. That was a fantastic strategy then. It may no longer be the right way for me to live now." I was thinking as you were speaking about that that there's kind of two groups of people. I was bouncing through different people that I know to see how it fit with them and I identified in my mind that there's basically two groups of people there. The ones that are aware of their cycle, you know, and whether they've acted to change it or they're just reliving it, who knows. And the ones that are totally unaware that they're in this cycle and they just think, "Oh God, that's my luck." You know, they say phrases like, "That's just my luck." How does one increase their awareness of their own cycle? Do you think there's a way? Yes. Um so much that can be done. Let's imagine the very simplest exercise. Psychologists have these things called sentence completion tests where you start with a stub of a question and then you end it with an ellipsis, a dot dot dot, and you say to somebody, "Don't think too much. Just finish the sentence." And typical ones are men are dot dot dot. Women are dot dot dot. I am dot dot dot. Life dot dot dot. If you give somebody that sheet of paper and say to them, "Don't think too much. Just write it down." All right? Amazing things bubble up. Men are, you know, authoritarian villains. Wow, where did that come from? Right? You're carrying out, you know, women are, you know, whatever it is. Life is, you know, I am, you know, a nobody who deserves to be stamped on. Did you know a minute ago that you have that in you? Not necessarily. In other words, sometimes you need these little levers to shine a light. Now, the thing that really helps, and I'm not, you know, for your viewers, um, many therapists, many psychotherapists are not what they should be, but some are great. If you find yourself with a good psychotherapist, they can also increase your level of self-awareness. I think that's what we're talking about, increasing level of self-awareness. And and the reason is very simple. You know, there's stuff that we all do. Let's imagine, I don't know, when you're around a man, you think that person's judging me, therefore I'm going to withdraw and not enter into competition with them. I'm around a woman, I think I'm going to have to, you know, I'm going to be treated badly, therefore I must, you know, whatever it is. Something from your past is projected onto it. You end up in a therapy room with a man or a woman. And lo and behold, what do you do? You bring out that thing, and you bring out that thing that you're doing normally. Except this time, you're not doing it in the office, you're not doing it in a relationship, you're not doing it in a context where people are busy and have got their own stuff going on, and they're doing their own games. You're doing it with somebody, a trained professional, in a quiet room, and they can see. It's like a petri dish. They can see the stuff that you're doing. And so suddenly you'll be saying to your therapist, "I know you hate me." And the therapist will be going, "I really don't think so, but I'm interested that you have that conviction that you do." Um or someone will be going to the therapist, "I need to look after you. I think you're quite tired, and I really you know, you you've been doing such great work. I feel I want to look after you." Maybe you'd be doing that all your life, and the therapist will be going, "You don't need to look after me, but was there someone in your past that you needed to look after and that made you feel guilty and that has meant that every time you're with somebody, you feel that their needs are more important than your needs?" And there's a chance, therefore, to see more clearly than ever before, outside of the kind of hubbub of relationships or office life, the kind of stories that you're projecting onto reality to your huge cost. So, I'm now aware of my cycle that originates from my childhood. The next step is doing something about it. How do I overpower that sort of hardwired urge to repeat the cycle that comes from my childhood? Well, look, Stephen, let's not minimize. That's already an enormous achievement. Yeah. You know what I mean? I mean, that's that's it [laughter] you know, if you're there that you have a handle on Look, we don't need people to be perfect, right? We don't need pe- people perfect. At best, we need people to know how they're imperfect and that they can have a chance to warn us of their imperfections in good time before they've done too much damage. There's an enormous difference. I mean, look, again, take the take the dating idea. Let's imagine, you know, I I often say, "Don't do this to me cuz we're not um we're not on a date, but um but a great question to ask somebody on a date is how are you mad? How are you mad? Right? If the person says, 'I'm not mad. I'm completely sane.' Run away because, you know, everybody has folly inside them. And we're approaching a measure of everyday tolerable sanity when we've put some flags in the areas of our madness. So, total sanity is not a possibility for any human being. Um but the awareness of where the insanity lies and a little bit of warning and prompt apology, you know, after um an incident goes a huge long way. You know, People often say, "I'm looking for a partner with a good sense of humor." No one needs jokes. It's not It's not about jokes. It's really about modesty about oneself. Right? Somebody who's able to go, "I think I mean look, take the other thing. If you meet somebody who thinks they're easy to live with, run away. No one's easy to live with. And someone who thinks they're easy to live with is really trouble. So, somebody who can put up their hand and go, "You know what? Yeah, I'm a bit of I'm I'm pretty tricky to live to to live with." Great. That person is safer, not necessarily totally safe, but they're safer because they've started on the road to self-awareness. And so, ultimately, the best we can do in this world is self-awareness, prompt apologies when we slip up. Um yeah. And a genuine and intention to uh make progress, I guess. Is that Is that important as well? So, like me being aware that I I have certain habits in my relationship is one thing, but then I think my partner would like to know that some of the destructive cycles I might have, I'm working on them. I'm tr- I'm I'm at least trying to make forward motion. Yeah, totally. I mean, I think one of the most destructive ideas in the modern world is the idea that true love means accepting somebody for who they are in all of their you know, all of their good and bad sides. It's a It's a lovely dream. And you know, sometimes when you hear of breakups, they'll go, "You know, my ex, you know, they just didn't accept me for who I was. And everyone would go, "Oh, yes, God, what a terrible person, you know, how awful." You know, politely one wants to go, "Hang on a minute. Do any of us really deserve to be loved for the whole of who we are? Is that really a fair expectation? Or isn't, as you suggest, isn't it fair to suppose that all of us are works in progress? And that, you know, there is nothing contrary to the spirit of love in a desire to improve. The ancient Greeks had this right. You know, for the ancient Greeks, Plato saw love as a classroom. Beautiful idea. That love is a classroom in which two people, in a spirit of generosity and kindness, I mean, we're not talking about shouting here. We're talking about generosity and kindness. Two people endeavor to help each other to become the best version of themselves, of each other, right? That that that love is is geared towards progress and working on