Alain de Botton on The News - National Theatre

We live in a world of 24-hour news, but is it good for us? This is the question posed by the philospher Alain de Botton in his latest book, The News: A User’s Manual. Having considered the ways in which architecture impacts on our well-being, he is turning his philosophical gaze onto the news and modern journalism. 

He suggests we stop feasting on a diet of natural disasters, celebrity marriage break-ups and political outrages, think twice before scanning the internet for yet more details. In what is designed to be a practical manual which will change our relationship to the media, de Botton also sets out his utopian vision of how news might be in the future. 

We need to wake up to the ways in which the news influences us so much more than we realise, he argues. 'No-one teaches you this at school. It is deemed more important for us to know how to make sense of the plot of Othello than how to decode the front page of the New York Post. We are more likely to hear about the significance of Matisse's use of colour than to be taken through the effects of the celebrity photo section of the Daily Mail.'

Tickets are selling fast for de Botton's talk at the National Theatre. If you can’t catch him here, you could book for 9th February, when he giving a 'strictly secular' Sunday Sermon at his School of Life.

'The hum and rush of the news has seeped into our deepest selves,' says de Botton. 'What an achievement a moment of calm now is, what a minor miracle the ability to fall asleep or to talk undistracted with a friend – and what monastic discipline would be required to make us turn away from the maelstrom of news and to listen for a day to nothing but the rain and our own thoughts.' Amen.