Book Review: "A Therapeutic Journey" by Alain de Botton

I have been trying to find some help in literature for the current affliction that bothers me. The only way this can be described is a resigning to whatever may happen - in other words, an unbothered nature towards the future. A deep-seated sadness of the soul which I am trying to solve. The one way I know how to solve something is through literature and so, I read Alain de Botton's A Therapeutic Journey in order to do this. I have rarely felt this complex in my life and so, let's take a look at what I found I could use from this text and what I found I could not.

When it comes to the topic of sadness, I think that de Botton has a lot of good words for us throughout the text. There is a definite attempt to make the different levels of sadness, depression and melancholy more widely understood and look at the terms at which they are given to us. I feel like ven though there are simplistic explanations for more complex issues than de Botton is detailing, to make it more widely understood is perhaps the best way of going about it. There's really no point in being purposefully abstruse for no reason.

I also believe that de Botton is correct when he states that most of our modern sadness and beyond into depression comes from the will towards the expectations of others - not because we love them, but because we fear them. I like to think of this as a form of suicidal empathy, someone holding tyrannical expectations of someone else in a way sounds like it's loving and caring. In fact, de Botton is correct in his implication that having such rigidity from childhood with the inability to express what is happening through a lacking vocabulary would have dire consequences for the adult when they grow up. It leads to an adult who is unable to nurture the correct boundaries and thus, does not feel like they are worthy of the same basic human respect that others get so freely.

The author also details the importance of healthy parenting which is free of tyranny and self-importance by laying out what will inevitably happen to the adult the child grows up to be. Of course, we're not playing bingo to get all of them, but you understand the general idea.

In my own lifetime, I have often thought about my own childhood just to look back and realise I don't actually remember very much of anything and most of what I do know has been dictated to me by other people who were also there: this can be done through narratives, photographs or VHS tapes. Organic memory is definitely lacking and therefore, I seem to have derived that maybe my childhood was not as eventful as I would have initially thought it were. Maybe there wasn't really anything worth remembering. That seems to be the correct conclusion.

And please don't get me wrong: uneventful doesn't always mean bad. It just means unimportant. It's probably better than 'terrifying' or 'awful'.

The author also talks about the way in which sadness pervades us philosophically. I can tell you that this might not be a monolithic statement but when I lost my sense of religion, I became very upset and despondent. It was probably nothing like how I have been feeling recently, but I did write a piece about it on Vocal some time ago. I definitely felt the way in which the author spoke about philosophical sadness, but I do not agree with the idea that religion should be the turning point to tend to when we feel hopeless. It seems like a cop-out and from my own experience, it not only doesn't work, but it makes a lot of things worse by degrees.

I was lukewarm about this book to begin with, but I think I warmed even further to it when it looked at catastrophe and breakdown. In my life, I have often felt irredeemable and the maintenance I commit in order to ward that off often leads to a breakdown in some way. This is often characterised by a lack of sleep, an unhealthy diet and the fact that my ability to actually keep myself alive goes down the drain. I don't tend to enjoy it when every self-help guru comes out with some philosophical book to detail the what and why filled with lousy affirmations which have been scientifically proven not to work. But de Botton gives us one sentence which explains it almost perfectly. There's no jargon, it's just simple to understand. Yes again, it might oversimplify the issue, but there is something to be said for articulation. Instead of affirmations to stop it happening, he explains what has already inevitably happened.

When de Botton takes a look at freedom, he takes the initiative of what the person in question would be free of if they were to return to a state of mental wellness. We can't get this confused with being happy all the time because that is also an unreal state. Mental wellness is the ability to balance everything to a degree and feel each emotion in a proper, standard way - something that is probably better than great joy and definitely better than extreme sadness. But what people think freedom means for someone who feels the latter and what it actually means are two different things. In the first way, people often think freedom means the power to do whatever you feel like whenever you feel like and of course, this is reductive and is perpetuated only by the most chronically online low-IQ communities. De Botton outlines what freedom actually means...

Again, it isn't a bingo card but hopefully we can tell what freedom means now. A lot of the things on this list weigh down the person who is wanting for the freedom and I think they are especially damaging the closer the people hindering your freedom are to you. However, there's a way to break the cycle which is essentially: pack up and leave. It doesn't matter where but if someone's main concern is to not treat you like a human being then practically everywhere in the world is better.

All in all, I thought there were definitely some good chewing points in here. The whole of the section on 'love' seems to be a bit ridiculous and the section on 'art' was rather bland. But, the rest of the book does its job very well.