Another beautiful piece of work of de Botton! He might not tell us anything that we didn’t know, but he puts all the pieces together in an absolute coherence and offers a philosophy book way more self-help one than the self-help ones. A beautiful merge of philosophy, art, history and economics of capitalism in which none sentence is dull,arbitrarily all are eloquently chosen.

The key message of Alain de Botton:

Although many people in modern society spend their lives striving to achieve wealth, respect, and power, that struggle can lead to a deep anxiety about how we measure up to our peers. We might do well to remember that our vision of success is a very new one, and that our predecessors in past societies didn’t share the same fear of being perceived as a nobody or a loser.

Fortunately, there are a few antidotes to the sickness of status anxiety, including art, spirituality, and bohemia...