The School of Life: An Emotional Education

As Adam Smith argued, the causes don’t lie in some personal error we’re making. It’s a limitation forced upon us by the greater logic of a competitive market economy. But we can allow ourselves to mourn that there will always be large aspects of our character that won’t be satisfied. We’re not being silly or ungrateful. We’re simply registering the

Cézanne in his studio was generating his own revolution, not an industrial revolution that would make once-costly objects available to everyone, but a revolution in appreciation, a far deeper process, that would get us to notice what we already have to hand. Instead of reducing prices, he was raising levels of appreciation – which is a move perhaps

Marriage is a state-sanctioned legal construct, fundamentally linked to matters of property, progeny and pension entitlements – a construct which aims to restrict and control how two people might feel towards one another over fifty or more years. It places a cold, unhelpful, expensive and entirely emotionally alien frame around what is always going

Success and Failure The wise emerge as realistic about the consequences of winning and succeeding. They may want to win as much as the next person, but they are aware of how many fundamentals will remain unchanged, whatever the outcome. They don’t exaggerate the transformations available to us. They know how much we remain tethered to some basic dy

But the legacy of Romanticism has been an epidemic of loneliness, as we are repeatedly brought up against the truth: the radical inability of any one other person to wholly grasp who we truly are. Yet there remains, besides the promises of love and religion, one other – and more solid – resource with which to address our loneliness: culture.

We can be more compassionate. We will inevitably, in the course of therapy, realize how much we were let down by certain people in the past. A natural response might be blame. But the eventual, mature reaction (building on an understanding of how our own flaws arose) will be to interpret others’ harmful behaviour as a consequence of their own distu

Realism The wise are, first and foremost, ‘realistic’ about how challenging many things can be.

A central premise of the partner-as-child theory is that it’s not an aberration or unique failing of one’s partner that they retain a childish dimension. It’s a normal, inevitable feature of all adult existence. You are not desperately unlucky to have hitched yourself to someone who is still infantile in many ways. Adulthood simply isn’t a complete

Adam Smith, an economist too often read as a blunt apologist for all aspects of consumer society, but in fact one of its more subtle and visionary analysts. In his The Wealth of Nations, Smith seems at points willing to concede to key aspects of Mandeville’s argument: consumer societies do help the poor by providing employment based around satisfyi