ALAIN DE BOTTON has become the self-help guru to the British middle-class—a life coach pitched at those who might read The Guardian on an iPad, buy ethical chocolate, and assert an interest in the Booker shortlist. If you’re a certain kind of amateur intellectual with self-improving impulses, it’s less vulgar to entrust your anxieties to a Cambridge- and Harvard-educated pop philosopher who speaks three languages than to the hearty exhortations of Tony Robbins or Oprah. Oprah asks the right questions, says de Botton—“how do we live with other people, how do we cope with our ambitions, how do we survive as a society”—but she “fails to answer them with anything like seriousness.” Enter Professor de Botton. But if the latest publications from his “School of Life” imprint are the current course curriculum, truth-seekers would be better off reading O magazine.