yourself. That sounds very odd nowadays. You know, if you if you went around saying, "I've read some Plato and he's kind of guiding me towards uh the idea that love is a classroom. So, therefore, I'm going to give you a 40-minute lecture on some of your flaws. And then I'd like you to give me a 40-minute lecture on some of my flaws." This would be considered, ding ding ding, unromantic, right? That's not very romantic, is it? Doesn't mean it's a bad idea. As I say, love is a skill to be learned, not just an emotion to be felt. And some of that means that we might need to go back to school. I I've been thinking more recently that most relationships the success of most relationship comes down to this idea of like how good you are at conflict resolution. Because I've had a previous relationship where I we both can take the the blame, per se. We were just not good at conflict resolution. And then I've had a more recent relationship where we're very we seem to be much better, not perfect, but much better at conflict resolution. And it makes all the difference. And but I think it's even, you know, it's not if you were bad at conflict resolution, it's not just your fault. It's It's partly the way our society works. Come back to the idea of romanticism, right? Romanticism gives us this extraordinary idea that love is something that should be felt and communicated without words, right? So, the most romantic people think the most romantic sentence that often people will say is, "I met this person and we didn't even need to speak. We just felt on the same page." Everyone goes, "Oh, how romantic." Ding ding, danger. Um because it's, you know, well, this leads to a catastrophic outbreak of sulking, right? What is sulking, right? A What is a sulk? A sulk is a fascinating pattern of behavior where you get very angry with someone because they have not understood you without even though you haven't said anything. They've not understood you and you get offended because you think, because you're a romantic person, you think, "They can't possibly love me because true love means understanding somebody, you know, intuitively, um wordlessly. And therefore, I'm not going to speak." And so, you know, you come back from a party with your with your partner and uh they say to you, "Is anything wrong, darling?" And you go, "Mhm." Of course there is, but you're not going to tell them. And then they start saying, "Come on, you can tell me. What's wrong?" And And the sulking person goes, "No." And this can go on and on and on. I mean, you know, we're all We've all been at it sometime. [laughter] You know, you you go home, uh you you go straight upstairs, you go to the bathroom, you shut the door. And then your partner's kind of knocking at the door going, "Please, darling, just just tell me what's wrong." And you go from behind the door, "No." And And the reason is that you're a romantic and you believe that your partner should have miraculous, almost alien capacities to look through the bathroom door into your gnarled and wounded soul to understand what the upset is. But of course they can't because they're just human, you know. Takes us a long time to realize that other humans are not mind readers. You know, one of the first thing we should always ask is, "Have I told them this?" I I know I'm upset, but did I tell them this? And so often the answer is not quite, because we're romantics. And so we have to do that really, I mean, you know, we can accept it's really boring. We've got to use words. We've got to painfully stack up words and go "The reason that I'm getting a little touchy is because and you've got to explain yourself." It's not very romantic. But that is normally a sign it's a good idea. So, honesty, I I've struggled at times to be completely honest in my relationships when I felt like the honesty might hurt them. So, can we have true love and total honesty? I believe that the the wish to tell someone absolutely everything is is both beautiful and ultimately utopian in a problematic way. Because we all of us have within us ambivalences, doubts, unfaithful thoughts, etc. And it isn't the work of love to rub your partner constantly up against the most troubling, disturbed sides of your psyche. Now, we're not talking This is not an advocacy for sort of total mendacity and lies, but it is an advertisement for editing. You know, we should hope that we don't meet the fullest version of each other all the time. You know, I know it sounds romantic, but sometimes it's as parents know, is it is it that great as a parent to tell your child absolutely everything about what's going through you? Well, sometimes, you know, is there a role for saying "I'm just going to edit myself" not in the name of subterfuge or deceit, but in the name of love? That love could be compatible with an editing of certain aspects of your reality. One [snorts] of the areas where a lot of editing happens is in the bedroom. In relationships, in sex, in sexless relationships. Um I was looking through some statistics earlier on because I know that you've talked quite um extensively on relationships and sex and sexless relationships. I found this stat that says a 2022 study by Relate, a UK-based uh counseling network, found that 26% of people in relationships were having sex less than 10 times per year and 8% were having no sex at all. This is a stark rise from 2018 um where the numbers were quite significantly lower than that. It seems like as a society we're getting increasingly sexless. Yeah. So, the question is where's the problem? Is the problem in the body or is the problem in the mind? Now, you know, being the kind of guy I am, I'm going to shift us to the mind. I'm sure sometimes there are bodily issues and you know, they deserve attention too. But if I can talk about the mind, um why is it that sex is easier at the beginning than in a long-term relationship? One of the leading answers is anger. It's not very easy to have sex or want sex with someone that you're angry with. And in many relationships, there's a lot of stored anger that neither party knows is there. And that anger has come from micro incidents of disappointment. Someone didn't quite call when they said they would. Someone didn't laugh when they might have done. Someone didn't show generosity when it might have been required. Um and these things get stored up and the result of too much of this is that you don't want someone going anywhere near you. Contempt. Because you're you're because you're furious. You're essentially furious. But in the way of these things, you don't know you are. You don't know you're furious. Again, as it you know, the mind is not obvious to itself. So, you know, if you want to have more sex, don't just invest in candles and fancy linen. Um a quite useful thing to do is to go and have dinner with your partner and say to them, "We're both going to ask each other how we've annoyed each other." Cuz we have annoyed each other, not because we're evil people, but because we're human and we're in a relationship. And no relationship can survive more than an hour without a build-up of frustration. And the more we can let out the frustration at the dinner table, the more it won't you know, create a blockage in the bedroom. And so, the chance to discharge frustration and you know, often the reason why we don't tell our partners what our frustrations are is that they sound ridiculous. It's like, "Well, hang on. You're upset with me because I used the word really in what you thought placed too much emphasis on the why when I was speaking to your mother." Are you crazy? Right? You could you are laying yourself