The School of Life Press – förlag

Exploring ideas around minimalism, simplicity and how to live comfortably with less.The modern world can be a complicated, frenzied and noisy place, filled with too many options, products, ideas and opinions. That explains why what many of us long for is simplicity: a life that can be more pared down, peaceful and focused on the essentials.But finding simplicity is not always easy; it isn’t just a case of emptying out our closets or trimming back commitments in our diaries. True simplicity requires that we understand the roots of our distractions – and develop a canny respect for the stubborn reasons why things can grow complex and overwhelming.This book is a guide to the simpler lives we crave and deserve. It considers how we might achieve simplicity across a range of areas: our relationships, social lives, work routines and our approaches to possessions and media. Along the way, we learn about Zen Buddhism, modernist architecture, monasteries, psychoanalysis, and why we probably don’t need more than three good friends or a few treasured belongings.It isn’t enough that our lives should look simple; they need to be simple from the inside. This book takes a psychological approach, guiding us towards less contorted hearts and minds. It suggests that once we truly know who we are and what we want, we will be able to live with far less than we currently believe we need. We have for too long been drowning in excess and clutter from a confusion about our aspirations; A Simpler Life helps us tune out the static and focus on what properly matters to us.

Raising a child to be an authentic and mentally robust adult is one of life’s great challenges. It is also, fortunately, not a matter of luck. There are many things to understand about how children’s minds operate and what they need from those who look after them so they can develop into the best version of themselves.The Good Enough Parent is a compendium of lessons, including ideas on how to say ‘no’ to a child one adores, how to look beneath the surface of ‘bad’ behaviour to work out what might really be going on, how to encourage a child to be genuinely kind, how to encourage open self expression, and how to handle the moods and gloom of adolescence.Importantly, this is a book that knows that perfection is not required – and could indeed be unhelpful, because a key job of any parent is to induct a child gently into the imperfect nature of everything. Written in a tone that is encouraging, wry and soaked in years of experience, The Good Enough Parent is an intelligent guide to raising a child who will one day look back on their childhood with just the right mixture of gratitude, humour and love.

Our society typically devotes huge attention to the start of a marriage – and particularly to the actual wedding ceremony. But the real challenge lies beyond the wedding, with the long years ahead – and here we are too often left on our own.This box is The School of Life’s guide to the rest of a life together, containing twenty beautiful cards which lay out the central ideas on how to make a relationship work over the decades beyond the wedding day. It is filled with artful suggestions on coping with what even the most loving couple will face as they build a life together. This set of cards is both a celebration of marriage and a rich source of insights into the skills it demands. Quotes From The Cards: In Praise of Compromise: ‘Couples who compromise are not the enemies of love: they may be at the vanguard of understanding what lasting relationships truly demand and what they are for. They deserve admiration, not condemnation.’On Sex and Marriage: ‘The waning of sex is – far more than we collectively admit – a sign that a marriage is stabilising, not failing. If we more publicly admitted this, we’d be less panicked, less ashamed and a little less resentful when the sex got less intense and less frequent.

One of the trickiest tasks we ever face is that of working out who we really are. If we’re asked directly to describe ourselves, our minds tend to go blank. We can’t just sum ourselves up. We need prompts and suggestions and more detailed enquiries that help tease out and organise our picture of ourselves.This book is designed to help us create a psychological portrait of ourselves with the use of some far more unusual, oblique, entertaining and playful prompts. The questions are designed to help us cumulatively appreciate how rich our identities are and how complicated, beautiful and sometimes painful our experiences have been.If self-knowledge is central to a wise and fulfilled life, it is because it teaches us which of our many—often contradictory—feelings and plans we might trust, in order that we can be a little more sceptical around our first impulses and less puzzled by the ebb and flow of our moods. We can understand where some of our feelings have come from and what might be driving our convictions and our longings.

We probably went to school for what felt like a very long time. We probably took care with our homework. Along the way we surely learnt intriguing things about equations, the erosion of glaciers, the history of the Middle Ages, and the tenses of foreign languages. But why, despite all the lessons we sat through, were we never taught the really important things that dominate and trouble our lives: who to start a relationship with, how to trust people, how to understand one’s psyche, how to move on from sorrow or betrayal, and how to cope with anxiety and shame? The School of Life is an organisation dedicated to teaching a range of emotional lessons that we need in order to lead fulfilled and happy lives – and that schools routinely forget to teach us. This book is a collection of our most essential lessons, delivered with directness and humanity, covering topics from love to career, childhood trauma to loneliness. To read the book is to be invited to lead kinder, richer and more authentic lives – and to complete an education we began but still badly need to finish. This is homework to help us make the most of the rest of our lives.

We spend our lives inside ourselves and yet understanding our inner world remains one of our most complex challenges. This enlightening and practical book offers a collection of transformative psychological tests designed to illuminate the hidden dimensions of our psyches.Through a curated selection of 50 psychological exercises, you’ll embark on an intimate journey of self-discovery. These tests invite you to look beneath the surface of your conscious thoughts, uncovering the subtle narratives that shape your emotions, relationships and sense of self.Each test is an invitation to explore your unspoken fears, your deepest desires and the unconscious patterns that drive your behaviours, providing unprecedented insight into your inner workings.

