@AlaindeBotton

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You know those accounts, the Will Smith parody accounts or the Notebook, endlessly tweeting the self-help slogans and the “never give up on your dreams” gruel? The ones that take up the part of Twitter that isn’t comprised of football ‘banter’ retweets and “that awkward moment when you thought they were talking about the man of the same name who sings in that band” tweets whenever a Mossad informant who shares a letter in his name with a member of one direction gets killed.

The problem with them is, eventually you grow up, get a mortgage, kids, a wife, et cetera. So then what do you do? Where do you go to get that same level of maudlin, cringeworthy philosophical marzipan? Step forward Alain de Botton.

You’ve got to be immediately suspicious of someone brought up in a continental tradition who is more popular in England. Football being the exception, it’s never a good sign. The reasons are obvious: English people crave boredom. They actively seek it out. Cricket is the national sport. Peep Show got seven series and 15 Storeys High got two. Chicken breasts are the most popular cut of meat. It’s into this background that we get De Botton, rather than, for instance, another Alain who might have something interesting to say, like Badiou. 

De Botton is a 'philosopher’, you will have heard. He, his agent, his publishers, will continually push this simple job description, which whether technically accurate or not, is a thin attempt to insist that he’s on the level of Marx, or Plato, or whatever. You might think it’s unfair to judge him on those standards, but remember that when one reviewer had the temerity to question whether his book was an epoch-defining masterpiece, he left the comment “I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make.” 

In reality though, it was what happened after that that really summed the man up. He apologised meekly, of course, but how did he do it? By tweeting “To learn we have said a stupid thing is nothing: we must learn a more ample, important lesson: we are but blockheads.” I’m no Ian Dury fan, but “I fucked up, why not learn from that” in the most gushing, flowery way imaginable is something that could make Laurie Penny say “I think that makes you sound a bit priveleged and self-absorbed there, Alain.”

Sample Tweets

“Politicians: crooks, incompetents or up against near impossible tasks? As the media know, only the first two explanations sell news.”

“So easy to think we might be living late on in history - while in truth we’ve barely just begun.”

“The end logic of our relationship to computers: asking the search engine, 'What shall I do with my life?’”