Alain de Botton: ‘Raw experience is too overwhelming, dense, messy or dark – I have to write it down’ | Books

Many of us are probably not entirely well in our minds. I’m not: I have a powerful need to go manically through my thoughts far more than is considered to be normal. I need to process experience or else I become anxious and a real burden to be around. Raw experience proves too overwhelming, dense, messy, confused or dark – and I have to download it. That’s how I got into the business. Becoming a writer wasn’t a choice (there would have been far more worthwhile things to do), it was the best, most fruitful way of being a bit ill.

So I’m never not working, in a way – but at the same time, I’m never working hard or fast enough. Self-disgust is second nature to most writers; procrastination is endless. It’s a pity for literature that the news has been quite so interesting lately. It takes a long time – and a lot of browsing of the Guardian website – till the pain of achieving nothing at all trumps the fear of doing something badly.

Naturally, I can’t quite sleep. Fortunately, I’m noticing, fewer and fewer people can. Still, it’s lonely and strange at 3am. You see stuff that’s harder to hold on to in daylight. It’s easy to forget how little strategic thinking ever gets done in the day. Judging by the ideas generated there, our beds have more of a right to be called our offices than our offices. Insomnia is the revenge of the many big thoughts one hasn’t had time to deal with in the daylight hours.

Sometimes, I go to an office. I set up something called www.theschooloflife.com a few years ago – and do some of my best writing among other people. One of the most welcome aspects of office work is that you do not need to be fully yourself. It demands that those who participate in it behave “professionally”, which means that you are not asked to bring the entirety of your character to the fore. I act almost normally, from the outside, clicking away at the keyboard. Even though I may inside be tempted by all kinds of emotions, I handle myself with calm and reserve – which is not the limitation it may sound. It can be the greatest freedom, sometimes, to have to repress some of what you are. I sit quietly for hours. I’ll have a sandwich at the desk. I can’t sink into despair, scream or act all poetic: other people are watching. At the office, there’s a chance to edit yourself, thankfully. That’s why I go there.

My writing ends up sounding quite different to the way I feel inside. That’s the point. It tries to understand, to be serene, to be competent. Perhaps this ability to have a gap between who you are and what your work is like doesn’t just hold true for art: it’s something all work offers. The legal documents sent around the office probably bear none of the panic, emotional turmoil and questionable habits of the lawyers who put them together. The dentist, in his or her white jacket, is no longer the tricky person others found they were becoming over the weekend. Work gives us a chance to give our better natures a go.

It’s great to make things tidy via work. The wider world will always be a mess. But around work, you can sometimes have a radically different kind of experience: you can get on top of a problem and finally resolve it. You can bring order to chaos for a bit. I was reading about the Zen Buddhist monks of medieval Japan – who seem to have had an intuitive understanding of this kind of benefit to work. They recommended that, in order to achieve peace of mind, members of a monastery regularly rake the gravel of their beautiful temple gardens around Kyoto. Within the confines of a large courtyard, the monks could bring total coherence and logic to fruition. It wasn’t easy. The monks loved to make ambitious patterns of swirls and circles. The lines were often on a very small scale; they might inadvertently tread on a bit they’d already done. They might struggle to keep the rake going at just the right angle. It was sometimes maddening, especially when it was autumn and there were leaves everywhere. But it could, eventually, all be put right. With time, a bit of careful correction and a well-trained hand, they could get everything just as it should be. The problems were real, but they were bounded – and they could be solved.

That’s how it feels when a book finally gets done. It’s a patch of gravel you can rake, a bounded space you can make ideally tidy and via which you can fulfil that powerful inner need for order and control, a need so often delayed by those compelling news websites that so effectively and powerfully get in the way of doing any work.