open to your partner pointing to you going, "Are you crazy?" But I think that we're all in love, very small children, at least a small part of us is. And um as we know, small children get upset about really weird, tiny things. You know, you'll you'll move a button and they start wailing and you go, "What's happened?" And they go, "You moved the button." And you go, "I did? Uh and why does that matter?" But but for them it matters. Or you know, a pencil has slightly changed direction. So, we should learn we should remember what it felt like to be a child. And we should acknowledge that there remains, even in an adult who's very competent in all sorts of areas, a small child who is liable to be getting very upset about small things. Triggered. Triggered. But because they're an adult, this is the problem, we we think, "Well, an adult can't possibly be having such childish reactions." Again, we need to just um cast aside our fears of shame and say, "You know what? Yes, an adult can get very upset about tiny things. An adult probably is upset about tiny things." And we're doing ourselves an honor when we can dare to reveal this to our partner and they can do likewise. So, if I'm if if I'm someone listening to this now and I'm in a relationship where I don't think cuz it's it's interesting even when I say I don't think I'm having enough sex, the idea of how much sex is enough sex has probably come from movies, which is a bit of a trap as well, right? Um but if I'm in a relationship and we are in a sexless relationship by whatever definition, solution one you presented there is try and resolve the anger, the underlying contempt. Um are there anything else that you think is effective ways of solving for that? Look, I think we I think one useful thing to do is to go why does sex matter? What is this thing called sex? Why why does it matter? And when people get very upset, I think the answer tends to be that sex is a symbol of something very poignant and very delicate, which is my partner loves me. And they can't The reason why it becomes such an acute issue is that they cannot hold onto the idea that the partner might love them and might not want sex. This is psychologically impossible. Now, it is important to say it is possible. It is possible that your partner both loves you and doesn't want to have sex. There could be other reasons. They're feeling unwell, they're So, and and then we can ask ourselves what does sex really aim at? Sex aims at intimacy. Yeah, even we'll say they you know, in in in in people so polite language they say they became intimate, which means they had sex. So, what what we know about sex is that the really exciting thing about sex is not the sex bit, it's the intimate bit. Um it's the idea that someone is without their guard. You know, most of the time we approach other people without guards on. And um in this very rare and unusual thing we do, we meet another human being in a vulnerable state. And this is such a relief from the normal limitations of life. And there are other ways of doing this. You know, sex is not the only way of doing it. So, by understanding better what sex is, we can also have a chance to get some of what we get in sex in things that are not sex, if that makes sense. I had Tracey Cox on the podcast and she said something to me which really stuck with me because I hadn't noticed it until she said it, which is this idea I believe she called otherness, which is when your partner almost becomes like a family member or you start seeing them as like a a sibling because they are in their sweatpants around you. And she made the claim which I think I've read in your books as well that in many respects that's the very opposite of the the spice that makes sex so appealing in those early days when it's new and novel and risky, you know, and so [clears throat] she kind of alluded to the fact that love and sex are actually sit on two different ends of a pole. Right. And again, to come back to my theme, um what does a romantic say? A romantic romanticism tells us sex and love belong entirely together. But I think what you're saying and you know, what many of your viewers will know is that the relationship is is trickier. And again, let's not torture ourselves about this. Let's let's get curious and then let's communicate about this. And I think that look, a growing child has a paradox to deal with. And this is what Freud famously, doesn't matter what you think of Freud, very useful observation really, that um the child experiences love in the first instance, at the beginning of life, we all experience love at the hands of people who, everything's gone right, we will have no sexual connection with. Right? So, given the debt that adult love owes to childhood, Um, that sets us up with a problem. When we as adults start to fall in love with people and start to build up relationships, which is that the more we get cozy with someone, the more we feel like we did a little bit with our parents when things were really cozy. Which is oddly why um, people like going to hotels. Why do people like going to hotels? To revive a relationship. It's cuz the furniture doesn't remember you. The curtains don't remember you. You are You're allowed to be for a a chosen moment somebody without the history. And it's the history that is making intimacy hard because that history, while it's knitting you together and making you emotionally close, is also rendering sexual freedom problematic. And I think it's just we need to go very easy on ourselves for the fact that this happens. And um, What do I do about it, though? Um, Do I need to book a lot of hotel rooms? Do I need to spend a lot of time away from my partner? I notice even that you're laughing. You're smiling as you say that. And I think that's partly the clue. You know, when we come up against the hardest conundrums in in life, um, having the tolerance of a sense of humor, a shared sense of humor, you know, if a couple can turn the sexual challenges from a tragedy into something, you know, closer to um, a comedy, it's an enormous achievement. Think of you know, think of teasing, right? There are sides of couples that they find really, really hard. Isn't it wonderful when a couple learns with affection to tease one another? They go, "Ah, Stephen, you there's that thing that you do." Gives you a little nickname, calls you whatever it is, you know, a little affectionate nickname. That's a wonderful moment because it means that irritation has been sublimated into tender, compassionate understanding for why someone is difficult as they are. So, the best thing we can do with our irritations with our partners is to be able to tease our way out of them. Um and we may need to do this in troublesome areas like I say, it's an enormous achievement if your partner can call you, you know, can go from thinking that you are an idiot to smiling at you and thinking, "You're a lovable idiot." Right? We're all in the end of the day a lovable idiot. We don't need to believe in God, but if God was watching us from up there in the space station, um we are all, you know, 8 billion lovable idiots. And once we can have that sort of compassionate relationship to ourselves, that's the beginning of a big bit of the big bit of the solution. I often think, you know, I've been in my relationship now for a couple of years. I I think, "How do I stop my partner getting bored of me?" Will there become a day? Sometimes it does cross my mind. Like, is she just going to get like bored of me? And also, you know, vice versa, you think of being with someone for like 40, 50, 60 years. I'm sure some people listening have