在输赢的过程中有太多偶然,今日我们太讲求所有事情的正义和公平,政治人物总是在谈论正义,我非常支持正义,我只是觉得那不可能,我们应该尽力,尽力去追求正义,但我们也应该记得,我们所面对的,无论在他们人生中发生过什么,偶然总是一个强烈的因素,我希望大家留一点空间这么想,不然真令人有一种幽闭恐怖症的感觉。
阿兰·德波顿
英国作家

阿兰·德波顿(Alain de Botton),英国作家,1969年出生于瑞士苏黎世,毕业于英国剑桥大学。著有小说《爱情笔记》、《爱上浪漫》、《亲吻与诉说》及散文作品《拥抱逝水年华》、《哲学的慰藉》、《旅行的艺术》、《身份的焦虑》等。

如果同情心的一个极端,是这些八卦小报。另一个极端便是悲剧和悲剧艺术,我想说的是或许我们该从悲剧艺术中学习,你不会说汉姆雷特是个失败者,虽然他失败了,他却不是一个失败者。我想这就是悲剧所要告诉我们的,也是我认为非常重要的一点。

In a way, if you like, at one end of the spectrum of sympathy, you've got the tabloid newspaper. At the other end of the spectrum, you've got tragedy and tragic art. And I suppose I'm arguing that we should learn a little bit about what's happening in tragic art. It would be insane to call Hamlet a loser. He is not a loser, though he has lost. And I think that is the message of tragedy to us, and why it's so very, very important, I think.

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现代社会让我们焦虑的另一个缘故是,我们除了人类以外没有其它重心。我们是从古至今的第一个无神社会,除了我们自己以外,我们不膜拜任何事物,我们对自己评价极高,为什么不呢,我们把人送上月球,达成了许多不可思议的事,我们习惯崇拜自己。

The other thing about modern society and why it causes this anxiety, is that we have nothing at its center that is non-human. We are the first society to be living in a world where we don't worship anything other than ourselves. We think very highly of ourselves, and so we should; we've put people on the Moon, done all sorts of extraordinary things. And so we tend to worship ourselves.

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我们的英雄是人类,这是一个崭新的情况。历史中大部分的社会重心都是敬拜一位人类以外的灵体,神,自然力、宇宙,总之是人类以外的什么。我们逐渐失去了这种习惯,我想这也是我们越来越被大自然吸引的原因。

Our heroes are human heroes. That's a very new situation. Most other societies have had, right at their center, the worship of something transcendent: a god, a spirit, a natural force, the universe, whatever it is -- something else that is being worshiped. We've slightly lost the habit of doing that, which is, I think, why we're particularly drawn to nature.

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虽然我们时常显示是为了健康,但我不这么认为,我认为是为了逃避人群的蚁丘,逃避人们的疯狂竞争,我们的戏剧化,这便是为什么我们如此喜欢看海、观赏冰山,从外太空观赏地球等等,我们希望重新和那些“非人类”的事物有所连接,那对我们来说很重要。

Not for the sake of our health, though it's often presented that way, but because it's an escape from the human anthill. It's an escape from our own competition, and our own dramas. And that's why ween joy looking at glaciers and oceans, and contemplating the Earth from outside its perimeters, etc. We like to feel in contact with something that is non-human, and that is so deeply important to us.

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阿兰·德波顿

我一直在谈论成功和失败。成功的有趣之处是,我们时常以为我们知道成功是什么,如果我现在说,这个屏幕后面站着一个非常成功的人,你心里马上就会产生一些想法。你会想,这个人可能很有钱,在某些领域赫赫有名,我对成功的理解是。首先,我是一个对成功非常有兴趣的人,我想要成功,我总是想着“要怎样我才能更成功?”,但当我渐渐长大,我越来越疑惑,究竟什么是“成功”的真正意义。

What I think I've been talking about really is success and failure. And one of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. If I said that there's somebody behind the screen who's very successful, certain ideas would immediately come to mind. You'd think that person might have made a lot of money, achieved renown in some field. My own theory of success -- I'm somebody who's very interested in success, I really want to be successful, always thinking, how can I be more successful? But as I get older, I'm also very nuanced about what that word "success" might mean.

