Who in this room is happy to be married but not in love? Who here is happy to be in a job where you’re earning money but you’re not fulfilled? This is why you need an emotional education.
Trying to tell people life is a perfect business that can be made ideal is one of the quickest ways to depress them. The best way to cheer anyone up is to tell them life is difficult for everyone. We suffer, all of us, alone, thinking that we are massively unique in our suffering. We’re not. That’s actually what binds us together. Being able, therefore, to say we are a broken species is the first step towards consolation and an act of friendship.
Nowadays we often hear critics saying that we live in incredibly materialistic times and that never before people have been so greedy and focused on acquiring money. I don’t think that we’re living in particularly materialistic times, I think we live in times that have, for a whole variety of reasons, connected emotional rewards to the possession of material goods.
Next time you see somebody driving by in a Ferrari, don’t think “this is somebody very greedy,” think “this is somebody with an unusually intense and very poignant need for love that they’re expressing through automotive means.”
<aside> ❤️ I would admire infinitely someone with a house full of love, a fulfilling job, and a very crappy car (because he doesn’t give a shit about the car).
</aside>
When we speak of emotional intelligence, we are referring to their ability to introspect and communicate, to read the moods of others, to relate with patience, charity and imagination to the less edifying moments of those around them. The emotionally intelligent person knows that love is a skill, not a feeling, and will require trust, vulnerability, generosity, humour, sexual understanding and selective resignation. The emotionally intelligent person knows how to hope and be grateful while remaining steadfast before the essentially tragic structure of existence. The emotionally intelligent person knows that they will only ever be mentally healthy in a few areas and at certain moments, but is committed to fathoming their inadequacies and warning others of them in good time, with apology and charm.
Ultimately, the thing that really turns strangers into friends is the display of vulnerability- failure. You cannot become friends with any human being on the planet without showing them a bit of yourself that they could use against you, to humiliate you.
So many of us spend so much of our time feeling a bit weird. The problem is that we know other people only from what they choose to tell us, but we know ourselves from the inside.
It’s very very hard to achieve self-knowledge. Most childhoods have gone a bit wrong.
Freud proposed that as infants we are all driven solely by the pleasure principle, which inclines us towards easy physical and emotional rewards and away from unpleasant things like discipline. But then we adjust to the reality principle. He described a conflict between 3 parts of our minds:
<aside> 💦 Freud insisted that little children have sexual feelings, and they direct their sexual impulses towards their parents, the most immediately available and gratifying people around. What is complex is that no matter how much our parents love us, they cannot extend this to sexual life, and will always have another life with a partner. This makes our young selves feel dangerously jealous and angry and shapes our idea of love. We may be prone to associate love with a certain distance, not being able to merge sex and love because the people we learned about love from are also those we were blocked from having sex with. So the more in love we are with someone, the harder it becomes to make love to them.
</aside>
<aside> 🧠 Our parents gave us mixed signals: sometimes they were very nice to us, sometimes they were destructive to us, yet, because we love them, we remain loyal to them. This also shapes our idea of love.
We’re not merely on a quest to be happy, we’re on a quest to suffer in ways that feel familiar.
</aside>
A breakdown is very often a prelude to a breakthrough, and that something can very often be a healthy thing. Something needs to be heard.
Let’s talk about love because it’s been estimated that a person’s life satisfaction is dependent up to 60% on the quality of their primary relationship.
35:00
We’re still living in what we would call a Romantic Age. It starts off in the minds of poets, writers, and artists, and it’s spread everywhere in the modern economy: you find romanticism in pop songs, in ads, it’s everywhere. Romanticism teaches us all sorts of things about relationships that poison our capacity to have good relationships, so we’re up against a very unhelpful cultural background.
When we fall in love we’re not falling in love for the first time, we’re re-finding love.
I am actually a small child inside and I need you like a small child would need his parents
We think we’re out to find partners who would make us happy, but we’re not. We’re out to find partners who will feel familiar. And that may mean very different things, because familiarity may be bound to particular kinds of torture. This explains why sometimes people will say to us “he is a wonderful person, you should go and date them, they’re good looking, they’re charming”, and we go out and date them and we do recognize that they’re really wonderful, they’re amazing, but we have to confess to our friends that actually we found this person - and we often struggle with vocabulary - … maybe not that exciting, or maybe not sexy, or maybe a bit boring, really what we mean is that we detected in this really quite accomplished person someone who will not be able to make us suffer in the way that we need to suffer in order to feel that love is real, that’s why we reject.
“This person you set me up with is simply too healthy to produce in me the sort of dynamics that need to be generated if I’m to feel that I’m in love” because, at some level, love has become associated with forms of suffering that we don’t even understand.
No one should be loved for who they are, all of us should be educated. Love is a classroom, the point of love is to be able to teach and learn. A good lover is a good educator.
There is only one way to be understood and that is through the horribly cumbersome business of language.
The fundamental nature of being human is idiocy. Just go up and ask the person on a date because you’re an idiot and it doesn’t matter, they’re an idiot too. Life is short, we’re all idiots. The fundamental notion of confidence is built up not through an assumption of our perfection and our perfectibility, but precisely a confidence born of an elegant negotiation with everything that is imperfect in us.
When you’re at a party and someone asks you “what do you do?”, say something like what are you suffering from, how are you sad, what are you scared of.
The composed are those who know that they will not overcome anxiety fully but have made their peace with that and are not anxious that they’re anxious. Those emotions belong to us.
No child needs a perfect parent. To have a perfect parent is to be on the short road towards psychosis. The job of a parent is to let down a child in a structured way, to gently introduce them to the misery of existence.
“It’s not that I’m a particularly horrible person, it’s just that you’re encountering the horribleness of life via me first, but you will later see that this is a general phenomenon, you just met with it first here.”
No one needs perfection, you just need good enough. Good enough is good enough.
To philosophize is to learn to die.
The goal is to die before you die: relinquish certain sorts of unhelpful attachments before death actually comes