Alain de Botton- a kinder success philosophy
For me they normally happen, the career cris, often, actually, on a Sunday evening, just as the sun is starting to t, and the gap between my hopes for mylf, and the reality of my life, start to diverge so painfully that I normally end up weeping into a pillow. I'm mentioning all this, I'm mentioning all this becau I think this is not merely a personal problem. You may think I'm wrong in this, but I think that we live in an age when our lives are regularly punctuated by career cris, by moments when what we thought we knew, about our lives, about our careers, comes into contact with a threatening sort of reality.
It's perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living. It's perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.角马大迁徙 I want to look now, if I may, at some of the reasons why we might be feeling anxiety about our careers. Why we might be victims of the career cris, as we're weeping softly into our pillows. One of the reasons why we might be suffering is that we are surrounded by snobs.
百合粥的做法In a way, I've got some bad news, particularly to anybody who's come to Oxford from abroad. There is a real problem with snobbery. Becau sometimes people from outside the U.K. imagine that snobbery is a distinctively U.K. phenomenon fixated on country hous and titles. The bad news is that's not true. Snobbery is a global phenomenon. We are a global organization. This is a global phenomenon. It exists. What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and us that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.
The dominant kind of snobbery that exists nowadays is job snobbery. You encounter it within minutes at a party, when you get asked that famous iconic question of the early 21st century, "What do you do?" And according to how you answer that question, people are either incredibly delighted to e you, or look at their watch and make their excus. (Laughter)
Now, 飞的英文单词the opposite of a snob is your mother. (Laughter) Not necessarily your mother, or indeed mine, but, as it were, the ideal mother, somebody who doesn't care about you
r achievements. But unfortunately, most people are not our mothers. Most people make a strict correlation between how much time, and if you like, love -- not romantic love, though that may be something -- but love in general, respect, they are willing to accord us, that will be strictly defined by our position in the social hierarchy.
And that's a lot of the reason why we care so much about our careers and indeed start caring so much about material goods. You know, we're often told that we live in very materialistic times, that we're all greedy people. I don't think we are particularly materialistic. I think we live in a society which has simply pegged certain emotional rewards to the acquisition of material goods. It's not the material goods we want. It's the rewards we want. And that's a new way of looking at luxury goods. The next time you e somebody driving a Ferrari电路板修复 don't think, "This is somebody who is greedy." Think, "This is somebody who is incredibly vulnerable and in need of love." In other words -- (Laughter) feel sympathy, rather than contempt.
There are other reasons -- (Laughter) there are other reasons why it's perhaps harder no
w to feel calm than ever before. One of the, and it's paradoxical becau it's linked to something that's rather nice, is the hope we all have for our careers. Never before have expectations been so high about what human beings can achieve with their lifespan. We're told, from many sources, that anyone can achieve anything. We've done away with the caste system. We are now in a system where anyone can ri to any position they plea. And it's a beautiful idea. Along with that is a kind of spirit of equality. We're all basically equal. There are no strictly defined kind of hierarchies.
昂刺鱼汤There is one really big problem with this, and that problem is envy. Envy, it's a real taboo to mention envy, but if there is one dominant emotion in modern society, that is envy. And it's linked to the spirit of equality. Let me explain. I think it would be very unusual for anyone here, or anyone watching, to be envious of the Queen of England. Even though she is much richer than any of you are. And she's got a very large hou. The reason why we don't envy her is becau she's too weird. She's simply too strange. We can't relate to her. She speaks in a funny way. She comes from an odd place. So we can't relate to her. And when you can't relate to somebody, you don't envy them.安徽省网上税务局
The clor two people are, in age, in background, in the process of identification, the more there is a danger of envy -- which is incidentally why none of you should ever go to a school reunion -- becau there is no stronger reference point than people one was at school with. But the problem, generally, of modern society, is tha新的一年图片t it turns the whole world into a school. Everybody is wearing jeans, everybody is the same. And yet, they're not. So there is a spirit of equality, combined with deep inequalities. Which makes for a very -- can make for a very stressful situation.
It's probably as unlikely that you would nowadays become as rich and famous as Bill Gates, as it was unlikely in the 17th century that you would土豆发芽可以吃吗 accede to the ranks of the French aristocracy. But the point is, it doesn't feel that way. It's made to feel, by magazines and other media outlets, that if you've got energy, a few bright ideas about technology, a garage, you too could start a major thing. (Laughter) And the conquences of this problem make themlves felt in bookshops. When you go to a large bookshop and look at the lf-help ctions, as I sometimes do, if you analyze lf-help books that are produced in the world today, there are basically two kinds. The first ki
nd tells you, "You can do it! You can make it! Anything is possible!" And the other kind tells you how to cope with what we politely call "low lf-esteem," or impolitely call "feeling very bad about yourlf."
