Do We Live in a Society of Snobs? Why Is an Ordinary Life Not Enough?
We don’t need a seven-figure business to be worth something
Alain de Botton is one of the most famous contemporary philosophers nowadays, for both his books and his YouTube channel The School of Life, which amounts to more than 8 million subscribers.
In his interview with Brian Rose, Botton brings us some reflections that may change our perspective about one aspect of our lives, the one in which we think we have to be extraordinary.
It’s becoming common sense and a kind of absolute truth the idea that we have to find our purpose, be the best at what we do, travel the world, marry the most gorgeous person from a physical standpoint, and, of course, be a millionaire.
But do we truly have to live in such a flashy way? Would it be a total failure to think small, to strive to achieve a smaller, easier target? It’s at this very point that Botton’s ideas bring us some clarity and help us to have a different take on the topic, which has more chances of providing us with a better life.
Botton states, in a pretty straightforward way, that the current scenario suggests to him that “we live in a world of snobs”. This is shown, for example, when our value as human beings is judged based on what kind of job we have and how much we have in our bank account.
However, what we are seeking is not necessarily a respected job or a huge amount of money, but the “honor” and the “love” we believe these things will bring us. We get to the point of thinking that a job with lots of status and loads of money is the only means to achieve the “honor” and “love” that we crave.
Thus, whenever we find someone using a flashy watch or living in a mansion, we shouldn’t hurry and conclude that this person is greedy, but just somebody with a huge necessity for being loved.
Botton says that people like this need a larger amount of stuff to feel like “they have the right to exist”, and he states that if we feel good about ourselves just riding a bicycle around our city, something has gone right in our past; if we are parents whose children don’t want to become famous, we are doing something right.
Botton reminds us that the idea that anybody can be anything is beautiful, but a dangerous one. If this is true, think about how we would feel about ourselves if we achieve very little in our life. The possibilities to feel humiliated are far bigger.
We need to realize that “most of us are going to have an ordinary life”, and this may be a wonderful thing, exactly what we are looking for.
After all, how many people who lived an extraordinary life lived in a way by which we would really like to live? Would we like to be sleep deprived, lose our privacy and our right to go wherever we want, and receive all kinds of personal attacks?
That’s why Botton concludes that the way whereby our society is currently built, in which ordinary life is not good enough, is a kind of self-torture.
We live in a society in which a large number of people have absolutely everything they need, like shelter, food, clothes, and even hot showers.
It suffices to remember that our current lives are probably far more comfortable than the ones experienced by the richest people on earth some decades or centuries ago.
Yet, we end up torturing ourselves because we are not millionaires and famous. We think that all these wonderful things, which in the past were unthinkable and that nowadays are just a dream for lots of people, are not enough. “We put a snake in the grass, we ruined paradise”. In short, “we’re insane”.
Botton ends this part of the interview with a strong statement, that a bit of ambition is not necessarily a bad thing, but that we are not at risk of being unambitious. “The danger now is suicide”.
This reminds us of another problem, brought up by Brian Rose in the interview: social media. It amplifies the possibilities of us comparing ourselves with others and feeling like losers because we don’t have an extraordinary life.
All of this “is making us sick” and the consequences may be far more serious than we would like to admit.
“We need to hear another message”, maybe from Henry David Thoreau: “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”
