Alain de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, extract - The Diigo Meta page

• 25 Jun 09
  

  Yule Heibel

  I like this last bit (the prior sections are somewhat artificial, imo, but this works):
  QUOTE
  We are the victims of these two momentous and strangely optimistic ideas. There is immense unthinking cruelty discreetly coiled within the assurance that everyone can discover happiness through work and love. It isn’t that these two entities are invariably incapable of delivering fulfilment, only that they almost never do so. And when an exception is misrepresented as a rule, our individual misfortunes, instead of seeming to us quasi-inevitable aspects of life, will weigh down on us like particular curses. In denying the natural place reserved for longing and incompleteness in the human lot, the modern world denies us the possibility of consolation for our fractious marriages and our unexploited ambitions, and condemns us instead to solitary feelings of shame for having stubbornly failed to make more of our lives.
  UNQUOTE

  alain_de_botton work socialtheory books

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