The School of Life has produced 500 films and written 5 million words. This is an enormous problem. To stand any hope of remaining in anyone’s mind, ideas — even very good ideas — need to be brief and reduced to an essence. That’s why, for the sake of our…

Since the middle of the eighteenth century, beginning in Northern Europe and then spreading to every corner of the world, people have become aware of living in an age radically different from any other and which they have called — with a mixture of awe and respect, trepidation and nostalgia…

We’re surrounded by some powerful ideas about the sort of things that will make us happy. We think that really to deliver satisfaction, the pleasures we should aim for need to be: Rare — we’ve inherited a Romantic suspicion of the ordinary (which is taken to be mediocre, dull and…

The most basic and never-to-be-forgotten fact about any infant is that it is born into a state of radical immaturity. It cannot understand its condition; it doesn’t know how to communicate; it has no way of empathising; it can’t help but be muddled about its own needs. …

One of the things it’s easiest to forget about children is that they are aliens recently descended from another planet. In the way they look at everything around them, in the wide open stares they give to ways of living and being that have grown utterly familiar and therefore invisible…

We’ve got a steady, unfortunate tendency to focus exclusively on what’s bothering us. We brood; we circle endlessly round our worries. We get drawn deeper into the gloomy recesses of our own minds. We lose touch with the brighter, more cheerful parts of who we are. As we wander through…

The decision whether one should stay or leave is one of the most consequential and painful any of us ever has to make. …

One way to start assessing how badly we have been knocked by our early years — and where we might therefore need to direct most of our repair work and attention — is to identify a range of markers of emotional health and imagine how we fare in relation to…

It’s not necessarily a well-flagged problem: we tend to situate the risks to our happiness elsewhere — but for a proportion of us, the greatest obstacle to our flourishing lies in a high and persistent degree of inhibition. We are, in a range of areas, painfully hesitant about saying what…