The School of Life

This is a book that should never fall into the hands of children, for it is filled with the darkest truths about life that might unbearably depress the young. However, for the older ones among us, this is a book full of solace, humour and relief.In a charming, naively illustrated tale, we follow the adventures of Bunny - a version of all of us - as he encounters a series of obstacles that we may well recognise from our own lives.Watching poor Bunny, we end up delighted that we are not alone, and perhaps smiling darkly in sympathy with his sorrows. Children might even have the odd peek inside if they dare.

The difference between success and failure often hangs on a concept that our standard education system never touches: confidence. On Confidence walks us around the key issues that stop us from making more of our potential. We hear about the impostor syndrome, the wisdom of imagining the great in their bathrooms, and what Nietzsche and Montaigne (among others) have to tell us about resilience and courage. We often stay stuck with the level of confidence we have because we regard being confident as a matter of good luck. In fact, the opposite is true: confidence is a skill based on ideas about our place in the world, and its secrets can be learnt.

Few things promise us greater happiness than our relationships – yet few things more reliably deliver misery and frustration. Our error is to suppose that we are born knowing how to love and that managing a relationship might, therefore be intuitive and easy. This book starts from a different that love is a skill to be learnt, rather than just an emotion to be felt. It calmly and charmingly takes us around the key issues of relationships, from arguments to sex, forgiveness to communication, making sure that success in love need never again be just a matter of luck.

In Ancient Greece, when the philosopher Socrates was asked to sum up what all philosophical commandments could be reduced to, he replied: 'Know yourself'. Self-knowledge matters so much because it is only on the basis of an accurate sense of who we are that we can make reliable decisions – particularly around love and work. This book takes us on a journey into our deepest, most elusive selves and arms us with a set of tools to understand our characters properly. We come away with a newly clarified sense of who we are, what we need to watch out for when making decisions, and what our priorities and potential might be.

This book explores ideas around minimalism, simplicity and how to live comfortably with less.The modern world can be a complicated, frenzied, and noisy place, filled with too many options, products, ideas and opinions. That explains why what many of us long for is simplicity: a life that can be more pared down, peaceful, and focused on the essentials.But finding simplicity is not always easy; it isn’t just a case of emptying out our closets or trimming back commitments in our diaries. True simplicity requires that we understand the roots of our distractions – and develop a canny respect for the stubborn reasons why things can grow complex and overwhelming.This book is a guide to the simpler lives we crave and deserve. It considers how we might achieve simplicity across a range of areas. Along the way, we learn about Zen Buddhism, modernist architecture, monasteries, psychoanalysis, and why we probably don’t need more than three good friends or a few treasured belongings.It isn’t enough that our lives should look simple; they need to be simple from the inside. This book takes a psychological approach, guiding us towards less contorted hearts and minds. We have for too long been drowning in excess and clutter from a confusion about our aspirations; A Simpler Life helps us tune out the static and focus on what properly matters to us.

This is a collection of some of the most important ideas of Eastern and Western culture — drawn from the works of those philosophers, political theorists, sociologists, artists and novelists whom we believe have the most to offer to us today. We've worked hard to make the thinkers in this book clear, relevant and charming, mining the history of knowledge to bring you the ideas we think have the greatest important to our times. This book contains the canon of The School of Life, the gallery of individuals across the millennia who help to frame our intellectual project — and we will have succeeded if, in the days and years ahead, you find yourself turning to our thinkers to illuminate the multiple dilemmas, joys and griefs of daily life.

A guide to breaking free from the enduring, and sometimes damaging, behavioral patterns we learned in childhood. As we try to navigate the complexities and anxieties of adulthood, considering our childhoods can feel like a daunting task. They happened so long ago; we can probably barely remember, let alone relate to, the little person we used to be. But one of the most powerful explanations for why we struggle as adults is that we were denied the opportunity to fully be ourselves as children. Whether our parents or caregivers were strict disciplinarians, overly fragile, or distant and preoccupied, the way we were taught to act as children deeply influences how we behave as adults. We might have assumed the role of caregiver, become people pleasers, or learned to tell lies to protect ourselves, burying our true needs and desires deep underground. When we thoroughly examine our upbringings, the larger implications for our adult selves become clear. Once we understand the roots from which our flaws stem, we can begin to correct the harmful behaviors we mistakenly believe to be innate. This book is a guide to better understanding our younger selves in order to shape who we wish to be today. It explores to what extent we can pin our actions in the present to our experiences in the past, and how we can break free from the learned patterns of our childhoods.

