What six philosophers can do for your worst days

Alain de Botton published The Consolations of Philosophy in 2000 with a deliberately provocative premise: that the great philosophical tradition is not primarily an academic enterprise but a toolkit for living, and that the problems it was built to address — unpopularity, poverty, frustration, inadequacy, heartbreak, difficulty — are the same ones people face today.

He organises the book around six pairings: Socrates on unpopularity, Epicurus on the absence of money, Seneca on frustration, Montaigne on inadequacy, Schopenhauer on heartbreak, and Nietzsche on difficulty. Each chapter reconstructs the philosopher's life and central argument before turning it toward a recognisable modern situation.

The Epicurus chapter is particularly striking. The popular image of Epicureanism is of refined pleasure-seeking. De Botton corrects this: Epicurus and his friends lived simply, outside Athens, in a communal garden. They believed that the sources of genuine happiness — friendship, freedom from fear, philosophical conversation — were cheap, while most sources of misery — status anxiety, competitive luxury — were expensive. The mismatch between what we think will satisfy us and what actually does is the chapter's real subject.

De Botton's method — essayistic, biographical, illustrated — attracted some academic criticism for simplifying complex positions. His reply, implicit in the book's structure, is that philosophy abandoned the public too easily, retreating into specialised language that serves no one but its own practitioners.

Whether or not the reader agrees, the book works as an introduction: it makes each philosopher feel like a person with a problem to solve rather than a monument to study at a distance.