School of life

The School of Life An Emotional Education by Alain de Botton

The slowest among us can, in a few hours, pick up ideas that it took a few rare geniuses a lifetime to acquire. What is distinctive is just how selective we are about the topics we deem it possible to educate ourselves in. Our energies are overwhelmingly directed towards material, scientific and technical subjects -- and away from psychological and emotional ones, very little around their abilities at marriage or kindness.

The assumption is that emotional insight might be either unnecessary or in essence unteachable, lying beyond reason or method. 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.

School of life

In an ideal society, it would be not only children who were known to need an education. All adults would recognize that they inevitably required continuing education of an emotional kind and would remain active followers of a psychological curriculum. Schools devoted to emotional intelligence would be open for everyone, so that children would feel that they were participating in the early stages of a lifelong process.

Emotional intelligence

We are referring to their ability to introspect and communicate, to read the moods of others, to relate with patience, charity and imagination. The temptation can be to insist that our ideas must solely be the offspring of reason. A wiser interpretation would be that most of what passes through our minds is in some way dependent on particular things going on in our bodies.

Moods show up and insist that they are telling us total certainties about our identities and our prospects -- perhaps that our love lives will never work out or that a professional situation is beyond repair. Still, we always have an option of calling their bluff, of realising that they are only a passing state of mind-- and that we could, with courage, politely ignore them and change the subject. We might recognise, but not give way to, a mood and put a bit of distance between it and our conscious selves. We might, at times, even do precisely what a mood commands us not to do: see someone rather than cede to shame, show our face rather than give way to paranoia, go out for a walk rather than fold our limbs into the foetal position.

Our low moods are far more about a past we still need to mourn fully than a future that there is any reason to dread.

We could picture our minds like a theatre, much of it sunk in darkness, with a brightly illuminated lectern and microphone at the centre of the stage. At different moments of our days and nights, contrasting characters will seek to step up to speak and interpret the world unfolding before our eyes. What unites these characters is that they are, in their diverse ways, very keen to speak and very, very unhelpful. All we need to do, at important moments when our other inner characters will be rushing to get to the microphone of the mind, is to hold them all back purposefully, breathe deeply and ask ourselves one simple but categorical question: what would the adult say here?

Treats of EI:

• knows that love is a skill, not a feeling, and will require trust, vulnerability, generosity, humour, sexual understanding and selective resignation.

• takes time to determine what gives their working life meaning and has the confidence and tenacity to find an accommodation between their inner priorities and the demands of the world.

• knows how to hope and be grateful, while remaining steadfast before the essentially tragic structure of existence

• knows that they will only ever be mentally healthy in a few areas and at certain moments, but is committed to fathoming their inadequacies and warning others of them in good time, with apology and charm.

Emotional maturity (communication, trust, vulnerability)

• Capacity to stay calm

• Capacity to explain

• Capacity to be vulnerable

Work

The values we seek in meaningful job are:

• Making use of our skills (challenging but not too challenging)

  • Figure what you want and what you are good at

• Helping others. Contributing something useful.

• Seeing the direct impact of one's work to the above.

Business ideas are based on the simple idea to solve people's problems. Think about a normal day and how to make it easier.

Jobs are created based on what we consume. What people consume does not necessarily reflect our personal choices:

• Businesses offer lots of choices to fulfil different people's desires.

• We do not always want/chose the best options, in the sense of what is best for us, what educates us most, what is most healthy. Because we are exhausted.

Self-Help

Religion used to be the authority on providing guidance if it comes to emotional intelligence. There was an attempt, realizing the downfall of religion, to replace religion by culture for this purpose, but it has fallen short. Religion used art and ritual to convey messages through beauty and repetition. A good 'school' shouldn't tell us only things we've never heard of before; it should be deeply interested in rehearsing all that is theoretically known yet practically forgotten.

Human condition

Humans are by nature inherently flawed beings. It helps to understand this and not try to fix this or think that we can be perfect instead we should develop compassion towards us and others because of this.

They (the sane insane) can -- at their best -- be drily funny about the tragedy of being human. They lay bare the fears, doubts, longings, desires and habits that don't belong to the story we commonly tell ourselves about who we are.

The sane insane among us are not a special category of the mentally unwell; they represent the most evolved possibility for a mature human being.

Many things that we might assume to be uniquely odd or disconcertingly strange about us are in reality wholly ubiquitous, though simply rarely spoken of in the reserved and cautious public sphere.

Melancholy

Melancholy is not rage or bitterness or sarcasm it is a noble species of sadness that arises when we are properly open to the idea that suffering and disappointment are at the heart of human experience. It is not a disorder that needs to be cured; it is a tender-hearted, calm, dispassionate acknowledgement of how much agony we will inevitably have to travel through.

