You're kind of an idiot, dude. Go be a plumber.

Allright, and that has what to do with my opinion of Alain de Botton? It still doesn't change his sense of overwhelming and erroneous self-importance does it?

Ooo, look! Dadsy! Dramatic camera shots of me DRIVING one of those plebian automobiles!

Have you read Status Anxiety? It's pretty brilliant. Your problem seems to be that you have a problem with philosophy.

Do you hate Leo Tolstoy because he was a count? Or Dosteoevsky because his rich family sent him checks all the time and he never had to worry about all the things that you do?

I have met "philosophy" students who are extremely disconnected from life, as you said. Part of what he is doing is making philosophy extremely accessible and removing the ivory tower stimga. Watch his piece on Montaigne, where he condemns his own Cambridge education as incomplete and lacking in life's basic lessons.

I do not feel, based on your comments, that your opinion on de Botton's work comes from a genuine desire to understand him or what he wishes to accomplish in any sense.

I think you're discounting philosophy, as a study, unfairly. I majored in philosophy, and I was (and remain, since all I can do is teach) dirt poor. But just because some people are dilettantes about it doesn't mean everyone is. Nor does it mean the whole field of study and human endeavor is worthless.

To the contrary, there's a lot of very practical stuff in there, buried under the theory and the berets and the pretensions of some of the people who practice it. If you ignore the doofuses in coffee houses who think they grok Nietzsche cause yeah man, God totally IS dead!, then there's really a lot there that's both interesting and applicable to most of our lives.

I wanted to call you an idiot, but I don't think it's really fair or accurate, when there are a lot of philosophy majors (not necessarily philosophers) out there who are douchebags. But it's a bit like movies are stupid and worthless because so many of the people who call themselves film critics are idiots.

Valid opinions I think, but he seems to be focused less on the benefits of materialism and more on the unhappiness that desire for material possessions creates.

I can see why he would be considered simplistic, but I see him as the Carl Sagan of philosophy, but instead of talking about wormholes and time travel (both things Sagan had absolutely no personal "contact" with in his short life) he's making fun documentaries that connect historical important minds to the problems we all experience today.

By strange coincidence there is an interesting blurb in the new issue of Scientific American about the way brains deal with material rewards vs. status anxiety. Status is even more valued than basic material gain.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=for-the-brain-status-is-be tter&sc=rss

I'm 5ing for the response. I'd argue that status works as a great placebo in the short run, but not much else. And you make a good point re: Carl Sagan.

There's a term for the unhappiness the want of material posession creates: anomie. The resulting normlessness breaks down society and I think that's evident in class structures. The less material benefit, the more anomie, and the experience of anomie is greater or lesser depending upon one's material status. And its not that one needs shitloads of money to be happy, just enough not to have to worry.

But I just got my tax return and my family FINALLY got the FEMA grant to rebuild the house that we already rebuilt on credit anyway, so...

I like Michio Kaku more than Sagan, but if we're gonna argue over who's simplifying extremely complex ideas, he'd be an ironic one to put out there, eh?

Link fix:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=for-the-brain-status-is-be tter&sc=rss

But people AREN'T happy with just enough to get by, in fact many people are "happier," when they have little, so long as they feel they aren't permitted to have anything more. It's about what they have in comparison to others and the opportunities they are allowed to expand their material wealth. Class mobility breeds contempt and competition, but I believe status transcends class, or else the poor in caste systems such as those in Calcutta or the Phillippines would not claim to be happier than the middle class of the suburbs of Houston or the average inhabitant of Manhattan.

I am not participating in the "romanticization of the trenches" or some kind of modern equivalent of the Noble Savage, I am saying that happiness is fundamentally attached to our comparison to others in every single aspect of our lives, rather than what we own materially. This is all stuff straight out of Status Anxiety.