Alain de Botton

Thankfully half the book are illustrations, so it's only half as long as it seems. There's a legitimate conversation to be had about the lack of "third places" in society - this ain't it. The book is an uncritical look at 10 aspects from architecture to kindness, where religion is presented as having 'got it' and atheism/secular society has failed. Botton has some unexplained gripe with a libertarian boogeyman as well, presented as if they had some significant impact on society - most of the show more time it seems to be a stand-in for strikes against capitalism or consumerism.
The argumentation goes a little like; isn't architecture soulless and ugly? Aren't churches awe-inspiring and pretty? Atheism/libertarianism is wrong to deprive us of beauty and we should find ways of returning to tradition by having prettier buildings. The cause and effect is all over the place and who's being blamed for the status quo makes no sense whatsoever, and apparently the megachurches that look like malls or the hole in the wall prayer rooms don't count, only pretty churches do, and represent religion as a whole.
Art is similarly "stolen" from its religious contexts and this is bad because museum goers aren't worshipping the pictures, but maybe if we arrange art thematically (Botton helpfully includes detailed museum plans for this) then by walking through the "Gallery of Suffering", Compassion, Fear, Love and Self-Knowledge we can approach what the religious get out of the Stations of the Cross? Huh?
Now these gripes about the ugly modern world and returning to tradition are staples of far right opinion makers, as well as the calls for more "community" - Botton is presumably diametrically opposed to all that but doesn't make his argument any more coherent than those pining for the lost golden age.
Other missed swings includes a defense of the liberal arts against the commercialization of education, where somehow, mysteriously, religion is a beacon we should learn from when it comes to rounded education?
The book is far worse than the half-baked "dude what if" premises that tries to tie this together, it's so full of cherrypicking and outright nonsense, it's insulting to the reader. show less

This was the book I needed right now. I read Botton's first novel in 2009 —Essays In Love—and it was insightful, calling out issues that arose in my own relationship at the time. The novel had challenges with pacing and the protagonist was a bit too...fancy-pants for me. Regardless of that, Botton's philosophic look at a modern relationship was very helpful and unlike much else I'd read at the time. I've kept an eye on his work since.

In his return to the novel, Botton provides a show more stunning, insightful (and useful) look at the course of a marriage over twenty-plus years. It opened my eyes to considering different paths about how one approaches a relationship, and what is underneath the actions of another. Attachment theory, for example, is discussed near the end of the book when the fictional couple goes to counselling. Botton's insights and explanations shined a new light on the fictional couple and in turn, my own romantic relationship.

It doesn't portray perfect people - it provides a look at a better way to be. If we were a little more aware, a bit kinder and knew ourselves more, we can accept and allow our own relationships to flourish for what they are, not what we want the other person to be. It's given me a lot to think about. show less

I read most of this during a week when I was traveling for my grandmother's funeral, and this was like a gentle hug for my brain.

I have been a fan of Alain de Botton and The School of Life for quite some time, so when I saw this on the shelves at my local bookstore, I purchased it immediately.

Occasionally I was a little bit frustrated by how dialed into a particular audience this book felt -- highly educated, upper-middle class, pursuing competitive professional careers. I fall into parts of show more that, obviously, but sometimes the advice in this book felt a bit limited by being locked into a particular worldview. Particular definitions of stability, relationships, etc.

But overall I did love this, and needed its gentle tone of compassionate understanding that week in particular. show less

The passages quoted from the book are beautifully written and sound like a refreshing take on thinking about sex. de Botton is clearly an excellent writer, and the beginning of the book is so very promising. For example: "Ultimately, sex is a grounding mechanism that reminds us of our own imperfect humanity, and in that imperfection lies the messy richness of being human" and "We are granted an extraordinary opportunity to feel comfortable in our own skin wen a willing and generous lover show more invites us to say or do the very worst things we can imagine."

Beautiful, yes? Selectively quote a book and you can make anything sound wonderful, even to the extent of giving the impression that it is about the exact opposite of its actual content. In this case, the content is primarily that we should feel shame about sex, and focus on it LESS. I still haven't figured out why the book is titled "How to Think More About Sex."

To start, an amped-up version of Freudianism appears when the author insists that the reason the amount of sex had in a relationship diminishes over time because we start to see our partners as our parents, and sex with our parents is icky. Since this is normal and inevitable, we should resign ourselves to this state and disregard our sexual impulses. But don't go assuming that you're in the clear if you just give up on expecting to have sex with your partner. Want to watch porn? Congratulations. You are destroying society.

"The associated waste of time is naturally horrific. Financial analysts put the value of the online pornography industry at $10 billion a year, but this figure doesn't begin to evoke its true cost in terms of squandered human energy: perhaps as many as two hundred million man-hours annually that might otherwise have been devoted to starting companies, raising children, curing cancer, writing masterpieces or sorting out the attic, are instead spent ogling the mesmerizing pages of [porn] sites."

