The School of Life by Alain de Botton
★★★☆☆ | Psychology | Print | Own | StoryGraph | Goodreads
Alain de Botton and his School of Life organization are on a mission to help otherwise bright people become more emotionally intelligent. We have lost touch with the instructive benefits of organized religion and the traditional family unit. Without this foundation, our quest for knowledge through technical and technological means has left our souls barren and empty.
De Botton suggests we need to study culture and art as a replacement for the calm and perspective religion once gave us. Without this, we will continue to seek our happiness in brash consumerism or destructive behaviors.
Buying expensive things can feel like solutions to needs we don’t understand. Happiness may be difficult to attain, but the obstacles are rarely financial.
And so, the book represents “a crash course” in emotional maturity, and by necessity, it must gloss over big swathes of psychology, philosophy, art, and literature. I didn’t pick up much new from the book, though it was a nice refresher in some areas. The British writing style, with its dry humor and roundabout sentence structure, was initially a delight, but it grew tiresome by the end.
For a recent college graduate, this might be just enough of a primer to tease a lifelong appetite for the arts and offer advice for being a better human being.
Highlights
Almost universally, without anyone intending this to happen, somewhere in our childhood our trajectory toward emotional maturity can be counted upon to have been impeded. Even if we were sensitively cared for and lovingly handled, even if parental figures approached their tasks with the highest care and commitment, we can be counted upon not to have passed through our young years without sustaining some form of deep psychological injury-what we can term a set of “primal wounds.”
The causes of our primal wounds are rarely outwardly dramatic, but their effects are rarely insignificant. Such is the fragile base of childhood that nothing outwardly appalling needs to have happened to us for us to wind up inwardly profoundly scrambled.
What properly indicates addiction is not what someone is doing, but their way of doing it, and in particular their desire to avoid any encounter with certain sides of themselves. We are addicts whenever we develop a manic reliance on something — anything — to keep our darker and more unsettling feelings at bay.
Most of what we are remains a secret to the world, because we are aware of how much of it flouts the laws of decency and sobriety we would like to live by. We know that we would not last long in society if a stream of our uncensored inner data ever leaked out of our minds.
Philosophical meditation seeks to lend us a structure within which to sieve the confused content that muddies our stream of consciousness. Key to the practice is regularly to turn over three large questions:
What am I anxious about right now?
What am I upset about right now?
What am I ambitious and excited about right now?
Kindness is built out of a constantly renewed and gently resigned awareness that weakness-free people do not exist.
The tragedy of every sorry argument is that it is constructed around a horrific mismatch between the message we so badly want to send (“I need you to love me, know me, agree with me”) and the manner in which we are able to deliver it (with impatient accusations, sulks, put-downs, sarcasm, exaggerated gesticulations, and forceful “fuck you”s).
People don’t change when they are gruffly told what’s wrong with them; they change when they feel sufficiently supported to undertake the change they-almost always—already know is due.
We must beware too of the “incumbent problem”: the vast but often overlooked and unfair advantage that all new people, and also cities and jobs, have over existing―or, as we put it, incumbent-ones. The beautiful person glimpsed briefly in the street, the city visited for a few days, the job we read about in a couple of tantalizing paragraphs in a magazine all tend to seem immediately and definitively superior to our current partner, our long-established home, and our committed workplace and can inspire us to sudden and (in retrospect sometimes) regrettable divorces, relocations, and resignations.
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 are idiots now, we have been idiots in the past, and we will be idiots again in the future-and that is OK. There aren’t any other available options for human beings.
We tend to become ironic around things that we feel disappointed by but don’t think we’ll ever be able to change. It’s a maneuver of disappointment stoically handled.
There can wisely be no “solutions,” no self-help, of a kind that removes problems altogether. What we can aim for, at best, is consolation—a word tellingly lacking in glamour. To believe in consolation means giving up on cures; it means accepting that life is a hospice rather than a hospital, but one we’d like to render as comfortable, as interesting, and as kind as possible.
