Status Anxiety

How to Think More About Sex: The School of Life

• UNABRIDGED (3 hrs and 21 mins)
• By Alain de Botton
• Narrated By David Thorpe

We don't think too much about sex; we're merely thinking about it in the wrong way.

So asserts Alain de Botton in this rigorous and supremely honest book designed to help us navigate the intimate and exciting - yet often confusing and difficult - experience that is sex. Few of us tend to feel we're entirely normal when it comes to sex, and what we’re supposed to be feeling rarely matches up with the reality. This audiobook argues that 21st-century sex is ultimately fated to be a balancing act between love and desire, and adventure and commitment.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

• UNABRIDGED (6 hrs and 32 mins)
• By Alain De Botton
• Narrated By David Colacci

We spend most of our waking lives at work - in occupations often chosen by our unthinking younger selves. And yet we rarely ask ourselves how we got there or what our occupations mean to us. Characteristically lucid, clever, and inventive, de Botton's "song for occupations" is a celebration and exploration of an aspect of life that is all too often ignored and a book that shines a revealing light on the essential meaning of work in our lives.

The Architecture of Happiness

• UNABRIDGED (4 hrs and 40 mins)
• By Alain de Botton
• Narrated By Simon Vance
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

One of the great, but often unmentioned, causes of both happiness and misery is the quality of our environment: the kinds of chairs, walls, buildings, and streets that surround us. And yet, a concern for architecture is too often described as frivolous, even self-indulgent. Alain de Botton starts from the idea that where we are heavily influences who we can be, and argues that it is architecture's task to stand as an eloquent reminder of our full potential.

The Art of Travel

• UNABRIDGED (5 hrs and 22 mins)
• By Alain de Botton
• Narrated By Nicholas Bell

Aside from love, few actvities seem to promise us as much happiness as going traveling: taking off for somewhere else, somewhere far from home, a place with more interesting weather, customs, and landscapes. But although we are inundated with advice on where to travel, few people seem to talk about why we should go and how we can become more fulfilled by doing so.

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

• UNABRIDGED (5 hrs and 5 mins)
• By Alain de Botton
• Narrated By Kris Dyer

The boring debate between fundamentalist believers and non-believers is finally moved on by Alain de Botton's inspiring new book, which boldly argues that the supernatural claims of religion are of course entirely false - and yet that religions still have important things to teach the secular world.