Alain de Botton Quotes

I think people are really desperate for conversations. I'm really fascinated by the idea that at the same time, the internet is sort of expunging our attention spans.

I remind myself that I'm always more satisfied by human interaction than by a digital connection.

The more technology we introduce into society, the more people will aggregate, will want to be with other people: movies, rock concerts, shopping.

Think about back in the day when we had Archie Bunker, 'The Jeffersons.' We had stuff to sit down and share and laugh at. The Internet has made it so we don't have to sit together anymore. It's so self-absorbed. No one has to talk to each other anymore, and people don't realize that that is killing us.

We're living in miraculous times where connections are made at the blink of an eye, the tap of a thumb, and the click of a mouse. We can never replace human interaction, but these simple actions can be powerful and meaningful to those we connect with.

We all think we are connected to the world now, but we are not talking to our neighbours any more.

History has shown that there needs to be some agora, or public spaces, and I think that we already live a lot of our life on a laptop, or even smaller devices that we hold in our hands.

A lot of our communication has now become digital, and it does not mimic the natural way we have evolved to communicate with each other, so it's almost like we have this muscle, these social-emotional skills, and they're atrophying, right?

For all the sophistication of a world in which most of our waking hours are spent consuming or interacting with media, we have scarcely advanced in our understanding of what attention means.

With everything that you can imagine at our fingertips, many of the social interactions that help tie people together in a community have faded away. Are communities traditionally built on relationships, trust and familiarity a thing of the past?

Look, I live in the modern world as much as anyone else.

I had a book of essays out in 1997 in which I talked about the increasing virtuality of our lives. I've always been afraid of that in my own life.

We know in our hearts that technology at its best should make us feel even more human than we currently feel. Sometimes it makes us feel less human.

I am a child of the 21st century.

Social media and the Internet haven't changed our capacity for social interaction any more than the Internet has changed our ability to be in love or our basic propensity to violence, because those are such fundamental human attributes.

I know when I grew up, it was, if it was daylight outside, get outside. Well, now, with the technological age of computers and everything, everyone's inside virtually going everywhere they want to go, virtually having relationships, virtually traveling across the neighborhood, virtually going to that island.

I try to write about how we live today, how we use language, technology, our bodies.

What we have found is that because of smartphones and access to media, and because everybody knows how everyone else lives, you have no idea where the next huge social movement is going to erupt.

It's important for people to talk and get beyond the wall of Facebook and social media.

People live too much of their lives on email or the Internet or text messages these days. We're losing all of our communication skills.

We like technology because we don't have to talk to anybody.

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say.

Social media is an amazing tool, but it's really the face-to-face interaction that makes a long-term impact.

Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other.

The personal contact is a personal thing. The fact that some people don't know their neighbors, I don't think that technology is at fault. You don't lose anything with technology. You gain other avenues of understanding.