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我对成功有一些观察,你不可能在所有事情上成功。我们常听到有关工作和休闲的平衡,鬼话。你不可能全部拥有。你就是不能。所有对成功的想象,必须承认他们同时也失去了一些东西,放弃了一些东西。我想一个智者能接受,如我所说,总是有什么是我们得不到的。

Here's an insight that I've had about success: You can't be successful at everything. We hear a lot of talk about work-life balance. Nonsense. You can't have it all. You can't. So any vision of success has to admit what it's losing out on, where the element of loss is. And I think any wise life will accept, as I say, that there is going to be an element where we're not succeeding.

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阿兰·德波顿

常常,我们对一个成功人生的想象,不是来自我们自己,而是来自他人。如果你是个男人,你会以父亲做榜样,如果你是个女人,你会以母亲做榜样,精神分析已经重复说了80年,但很少有人真正听进去。但我的确相信这件事。

And the thing about a successful life is that a lot of the time, our ideas of what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They're sucked in from other people; chiefly, if you're a man, your father, and if you're a woman, your mother. Psychoanalysis has been drumming home this message for about 80 years. No one's quite listening hard enough, but I very much believe it's true.

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阿兰·德波顿

我们也会从电视、广告,各样的市场宣传中得到我们对成功的想象。这些东西影响了我们,对我们自己的看法、我们想要什么。当我们听说银行业是个受人尊敬的行业,许多人便加入银行业,当银行业不再受人尊敬,我们便对银行业失去兴趣,我们很能接受建议。

And we also suck in messages from everything from the television, to advertising, to marketing, etc. These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves. When we're told that banking is a very respectable profession, a lot of us want to go into banking. When banking is no longer so respectable, we lose interest in banking. We are highly open to suggestion.

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阿兰·德波顿

我想说的是,我们不该放弃,我们对成功的想象,但必须确定那些都是我们自己想要的,我们应该专注于我们自己的目标,确定这目标是我们真正想要的,确定这个梦想蓝图出自自己笔下。因为得不到自己想要的已经够糟糕了,更糟糕的是,在人生旅程的终点,发觉你所追求的从来就不是你真正想要的。

So what I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas, and make sure that we own them; that we are truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it's bad enough not getting what you want, but it's even worse to have an idea of what it is you want, and find out, at the end of the journey, that it isn't, in fact, what you wanted all along.

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阿兰·德波顿

我必须在这里做个总结,但我真正想说的是,成功是必要的,但请接受自己怪异的想法,朝着自己对成功的定义出发,确定我们对成功的定义都是出于自己的真心。

So, I'm going to end it there. But what I really want to stress is: by all means, success, yes. But let's accept the strangeness of some of our ideas. Let's probe away at our notions of success. Let's make sure our ideas of success are truly our own.

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阿兰·德波顿

在输赢的过程中有太多偶然,今日我们太讲求所有事情的正义和公平,政治人物总是在谈论正义,我非常支持正义,我只是觉得那不可能,我们应该尽力,尽力去追求正义,但我们也应该记得,我们所面对的,无论在他们人生中发生过什么,偶然总是一个强烈的因素,我希望大家留一点空间这么想,不然真令人有一种幽闭恐怖症的感觉。

I think it's merely the randomness of the winning and losing process that I want to stress, because the emphasis nowadays is so much on the justice of everything, and politicians always talk about justice. Now I'm a firm believer in justice, I just think that it's impossible. So we should do everything we can to pursue it, but we should always remember that whoever is facing us, whatever has happened in their lives, there will be a strong element of the haphazard. That's what I'm trying to leave room for; otherwise, it can get quite claustrophobic.

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阿兰·德波顿

梦魇是相信恐吓人们是刺激他们发奋的最好办法,或是环境越残酷,就会有越多人接受挑战。你必须想,你的理想父亲是怎样的?你的理想父亲往往是严厉又温和的,虽然这界限很难画定,我们社会需要的模范性人物是像一个理想父亲,不要走极端,不要完全集权、纯粹纪律,也不要模糊马虎,乱无规章。

The nightmare thought is that frightening people is the best way to get work out of them, and that somehow the crueler the environment, the more people will rise to the challenge. You want to think, who would you like as your ideal dad? And your ideal dad is somebody who is tough but gentle. And it's a very hard line to make. We need fathers, as it were, the exemplary father figures in society, avoiding the two extremes, which is the authoritarian disciplinarian on the one hand, and on the other, the lax, no-rules option.