You could be curing cancer! How selfish to spend that time and energy on porn. Besides, you really should have known since "how deeply contrary pornography is to the rest of our plans and inclinations becomes clear only after orgasm. Where just a moment before we might have sacrificed our worldly goods for one more click, now we must confront with horror and shame the temporary abandonment of our sanity." That's right, watching porn and masturbating should make you feel immediately ashamed and horrified.

If all this stress leads to some impotence, worry not. It just means you're a good and ethical human because:

"...what is often termed 'nerves' in a man, far from being a problem, is in fact an asset that should be sought out and valued as evidence of an evolved type of kindness. The fear of being disgusting, absurd or a disappointment to someone else is a first sign of morality. Impotence is an achievement of the ethical imagination - so much so that in the future, we men might learn to act out episodes of the condition as a way of signaling our depth of spirit, just as today we furtively swallow Viagra tablets in the bathroom to prove the extent of our manliness."

Perhaps we should start having Impotence Pride Day to celebrate our evolution.

Who can we turn to for guidance around our sexuality? According to de Botton, religion (specifically Judeo-Christian religions) is the answer. Without religion, we in the West would have been devoid of any sense of morality or ethics. He states, "Reason and kindness had not yet intruded upon the free flow of animal impulses - nor, in the West, would they do so convincingly for many millennia to come, until the influences of classical philosophy and Judeo-Christian ethics at last percolated through the general population in the centuries after the death of Christ." Not only are we finally kind and reasonable, we can absolutely rely on religion to dictate how we should think about sex and sexuality.

"Only religions still take sex seriously, in the sense of properly respecting its power to turn us away from our priorities. Only religions see it as something potentially dangerous and needing to be guarded against. We may not sympathize with what they would wish us to think about in the place of sex, and we may not like the way they go about trying to censor it, but we can surely - though perhaps only after killing many hours online at [porn site] - appreciate that on this one point religions have got it right: sex and sexual images can overwhelm our higher rational faculties with depressing ease."

(Who exactly does de Botton think creates and maintains religions? It's the very people he insists are unable to overcome their impulses and hormones, and who set aside all goodness for the sake of a quick orgasm.)

Religion will help us kick our porn habit by redefining pornography.

"The new pornography would combine sexual excitement with an interest in other human ideals. The usual animalistic categories and hackneyed plots, replete with stock characters seemingly incapable of coherent speech, would give way to pornographic images and scenarios based around such qualities as intelligence (showing people reading or wandering the stacks in libraries), kindness (people performing oral sex on one another with an air of sweetness and regard) or humility (people caught looking embarrassed, shy or self-conscious). No longer would we have to make a painful choice between being human and being sexual."

Can't you just imagine it? Whole shelves devoted to library porn. Perhaps we can have some really hard-core stuff like videos of people studying physics or organic chem. Mmm… I'm getting wet already.

Turning to religion will also improve our marriages, which also happens "to suit children well. It spares them anxiety over the consequences of their parents' arguments: they can feel confident that their mum and dad like each other well enough to work things out, even though they may bicker and fight every day, as kids themselves do in the playground." Staying together for the kids, even if you're fighting all the time, is just so beneficial! de Botton also insists that any sexual exploration outside of a marriage, consensual or not, will destroy the relationship and that staying faithful necessarily means that you will miss out on "some of life's greatest and most important sensory pleasures along the way." But since we're slaves to our urges and hormones, it's pretty likely that we will stray, in which case de Botton has some counterintuitive advice for us:

"Rather than ask their 'betrayers' to say they are sorry, the 'betrayed' might begin by saying sorry themselves - sorry for being themselves, sorry for getting old, sorry for being boring sometimes, sorry for forcing their partners to lie by setting the bar of truthfulness forbiddingly high and (while we are at it), sorry for being human."

Yeah. That'll fix it.

To sum up, all relationships lead to marriage, which is important for children regardless of the health of the relationship. During the course of a marriage, we will start thinking of our spouses as our parents and stop having sex because incest is taboo. Ideally, we will just give up on our sexuality at that point, because watching porn is the equivalent of taking food from starving children and hosting book burnings. If we're lucky, our genitals will stop working entirely. Religion, however, will save us by shaming us into having as little sex as possible, to the extent that we will eventually evolve to find images of people reading erotic. And if we ever make a mistake in all this, don't worry too much. Our partners will apologize for making us do whatever bad thing it is we did.

Or, as the author says towards the end of the book: "We would be so nice without sex - nice in the way that seven-year-old boys and girls are, full of sweetness and wonder about the lives of marmosets or deer."

Never have I wanted so badly to throw a book across the room. This is the most shaming, sex-negative book I've read in ages, and it is shocking that it gets such good reviews. show less