been with their partners for multi-decades. Is there a risk of us getting bored of our partner and then seeking the sort of, you know, the novelty in affairs? And how do we prevent that? Okay, well look, here's one suggestion. Um the thing that becomes very boring in all relationships is when people cease to listen to each other. Now, you know, when you when you say the word listen, you've got to think, "Oh yeah, yeah, I know what that means." Hang on. Let's complicate this issue a little bit usefully. Um to you know, most of us have never been listened to properly. It's not something that normally we know how to do. We know how to speak. You know, there are there are there are lessons in how to become a good public speaker, not very many lessons in how to become a good listener, right? So that's that's telling us something. Um so what is it to listen? Imagine a situation where someone says something to you and rather than you jumping in and going, "Oh, that reminds me of, you know, something happened with my auntie." Or "That reminds me of a" or you know, starting to give advice and going, "The thing that you need to remember is 1 2 3 4." Right? Which is normally what we do when people speak. It's to simply hold back. And therapists are good at doing this. And simply do what they call reflexive listening. So, you know, you say to somebody, um I'm really annoyed. I've had such a difficult day at work. This happened, that happened, that happened. And then you simply repeat back to them using slightly different words the essence of what they've said. And you say, I'm hearing that life's quite difficult for you at the moment at work and that you, you know, coming under pressure from your boss. And the person, you know, it'll be Try it because the person will immediately feel, I'm being heard. And then they will have they'll feel more they understand more about themselves. You know, why is it that in the company of some people we feel really interesting and have lots to say and in company of others we kind of feel a bit bored we don't we don't have anything to say with the same people. It's because we feel we intuit that we're in the presence of a listener. And the best way to listen is literally to not give advice, not um give out anecdotes, but repeat back to somebody what they've said in slightly different words. And I mean, you know, parents, bless them. I've been a parent, we've all been parents, been parents. Um parents are often quite bad at listening to their children. They think they're listening. I I was in a holiday resort um a few months ago and there was this kid, little kid, must have been three or four, and it was having a bad day. It was really screaming. And the parent, the mother, was say might might be the mother, someone, was saying, um What's What's wrong? Um and the kid was saying, I hate it here. The whole place smells. Um it's a poo and I want to be back home at kindergarten. And the caregiver said, Don't be so silly, darling. We're on holiday. Holidays are fun. And what's more this hotel has cost a lot of money. And you want to go, Okay. I get it. This woman was trying to help. She was trying to, you know, calm down this this distressed child. Was she listening? Not really. Cuz basically what the kid was saying is, I'm having a really bad day. Everything feels absolutely disastrous. Help me. Ah. Right? And we're all we all have a version of those days. And we don't want to be told, "Come on, you're living in really wonderful times. The sun is shining, you know, there's lots to celebrate." We want someone to go, "I hear things are bad for you. I'm hearing things are bad for you. Um I'm hearing you're not coping very well. And you're pretty sad. And if you do that, don't rush them. Don't give advice. Don't give, you know, you will get a great response back. We can put money on it. [snorts] Listening. What are the the other core components then? Cuz I really want to close off this topic on love and sexless relationships. What would you say are the core components or the core habits of two people who have a really successful, long-term, enduring sexual and romantic relationship? If we just focus on the the the sex side of things first. What are those core habits? So, communication's one that's come through quite loudly. Look, I'd I'd I'd start a little bit further upstream and go like, overall, what do these guys need to do? And I think overall, they both need to acknowledge that they are frail, fragile, slightly crazy people because, not because they are them, but because they're human. And there's no other option for a human being than to be slightly crazy. And nevertheless, against that background, they're attempting to do their best. Right? So, that the combination of an acknowledgement of their fallible nature mixed in with a dedication to trying to understand it through broadly therapeutic means. So, this is a very crucial thing. The other absolutely crucial thing is an acknowledgement that a lot of what people will be getting up to in relationships will have nothing to do with the person in front of you. That you will be importing from different periods of your life, scenarios and assumptions that owe nothing to the here and now and owe quite a lot to mom, dad, caregivers and other scenarios. And the capacity to acknowledge that with grace, to say, "Okay, I'm sorry. I'm, you know, I'm getting confused about who's in front of me, right? I'm importing into this situation an energy that doesn't belong there." We all do this. The whole basis of attachment theory, let's remind ourselves, is that your attachment style is governed by your first attachment, the attachment that you had with a parental figure. And therefore, you know, you will be, let's say, insecurely preoccupied, attached to somebody, um, not because they deserve that quality of attachment, because your early caregiver did. That's That's what they mandated through their own behavior. But your partner may be someone completely different, is someone completely different. So, if I can put it this way, getting on top of your projections, we project wildly as human beings, and being able to have at least a sense that the person in front of you may not be entirely who you think they are, and that reality in the here and now may be slightly more innocent, um, and I think, you know, you owe it to yourself. It's Look, it's so boring. I'm sorry, Stephen. I'm sorry to your listeners. You have to get on top of your childhood. It's so boring to be told this, to be to be 30, 40, 50, 60, and to be told that you have to get on top of your childhood. I mean, my goodness, this is not a nostalgia fest. The only reason is so you can put the damn thing to bed and never have to think about it again, but it's going to be rattling around unless you have done so. And I think it's so Look, think of language. All of us, when we were kids, we were put in an environment where without us doing anything, we learned an entire language with syntax, grammar, complicated vocabulary, etc. And this happened while we were doing handstands in the garden, drawing buttercups in the kitchen, etc. We absorbed an entire language and we had no idea. The same thing was going on emotionally. We learned an emotional language, not a language about grammar and vocabulary, but a language about trust, a language about self-esteem, a language about who we are, a language about what will happen to us when we trust someone, a language about whether it's safe to go with someone, to be ourselves, etc. We learned that whole language and we had no idea we learned it, just that we had no idea we ever