Few life skills are as neglected, yet as important, as the ability to remain calm. Our very worst decisions and interactions are almost invariably the result of a loss of calm - and a descent into anxiety and agitation. Surprisingly, but very fortunately, our power to remain calm can be rehearsed and improved. We don't have to remain where we are our responses to everyday challenges can dramatically alter. We can educate ourselves in the art of remaining calm not through slow breathing or special teas but through thinking. This is a book that patiently unpacks the causes of our greatest stresses and gives us a succession of highly persuasive, beautiful and sometimes dryly comic arguments with which to defend ourselves against panic and fury.

Alongside a satisfying relationship, a career we love is one of the foremost requirements for a fulfilled life. Unfortunately, it is devilishly hard to understand oneself well enough to know quite where one’s energies should be directed. It is to help us out of some of these impasses that we wrote A Job to Love, a guide to how we can better understand ourselves and locate a job that is right for us. With compassion and a deeply practical spirit, the book guides us to discover our true talents and to make sense of our confused desires and aspirations before it is too late.

We are all desperate, of course, to marry the right person. But none of us ever quite does. The fault isn’t entirely our own; it has to do with the devilish truth that anyone we’re liable to meet is going to be rather wrong, in some fascinating way or another, because this is simply what all humans happen to be – including, sadly, ourselves. Yet – as these darkly encouraging and witty essays propose – we don’t need perfection to be happy. So long as we enter our relationships in the right spirit, we have every chance of coping well enough with, and even delighting in, the inevitable and distinctive wrongness that lies in ourselves and our beloveds. The New York Times’s most-read article of 2016 – now in expanded book form.

Choosing a partner is one of the most consequential and tricky decisions we will ever make, and the cost of repeated failure is immense. How to Find Love explains why we have the ‘types’ we do, and how our early experiences give us scripts of how and whom we love. It sheds light on harmful repetitive patterns and the extent to which we are not always simply choosing people who can make us happy. We learn the most common techniques we use to sabotage our chances of fulfilment and why, despite their costs, we unwittingly engage in them. The book provides a crucial set of ideas to help us make safer, more imaginative and more effective choices in love.

We probably went to school for what felt like a very long time. We probably took care with our homework. Along the way we surely learnt intriguing things about equations, the erosion of glaciers, the history of the Middle Ages, and the tenses of foreign languages.But why, despite all the lessons we sat through, were we never taught the really important things that dominate and trouble our lives: who to start a relationship with, how to trust people, how to understand one's psyche, how to move on from sorrow or betrayal, and how to cope with anxiety and shame?The School of Life is an organisation dedicated to teaching a range of emotional lessons that we need in order to lead fulfilled and happy lives - and that schools routinely forget to teach us. This book is a collection of our most essential lessons, delivered with directness and humanity, covering topics from love to career, childhood trauma to loneliness. To read the book is to be invited to lead kinder, richer and more authentic lives - and to complete an education we began but still badly need to finish. This is homework to help us make the most of the rest of our lives.

We know that our minds are capable of great things because, every now and then, they come out with a brilliant idea or two. However, our minds are also unpredictable, spending large stretches of time idling or distracting themselves. This is a book about how to optimise these beautiful yet fitful instruments so that they can more regularly and generously produce the sort of insights and ideas we need to fulfil our potential and achieve the contentment we deserve. Among other things, we learn how to grasp fragile and flighty thoughts before they disappear through anxiety and fear; at what times of day to try to work and for how long; how to make use of our boredom and instincts, and how to overcome timid and predictable approaches to the largest problems. The result is an operating manual to that most wondrous, though intermittent and always baffling, the human mind.

