Yule Heibel's Library tagged alain_de_botton →  View Popular

Excellent presentation by Alain de Botton, described as follows:
QUOTE
[Botton] examines our ideas of success and failure -- and questions the assumptions underlying these two judgments. Is success always earned? Is failure? He makes an eloquent, witty case to move beyond snobbery to find true pleasure in our work.
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Really worth watching/ listening to.

www.ted.com/...ler_philosophy_of_success.html - Preview

alain_de_botton careerism success snobbery ted_conference video

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

www.alaindebotton.com/...index.asp - Preview

alain_de_botton work socialtheory books