I recently watched a podcast with Alain de Botton, one of my favorite thinkers. I recommend you watch it. I’ve cut out some excerpts that have been playing on repeat in my head. Alain has an unparalleled ability to articulate certain truths about the human psyche.

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Alain: We’re really bad independent judges of significance. So if somebody says, that artwork on the wall that’s really expensive, that’s really famous, that used to belong to a king or a queen, we think, oh, that’s marvelous. And if we don’t know who the painter was, who the artist was or what it is, we think, oh, that can’t be any good. It’s almost comedic, isn’t it? How supine and dumb we are in deciding for ourselves what matters. If a book wins a prize, everybody decides that book’s amazing. But before it won the prize, everybody thought it was boring, but the book hasn’t changed.

True creativity is when you have a sense that your pleasure could be legitimate wherever it lies. So if you happen to like pebbles, go for it. That’s going to be your pleasure. Or if you like the way that sunlight hits a window blind or concrete, that’s going to be the thing for you.

And I think small children have it more naturally. That’s what makes that’s what makes small children delightful to adults. If you take a small child to a park, it’s hilarious. You can’t even get to the swings because they will have stopped. The child will have stopped by a wall or noticed a piece of chewing gum in, in, in a rock and you think enough looking at it, whatever. And you go, come on, let’s go to the swing. And they don’t want to go to swing cause they’ve discovered a tuft of grass growing out of a concrete ledge or whatever it is. They are independent arbiters of significance. By 15 they’re like, well what did Drake like? Or what’s X telling me?

Chris: They outsource their sense of taste.

Alain: Exactly. And that’s so tedious. I mean, bless them, everybody does it. But ideally, by the time you get to full maturity, you become a bit weirder once more. And that’s what makes certain adults really delightful. They go, doesn’t matter what everybody thinks, for me I’m liking this thing.

I don’t know how much entertaining you do when people say, I’m going to give a dinner party, I’m going to invite some friends for dinner. They get into such a mess thinking how am I going to organize this dinner? And oh, I must have a starter and, and maybe it’s a melon and, I don’t know, prawns or something. And then, well, I must have this thing called a main course, which might be chicken or something. And and then they or I got a dessert and they’re just overflowing with anxiety, etcetera.

And if you all said to them, what do you actually enjoy? And they might go, well, I like opening, a can of tuna, putting it on the table, getting some hummus, dipping that, putting my feet up. Well, why don’t you just do that with your mates? Why don’t you just just drop the pretense, have the courage to think what’s touching me might touch another person. Your dinner party is going to be a lot more fun.

This is ultimately, of course, what great artists do. Great artists have a sense that what’s fun for them, what’s meaningful for them will probably be meaningful for other people, even though right now there’s quite a lot of silence about that area. They’ve got a faith that the things that turn them on are likely to turn other people on as well. And that’s a beautiful confidence. And that’s what leads to great art.

Great art is really the courage to define the pleasure for yourself.

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Chris: Your heroes aren’t gods, they’re just regular people who got good at one thing by sacrifice literally everything else, and you don’t get to see that. That is probably one of the most fascinating questions that’s captivated me since starting the show: what is the price that people pay in order to be someone that others admire? What are the externalities?

Alain: I don’t look at it like that because I think that people tend to achieve what they need to achieve. They’re not saying, well, I could have, this sort of life or that sort of life, but I’ll choose to try and win Wimbledon or go to the moon. I think they’re driven to it. It’s not a choice, it’s a compulsion. And we can feel sorry for that compulsion, but also appreciate that it is a slightly neurotic overcompensation.

Chris: Should you look at successful people with more pity than envy in that regard?

Alain: Sure. Somebody with an outsized need for anything - always think, what’s the opposite of that? The very funny person, they’re really afraid of seriousness. The very wealthy person, they’ve got a really complicated relationship to a modest income, etcetera. So yes, there is a a massive overcompensation which speaks of lack. Ultimately, it’s a lack.

Think how poor you must feel in order to make that much money. You think how deprived you must feel inside in order to need that level of status in order to be thought so special by millions of strangers. How much you must despise yourself.

And we know this. Every single biography teaches us this. We know this about the lives of everyone who’s done an outsized thing in one area. We know there’s a relationship with the undersized opposite.