Decision making

Think of every issue through the eyes of your

• Enemy

  • Enemies know our failures

  • Do the opposite than an enemy would love you to do

• Gut

  • Be brave and open enough to discover your gut feeling

  • Be reasonable enough to follow your gut feeling immediately but take it into consideration

• Death

  • Death is the only certainty in life.

  • Makes us less concerned about consequences or smaller obstacles.

• Caution

  • Consider potential downsides and risks

  • Are there other options

  • Which opportunities can't be realized by following this.

• Courage

  • Don't do what others think is right

  • Do the unexpected.

Simple truths

• we should understand rather than condemn

• others are primarily anxious rather than cruel

• every strength of character we admire bears with it a weakness we must forgive

Self-knowledge

A casual acquaintance may, in a few minutes of conversation, deduce more about our psyches than we have been able to determine across many decades. We are frequently the very last people to know what is at work within 'us'.

We suffer because there is no easy route to introspection.

We pay a very high price for our self-ignorance. Feelings and desires that haven't been examined linger and distribute their energy randomly across our lives. Ambition that doesn't know itself re-emerges as panic; envy transforms itself into bitterness; anger turns into rage; sadness into depression. Disavowed material buckles and strains the system. We develop pernicious tics: a facial twitch, impotence, a compulsion, an unbudgeable sadness. Much of what destroys our lives can be attributed to emotions that our conscious selves haven't found a way to understand or to address in time.

Childhood

Our species' offspring is born very helpless and remains very dependent for many years, as compared to many other species. The dependence is physical and emotional. It doesn't take major blunders to cause damage in a child's emotional well being that can last a lifetime.

We are a certain way because we were knocked off a more fulfilling trajectory years ago. In the face of a viciously competitive parent, we took refuge in underachievement. Having lived around a parent disgusted by the body, sex became frightening. Surrounded by material unreliability, we had to overachieve in relation to money and social prestige. Hurt by a dismissive parent, we fell into patterns of emotional avoidance. A volatile parent pushed us towards our present meekness. Early overprotectiveness inspired timidity and, around any complex situation, panic. A continually busy, inattentive parent was the catalyst for a personality marked by exhausting attention-seeking behaviour.

The wounds caused by experiences from childhood should be addressed by putting yourself in the mindset of yourself as a kid and re-evaluating the childhood experience with a more mature mindset than at the time it was experienced.

The origin of the voice of the inner judge is simple to trace: it is an internalization of the voices of people who were once outside us. We absorb the tones of contempt and indifference or charity and warmth that we will have heard across our formative years. Sometimes a voice is positive and benign, encouraging us to run those final few yards. But frequently the inner voice is not very nice at all. It is defeatist and punitive, panic-ridden and humiliating. It doesn't represent anything like our best insights or most mature capacities.

An inner voice was always an outer voice that we have -- imperceptibly -- made our own.

A good internal voice is rather like (and just as important as) a genuinely decent judge: someone who can separate good from bad but who will always be merciful, fair, accurate in understanding what's going on and interested in helping us deal with our problems. It's not that we should stop judging ourselves, rather that we should learn to be better judges of ourselves.

The best way to change the inner voice is by adapting another external voice that has those characteristics, internalize and rehearse it during judgements.

EMOTIONALLY HEALTHY CHILDHOOD

In an emotionally healthy childhood,...

• ... someone will put themselves profoundly at our service.

• ... we're given the benefit of the doubt. We are assessed by what we might one day be, not by exactly what we are right now. Someone is on hand to put the best possible spin on our behaviour. Someone is kind.

• ... the relationship with our caregiver is steady, consistent and long-term. We trust that they will be there tomorrow and the day after. They are boringly predictable.

• ... we aren't always required to be wholly good boys or girls. We are allowed to get furious and sometimes a bit revolting -- at certain points to say 'absolutely not' and 'because I feel like it'. The adults know their own flaws and do not expect a child to be fundamentally better than they are.

• our carer isn't jealous of or competitive with us. They can allow themselves to be overtaken and superseded. They have had their moment in the limelight, or are having it elsewhere beyond the family.

• ... the child learns that things which break can be fixed. Plans can go awry, but new ones can be made. You can fall over and start anew. A voice of resilience, originally external, becomes the way the child learns to speak to themselves. There are alternatives to panic.

• plenty goes wrong. No one has staked their reputation on rendering the whole story perfect. The carer does not see it as their role to remove every frustration. They intuit that a lot of good comes from having the right, manageable kind of friction, through which the child develops their own resources and individuality.

• the child can see that the good carer isn't either entirely good or wholly bad and so isn't worthy of either idealization or denigration. The child accepts the faults and virtues of the carer with melancholy maturity and gratitude -- and in doing so, by extension, becomes ready to accept that everyone they like will be a mixture of the positive and the negative.

