The School of Life: An Emotional Education was published by the eponymous organization The School of Life. This book finally addressed my inner worries and provided a strong foundation for the education I was missing all these years.
The School of Life provides a vast curriculum of everything we didn’t learn in school. That is, life’s most pressing questions:
- What is love?
- Why am I an idiot?
- Why am I not happy?
- What is the meaning of it all?
- Is it just me who has all these concerns?
- Why do I screw up so hard and can’t make it right?
- Who am I, and what the hell should I do with my life?
The first chapter alone expresses precisely the struggle I experienced growing up:
“Our energies are overwhelmingly directed towards material, scientific and technical subjects — and away from psychological and emotional ones … We are left to find our own path around our unfeasibly complicated minds — a move as striking (and as wise) as suggesting that each generation should rediscover the laws of physics by themselves.”
The School of Life solves this problem head-on. It teaches the skill we’re missing in our education: emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence is, as The School of Life puts it in the book:
“[Someone’s] ability to introspect and communicate, to read the moods of others, to relate with patience, charity, and imagination to the less edifying moments of those around them.”
Luckily, emotional intelligence — including love, work, and mental health — can be learned like any other skill. As a result, The School of Life saves us time by teaching the lessons many of us learn too late in life.
So, in an attempt to spare you a bit of time, here are my ten favorite insights from this book. They helped me go from a desperate, emotionally unintelligent autopilot to a reasonably content, aware human being.
1. Self-Knowledge Is Bliss
We are the last person to know what’s going on inside us.
And if we ignore our deepest desires and inner woes, we pay a high price. We won’t know why we’re upset. We’ll struggle to find our purpose. We wonder why relationships break apart or we have trouble finding them. We become plagued by anxiety and get anxious about being anxious.
Reflecting is, therefore, one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves.
One of my favorite tools for reflection, and greater self-knowledge from the book is philosophical meditation. It changed my life so drastically that I dedicated an entire article to the practice. Essentially, we ask ourselves three questions, answer them with brutal honesty, and console ourselves:
- What am I anxious about?
- What am I upset about?
- What am I ambitious and excited about?
Ironically, the result of reflection is not finding all the answers in your life (although many things will start making sense). Instead, you’ll find out that your mind is a suggestion engine and that you’ll never fully understand yourself.
The same applies to others. We’ll never be able to grasp the deepest emotional caverns of the people we love. The closest thing to the truth we’ll experience is a highly filtered version of someone’s mind through a medium we call “language.”
And honestly? I think this is a relief. It taught me I don’t need to have all the answers all the time.
Not knowing is closer to the truth than pretending to know.
2. We All Carry Primal Wounds — and That’s Okay
We’ve all been hurt in childhood. No matter how loving our upbringing was, we all carry “primal wounds” with us for the rest of our lives.
The reason for this is the design of the human species. One of my favorite passages from the book:
“Unlike all other living things, Homo sapiens is fated to endure an inordinately long and structurally claustrophobic pupillage. A foal is standing up thirty minutes after it is born. A human will, by the age of eighteen, have spent around 25,000 hours in the company of its parents.”
It’s inevitable that uncomfortable events take place during all this time we spend as vulnerable, helpless, and insignificant creatures. These events will haunt us for the rest of our lives. And so we try to compensate:
- An overly competitive upbringing might create a need for underachievement.
- A lack of money might result in an obsession with success and social prestige.
- Busy and inattentive parents might cause a pathological craving for attention.
Reflection and therapy can help us uncover the causes of our primal wounds. But we’ll never fully heal the scars inflicted in our childhood. And that’s okay. We’re all victims of the human condition.
Thus, we shouldn’t label ourselves or others as mean, incapable, or crazy. Instead, we should realize that we all share a tricky history.
3. You’re Not Boring
For most of my life, I thought I was a boring person. I wasn’t good at telling stories or jokes, coming up with clever punchlines, or talking to girls.
In the past few years, though, something changed. I realized it wasn’t me that was boring; it was my perspective.
You see, we all think we’re a bit boring and have nothing interesting to say in conversations. But, in reality, everyone can have the most profound conversations imaginable because they’re human. The only thing that makes us boring is to deny this fact and scratch on surface-level topics.
Instead, we could offer what we’re all craving: A raw perspective on what it’s like to be alive. That is to say, sharing our deepest fears, insecurities, and dreams about life on Earth.
The result? Deep reassurance and a feeling that this complicated thing we call “life” got a little less lonely.
4. Anxiety Is Normal
We’re not alone with feelings of anxiety, loneliness, or general suffering. I can guarantee you: Every person you know is in more pain than they’re willing to admit.
In a way, anxiety is the default state. And that’s why, according to The School of Life, we should change our perspective on it:
“Anxiety deserves greater dignity. It is not a sign of degeneracy, rather a kind of masterpiece of insight: a justifiable expression of our mysterious participation in a disordered, uncertain world.”
Just like the fear of being boring, this connects us. We can reach out to friends, neighbors, and strangers and tell them we understand that life involves suffering. And that it’s okay.
5. The Importance of Being Alone
I feel anti-social and — for the lack of a better word — weird that I’ve been spending the main chunk of my life alone. But, as it turns out, many people would profit from seeing through the stigma of being alone and recognizing the benefits.