learned our language of birth. It just happened. But it's inside us, no less than the grammatical language. And what we have to do, and it's just as difficult as learning in adulthood, you know how difficult it is. Imagine if I said to you, learn Finnish now. Now you're going to learn Finnish. Or next week we're going to go off and we're going to learn, you know, I don't know, Korean, right? You'd be like, in a week? Uh well, it's going to take a long time, isn't it? We're going to have to do this for a long time. Do you know what I'd say? There's two things I'd reply if you told me to learn Finnish. First one is, God, that's going to This is what I think. That's going to take forever. And the second one is, what's the point? But I'd also say, let's say we're not trying to learn Finnish, we're trying to learn trust. Let's say we're not trying to learn Korean, we're trying to learn the lesson of vulnerability, safe vulnerability, right? These are very valuable lessons. Very valuable lessons that we need in our relationships. I say that because I I point at the childhood patterns that you're talking about. And I think one of the reasons why people don't open up that closet and do the work there is because they don't realize that that is the puppet master dictating their career, relationships, and everything in between. So, I think step one is like them understanding the impact that that childhood narrative is having today. Yeah. And and then also realizing, you know, this is where language can be a useful metaphor, is is about time. Because sometimes people say, okay, so I I I understand I saw I listened to podcasts. a Great great guy, Steven, you know, really gets on top of it. Listen to many of his podcasts. Problem is, after three podcasts, I'm not healed." And you want to go, "Look, how many lessons of Finnish your career did you do?" "Oh, three." "Are you fluent?" "Not quite. I might need another 150." Right? So, in other words, You need 150 [laughter] more. Well, in other words, we need to take it slowly and we need to repeat these things. You know, what we're talking about religion earlier. One of the things about religions is they understand that our minds are like sieves. You know, take Islam. Islam wants us to remember their God three, four, five times a day. In many religions, you're on your knees constantly because they know these religions know that it goes in one ear, it goes out the other. It goes you know, that that we're not very good at holding on to the even the truths that we are most attached to. And I think part of the problem with the modern world is we tend to think, "I'll just listen to that idea once. I'll just read an interesting book. Say say something to me once and and and I'm going to change my life." You want to go, "No. No." You know, again, think of the holy books. How many times are you supposed to read the Bible, the Quran, the Buddhist text? Every day because we're not very good at holding on even to the things on which our lives depend. Is there a risk though in this sort of healing culture where we're all just healing forever and we're all kind of like broken and trying to recover from [laughter] our early years where someone snatched candy out of our hands or something. Is there I read an article a couple of weeks ago and it said there was a bit of a bit of a risk to this long-term ongoing healing mentality that we're Look, I I sense your frustration and I share it. It would be so nice if we could just get on with life without having to bother with all this stuff. I I I understand. But I think, Steven, the thing you have to bear in mind is we are no longer merely trying to survive. We're trying to thrive. Right? The age of survival is behind us. You know, we're not just looking to reach the age of 30 and then collapse into bed and thinking, you know, it's been fantastic life. I've not been butchered by an enemy, right? You know, we want to reach 80, 85, and we want not just survival, we want fulfillment. And if we want that, we're going to have to pay attention to things that previous generations didn't. Again, let me use another metaphor, right? Um for most of human history, people here I am drinking a glass of water, right? Um people didn't pay much attention to water. If it looked like there wasn't anything actively floating in it like a frog or something, they'd think it's clean water, right? They'd just gulp it back. And through such nonchalance, if I can put it that way, millions of people died, okay? And then towards the end of the 19th century, at about the very same time that Sigmund Freud in Vienna was getting going helping us to think about certain things in the psyche, various people got very interested in water supply. And all the main cities, Paris, London, New York, got a complete overhaul of their water supplies because it was suddenly discovered that microscopic organisms could kill hundreds of thousands of people. In a glass of water that looked completely clear, you might have enough to kill a city, right? And this is deeply perplexing. You think, "Hang on a minute, it's just a glass of water, must be fine." And, you know, I don't want to be hard on you, but in that tone of like, "Really? Is it Can we be bothered with that old childhood stuff? Why don't we just get on with it?" You want to go, unfortunately, we have to take care because there are macrobiotic organisms, as it were, in our lives that are gumming up our capacities for fulfillment. And it's not that it's not necessarily they're going to kill us, but they will hamper our capacity to be you know, to exploit our full potential. And after all, you know, this is what this podcast is about. This is what many people are concerned about, and it's going to require work. Can we ever truly heal from those things? Can Or will they always be there in the back room just exerting less power over us? Um look, wonderful German philosopher Schopenhauer, he says that uh the goal of life is to turn tears into knowledge. Wonderful progress. Tears, what are you what are you going to do with those? They just end up in your pillow. They might end up, you know, being uh things you can learn from. So, I think the best we can do is to learn to turn so many of the troubles that afflict us. You know, no life is without affliction. But that moment when we go, "You know what? I've learned something from this torment. This was a total nightmare, but I've pulled out of it something about myself, about human nature, about psychology." Then we're really learning. Then we're really on the path to a good life. Because a good life is not a problematic-free life. It's a life in which we've found a way of learning from our inevitable pains. You will never find the right person. I read that sentence and that sounded a little bit um negative. I think I read it in your book. You will never find the right person. Well, I was teasing gently our old friends, the romantics, who tell us that of course we will find the right person. And the belief in the right person has led to more rage, more disappointment, more frustration than any other. You know, if you tell people, "You will find the right person." If you build up a model of what it will mean to find the right person, you will be dooming people to disappointment. If, for example, they meet somebody who's really good, in many ways very, very good, but they've had an argument with them. Well, "Oh, I'm not supposed to argue with somebody that is the right person. We're supposed to be bliss blissful." So, I'm teasing really the concept of rightness. Rightness can include a lot of wrongness. And that's why, you