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阿兰·德波顿

I'm mentioning all this -- I'm mentioning all this because I think this is not merely a personal problem; you may think I'm wrong in this, but I think we live in an age when our lives are regularly punctuated by career crises, by moments when what we thought we knew -- about our lives, about our careers -- comes into contact with a threatening sort of reality.

我提出这件事是因为,我认为不只有我这么感觉。你可能不这么认为,但我感觉我们活在一个充满事业恐慌的时代,就在我们认为我们已经理解我们的人生和事业时,真实便来恐吓我们。

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It's perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living. It's perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety. I want to look now, if I may, at some of the reasons why we might be feeling anxiety about our careers. Why we might be victims of these career crises, as we're weeping softly into our pillows. One of the reasons why we might be suffering is that we are surrounded by snobs.

现在或许比以前更容易过上好生活,但却比以前更难保持冷静,或不为事业感到焦虑。今天我想要检视,我们对事业感到焦虑的一些原因,为何我们会变成事业焦虑的囚徒。不时抱头痛哭,折磨人的因素之一是,我们身边的那些势利鬼。

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阿兰·德波顿

In a way, I've got some bad news, particularly to anybody who's come to Oxford from abroad. There's a real problem with snobbery, because sometimes people from outside the U.K. imagine that snobbery is a distinctively U.K. phenomenon, fixated on country houses and titles. The bad news is that's not true. Snobbery is a global phenomenon; we area global organization, this is a global phenomenon. What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you, and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. That is snobbery.

对那些来访牛津大学的外国友人,我有一个坏消息,这里的人都很势利。有时候,英国以外的人会想象,势利是英国人特有的个性,来自那些乡间别墅和头衔爵位。坏消息是,并不只是这样,势利是一个全球性的问题,我们是个全球性的组织,这是个全球性的问题,它确实存在。势利是什么?,势利是以一小部分的你,来判别你的全部价值,那就是势利。

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阿兰·德波顿

The dominant kind of snobbery that exists nowadays is job snobbery. You encounter it within minutes at a party, when you get asked that famous iconic question of the early 21st century, "What do you do?" According to how you answer that question, people are either incredibly delighted to see you, or look at their watch and make their excuses.

今日最主要的势利,就是对职业的势利。你在派对中不用一分钟就能体会到,当你被问到这个21世纪初,最有代表性的问题:你是做什么的?你的答案将会决定对方接下来的反应,对方可能对你在场感到荣幸,或是开始看表,然后想个借口离开。

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阿兰·德波顿

Now, the opposite of a snob is your mother.

势利鬼的另一个极端,是你的母亲。

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阿兰·德波顿

Not necessarily your mother, or indeed mine, but, as it were, the ideal mother, somebody who doesn't care about your achievements. Unfortunately, most people are not our mothers. Most people make a strict correlation between how much time, and if you like, love -- not romantic love, though that may be something -- but love in general, respect --they are willing to accord us, that will be strictly defined by our position in the social hierarchy.

不一定是你我的母亲,而是一个理想母亲的想象,一个永远义无反顾的爱你,不在乎你是否功成名就的人,不幸地,大部分世人都不怀有这种母爱,大部分世人决定要花费多少时间,给于多少爱,不一定是浪漫的那种爱,虽然那也包括在内,世人所愿意给我们的关爱、尊重,取决于我们的社会地位。

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阿兰·德波顿

And that's a lot of the reason why we care so much about our careers and indeed start caring so much about material goods. You know, we're often told that we live in very materialistic times, that we're all greedy people. I don't think we are particularly materialistic. I think we live in a society which has simply pegged certain emotional rewards to the acquisition of material goods. It's not the material goods we want;

这就是为什么我们如此在乎事业和成就,以及看重金钱和物质的原因。我们时常被告知我们处在一个物质挂帅的时代,我们都是贪婪的人。我并不认为我们特别看重物质,而是活在一个物质能带来大量情感反馈的时代。

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It's the rewards we want. It's a new way of looking at luxury goods. The next time you see somebody driving a Ferrari, don't think, "This is somebody who's greedy." Think, "This is somebody who is incredibly vulnerable and in need of love." Feel sympathy, rather than contempt.

我们想要的不是物质,而是背后的情感反馈,这赋予奢侈品一个崭新的意义。下次你看到那些开着法拉利跑车的人,你不要想“这个人很贪婪”,而是“这是一个无比脆弱、急需爱的人”,也就是说,同情他们,不要鄙视他们。

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阿兰·德波顿