Reflecting on the works of Alain de Botton and the School of Life

Alain de Botton is a Swiss philosopher now living in London. He writes about everyday life, and our issues with it and how these have evolved and how we can help solve them. In addition to numerous books, Botton has created a team under the name of the School of Life. This emerged as a book series, but is also a Youtube channel featuring mostly short videos on everyday issues that people have access to for free. They act as a self-help book would.

I have watched a fair amount of these videos and will be touching upon specific ones that I think are relevant to my project in some way or another. As my project is about escapism, and therefore the mind, this research felt very apt for my project. It's important to understand why I am making these images, and I think that understanding how the mind works is key to this.
I have picked videos that resonate with me, so I am not just trying to force myself to apply to every video, rather only sharing those that are relevant. 

1. Loneliness and our Craving for Community.

This video touches upon some really interesting points. Simply, it tells us that community is missing from our lives, which can cause anxiety and trauma. In the past we lived in communities, tribes, spent most of our time together, ate together, and of course we bickered but as a whole we flourished from being together. Relative to human history, it's only been recently since this stopped, and we started living in houses alone or with just a few people.
This causes a pressure to fall in love, as they're told it will cure all of their social needs, but this only put pressure on the person as we want them to become everything we need. This is unrealistic and causes many good matches for us to be a wasted chance.
The desire for connection causes a deep need to be 'successful', as that promises the idea of a community around you. I think I certainly fit into this category, as I always push myself and put pressure on myself to do good, get the good grades, make a good marketing post for my mum's business, even win at games. When I am not successful, I get a wave of enormous anxiety. It is then this anxiety that causes me to feel the need to escape, hence the birth of this project.
Botton goes on to explain that even if we do have good friends, they can be unavailable most of the time. This is again true for me, especially through changing education stages. I had a great group of friends in high school that I continue to be nostalgic for, but when I went to college and they stayed at the high school sixth form, I lost that community. After going to university from college, I lost the communities I made there. I remain friends with some of them, but life means that we see each other rarely. Even now, one of my best friends I met on the internet and he lives in Hawaii.
The video proceeds to explain how communes have a bad reputation because of terrorist groups and extremists, and anything legal and commercial opposes communal living. But he asks us to imagine a perfect place where we live as a community, and the visual he used solidified my need for community. 

Alongside this image of a potential idealistic, modern-day communal living environment, Botton says that we would have shared ideas and values. Now, I understand this seems like a stretch, but I also think that we find community wherever we can. Last summer I went to Walt Disney World, and stayed at a Disney hotel. Just being at the resort was one of the best feelings, I had no anxieties, I was purely happy. The image above reflects that of a hotel. It's simply rooms in a line.

Now, as this is a Disney resort, you assume that most people there are there for Disney, enjoy Disney, have the same interests as you, the same goals as you, and the same, brief purpose as you for that moment that you are there. It is a community, even if everybody around you are strangers, there is an emotional connection. Again, this probably seems like a stretch, but I truly think that how I relaxed here, felt like I was a part of something and my anxieties faded, is proof of Botton's theory.
Botton says that if we could live as a community once again, our impulses of addiction, power and paranoia would lessen, and while it seems impossible that we could live like this again, the first step is to be aware of this desire inside us.

I genuinely think this could be a potential cause for some of my anxieties that have led me to make this work as an escape from them. I'd also like to touch upon another point, that it is key to understand that in the past, people lived as communities. This includes the Greeks (obviously not as communal as tribes, however) and this includes how it was believed the Gods lived up at Olympus as one big family. I will be touching upon this within a later video analysis below.

2. Self-Hatred and Anxiety

This video explains that a cause of high anxiety is actually self-hatred. This is because people believe that if you're not worthy of good things, you are at risk of being punished, and if things are going well, it's about to collapse at any moment. Hating on the self has become second nature and we may not even realise we are doing it. To quote Botton, "One is an agitated person not because one has more to worry about but because one likes oneself rather less than normal - and certainly less than one should".
I think this is also very true within myself, unfortunately. I've been described as very pessimistic when it comes to myself, but I think I am optimistic when it comes to others. I am better at supporting others than I am myself, and I see no purpose to be being here, not in a necessarily negative way but in a way that statistically humans are only making the world worse, and I am human. I am and have been working on my outlook of myself, but I think I certainly fall under this category. As another source of anxiety, this again links with my work as I use it for a sense of escapism. However, the way in which I am doing so is important here; I embody something else. A character that has importance, that has flaws but is loved by thousands all the same, who's mistakes are accepted, and who, perhaps most importantly, is untouchable as she if fictional. 

