Self-Knowledge
An Interesting Life Rather Than a Happy One
We typically assume that the ultimate aim of all our efforts is to have a happy life. And judged on…
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Articles by The School of Life
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Leisure
The Wisdom of Liming
To know how to lime isn’t just one more low-key leisure activity, it’s evidence that one has understood some extremely significant things about oneself and one’s place in society and the cosmos.
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Leisure
Reasons Not to Give Up
We can sometimes wonder what art is for. Kølle’s picture offers us one possible answer: art is there to refocus our attention on what matters most deeply.
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Sociability
The Need – Sometimes – Not to Complain
We may choose not to complain not because we are weak, but for a more fundamental and clear-eyed reason: because we are up against something we know we cannot change.
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Leisure
The Pleasures of the Underground
There are moods – of dissatisfaction and loneliness, panic and despair – when the very best counsel we might be offered is to go and take a ride on the underground.
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Self-Knowledge
Is There Something Wrong – or Am I Just a Miserable Person?
Hope can spring from an initially hugely difficult thought: we don’t live in an unbearably miserable world, we may just have grown up (for extremely forgivable reasons) to be very miserable people.
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Relationships
Why Small Pleasures Become a Bigger, Not a Smaller Deal, the More We Suffer and Age
The more challenging existence as a whole becomes, the more we may appreciate what remains pure and hopeful, despite its modest appearance or lack of obvious glamour.
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Relationships
A Crucial Sign That Someone is Worth Going Out With
There is one sign that more than any other indicates that someone may well be a rewarding and trustworthy person to go out with: that they are prepared to go to therapy.
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Relationships
There Are No Small Issues in Love
The only way to prevent the largest problems is to focus exhaustively and with dark good humour on the very smallest ones.
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Relationships
On Not Being Very Good at Love
Our romantic fiascos can get a little less arduous the more we can bring ourselves to shrug our shoulders and confess: I really can’t do this thing called love.
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Relationships
When One Partner Feels Controlled; And the Other Feels Abandoned
A thread has come out of the seam of the relationship. If it keeps being pulled, a whole hem may unspool.
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Relationships
Our Longing to Avoid Love
For all their professed faith in love, the anxiously attached find it extremely hard to trust that love could eventually go right for them. And therefore they discover that it seldom does so.
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Relationships
Our Longing to Avoid Love
We’re avoiding love now because somewhere in the past, it proved intolerably distressing in a way that we have not understood – and therefore cannot overcome.
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Relationships
Five Ways to Handle an Avoidant Partner
Part of the difficulty of handling an avoidant person lies in being clear exactly what the issue with them might be.
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Relationships
The Pleasures of Talking Nonsense With Someone We Love
People who know and love each other deeply do not sit together discussing philosophy or economics: rather, they talk nonsense.
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Relationships
The 9 Most Common Mistakes We Make When Choosing a Partner
Choosing a long-term partner may be the single most consequential decision any of us ever has to make. What then are some of the most weighty mistakes we make when attempting to find a lover?
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Self-Knowledge
How We Can Feel Misunderstood – Without Ever Explaining Who We Are
Did you ever explain yourself properly to the person who is meant to have ignored you? Did you work hard to make yourself known before surrendering to a sense of being unnoticed?
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Sociability
The Challenges of Male Friendships
Men are lonely because of an inherent conflict between what is required of being a man on the one hand, and what is involved in being a friend on the other.
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Self-Knowledge
What Does the Child in You Need Today?
We’ll accede to a fairer, kinder adulthood once we accept how close we remain always to the delicate, sensitive, tear-prone little person we once were.
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Self-Knowledge
Why We Can so Quickly End up Feeling Hated
We may be far more loved than we thought – once we remember the scale of the reservations that true love can encompass.
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Self-Knowledge
Why We Sometimes Need to Be Tied to a Mast
There are situations in which we have to concede that only the blunt removal of temptation can save us.
Relationships
Good Endings in Love
Many relationships cannot be resurrected; all relationships deserve dignified and thoughtful burials.
Relationships
On Castration Anxiety
If sex is going wrong, we may need to look beyond physical interventions and take an audit of the mutual suspicions that each side can be unconsciously carrying with them into the bedroom.
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Relationships
How to Find Out What Might Happen With a New Partner
When a new relationship is on the cards, we might greatly expand our sense of what could subsequently happen with our date by turning to one subject in particular…
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Self-Knowledge
Trust What You Knew Then, Not What You Feel Now
The further away we stand from the moment when we took a decision, the more our judgement is likely to be clouded and corrupted.
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Self-Knowledge
Four Explanations for Self-Sabotage
One of the most curious and dispiriting of all psychological behaviours goes under the title of self-sabotage. In our search for answers, we can identify at least four explanations…
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Leisure
The Wisdom of Liming
On the Caribbean islands of Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago, there’s a skill which is widely revered, which has been…
View
Leisure
Reasons Not to Give Up
In one of the upper rooms of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford hangs a picture by a minor Danish nineteenth…
View
Sociability
The Need – Sometimes – Not to Complain
We know so much about the importance of complaining; of standing up against problems; of pointing out what is wrong;…
View
Leisure
The Pleasures of the Underground
There are moods – of dissatisfaction and loneliness, panic and despair – when the very best counsel we might be…
View
Self-Knowledge
Is There Something Wrong – or Am I Just a Very Miserable Person?
We can spend a lot of our lives angrily focused on just how hopeless and awful many things are: this…
View
Leisure
Why Small Pleasures Become a Bigger, Not a Smaller Deal, the More We Suffer and Age
There’s an apparent paradox in the way that the longer we have lived, the more appreciation we tend to develop…
View
Relationships
A Crucial Sign That Someone Is Worth Going Out With
There is one sign that more than any other indicates that someone may well be a rewarding and trustworthy person…
View
Relationships
There Are No Small Issues in Love
We are sometimes let down by an unhelpful idea about how big an issue needs to be in order to…
View
Select themes
Leisure
The Wisdom of Liming
On the Caribbean islands of Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago, there’s a skill which is widely revered, which has been…
View
Leisure
Reasons Not to Give Up
In one of the upper rooms of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford hangs a picture by a minor Danish nineteenth…
View
Sociability
The Need – Sometimes – Not to Complain
We know so much about the importance of complaining; of standing up against problems; of pointing out what is wrong;…
View
Leisure
The Pleasures of the Underground
There are moods – of dissatisfaction and loneliness, panic and despair – when the very best counsel we might be…
View
Self-Knowledge
Is There Something Wrong – or Am I Just a Very Miserable Person?
We can spend a lot of our lives angrily focused on just how hopeless and awful many things are: this…
View
Leisure
Why Small Pleasures Become a Bigger, Not a Smaller Deal, the More We Suffer and Age
There’s an apparent paradox in the way that the longer we have lived, the more appreciation we tend to develop…
View
Relationships
A Crucial Sign That Someone Is Worth Going Out With
There is one sign that more than any other indicates that someone may well be a rewarding and trustworthy person…
View
Relationships
There Are No Small Issues in Love
We are sometimes let down by an unhelpful idea about how big an issue needs to be in order to…
View