Most books that want to change us seek to make us richer or thinner. This book wants to help us to be nicer: that is, less irritable, more patient, readier to listen, warmer, less prickly … Niceness may not have the immediate allure of money or fame, but it is a hugely important quality nevertheless and one that we neglect at our peril. This is a guidebook to the uncharted landscape of niceness, gently leading us around the key themes of this forgotten quality. We learn how to be charitable, how to forgive, how to be natural and how to reassure. We learn that niceness is compatible with strength and is no indicator of naivety. Niceness deserves to be rediscovered as one of the highest of all human achievements.

Children are, in many ways, born philosophers.Without prompting, they ask some of the largest questions about time, mortality, happiness and the meaning of it all. Yet too often this inborn curiosity is not developed and, with age, the questions fall away.This is a book designed to harness children's spontaneous philosophical instinct and to develop it through introductions to some of the most vibrant and essential philosophical ideas of history. The book takes us to meet leading figures of philosophy from around the world and from all eras - and shows us how their ideas continue to matter.The book functions as an ideal introduction to philosophy, as well as a charming way to open up conversations between adults and children about the biggest questions we all face.

So often, we exhaust ourselves and the planet in a search for very large pleasures – while all around us lies a wealth of small pleasures, which – if only we paid more attention – could daily bring us solace and joy at little cost and effort. But we need some encouragement to focus our gaze. This is a book to guide us to the best of life’s small everything from the distinctive delight of holding a child’s hand to the enjoyment of disagreeing with someone to the joy of the evening sky; an intriguing, evocative mix of small pleasures that will heighten our senses and return us to the world with new-found excitement and enthusiasm.

A thought-provoking guide to one of the greatest questions we will ever face - what is the meaning of life? It may seem useless, silly, or overwhelming to ponder the meaning of life. In truth, it is essential to ask ourselves this question in order to define and work towards a more meaningful existence. This book presents a range of areas in which we can seek the meaning of life, including love, family, friendship, work, self-knowledge and nature. We discover why some things feel meaningful and others don't, and learn how to introduce more meaning into our daily lives.

Love has, quite unfairly, come to be associated with being happy. However, it is also one of the most reliable routes to misery. We tend to treat our sadness individually, as if it were unique and shameful. But, as this book explains, there are some solid reasons why love should be highly sorrowful at times. The good news is that, by understanding our romantic troubles and griefs, seeing them in their proper context and appreciating their prevalence, we will cease to feel so alone and so cursed. This essay is not a study in despair; it is a guide to a more consoling, humane and in its own way joyful perspective on the complexities of love.

Raising a child to be an authentic and mentally robust adult is one of life’s great challenges. It is also, fortunately, not a matter of luck. There are many things to understand about how children’s minds operate and what they need from those who look after them so they can develop into the best version of themselves.The Good Enough Parent is a compendium of lessons, including ideas on how to say 'no' to a child one adores, how to look beneath the surface of 'bad' behaviour to work out what might really be going on, how to encourage a child to be genuinely kind, how to encourage open self expression, and how to handle the moods and gloom of adolescence.Importantly, this is a book that knows that perfection is not required – and could indeed be unhelpful, because a key job of any parent is to induct a child gently into the imperfect nature of everything. Written in a tone that is encouraging, wry and soaked in years of experience, The Good Enough Parent is an intelligent guide to raising a child who will one day look back on their childhood with just the right mixture of gratitude, humour and love.

A philosophical guide to the joys of travel and adventure.In this compact collection of twenty essays, The School of Life applies their signature mix of philosophy, practicality, and wit to the act of travel. We pursue travel as a means to make ourselves happy-so why do we often find ourselves bored, anxious, or lonely when on a trip?This is a guidebook not to geographical locations, but to the philosophy of travel itself. In a series of genial essays, it examines why we travel, how we choose where to go, what we can do when we get there, and how to make the most of our time away. This compact book is beautifully designed to take with us on our journeys. Ultimately, it reminds us to practice that most illusive and vital skill of how to relax.