3. The Golden Child Syndrome

This video suggests that sometimes, we are mentally unwell because once, we were loved with so much intensity. We were described as 'exceptional', 'beautiful', 'talented'. When both sides of the family have admitted that I am the favourite grandchild, it's clear that these words were once used to describe me. They usually revolved around me creating art - I had an aunt who I looked up to so much who was, and still is, an artist who owns a gallery in Brighton. My mother was, and still is, incredibly interested in crafts, drawing and painting. My grandma appreciated the arts to a great extent and was actually the one who introduced me to photography. But mentally, I was also applauded. I always got decent marks and ended up moving primary school because I wasn't being challenged enough. The video says that this, while can also give a person a layer of confidence, can also leave a child feeling incapable of meeting such expectations. At my second primary school, I saw a girl who was better at drawing at me and realised I was actually just okay. My grades were actually just okay. Everything about me was just okay. Botton says that this child just wants to be seen and accepted. Now, this is where I think my experience diverges a bit. My family have actually been fantastic in my freedom of me doing as I wish, they would never be disappointed in me if I didn't do as well as I had hoped. But most of the time I did pretty okay, and compared to them, who neither did good at school due to laziness rather than lack of intelligence, I was doing fantastic. And so I felt that need to continue to impress and make them proud, rather than being forced to. I ended up putting the pressure on myself. And I still do this, and so the need to make work where I embody somebody that would potentially fill my own expectations of myself and beyond is perhaps unsurprising. 

4. Alain de Botton on Art as Therapy

This video is a talk by Alain de Botton about how we can use art as therapy. 

He first starts discussing how religion is on a decline, and that people have been worried about what could replace it as a beacon of hope for people. He suggests that once, it was thoughts that Culture could replace religion, using influential works as a way of finding ourselves. However, the head of these elite institutions and organisations such as Oxford and Cambridge universities would realistically turn away those who claimed they wish to study because they feel lost, confused, don't know right from wrong and they fear death.

But we are vulnerable and fragile people who are in need of support, and art can be a form of self-help. The issue is, however, the general public is not encouraged to go and see art, and when they do the impact is not as it should be because the way we look at it, or the way the gallery presents it, is incorrect. But it could hold great power. Botton claims that "art is a bucket, it's holding stuff, but it's holding the most important thing, which is our own experiences and our own emotions" - art can be used for self-discovery. He says that a great artist opens our eyes to parts of life that would otherwise be invisible.

He takes a painting by Monet of water lilies with a Japanese bridge and explains that elite people don't like it because it's too common, and it's too pretty. Prettiness induces anxiety as it can feel like the viewer or the artist is forgetting about all of the darkness in the world - an irresponsible move. 

However, humanity is actually overwhelmed by the darkness, and art is a force of hope. How could we possibly forget about the darkness? There's so much of it around us. You can make pretty work while knowing and paying tribute to the dark side elsewhere. To me, the painting about feels fresh, clean, and yes, hopeful. It's beautiful nature being harmonious with human construction, something that is off balance in our part of the world. It is a sign of hope. Why should we restrict that?
There is, of course, dark art too. This type reminds us that we are not alone in our suffering, and can actually bring up spirits of the viewer by being able to acknowledge that we are all in this, we all have dark feelings, and you're not completely abnormal for feeling down. 

Botton claims that art can help balance us, and that everybody is unbalanced. In a way they are too much of one thing. I'm too much of a worrier. I'm too timid. I'm too poor. I'm too lonely. "The kind of art that moves us and draws us in is very often a work of art that our unconscious recognises contains a concentrated dose of our missing virtues - the missing bit of us". I think this quote is perhaps most interesting of them all from this talk. I find the above painting attractive to me because of my worrying, and the art offers a sense of peace and tranquillity. The paintings of the Goddesses I look at interest me because I am lonely, I am not financially well off, and I am timid. These Goddesses represent a concentration of everything that I wish to find a balance of within myself.
This is the reason we have different tastes in art - we all need something different. 

But, Botton claims, we need to figure out how we can address this within a gallery setting. He proposes galleries should not be organised in chronological order, but rather organised through categories of what people need. For captions to be clearer, perhaps. To alleviate the shame we feel when we don't 'get' a piece of work. In April - Sept 2014, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam accepted Botton's proposal and temporarily organised the gallery of work as Botton felt would be more appropriate (https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/art-is-therapy). The Art is Therapy exhibition ended up having mixed reviews, but it's interesting to consider. 

"What I'm trying to do with art is invite you ... to start to use art as something that can alleviate your sorrows, brings you hope, give you courage - a resource, a living resource, that's there for our hearts and not an academic or historical exercise"

Conclusion

This research has most certainly opened my eyes. I think it's the most interesting and perhaps most accurate way of looking at myself, and the issues that have caused me to feel the need to make this work. Understanding why I feel the way I feel, and therefore why I am so drawn to my project and the artworks that my photographs are based on is a great step for me to understand the project as a whole. Having the knowledge of why I am so attracted to these depictions of goddesses feels freeing and less strange. I think that having this understanding of why I feel the need to make this work will only benefit it in the future and help me progress.