Articles on Self-Knowledge, Relationships and Calm - The School of Life

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Art/Architecture

How Industry Restores Our Faith in Humanity

There is every reason to be appalled by our race. But to retain a vestige of hope, we should look at our docksides and warehouses, our flyovers and radar stations.

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Friendship

Why Misfits Make Great Friends

Once we have given up on the poisonous goal of respectability, we will at last be ready for friendship.

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Utopia

Who Deserves Love?

Attempts to render us more loving tend to try to focus our minds on those people that, in the ordinary course of things, we are prone to step over without the slightest thought or feeling of guilt.

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Sociability

The Origins of People Pleasing

The people pleaser labours under a punishing internal directive never to utter their own thoughts. Self-hatred has destroyed the development of their own minds.

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  • Self-Knowledge
  • Growth & Maturity

Why We Must Have Done Bad to Be Good

We have to learn how corrupt we are, how insipid we can be, how little we understand, in order to be in any position to bestow adequate warmth on our fellow humans.
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  • Relationships
  • Sex

What Freud’s Oedipus Complex Can Teach Us

We might think of the Oedipus Complex as offering us a guiding narrative about how we come, through the varied experiences of childhood, to have our own distinctive approach to sexuality.
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  • Self-Knowledge
  • Trauma and Childhood

How to Get Your Parents Out of Your Head

One of the most difficult things about being human is how easily influenced we are by our childhoods — and more particularly, our parents.
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Self-Knowledge

Self-Forgiveness

Our refusal to forgive ourselves for our mistakes tends to hang on a strong sense of how much these were, in the end, avoidable.

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Who Deserves Love?

Work

Who Deserves Love?

Attempts to render us more loving tend to try to focus our minds on those people that, in the ordinary…
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The Wisdom of Dusk

Calm

The Wisdom of Dusk

Our thoughts are – nominally – free to go in any direction at any time of day or night. In…
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