Welcome to Litsy!

This was a really eye opening book! I learned a lot from it and was able to look inward and examine my own status anxiety. I wish the book was not so Catholic/Eurocentric, there is so much to learn from Eastern and Indigenous cultures about status.

I‘m finally able to get past de Botton‘s structural foibles—the man drops pictures, diagrams, and numbers wherever he wants in a serious text—and am managing to understand and ponder his points!
This is as close to #philosophy as I think I‘ll get, ever since college put me off.

It‘s useful to think about how we attach #moral #merit to #economic status to #happiness, and how it‘s only been 250 years! I hope things evolve again, and soon.
#status

The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our #ancestors is a perpetual #anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.

I struggle with #deBotton‘s #structure every time I‘m intrigued by his thesis, but this time I finally pushed through/was in the right frame of mind to plough through the weird #d paragraphs and absorb the message.
A very important one about why we are unhappy—also perhaps a way out of #climatecrisis?!

As written in the title, this book only has the key insights compressed to about 25 pages. It did not fail however to create the philosophical arguments on how and why there is status anxiety and what we can do about it.

Excellent book, has a very strong message, very influential, must-read!

I normally loathe self-help books, but I think this is something I really need to address

"We may be happy enough with little if little is what we have come to expect, and we may be miserable with much when we have been taught to desire everything."

#AlaindeBotton #StatusAnxiety #Philosophy

TBR Tuesday! This is a fun idea. 😀 Here are mine. Tagging the Alain de Botton book because I'm eagerly awaiting his newest one to arrive today and because I'm seeing him on Friday. 🤓