know, wonderful English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who came up with this phrase, "a good enough" applied to parenthood. He he argued that no child needs a perfect parent. Indeed, quite dangerous to have a perfect parent cuz you never leave home. Quite good to have a parent who causes you few frustration. It'll It'll get you out there. Um, but he argued no one needs a perfect parent. No one needs a perfect lover. They need a good enough parent, a good enough lover." Do you think um that people that are in relationships, romantic relationships, should spend time apart? Do you think that's healthy for the stuff we've talked about with sexlessness and stuff? Cuz I think I I tend to get more excited about sex with my partner when she's been away for a while. And there's a real novelty to it. Yes. Look, I think one of the things that distance can do is to remind you that there is no preordained reason why someone should be with you. I mean, it's one of the most miraculous things that anyone should choose to be with anyone, cuz anyone is a quite complicated proposition. And some of the mystery of that um can kind of you know, it achieve its necessary force after a a period away. Look, it's like being very ill. Imagine being ill for a while. You've been you not been in the world for very long um for a while. Suddenly, you're feeling better. You go out into the world. You go to the park. And suddenly, oh my god, there's this thing called a tree. It's amazing. It's got leaves. There are some bugs crawling all over it. There's this thing called grass. There's a brick wall. You are suddenly like a 3-year-old, full of appreciation and wonder. And one of the great challenges of life is how to keep being people who have wonder in in their life. Because habit swallows everything up. You go, "Oh yeah, tree. Yeah, I I I I know what those are. I know what a tree's like." That's why we need art, you know, for example. I mean, what's the point of art? Small topic. Let's bite that one off, too. What's the point of art? Well, one of the things that happens when you go to one of these places called galleries or museums is they're full of paintings by people who look at the world as if they've never seen it before. Maybe it's their wife or husband. They look at their wife or husband as if they've never seen them before. And lo and behold, quite an amazing thing. Wow, it's kind of amazing. It's full of tenderness and beauty and compassion and interest. Wow, I could, you know, I could like this person. They look at a tree. They They at a cloud. They look at the grass. And you know, we are Part of what makes children, small children, so fascinating but also frustrating is you suggest a walk to the park, it takes them an hour and a half to go to the park. Why? Because everything's interesting. What have we done [clears throat] with those layers of interest that we also used to possess? We think we know what's going on. But we don't. Um and one of the wonderful things that children can remind us is the foreignness, the true foreignness of a world that we feel we know, we feel we've seen, but we haven't actually looked at. You say on page [snorts] 75 of that book that the solution to long-term sexual stagnation is to learn to see our lover as if we had never laid eyes on him or her before. Feels so natural though that through this process of sort of habituation everything in our lives becomes less yields less joy than it once did. And I and I I often fight with that because as, you know, as things get financially more as you get more financially free in life, you're able to experience the the, you know, the nice restaurants and the nice things and the nice holidays and the nice planes, all those kinds of things. Um but with that, the awe and the surprise escapes you. Absolutely. And I think we need to work at it. The Buddhists were onto this. Um the wonderful Buddhist scroll from the Middle Ages, medieval scroll, uh six persimmons. You know, a persimmon a kind of fruit. Um it's kind of like an apple. Um uh and it's just six persimmons on a on a canvas, beautiful rendition. And the idea is that the Buddhist sage is meant to look at those six persimmons for an hour. The true one could could keep going for even a day, right? Just six persimmons, right? And you might go, "Hang on a minute. Can I change the channel, please? Can I look at something else?" The capacity to stare intensely at something and draw benefit from it is absolutely something that we lose as especially life gets more more dizzying. The The thing to bear in mind is life can ever only be so exciting. It's not by more stimulation that you're ever If your senses are wrecked, if you're unable to draw benefit from one lemon, having a thousand lemons or a sports car isn't going to make you more of an appreciator. The goal is to learn to appreciate more of what we've already seen. And that is you know, we talk about gym and exercises and and and workouts. It's something we need to do. I mean, it's it's literally learning to see and to appreciate is a skill. Um and you can dial it up or dial it down. As I say, one of the good things about works of art is they are records of careful looking by people. They might not be looking at things you're looking at, but it's less about what you're looking at that it's a method of looking that you can learn from. As you'll know if you've listened to this podcast before, I'm an investor in a company called Huel. I'm on their board and they sponsor this podcast. And I have a very exciting announcement to make. This product called Daily Greens is one of the most highly requested products at Huel, but it's never been sold in the UK before. Until now. It's often difficult to get all of the greens into our diet that we need to have a healthy gut microbiome and a healthy body. And with Huel's Daily Greens product, with one scoop every morning, a very very delicious scoop, you can get 91 vitamins, minerals, and whole food-sourced nutrients into your diet. The most important point here is I genuinely believe it tastes delicious. It's maybe my favorite Huel product ever for all the reasons I've described. So, if you want access to this product, you can sign up right now. The link is in the description below. It launches in the UK in January. Because of the demand, I'm pretty sure it's going to sell out. A therapeutic journey, lessons from the school of life. The Sunday Times best-selling author of The School of Life. I've seen this book everywhere. Um I walk into bookshops all the time and I just wish my book had the prominence. [laughter] It does. No, I I saw it in I Yeah, I was in a Foyles the other day and I think you've got some signed copies in there. I picked up one, yeah. Um why why did you write a book called A Therapeutic Journey? Um cuz I have to say you you have written Lots and lots. Bit too much. A lot of books. I mean, this is not even half of them. No. There's about 70 of them. Yeah. This book, A Therapeutic Journey, um it's really following the arc of what one could call mental breakdown or um mental a mental crisis from the moment of its inception, the moment it strikes us, through to the moment of recovery. And then I go into lots of byways and lots of you know, lots of digressions, but essentially it's saying how can we keep our minds safe? How can we help them to heal? Um what can we do when we are in a mental crisis? It's written in a tone, I hope, of sympathy, um of kindness, and also trying to give people a sense of what's happening to me. Cuz very often, you know, when when there is a breakdown, we don't know what on earth's