Success Quote by Alain de Botton

De Botton’s line lands like a polite warning label slapped onto modern life’s loudest products: media, lifestyle branding, and the ever-refreshing feed of “how to win.” The hook is the word “bombarded” - a militarized verb for what’s usually sold as friendly guidance. Success, in this framing, isn’t discovered; it’s delivered at high volume, prepackaged, and hard to opt out of. He’s not attacking ambition so much as the ambient, coercive script that tells you what ambition should look like.

The intent is diagnostic. De Botton is pointing at a cultural machine that doesn’t merely report values but manufactures them, then presents them as common sense. Newspapers and TV appear to be neutral conduits, yet they smuggle in a hierarchy: which jobs matter, which bodies count, which homes signal arrival, which relationships “prove” adulthood. The subtext: your goals may be quietly swapped out while you’re busy trying to be informed.

That last phrase - “our own projects and priorities” - is doing the real work. It implies a private architecture of meaning that can be flattened by public metrics. In de Botton’s broader context (status anxiety, philosophy as self-defense), the enemy isn’t information but unexamined aspiration: adopting someone else’s scoreboard, then blaming yourself for losing.

The caution - “we should take care” - avoids puritanical media-bashing. It’s closer to mindfulness with teeth: watch what you consume, because it’s also consuming you. The line works because it treats “successful life” not as a personal triumph but as a contested narrative, and it reminds you that narrative pressure is still pressure, even when it arrives as advice.