The School of Life Guide to Modern Manners

How to navigate the dilemmas of social life

Alain de Botton, Alain Botton

• Publisher: The School of Life
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781912891276
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Communication & Public Speaking

An essential guide to modern etiquette. Life is full of awkward social situations; we forget someone's name while making introductions, we're stuck on the elevator with our boss, we run into our ex on a first date. While these dilemmas might feel trivial, they tap into some of the deepest themes of our social existence: how to pursue our own agenda while honoring the happiness and needs of others? How to go beyond the surface level when relating to another person?Featuring twenty case studies from our modern world, this book puts good manners back at the center of our lives. Far from being old fashioned or stuffy, The School of Life argues, etiquette provides a framework through which to create a kinder and more considerate world.

• THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO ETIQUETTE IN THE 21ST CENTURY
• NAVIGATING OUR MOST AWKWARD SOCIAL SITUATIONS this practical and relevant guide offers tips and scripts.
• TWENTY CASE STUDIES AND ACTIONABLE ADVICE for dealing with common social dilemmas.
• HOW TO WIN PEOPLE OVER, how to approach strangers at a party, and how to write an effective thank you note-the chapters in this book address common perplexing social situations head on.
• BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY THROUGHOUT

1
HOW TO TELL
WHEN YOU ARE
BEING A BORE

Some of the reason why we end up being inadvertently rude to people is that they are so polite with us – in a way that doesn’t give us sufficient information as to whether we might be inconveniencing or boring them.

It can at points be hard to tell whether what we are saying is really of any interest to those we are addressing. Few people – other than our partner in a bad mood or our adolescent child – will ever directly cut us short and announce that they find us dull. It is as a result all too easy to develop an impression of our own compelling nature. If we were to ask our interlocutor, ‘Am I boring you?’ we can be certain that the one answer we would never receive is: ‘Well, since you ask, yes you are rather.’ If we choose to wait until people fall asleep while we’re recounting an anecdote or check their phone as we get to the punchline of our joke, it will be too late. Our reputation as a windbag will long ago have been sealed.

Fortunately, most of what people need to tell us does not have to be directly stated; the evolution of a civilisation can be measured by the scope of its dictionary of unspoken signals. The clue to another’s interest lies not in their overt declarations but in their degree of responsiveness to our words. We can gauge interest by studying how closely and logically another’s questions follow on from our statements; how fast their replies come; how invested they seem in their emphases; whether their eyes meet ours when we stress a point; and the degree of elasticity and benevolence in their smile. To a trained observer, an urgent cry – ‘I need to go to bed now’ – can be communicated by nothing more brutal or direct than a gaze at the overhead smoke alarm that is held a fraction too long or a ‘That’s wonderful’ that lacks a minute but critical dose of wonder.

It is mostly easy enough to note the cues; when we ignore them, it isn’t that we aren’t receiving them, but that we are somehow opting not to register them – and we are not doing so for a poignant reason: because we cannot bear to imagine that we might be boring, because the idea of not belonging sufficiently deeply in another’s life is untenable; because we are unreconciled to the fundamental loneliness of existence and the tragic disjuncture between what we want from others and what they may be prepared to provide. We grow deaf from the rigidity of our need, not from any basic failure of sensitivity.

Somewhere along the line the idea of not pleasing someone conversationally may turn from a reasonable risk into a prospective catastrophe that must be manically warded off. We become wilfully oblivious; we give up seeking to delight and settle instead on the more modest hope of not being actively thrown out. The insult to our self-love that we read into another’s bored reaction feels too great, and our resources to deal with it too slim for us to take in the meaning of the long pauses and wandering eyes. We overlook the cues because what they indicate to our unconscious minds isn’t the relatively innocuous thought that the other wants to go to bed; they become embroiled in a deeper story about our self-worth: we take them to indicate that we are fundamentally displeasing, that we deserve our isolation or that we are hateful wretches.

The best guarantee of not boring others is – therefore – the development of an internal robustness that can allow us to withstand the idea that we naturally do have tedious sides, as everyone does. The interesting person can acknowledge that losing someone’s attention is a setback, but not an exceptional sign of damnation.