A guide to modern times that explores the challenges living in the 21st century can pose to our mental wellbeing.The modern world has brought us a range of extraordinary benefits and joys, including technology, medicine, and transport. But it can also feel as though modern times have plunged us ever deeper into greed, despair, and agitation. Seldom has the world felt more privileged and resource-rich yet also worried, blinkered, furious, panicked, and self-absorbed.How to Survive the Modern World is the ultimate guide to navigating our unusual times. It identifies a range of themes that present acute challenges to our mental well-being. The book tackles our relationship to the news media, our ideas of love and sex, our assumptions about money and our careers, our attitudes to animals and the natural world, our admiration for science and technology, our belief in individualism and secularism – and our suspicion of quiet and solitude. In all cases, the book helps us to understand how we got to where we are, digging deeply and fascinatingly into the history of ideas while pointing us towards a saner individual and collective future.The emphasis isn’t just on understanding modern times but also on knowing how we can best relate to the difficulties these present. The book helps us to form a calmer, more authentic, more resilient, and sometimes more light-hearted relationship to the follies and obsessions of our age. If modern times are (in part) something of a disease, this is both the diagnostic and the soothing, hope-filled cure.

A guide to emotional healing and living a more self-accepting life.Behind many of our problems lies an often ignored we don’t like ourselves very much. We are sufferers of self-hatred. We tell ourselves the meanest things. It’s because of self-hatred that we tend to neglect our potential at work and get entangled in unfulfilling relationships, that we lack confidence in our social lives and suffer from anxiety, despair and imposter syndrome.This is a book that, with immense compassion and fellow feeling, investigates the phenomenon of self-hatred while giving pragmatic advice on how to overcome it. It asks where the feeling comes from, what it makes us do and how we might become kinder and more compassionate towards ourselves.We have probably spent far too much of our lives disliking ourselves and attacking everything we say, do or feel, while not even realizing what we’re up to. It’s time to overcome our masochism and move towards a more self-forgiving and accepting stance. The School of On Self Hatred is a guide to the more compassionate and gentle relationship we should have had with ourselves from the start, and can all achieve now.IDENTIFIES THE ORIGINS AND CONSEQUENCES OF and provides advice for living a more self-accepting life.ENCOURAGES US TO DEVELOP ASSERTIVENESS AGAINST and gives us the tools to challenge our inner critic and deal with imposter syndrome.ACCESSIBLE AND with a compassionate and realistic tone, outlining the importance of self-care.PART OF THE SCHOOL OF LIFE'S SERIES OF GIFTABLE other titles Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person, On Confidence, How to Find Love and Self-Knowledge.

We all experience anxiety, but too often we bottle up our anxiousness, ashamed of what others might say, and end up feeling isolated and afraid. But anxiety is normal and deeply human. This book explains why we feel it, how we experience it, and what we can do about it.With their trademark combination of practicality, philosophy, and wit, The School of Life examines anxiety from a number of angles, providing a clear path forward to a calmer, kinder, compassionate, and more light-hearted future.

A guide to living a more joyful and interesting life.In pursuit of a more exciting life, we often seek external experiences to fulfill us. We take trips, parachute out of airplanes, and buy the latest technology. But the keys to a more joyful, thrilling, and beautiful life are already within us.This inspiring book from The School of Life is a guide to the psychology of fulfillment. It presents readers with a chance to accept our desires and aspirations, nurture our inner liberation, and have the courage to set ourselves free.

A practical, philosophical guide to understanding and overcoming heartbreak. Everyone experiences heartbreak at some point in their life. Advice can be heard to receive with a broken heart, and it tends to focus on letting time do the healing. This consoling and encouraging guide from The School of Life presents a refreshing perspective on heartbreak, arguing that a more nuanced understanding of our pain can help us along the path to healing. Through history, psychology, and a little philosophy, Heartbreak teaches us how our responses to abandonment are formed, what the best way to think about an ex might be, and how to envision future relationships when we are in the midst of despair. We come away feeling less alone, consoled that our suffering will have an end, and intrigued by the endless subtleties of relationships.