Others

Be Kind and forgiving

Provide people with kindness. Provide people with positive interpretations of their blunders by revealing the underlying positive motivations. Consider that no one is intentionally bad and there is always something else underneath.

We should interpret people's weaknesses as the inevitable downside of certain merits that drew us to them, and from which we will benefit at other points (even if none of these benefits are apparent right now). What we're seeing are not their faults, pure and simple, but rather the shadow side of things that are genuinely good about them. Every weakness can be connected to a strength.

pedantic and uncompromising -> thoroughness and honesty

messiness -> creative enthusiasm.

One of the fundamental paths to sympathy is the power to hold on, in the most challenging situations, to a distinction between a person's overt unpleasant actions and the more pitiable motives that may underlie them. Pure evil is seldom at work.

Almost all our worst moments can be traced back to an unexotic, bathetic, temptingly neglected ingredient: pain.

One has to feel very small in order to belittle.

Be polite and considerate and praise people

The polite person starts from the assumption that others are highly likely to be in quite different places internally, whatever the outward signs. Their behaviour is therefore tentative, wary and filled with enquiries. They will explicitly check with others to take a measure of their experiences and outlook: if they feel cold, they are very alive to the possibility that you may be feeling perfectly warm and so will take trouble to ask if you'd mind if they went over and closed the window.

Partnership

Truth about sex that are usually left unspoken:

• It's very rare to maintain sexual interest in only one person, however much one loves them, beyond a certain time;

• it's entirely possible to love one's partner and regularly want to have sex with strangers, frequently types who don't align with our ordinary concerns;

• one can be a kind, respectable and democratic person and at the same time want to inflict or receive very rough treatment;

• it's highly normal to have fantasies about scenarios one would not wish to act out in reality and that might involve illegal, violent, hurtful and unsanitary aspects;

• it may be easier to be excited by someone one dislikes or thinks nothing of than by someone one loves.

We are, via sex, seeking to connect emotionally with, and make ourselves understood by, another person.

Beneath the surface of almost every argument lies a forlorn attempt by two people to get the other to see, acknowledge and respond to their emotional reality and sense of justice. Beyond the invective is a longing that our partner should witness, understand and endorse some crucial element of our own experience.

It is ultimately no great sign of kindness to insist on showing someone our entire selves at all times. A dedication to maintaining boundaries and editing our pronouncements belongs to love as much as a capacity to show ourselves as we really are. The lover who does not tolerate secrets, who in the name of 'being honest' divulges information so wounding it cannot be forgotten, is no friend of love. Just as no parent should ever tell a child the whole truth, so we should accept the ongoing need to edit our full reality.

The world doesn't revolve around us, in the bigger scheme of things we are just a tiny speck. Nature can help us to see and set things in perspective.

We want to be understood for being the mad animals we are, and then comforted and reassured that it will all be OK anyway.

Confidence

At the heart of our under-confidence is a skewed picture of how dignified a normal person can be. We imagine that it might be possible to place ourselves permanently beyond mockery. We trust that it is an option to lead a good life without regularly making a wholehearted idiot of ourselves.

The way to greater confidence isn't to reassure ourselves of our own dignity; it's to live at peace with the inevitable nature of our ridiculousness.

We know ourselves from the inside, but others only from the outside. We're constantly aware of all our anxieties and doubts from within, yet all we know of others is what they happen to do and tell us, a far narrower and more edited source of information. We are very often left to conclude that we must be at the more freakish, revolting end of human nature.

Misc

The price of something is principally determined by what it cost to make, not how much human value is potentially to be derived from it.

There are two ways to get richer: one is to make more money and the second is to discover that more of the things we could love are already to hand (thanks to the miracles of the Industrial Revolution). We are, astonishingly, already a good deal richer than we're encouraged to think we are.

Manhood

Moving from playing it cool (neglecting one\'s vulnerabilities) to be aware and admitting of our vulnerabilities but also being able to handle our own psychological deficiencies.

Wisdom

We are operating with essentially the same piece of mental hardware as was used by Aristotle, the Buddha and Shakespeare. We are better read and better informed than they ever were -- and our tools are similar. The crucial ingredient lies neither in mental equipment nor in training, but in what a person can allow themselves to believe they are capable of; the limiting factor is mental low self-esteem. be realistic about what it takes and don't expect things to go easy most of the time.

The confidence to imagine that we might know some things that haven't yet entered the consciousness of others is crucial to our capacity to stick by and develop insights of brilliance.

• Appreciate when things do go right. Recognize the beauty of smaller things.

• Budget for madness, be unsurprised by mood swings and irrationality.

• Take live with humour.

• Trade honesty with politeness, be aware of how different things can look through the eyes of others.

• Accept yourself with all your flaws.

• Be slow to anger and judge. Consider good intentions.

• Forgive

• Don't envy and appreciate the role of luck.