going on. You know, yesterday we were happy-go-lucky, now we can't get out of bed. Yesterday we were able to hold it together, now everything that comes out of our mouth makes no sense. So, I think that the um uh it's it's it's supposed to be a companion through what might be some of our loneliest hours. Why do we need this book right now, do you think, in society? I think because Look, I hope that people will think, "Hmm, okay, this is written from a place of somebody who probably gets what what they're saying and what I'm feeling." I think we need companions through things that probably feel very personal, but are actually, this is the good news, very general. But I think, you know, at The School of Life we see so many people who are going through these things. And the thing that each one thinks is, "I'm alone." And the best thing you can say to people is say, "No, you're not." And the reason they think they're alone is that you know, it's a paradox of human beings. We only know people from what they choose to tell us. But we know our own minds from introspection. And so there's a massive sort of cognitive gap between self-knowledge and knowledge of others. And in that gap, shame develops, right? And um there's so much shame around mental illness because it's still, as we know, so rarely spoken about. And so the book aims to rehabilitate, to educate, and to comfort. [snorts] This is a book about getting unwell, imagining that we have let everyone down, and losing direction and hope. It's also a book about redemption, about regaining gaining the thread, rediscovering meaning, and finding a way back to connection, warmth, and joy. What are the ways in which we're unwell? Increasingly. Well, you know, it's very hard. When your mind is operating well, you almost don't notice what it's doing because it's doing so many things to keep you feeling, you know, you know that word, normal, right? You know, "How do you feel?" "I feel normal." You know, "That's That's my baseline. That's just That's just how I am." It's It's the result of what we call it gifts because when those gifts are taken away, goodness me, do you notice, right? So, for example, there's something in our mind in a well-functioning mind that more or less keeps us on our side, right? There would be so many reasons for all of us to despair of who we are. You know, "Why would I be on Why would I be on my side? I've made mistakes. I'm not perfect, etc." But most of us, you know, on a on a good day, you still will go, "Look, I'm not perfect, but you know, I'm okay. I can keep going." When you're mentally unwell, that that faculty breaks down. And suddenly, you can't abide your own self. You can't forgive yourself. You know, there are people who are unwell who will say, "17 years ago, I said something to someone and I can't forgive myself." And you want to go, "That's 17 years ago. It's okay." And they can't let it go. That's what illness is. Illness is not being able to let go of an argument against yourself because you've turned into your own worst enemy. Um the other thing that that people manage to do um in a in a healthy mind is bracket things so that not all the things that could be in your mind are active in your mind at any point. All right, so you're able to sequence thoughts. So you think, you know, [snorts] "Well, you know, I've got this to do. I'm I'm interviewing this guy now. Tomorrow I'll be in New York. Uh there's also thing with my granny and there's also thing with a friend etc." But those thoughts are sequenced. You're able to line them up in in a coherent order. When health breaks down, all of these things come at all angles. There's no order anymore. There's no hierarchy. So something that happened 10 years ago is expressing something's happening right now. Um something that's deeply urgent collides with something that, you know, by rational means is not that urgent, but it seems as urgent. And so everything coherent breaks down. You can no longer order things. There are voices that start coming in, not friendly voices. All of us have voices in our minds, not necessarily, you know, they're not I'm not talking about psychotic voices, but there are voices, voices of encouragement often. You can keep going. Just just, you know, do it. Or it's okay. You could dare to take that risk. Often kindly voices that we've incorporated from kind people around us. When mental health breaks down, we can only hear the worst voices. The voices that are telling us, "You don't deserve to be here. You've made a mistake and we don't want you here anymore. Better thing would be if you didn't exist." Those voices. And those voices don't let up. And then we're in trouble. And we need to raise the white flag because things are not well. And sometimes we keep going. We're so good at keeping going that it's terrible. Half the problem is that we keep going so well. You know, we're we're half dead before we realize there's a problem, right? And so, the ability to go, "Hang on. Hang on. I can't take it anymore." That is the beginning of being knowing how to get help. Because when the mind is in trouble, what it most needs is another mind. It's like calibration, right? When you've lost the correct calibration, you need somebody else to go, you know, when you go, "Everyone hates me and it's all terrible and nothing I've done is of any value." Just have another mind that says, "Okay, I know how you feel. Let's think about this. Is Is that Is that really who who it you are, who that that is?" And then, you know, gradually, with love. And let's remember, people always get mentally unwell because of love. I don't mean romantic relationships, but all mental unwellness stems somewhere. If you If you scroll back, there's always a deficit of love, always. There's always an experience of cruelty in some way that breaks the mind. And when people get well, there is also always an experience of love that heals. And it could be love, you know, not about romantic love, love from a friend, love from a therapist, love from professionals. But it's essentially an act of love. An act of love saves us, redeems us. So, the problem and often the antidote is love. Or at least the cause and the antidote is often love. Yes, imaginatively understood, not merely romantic love. In its broadest sense. And, you know, because mental breakdown is often emerges from a build-up of cruelty, an unbearable cruelty, which makes life unbearable for the person, and they then have to, you know, project it outwards. I mean, in when when illness becomes very severe and you have a psychosis, you know, what can happen is that people become obsessed with the idea that everyone is against them, the CIA is against them, other people are plotting against them. Really, what this is an outgrowth of is an unbearable inner negativity that hasn't found any way of being handled. You use the word resilience in this book, and I think the word resilience is often misunderstood because we think of resilience as like tough it up and, you know, take it. What is your definition of resilience, and why is why is that such a prominent word in this book? Look, I think true resilience should be compatible with things that don't look resilient at all, things that look very desperate, very humble, very broken, indeed. So, um yes, I mean, I like you, I'm suspicious of the use of that word resilience as as really just meaning a kind of stoic um bouncing back from all problems immediately. Um I think it means a generous understanding of how much madness has a legitimate claim on even a healthy life. Um towards the end of the book, I have a little thing I riff