Just One Thing - Alain de Botton

The Ten Thousand Things

To be a loving person is to wrestle with a profoundly improbable idea: that however modest our position in society might be, however much we may have been maltreated in the past, however mesmerised we are by the deplorable behaviour of powerful individuals, however shy and frail we are, we are constantly capable of causing other people significant hurt.
Alain de Botton in A More Loving World: How to increase compassion, kindness and joy

Creators & Guests

• Joe Loh - Host

This is the second of an ongoing series by Joe: short reflections on quotes he captured and shared with Ali and Sam while reading (usually books on spirituality, psychology, consciousness, religion etc).

Joe is writing over at https://joeloh.substack.com/ and it's genuinely sizzling stuff. You can tell he read Hunter S Thompson and Kerouac as a youngster, and since then I'm assuming he's read other stuff that sounds more mature, because his writing is kind of both of those things. It's present and truthful, and entirely unsentimental, but it has feelings in it. That link again: https://joeloh.substack.com/
- Sam

Image courtesy of Craig https://wish-art.blog/gallery/

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More on the quote's source, A More Loving World: How to increase compassion, kindness and joy at https://www.theschooloflife.com/shop/a-more-loving-world/ An extract of the book is available at https://assets.theschooloflife.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/04143544/A-More-Loving-World_extract.pdf

About the author of today's quote:

Alain de Botton FRSL (/dəˈbɒtən/; born 20 December 1969) is a Swiss-born British author and public speaker. His books discuss various contemporary subjects and themes, emphasizing philosophy's relevance to everyday life. He published Essays in Love (1993), which went on to sell two million copies. Other bestsellers include How Proust Can Change Your Life (1997), Status Anxiety (2004), and The Architecture of Happiness (2006).

He co-founded The School of Life in 2008 and Living Architecture in 2009.[1][2] In 2015, he was awarded "The Fellowship of Schopenhauer", an annual writers' award from the Melbourne Writers Festival, for that work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_de_Botton

More great quotes from Alain de Botton at https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alain_de_Botton

Transcript:

That's Alain de Botton. And that really struck me because I think I'd always given myself an out. That it didn't really matter what I did. That I was a small and insignificant person.

And as it says 'however mesmerized we are by the deplorable behaviour of powerful individuals...'

It always seemed enough to just look at someone like a Donald Trump, and just be like, "well, I'm nowhere near that bad, and I'm also nowhere near that powerful, so the things that I do don't really matter."

But as it says 'we are constantly capable of causing other people significant hurt.'

I look back and see a lot of burnt bridges. And actually burning bridges is the only way I know to deal with a lot of this stuff.

And I like to think that I have gotten better in sobriety and recovery.

But I've always had an edge that's capable of hurting people.

And I guess the point of this note and why I wrote it down at the time, and why it struck me so much, was this is the justification that I'd used for my poor behaviour in hurting people, that I was just a little insignificant ant.

And reflecting on it now, it's partially that insignificance that led to some of the rage, that led to some of the bitterness, that led to some of the poor behaviour.

So, I guess the thing that I'm trying to find now, is some genuine humility. And just getting myself out of the way and seeing other people, and other people have their struggles.

And to quote Bob Dylan's grandma, that "everyone walks a hard road."

And I know I'm not going to get this right. It's not going to be perfect.

But this quote reminds me that I matter to maybe a handful of people, but to those people I really matter. And I have to be really careful to try to be kind wherever I possibly can.

And it doesn't matter what's happened to me. It doesn't matter whether I've been given a diagnosis or I feel like I've had a hard time in life.

It actually only matters how I act in the world.

That's what I'll be judged on. And that's what I should be judged on.

I need to get my thoughts right. And my emotions, right. And then hopefully my actions will improve.