Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety, pg 190
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Rousseau’s Discourse goes on to sketch the history of the world not as a story of progress from barbarism to the great workshops and cities of Europe, but as one of regress, from a priviledged state in which we humans lived simply but were aware of our own needs to a state in which we are apt to feel envy for ways of life that can claim little connection to our true selves. In technologically backward pre-history, in Rousseau’s “natural state,” when people lived in forests and had never entered a shop or read a newspaper, men and women alike better understood themselves and so were drawn towards the more essential features of a happy life: love of family, respect for nature, awe at the beauty of the universe, curiosity about others and a taste for music and humble entertainments. It was from this state that modern commercial “civilization” pulled us, according to the philosopher, leaving us to envy and yearn and suffer in a world of plenty.
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