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Few writers receive the strong emotional reactions to their work that Alain de Botton gets: Many readers enjoy his efforts which connect philosophy with the practices of everyday life; Other readers, well… not so much.

You can put me in the camp that generally likes his work. Just as I have never expected a TED talk to replace deep study, I’ve never mistaken de Botton’s essays for the philosophical works that they reference. Generalists shouldn’t be mistaken for specialists or academics. However, that doesn’t mean that they can’t offer a valuable perspective or provide a good introduction to the ideas that they discuss. Not everything he’s done has resonated with me, but I’ve enjoyed books like ‘The Art of Travel’ and ‘Status Anxiety’ for what they are – One writer’s reflections on aspects of the human experience.

To that end, another de Botton venture called The School of Life just announced a YouTube channel. The London-based school is, like de Botton, devoted to encouraging a ‘philosophy of everyday life’. Though their collection looks a little bare at the moment, I think it’s worth keeping an eye on the page and checking back occasionally to see what gets published there. Given the school’s existing portfolio of courses, I think it may end up being a good resource of stimulating clips on topics like careers, relationships, politics, travels, and families.

A Three Part Series with Tim Ferriss

Kevin Kelly is a man after my own heart: A lover of technology who spent years traveling around Asia as a photographer, Kevin was one of the founding members of WIRED magazine and still spends a good deal of time trying to visualize what the future wants from all of us.

But part of why I really enjoyed Kevin’s three-part interview with Tim Ferriss is that it wasn’t strictly conceptual: Tim let Kelly talk, but did a good job of steering things back around to some very practical questions about how he got his start. Not to get all Upworthy about it, but the answers may surprise you.

Part One should be all queued up for you and ready to go in the player above… Give it a listen if you’re interested in hearing the personal history of one of our best-known futurists.

An Excerpt:

Ferriss:

Is it true that you dropped out of college after one year?

Kelly:

Yeah… I’m a college dropout. And actually, my one regret in life is that one year I gave.

Ferriss:

Oh… no kidding?

Kelly:

Yeah… I wish I had even skipped that. But I do understand how college can be useful to people and my own children have gone through. But for me, it was just not the right thing and I went to Asia instead. I like to tell myself that I gave my own self a PhD in East Asian Studies by traveling around and photographing very remote parts of Asia at a time when it was in transition from the ancient world to the modern world. I did many other things as well and, for me, it was a very formative time because I did enough things that when I finally got my first real job at age 35…

Ferriss:

[LAUGHS] Wow! Which job was that?

Kelly:

I worked for a non-profit at $10/hour which was the Whole Earth Catalog, which had been kind of a life-long dream… I said if I’m going to have a job, that is the job I want. Took me a long time to get it. But in between that, I did many things including starting businesses and selling businesses and doing other kinds of things (and more adventures). I highly recommend it.

Well, dear friends, I managed to survive another orbit! That’s right – I had a wonderful time celebrating my birthday this past weekend, though reading back over my opening sentence here makes me a little sad: Clearly I am relying upon technicalities and loosely-interpreted definitions to fulfill my childhood wish of becoming an astronaut.

Unfulfilled potential aside – Maybe you, too, feel a mixture of gratitude and melancholy when you reflect upon the passage of another year of your life? Sometimes a year can go by in an unremarkable blur, a year which leaves you searching for words or fumbling through your memories when you’re pressed to recall anything of import which happened to you or – more to the point – which you think anyone else would find interesting.

This past year didn’t feel like one of those to me.
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