The School of Life

Videos on thinkers worked because they gave a personal response, not a summary. When Alain de Botton covers a thinker, he asks what has really stuck after he shuts the book and where that thinker took him. The School of Life videos made this way, like his books on Proust and other philosophers, played extremely well.

He never wanted to be faithful to a thinker the way an academic is. "That's different from trying to write a Wikipedia page on somebody."

How I Write▶ 49:00

De Botton sees The School of Life as his childhood comfort object, grown up. He describes it as the teddy bear he invented to comfort himself as a boarding-school child, continued into adulthood.

It fits his wider view that writing and culture exist to turn pain into something useful. He began writing as a teenager to master emotions that felt bigger than him.

How I Write

Honest attention to your own feelings is what readers recognize as theirs. De Botton's research method is empirical observation of himself. Readers of his first book, On Love, asked how he knew that about them, though he had only observed himself.

He writes whatever he most wants to write each morning, in pieces of about 800 words, reasoning that if he is bored the reader will be too. He argues AI only sums up what has already been said, which raises the pressure on writers to explore their own experience more deeply.

How I Write