on about the seasons. Some of it is understanding that is normal. This is part of the natural cycle, not railing against it. Some of what What does that help? Understanding that it's normal. Sometimes when people have mental troubles, uh they will have ups and downs, right? And sometimes people can box themselves in and they'll go, "I suffered. Now I'm better again, you know, I'm I'm I'm better." And the advice is always, "Mm, careful, careful." That belief that you're better, the rigid belief, "The past is behind me, the darkness is behind me," can itself start to see kind of start to see that can itself start to seem like a problem because it means that you'll be intolerant towards any regression. And regression belongs to progress, just like dark days belong to good seasons. You know, we need some of that. And And the natural world has a wonderful way, if we're attuned to it, of telling us about cycles. Really, what we're talking about cyclicality. Darkness is followed by light. Autumn is followed by winter is followed by spring. The mind has its own seasons, and the more we can accept the legitimacy of those seasons, the less we'll rail against some of the necessary sliding into darkness, which for many of us is simply going to be unavoidable. If someone chooses to pick up this book, and they get to the final page, what do you hope they'd learned or taken away from them by getting to the end of this book? Mhm. Um real sympathy for the complexity of their minds, a real understanding that um it's not easy being human, that there is nothing indulgent about, you know, working on oneself, as you put it, that that this this is a a boring but alt- very necessary task, um some tools in there about how to do it, from the very practical to the more theoretical. It's a practical book about how you can work on the most broken bits of yourself and find a kind of equilibrium. Um but it's also very deliberately a warm book. It's a book of comfort, and I think that something that we often miss, we can get we can get a little too intellectual in this topic, thinking that people who are in trouble um mentally and just psychologically, that all they need is some ideas. You know, get some ideas. And yeah, sure, we need ideas, but you know what we also need is uh warmth, kindness, um friendship in in a way. Now, you could say, "Well, how how could a book be a friend?" Well, I you know, many of my best friends are books, let me tell you. And um I think it's absolutely in the remit of of a book to act as a friend and to say to you very simply, "You are not alone." You said earlier that a good conversationalist, a good friend, a good romantic partner is someone that makes you feel heard and understood. And I think that's exactly what you achieve in this book. It is a very difficult thing to do because books can often feel quite exclusive, especially when the author is as smart as you are. Um but this book does a wonderful job of first and foremost making you realize that the thing you're going through in the way that you are isn't evidence of your inadequacy. It's actually evidence that you are perfectly human and that you are like everybody else and through that lens you can offer support and some very practical tips about how to, you know, endure or rise rise from the situation that we all find ourselves in in the different seasons of life that you describe. And that's why it's such an important book and that's why it's done so tremendously well um and it's being passed around by so many people. Alain, thank you so much for for your time today and thank you for all your wisdom. You're a remarkable talker. I was learning I was watching you and I was just thinking, "Fucking hell." You know, um you've got a wonderful way to hold people with the way that you articulate yourself that is so unbelievably powerful. And uh speaking and the art of speaking is such a important incredible talent to have and you have that in such a wondrous way. You it's so soothing and engaging and intelligent and there's a real poetry to the way that you frame things which I think is just a superpower that I would love to have more of. You do, Stephen. You do. No, but no not like you have it. So, it no it was wonderful just to learn from the way that you speak. We have We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. And the question that's been left for you is Ah, interesting. What was the last thought to keep you awake at night? Mm. The last thought to keep me awake at night. Um Well, last night I was quite worried about coming here. [laughter] So, I was I was kept up. But um you know, I'm often kept up. I I I do I do I do sleep in a in quite a fragile way. And I think that one of the ways of thinking about it is that there are thoughts that happen in the middle of the night that can't happen at any other time. That they're actually some quite important thoughts. Often they're to do with things that you didn't even know you were concerned about, but the night teaches you. There is the school of night, you know, and and and I used to be very very impatient um uh insomniac. So, I used to wake up and think, "Oh my goodness, I can't believe that I'm still awake. How how annoying." etc. Now I'm thinking, "Maybe there's something to learn here. Maybe my mind's trying to teach me something." Um and it might not be anything sort of totally earth-shattering. It might not sound completely earth-shattering, but it might just be something might just be like, "Oh, I really love this thing." or "I think I should really steer away from that." or "This is really beautiful." or whatever it is. Something a a kind of acknowledgement of the night. And so, I'm I've become a better not a better sleeper, but something perhaps even more important, a better insomniac. Why were you uh nervous staying up about coming here? We're all friendly people. I know you are. Um I think, you know, we've spoken a lot about expectation, haven't we? Um and you know, if if your podcast had one listener, um and we were just going down to the pub, that'd be so lovely. If you called me up and said, "Anna, we're canceling the show, but we're just uh going to go to the pub." Uh I would have slept like a baby. [laughter] Well, you've certainly exceeded all my expectations and it's a real honor and a privilege that you chose to come. So, thank you so much for that. And your wisdom, I'm sure, has impacted countless people not just for the last couple of decades, but even in this conversation that I guess you'll never get to see. So, on behalf of them, thank you so much. Thanks, Steven. [music] In 2023, I launched my very own private equity fund called Flight Fund. And since then, we've invested in some of the most promising companies in the world. My objective is to make this the best performing fund in Europe with a focus on high-growth companies that I believe will be the next European unicorns. The current investors in the fund, who have joined me on this journey, are some of Europe's most successful and innovative entrepreneurs. And I'm excited to announce that today, as a founder of a company, you can pitch your company to us. Or, if you are an investor, you can also now apply to invest with us. Head to flightfund.com to gain an understanding of the fund's mission, the remarkable companies we proudly support, and to get in touch with me and my team. Legal disclaimer. Flight Fund is regulated by the FCA, so please remember that investing in the fund is for sophisticated investors only. Don't invest unless you're prepared to lose all of the money you invest. 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