To develop a more benevolent picture of what it means occasionally to bore, it can help to study the responses of parents to their small children, for there are no better examples of the easy coexistence of boredom with love. To a parent, their four year old child will be at once the most loveable creature they have ever met – and, by a long way, especially in their conversation, the most tedious. Even outside of parenthood, we are all endowed with surprisingly rich capacities to love someone and at the same time to find them extremely wearing. It does not, as the bore mistakenly ends up thinking, need to be a choice between love and interest on the one hand and tedium and loathing on the other.

To skirt the danger of being a full-blown bore, we should foster the courage to imagine that we might sometimes, without anything too awful being meant by this, be just such a thing.  

2
HOW TO WRITE
AN EFFECTIVE
THANK YOU LETTER

Life continually requires that we write down a few words of thanks: for holidays, meals, presents or parties. However, too often, our messages end up flat or unconvincing; we say that the dinner was ‘wonderful’, the present ‘brilliant’ and the holiday ‘the best ever’, all of which may be true while failing to get at what truly touched or moved us.

To render our messages more effective, we might take a lesson from an unexpected quarter: the history of art. Many paintings and poems are in effect a series of thank you notes to parts of the world. They are thank yous for the sunset in springtime, a river valley at dawn, the last days of autumn or the face of a loved one. What distinguishes great from mediocre art is in large measure the level of detail with which the world has been studied. A talented artist is, first and foremost, someone who takes us into the specifics of the reasons why an experience or place felt valuable. They don’t merely tell us that spring is ‘nice’, they zero in on the particular contributing factors to this niceness: leaves that have the softness of a newborn’s hands, the contrast between a warm sun and a sharp breeze, the plaintive cry of baby blackbirds. The more the poet moves from generalities to specifics, the more the scene comes alive in our minds. The same holds true in painting. A great painter goes beneath a general impression of pleasure in order to select and emphasise the truly attractive features of the landscape: they show the sunlight filtering through the leaves of the trees and reflecting off of a pool of water in the road; they draw attention to the craggy upper slopes of a mountain or the way a sequence of ridges and valleys open up in the distance. They’ve asked themselves with unusual rigour what is it that they particularly appreciated about a scene and faithfully transcribed their most salient impressions.

Some of the reason why great artists are rare is that our minds are not well set up to understand why we feel as we do. We register our emotions in broad strokes and derive an overall sense of our moods long before we grasp the basis upon which they rest. We are bad at travelling upstream from our impressions to their source; it feels frustrating to have to ask too directly what was really pleasing about a present or why exactly a person seemed charming to have dinner with.

But we can be confident that if our minds have been affected, the reasons why they have been so will be lodged somewhere in our consciousness as well, waiting to be uncovered with deftness and patience. We stand to realise that it wasn’t so much that the food was ‘delicious’, but that the potatoes in particular had an intriguing rosemary and garlic flavour to them. A friend wasn’t just ‘nice’; they brought a hugely sensitive and generous tone to bear in asking us what it had been like for us in adolescence after our dad died. And the camera wasn’t just a ‘great present’; it has an immensely satisfying rubbery grip and a reassuringly clunky shutter sound that evokes a sturdier, older world. The details will be there, waiting for us to catch them through our mental sieve.

Praise works best the more specific it can be. We know this in love; the more a partner can say what it is they appreciate about us, the more real their affection will feel. It is when they’ve studied the shape of our fingers, when they’ve recognised and appreciated the quirks of our character, when they’ve clocked the words we like or the way we end a phone call that the praise starts to count. The person who has given a dinner party or sent us a present is no different. They too hunger for praise in its specific rather than general forms. We don’t have to be great artists to send effective thank you notes: we just need to locate and hold on tightly to two or three highly detailed reasons for our gratitude.  

3
HOW TO
CHOOSE A
GOOD PRESENT

One of the reasons it can be so hard to buy other adults presents is that we haven’t at some level quite factored in that we are now all grown-ups. Presents were (probably) a deeply special part of our childhoods. We anticipated them eagerly, depended on them almost exclusively – and could be driven to either paroxysms of joy or of sadness by their quality.

But a lot has changed since then. Chiefly, all of us now have our own money. Anything that our friends are badly likely to want, they will either be able to buy for themselves – or we won’t be able to afford to buy it for them.

This isn’t to say that other adults don’t have any requirements; it’s merely that what they seek from us is largely psychological rather than material in nature. Our adult friends do – just like children – need us to offer them things that they can’t get for themselves. But, unlike children, these are not things we could ever buy in a shop: they want encouragement and compassion, they want to be listened to with understanding and sympathy; they want someone to fathom the agonies of their relationship...