Articles by The School of Life

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Calm

Our Anxious Ancestry

We carry fear in our bones. We are – to all intents – in the ancestral mind, somewhere 17,000 years ago in an underground shelter, while outside sabre-tooth tigers howl.

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Sociability

Abandoning Hope

Our dips in confidence can have an unlikely-sounding source: hope. We become hopeful that things can turn out well – but then, when life turns out to be trickier than we’d budgeted for, fall prey to grave panic, despair and anger.

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Relationships

The Secret Lives of Other Couples

Despite all our recording devices, and all the ways we have of sharing information about ourselves, one of the things that remains as hard as ever is to know what it is like, really like, for other people in relationships.

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Self-Knowledge

Why It’s Good to Be a Narcissist

Narcissism is one of the more misunderstood terms of our time. We’re so aware of the bad narcissist that we are at risk of missing the central role that narcissism should play in the development of any healthy human.

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Sociability

How to Leave a Party

People need a lot of self-love before they can find their own needs acceptable – and by extension, dare to try to transmit these to others.

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Sociability

On Becoming a Hermit

Hermits fascinate us because they are who we might be if only we learnt to be braver. They have unearthed the courage to be unusual.

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Calm

Why We May Need a Convalescence

The business of living is a sickness enough; it can take half a lifetime to realise it isn’t weak or indulgent to take very gentle care of ourselves.

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Calm

Auditing Our Worries

We should use the reams of data about the unreliability of fears gone by as a guide to the future. If we got it so wrong in the past, it’s highly likely we’re getting it rather wrong now too.

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Sociability

How to Have a Renaissance

One of the great cities of the world arose off the back of an inspired mood. It wasn’t coal, guns or wealth that did it: it was a movement of the mind.

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Work

Giving Up on Being Special

It can take a lot of pain before we make our peace with so-called ‘ordinariness’ and accept it for the wonder it is.

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Relationships

Why You Will Never Quite Get it Right in Love

Whatever intelligence, foresight, dedication and effort we bring to the task, perfection is almost certainly going to elude us. There is simply so very much that can go wrong.

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Calm

What is a Transcendental Experience?

In the grip of a transcendental experience, we willingly let go of the compromised ‘I’ in order to become, for a privileged while, a part of the timeless, beatific whole.

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Self-Knowledge

Am I a Bad Person?

No one is ever straightforwardly nice. The route to true benevolence flows through the door of a candid acknowledgement of ill temper and vanity.

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Calm

The Perils of Making Predictions

The only prediction we can rely on is that life will – with ceaseless ingenuity – outrun our finest predictions.

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Relationships

Understanding Attachment Theory

An unusual realisation that lovers may eventually make is that it is hard to envisage successfully navigating any relationship without some understanding – and mutual discussion of – Attachment Theory.

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Self-Knowledge

Why Some of Us Are So Thin-Skinned

Why do some of us end up unable ever to forget mean things people say and do while others sail on unmolested? The central explanation is: the degree and sort of love we received in childhood.

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Sociability

Think Like an Aristocrat

We limit the concept of aristocracy unhelpfully when we identify it simply with a restricted franchise and country houses. We may be able to become something far more relevant and more flexible than an aristocrat of the blood: an aristocrat of the spirit.

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Calm

Building the Cathedral

When despair stalks us, we should – like that mason – step back and imagine ourselves as part of a larger whole that can redeem us through its scale, logic and beauty.

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Relationships

Why We Need ‘Ubuntu’

Ubuntu is distinctive; it means compassion and humanity and zeroes in on the crucial role that empathy should play in love well understood.

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Self-Knowledge

Sympathy for Our Younger Selves

To soothe our agitations and reduce our compulsions, we may need to check in on them regularly to try to mend their injuries: the violence, neglect and fear they may have suffered.

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Sociability

Van Gogh’s Neglected Genius

Van Gogh’s story is so familiar that we are apt to lose sight of its ongoing relevance and universal import: people miss things.

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Calm

Making Peace with Life’s Mystery

At a certain point, the truly wise stop trying to understand what everything means and surrender instead to the ‘ineffable’: that which cannot be grasped by anything as limited and flawed as the human mind.

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Relationships

Beyond the Need for Melodrama in Love

We make relationships so much more dramatic than they need to be to drown out the fears we associate with ordinary contentment.

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Self-Knowledge

Why Sweet Things Make Us Cry

The true connoisseurs of beauty aren’t those who find life perfect, but those who have the full measure of its pain and bitterness.

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Relationships

True Love is Boring

Love properly understood entwines us deeply with the day to day experience of another, much of it entirely boring to the wider world but deeply redolent of commitment and of mutual daily care for one’s small trials and joys.

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Sociability

How to Be Quietly Confident

We may be in danger of gravely neglecting our potential so long as we continue to operate with a brittle concept of what confidence might look like.

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Calm

Rewriting Our Inner Scripts

The end goal of maturity might be defined as the ability to approach as much of life as possible life without a script.

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Sociability

How to Live Like an Exile

It may not always be possible for us to become actual exiles, but we should at the very least strive to become internal exiles, that is, people who can behave like visitors in their own lands.

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Calm

Don’t Hope for the Best; Expect the Worst

Peace of mind doesn’t come from hoping for the best; it comes from close-up attention to the very worst – and from the sure knowledge that we can, with the strength we have inside us already, endure whatever fate might assign us.

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Relationships

Why We ‘Split’ Our Partners

Like babies, we can be inveterate dividers. We decide that good and bad, pleasing and frustrating, cannot exist within the heart of a single person.

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Relationships

On Saying ‘I Hate You’ to Someone You Love

A frank declaration of dislike might even be deemed properly romantic, in the sense of being conducive to, and sustaining of, love.

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Calm

The Age of Agitation

We deserve to feel sorry for ourselves for the world we’ve built. We face unprecedented difficulties holding on to anything tranquil or soothing.

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Relationships

What True Love Looks Like

We need so much help in acknowledging what we are really like – and staying patient with what we see. We need all the loving realism can we can find.

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Calm

The Promise of an Unblemished Life

There are few more tempting or natural aspirations than that of managing to lead an unblemished life. But the years are in the habit of inducting us into a succession of heartbreaking realities.

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Sociability

Becoming More Interesting

Being interesting has nothing to do with being well-read or well-travelled – and everything to do with succeeding at being a slightly more faithful correspondent of one’s authentic self.

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Calm

Daring to Be Simple

We’ll be properly mature by the time we learn to appreciate the art of being direct, emotionally straightforward and – in the eyes of the frantic and impressionable many – exceptionally dull.

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Calm

How to Endure

The wise keep going not because they are braver, but because they have learnt to be a lot better prepared – by which we mean, a lot sadder.

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Self-Knowledge

How Music Can Heal Us

Intuitively, we know that music can heal but rarely is it asked to do so as directly and explicitly as it has been here. These extraordinary musical pieces carry the listener on a representative journey from psychological distress to understanding recovery and liberation.

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