BITESIZE | The Truth About Modern Anxiety & A Surprising Way To Find Joy and Meaning | Alain de Botton #558
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Welcome to Feel Better, Live More Bite-size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 495 of the podcast with author, internationally renowned philosopher and founder of the School of Life, the wonderful Alain de Botton. In this clip, Alain explains a concept. that he calls cheerful pessimism, which challenges what he describes as the modern obsession with happiness and introduces the idea that a more melancholic outlook to life might actually lead to greater fulfillment. Last night I came across one of your TED talks.
And in it, you said, it's easier now to make a good living, but harder than ever before to stay calm and be free from career anxiety. I found that really an interesting phrase. You said that 15 years ago on the TED stage. Do you still stand by that today? I mean, perhaps even more so.
I mean, I w I was calling it in those days, I mean, I wrote a book on this called status anxiety, which is really an and in, it's a feature of what we call the modern world, which the modern world existed for 200 years in the West, you know, what we call the modern world, which is, you know, a world where people are defined primarily by their activities. uh by their jobs. You know, nowadays, if you meet somebody for the first time, you you say to them, what do you do? And according to how you answer that question, people will either be really pleased to see you or they'll kind of leave you aside and think of you as, you know, that quintessential punitive modern word, a loser. And the thing about the modern world is that it accords status according to
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