The School Of Life
Everything you need to know about yourself and others
I remember watching Alain De Botton’s Ted Talk on a kinder, gentler philosophy for success many years ago as a teenager.
I loved it, but then managed to forget about his existence until recently, when I was in the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris. There, his newest book “The School of Life” caught my attention.
And not just because of its bright blue with yellow cover — but because of its subtitle “an emotional education”, and its promise to learn us everything we were never taught at school.
Alain dares to claim that “The School of Life” is the ultimate guide to how we might achieve emotional maturity and self-understanding. Sounds exactly like my cup of tea, so I decided to give it a try and see whether it lives up to its promise (spoiler: it absolutely did).
TL;DR
- Even if we had a loving and safe childhood, all of us still end up with psychological ‘damage’, or primal wounds that become our habitual templates as adults. Emotional maturity is being open to the truth and recognizing these patterns so we can break free of the past.
- It’s when we are in conflict with ourselves that we do hurt to others. We thus need to use a complex lens to the behaviors of…