Whether we should stay in or leave a relationship is one of the most consequential and painful decisions we are ever likely to confront. What makes the issue so hard is that there are no fixed rules for judgement. How can we tell whether a relationship is 'good enough' or plain wrong? How do we draw the line between justified longing and naivety? Does someone 'better' actually exist? Should the feelings of children be counted (and what might they be in the long term)? Could one's partner change, perhaps with therapy, or should one assume that who they are now is who they will always be? All these questions typically haunt our minds as we weigh up whether to stay or go. With no axe to grind or ideology to promote, Stay or Leave walks us gently through our options, opening our minds to perspectives we might not have considered. This book aims to take the reader towards a time, presently hard to imagine, when the choice will no longer feel so agonising. Using its lessons, we can understand ourselves deeply, consider our options, minimise our regrets and find the way ahead.

A fresh approach to our careers, offering hopeful solutions to a myriad of professional challenges. Work can be a source of creativity, excitement, and purpose. Yet many of us find ourselves confused, discouraged, and exhausted by our jobs. We are often tempted to blame ourselves, and to feel privately ashamed by our jobs. However, as this book lucidly explains, there are many reasons why our jobs demoralize us, including the evolution of modern work, the role of technology, and the mechanics of the economy.The Sorrows of Work offers an invigorating and optimistic perspective on our working lives - and presents the skills and tools we need to overcome any professional challenge.

We don’t think we hate cheap things, of course, but we often behave as if we do. We rarely properly appreciate what is around us and doesn’t appear to cost very much – for example, the night sky, pencils, fried eggs, zips, and the holding of hands. This essay explores the way we can grow disenchanted with our immediate circumstances and pine for what is exotic, costly and out of reach, and gently returns us to ourselves, full of new-found wonder and gratitude. Combining literature, economics and sheer good sense, Why We Hate Cheap Things reawakens us to the world around us and to the latent beauty and interest of what we have.

An exploration of the twenty core emotional skills we need to flourish at work.Work-related stress currently costs the United States economy $300 billion a year. Modern businesses prioritize technical training, yet the true success of a business has little to do with the hard skills taught at business school and much more to do with the emotional intelligence of its employees.This book examines the roots of our problematic behavioral patterns in the workplace and addresses how we can overcome them. The skills discussed range from giving honest feedback to accepting that it's OK to fail, to addressing jealousies and insecurities within teams. We learn about how our childhoods impact on how we deal with colleagues, and how to speak so that others will listen.

We live under a cheerful delusion that sex might nowadays be easy – because we have been ‘liberated’ from the hang-ups and taboos of the olden days. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Despite a veneer of openness, sex remains an extraordinarily complicated business, hard to discuss and surrounded by shame and unspoken desires. This book provides a relief from the loneliness and confusion, explaining how sex truly operates and what it aims at. The book demonstrates that far from thinking about sex too much, we haven’t begun to think about it as deeply as we should.

An insightful and consoling guide to the melancholic state of mind.This is a book that celebrates the most neglected but valuable emotion we can feel: melancholy. Melancholy isn’t depression, rage, or bitterness. It’s a serene, wise, and kindly response to the difficulties of being alive. It helps us navigate a wise and rational middle ground between extreme despair and naïve optimism.But melancholy is a well-kept secret. It isn't celebrated or recommended. It remains relatively unexplored in a hyper-competitive, noisy, frantic age.This book carefully collects and interprets a wide range of universally recognizable forms of melancholy, rendering us less confused by our precious yet elusive feelings. We discover everything from the melancholy of a Sunday evening and the melancholy of adolescence to the melancholy of parties and the infatuated melancholy of having a crush.Offering a rich and varied portrait of melancholy and its range of emotions, this book leads the reader toward deeper insight, more authentic acceptance, and more honest self-compassion.* AN IN-DEPTH EXPLORATION OF A COMPLEX EMOTION through the lens of art, architecture, literature, and philosophy.* HOW TO INTERPRET AND ACCEPT our melancholy moods.* INCREASE SELF AWARENESS through meditating on melancholy.* EXAMINES 35 VARIETIES OF MELANCHOLY including: Dating and Melancholy, Loneliness and Melancholy, Adolescence and Melancholy, and Politics and Melancholy.