watch your botton

Watch your Botton. Alain de Botton, auther of the well sold How Proust Can Change your Life, has a new book out: Status Anxiety. Shooting off from that, he gives us a three page mini-status-anxiety in today's Times. Give a read, if you've a few minutes to kill. To ruin the ending:

This is all sad, but not half as sad as it can be if we blind ourselves to the reality and raise our expectations of our work to extreme levels. A firm belief in the necessary misery of life was for centuries one of mankind's most important assets, a bulwark against bitterness, a defense against dashed hopes. Now it has been cruelly undermined by the expectations incubated by the modern worldview.

Now perhaps, as many of us return from summer vacations, we can temper their sadness by remembering that work is often more bearable when we don't, in addition to money, expect it always to deliver happiness.