The Best of The School of Life

We publish articles around emotional education: calm, fulfilment, perspective and self-awareness. | Self-Hatred & Anxiety — Read now

To be criticised is never pleasant. It is rarely a good day when we have to read an unflattering social media post about ourselves, when we are given harsh feedback on a project or hear that we are…

«If criticism from outside proves devastating, it is because it so readily joins forces with an infinitely more strident and more aggressive form of criticism that has long existed inside of us.»

Read our article - In Praise of Introspection. The School Of Life has a huge collection of interesting articles, read now.

We publish articles around emotional education: calm, fulfilment, perspective and self-awareness. | How the Modern World Makes Us Mentally Ill — Read now

«individualistic society preaches that the individual and their achievements are everything and that everyone is capable of a special destiny.»

Early on in the history of melancholy, the Greek philosopher Aristotle was said to have raised a question which it’s hard to answer without sounding self-serving – or smug: ‘Why is it that so many of…

The most basic and never-to-be-forgotten fact about any infant is that it is born into a state of radical immaturity. It cannot understand its condition; it doesn’t know how to communicate; it has no…

«The distinction between adult and infant is, confusingly, never assured by age alone»

There are few more important tasks for parents than to be able to listen properly to their children, that is, pick up on and give room to, their children’s moods, hatreds and enthusiasms, even when…

«We may as parents have said a very firm goodbye to vulnerability, imagination, frankness, sexual fluidity or sadness. But our children come into the world unaware of any such repudiations; what we have put into our shadow sides may lie in the midday sun of our offspring’s young lives.»

We publish articles around emotional education: calm, fulfilment, perspective and self-awareness. | Why So Many of Us Are Masochists — Read now

«We might aspire to serenity but — as psychological masochists — we are wired for panic and terror; we may want to live in the house of love, but — until we have unpicked our traumas — nothing will feel more like home than the house of pain.»

We publish articles around emotional education: calm, fulfilment, perspective and self-awareness. | Why Everything Relates to Your Childhood — Read now

We publish articles around emotional education: calm, fulfilment, perspective and self-awareness. | The Seven Rules of Successful Relationships — Read now

There are many reasons to believe that one of the dominant problems in the world today is an excess of anger. We know all about the very shouty and their antics: their tantrums, their lack of reason,…

«The goal is a firm but self-possessed protest: Excuse me, but you are ruining what’s left of my life, I’m so sorry, but you are cauterising my chances of happiness; I beg your pardon, but this is enough…»

Psychological trauma can be defined as a negative event so overwhelming that we cannot properly understand, process or move on from it – but, and this is the devilish aspect to it, nor can we properly…

«As the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott observed: ‘The catastrophe the traumatised fear will happen has already happened’.»

The word ‘trauma’ — meaning a terrible event we live through that cannot be remembered but which generates painful related symptoms — captures an acute paradox in our relationship to our own…

To wonder too openly, or intensely, about the meaning of life sounds like a peculiar, ill-fated and unintentionally comedic pastime. It isn’t anything an ordinary mortal should be doing – or would get…

«One way to get a sense of why love should so often be considered close to the meaning of life is to look at the challenges of loneliness»

Read our article - On Needing to Find Something to Worry About — Why We Always Worry for No Reason. The School Of Life has a huge collection of interesting articles, read now.

Read our article - How to Go to Bed Earlier. The School Of Life has a huge collection of interesting articles, read now.

«We’re not idiots because we stay up into the night; we’re in search of something important; the problem isn’t what we’re looking for but the fact that we can’t find it this way.»

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«good listening doesn’t just involve paying attention to what someone is saying. There’s a far more active side to the listening process which could properly be referred to as ‘editing’ – because it is in key ways highly similar to the work done for an author by an ideal literary editor. »

There is a kind of person who seems at first glance to have an admirable degree of self-motivation, thoroughness and drive. They are up at dawn, they rarely take holidays, they are always sneaking in…

«There will never be a point of rest or a lasting feeling of completion. In truth, we are ill rather than driven.»