Let’s face it: Life unfolds at terrifying speed. We process so much information every day that we have become numb to all the cues of real-life conversation. And so, we find ourselves (subconsciously) anxious, hurt, or excited because we didn’t take the time to decipher what happened during ten minutes of social interaction.
As a result, spending time alone is, paradoxically, not something offensive to others. It’s a grand gesture to enrich our relationships.
How else, if not by ourselves, can we develop our own opinions, styles, and perspectives?
Solitude helps us be better friends and partners.
6. Romanticism Has Ruined Love
Romanticism emerged in the 18th century and defined our modern understanding of love. Nearly every modern cultural artifact — books, movies, art — is tainted by the idea.
While there are some variations, the general blueprint looks like this:
- We need to find a soulmate (beautiful inside and out), experience love at first sight, and be equally attracted to one another.
- The attraction lasts forever, and so does highly satisfying sex.
- Our soulmate should also be our best friend, co-parent, therapist, accountant, and personal manager.
- Partners should always understand each other, never be attracted to someone else, and spend as much time as possible with each other.
- Love is a feeling to be followed, not a skill to be learned.
Of course, some of these points are exaggerated, but we all carry them deep inside us when we’re looking for love.
The result is a disaster of overblown expectations for love.
As tragic as it is, there are reasons to be hopeful. Many of the problems we experience in relationships don’t arise from our inability to be a good partner. They arise from our tainted perception of relationships.
We should develop more realistic, contemporary perspectives on love.
Sex may not always be a part of a partnership. We should be tolerant and generous because we’re all flawed. We can admit it takes enormous energy to understand each other. Soulmates are a fantasy.
7. The Purpose of Love
There’s this common notion that you shouldn’t change your partners and love them for their flaws.
The School of Life argues for the opposite. They draw upon the Greek idea of love which was, above all, education. The Greeks saw love and relationships as a constant process of teaching and improving.
I love this idea. Think about it — it’s careless to blindly accept the apparent flaws of another person. Why should you enter a relationship if you end up being the same or a worse version of yourself? How is the relationship ever going to grow?
Here’s how The School of Life put it:
“When lovers teach each other uncomfortable truths, they are not abandoning the spirit of love. They are trying to do something very true to genuine love, which is to make their partners more worthy of admiration.”
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to change our partners and vice versa. In fact, it’s legitimate and necessary. Working out the best possible version of each person should be the chief task of love.
8. The Drive Behind Sex and Affairs
Our craving for sex goes beyond our evolutionary drive to procreate.
Sex is actually one of the primary ways to make us feel less lonely. Why? Because we tend to hate ourselves and struggle with self-love. Sex makes us forget about this problem like a band-aid covering a scratch — particularly when it’s with a new person.
This also explains the main motivation behind affairs. In a long-term relationship, household chores and the management of everyday life get in the way of a lasting emotional connection. Partners become distanced and annoyed with each other. They start feeling disconnected.
The problem with affairs is not that someone is desperately horny. It’s that they’re deeply lonely.
9. The Friendzone Is a Gift
Everyone has experienced the dreaded friendzone at some point in their lives. I know I have. And I always felt terrible about it — as if I got the crappy consolation prize instead of winning the gold medal.
But, as it turns out, the friendzone is the grand prize.
You see, love makes us often become a twisted version of ourselves. We get jealous, distant, avoidant, and anxious. Friendship, in contrast, brings out the best in us. As friends, we are:
“… patient, encouraging, tolerant, funny and, most of all, kind. We expect a little less and therefore, by extension, forgive infinitely more. We do not presume that we will be fully understood and so treat failings lightly and humanely.”
We put more genuine effort into friendships while being our best, truest selves. Nothing is forced. Nothing is obligatory. Nearly anything is forgivable.
So, as hard as it is to see this in the moment of rejection: The friendzone might be the greatest gift a love interest can offer us.
10. No Job Will Ever Be Perfect
I spent years trying to find the right job. And now that I’ve found writing — a profession I love — there’s still so much unfulfilled potential in me.
Whenever I pick up a new skill I enjoy, I’m like, “Whoa, maybe this could be my job.” But of course, this is an endless struggle. Just like there is no soulmate, there’s no soulwork. No job will ever be perfect.
This sober realization makes me sad. Knowing I’ll depart this world with hundreds of untried jobs leaves me deeply unsatisfied.
But, there’s also a bright side.
First, we share this struggle with every other human being. No one can ever live a perfect professional life — not the CEO, painter, or janitor. And second, we can learn to embrace the benefits of specializing in one job area. We can end our desperate quest for the perfect job, settle down, and spend adulthood in a stable environment.
The Good Enough Life
If you forced me to summarize The School of Life: An Emotional Education in one sentence, it would probably go like this: Being a human being is mostly suffering, we’ll never be able to express what we’re feeling, our life will be unfulfilled, and nothing in life will ever be perfect.
But this is where the book’s central philosophy comes into play: life can be good enough. Because despite all the overwhelming human struggles, we’re still okay. It’s nice to be alive. And it’s even better to share this weird experience with others.
I wish I had learned this growing up. And I wish so many people had the chance to learn it in their lifetime. There was so much relief in these pages that I teared up a little typing these lessons.
So, remember: It’s never too late to pursue an emotional education. It’s never too late to visit the school of life.
(All quotes from The School of Life: An Emotional Education by The School of Life.)
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