A thought-provoking and practical workbook with exercises to help you discover a career that is truly fulfilling.There are few questions harder or lonelier than, ‘What should I do with the rest of my working life?’ We are often simply meant to know the answer. But in private, some of us are acutely aware that we aren’t happy where we are and would love to find a way towards a job that is truly fulfilling.Tantalisingly, many of the answers we need to better direct our futures are inside us, but we need help getting them out, making sense of them and assembling them into a plan. This workbook contains a series of prompts, questions and essays designed to help us systematically understand more about our working identities and to guide us (with something like the skill of a great career therapist) towards an approach to work that will honour our talents and allow us to thrive.

All of us have – to a greater or lesser extent – suffered from traumas in our lives, often at a young age. The less we address these traumas, the more they have a habit of causing us difficulties in the form of broken relationships, nagging anxieties, depression, or physical symptoms like insomnia, digestive issues or backache.This book helps us understand what trauma is, how it can affect us for decades, and how we can liberate ourselves from its unfair and painful legacy. At once deeply practical and packed with ideas, the book functions like a humane and wise guide through a range of our most puzzling psychological difficulties. We are shown how to understand our pasts, assess our pains and finally say goodbye to troubles and repetitive patterns that have dogged us for too long.This – at last – is a route to liberation and the calm self-awareness and fulfilment we have been searching for.

In an overcomplicated world, what many of us crave deep down is greater simplicity: less clutter, fewer commitments, less static and chaos. This ingenious set of cards asks us a range of deceptively simple questions – which we can answer by ourselves or with friends – that focus our minds on what really counts. They give us confidence to assess what we might give up on and where our true focus should lie. They ask us to look at our careers, our relationships, our family lives, and our ambitions more broadly. In a few easy steps, the cards help us prioritise and sift – and, with gentle humour, guide us to the simpler lives we long for and deserve. Examples Name ten ‘friends’ you keep seeing but that – in truth – you might be entirely content never to meet up with again.You’ve probably read hundreds of books to date. Which three have really mattered?Imagine that you were only allowed to make two more trips abroad in your life. Where still offers you something – and why?It’s the end of your life; what are two things you really want to tell the world in brief and simple terms?

This is a journal to help us process our lives; to think more clearly about what we really want, what we are actually feeling and what might be holding us back from our goals, by asking a series of repeated questions so we can embark on this journey of self-reflection.We’re given the space to observe what is going on in our minds and the encouragement to regularly analyse our thoughts with clarity and ease. By filling in the journal on a regular basis, we can lessen our anxieties and zero in on our genuine concerns. The questions, such as ‘What is still lovely?’ have been carefully picked to direct our minds to areas that we tend to neglect, and from where trouble can most intensely arise when we do so.This is a psychological tool to help us digest emotions and events – and over time, to establish the calm, mature and contented lives we deserve.

There are about 130 million books in the world – and they are being added to at a rate of 4 million a year or so. Which ones, therefore, should we really read? What are the books that count? Which ones are going to make a real difference to us in the limited time we have?This is The School of Life's answer: a definitive list of the 100 books that we feel should truly matter to anyone who cares about their development and growth, a 100 books that are guaranteed to inspire, console and uplift us. We find books from all over the world, some very well known, others fascinatingly unfamiliar, united by a common ability to help us grow into the best versions of ourselves and to combat anxiety, despair and loneliness.This book answers one of the great questions we all face: how to assemble the perfect set of books with which we can acquire self-understanding, calm and emotional maturity; how to build ourselves a true library for happiness.

A guide to developing the art of finding serenity by understanding the sources of our anxiety and frustrations.Almost all of us wish we could be calmer; it is one of the distinctive longings of the modern age.Across history people have sought adventure and excitement, however a new priority for many of us is a desire to be more tranquil. This is a book designed to support us in our endeavours to remain calm against all the adversities life throws at us.A calm state of mind is not a divine gift, we can alter our responses to everyday things and educate ourselves in the art of remaining calm, not through slow breathing or special teas, but through thinking.This is a book that explores the causes of our greatest stresses and anxieties and gives us a succession of highly persuasive, beautiful and sometimes dryly comic arguments with which to defend ourselves against panic and confusion.Part of a new essential paperback series from The School of Life, covering a range of emotional lessons needed in order to lead fulfilled and happy lives.

A guide to modern times that explores the challenges living in the 21st century can pose to our mental wellbeing.The modern world has brought us a range of extraordinary benefits and joys, including technology, medicine and transport. But it can also feel as though modern times have plunged us ever deeper into greed, despair and agitation. Seldom has the world felt more privileged and resource-rich yet also worried, blinkered, furious, panicked and self-absorbed.How to Survive the Modern World is the ultimate guide to navigating our unusual times. It identifies a range of themes that present acute challenges to our mental wellbeing. The book tackles our relationship to the news media, our ideas of love and sex, our assumptions about money and our careers, our attitudes to animals and the natural world, our admiration for science and technology, our belief in individualism and secularism – and our suspicion of quiet and solitude. In all cases, the book helps us to understand how we got to where we are, digging deeply and fascinatingly into the history of ideas, while pointing us towards a saner individual and collective future.The emphasis isn’t just on understanding modern times but also on knowing how we can best relate to the difficulties these present. The book helps us to form a calmer, more authentic, more resilient and sometimes more light-hearted relationship to the follies and obsessions of our age. If modern times are (in part) something of a disease, this is both the diagnostic and the soothing, hope-filled cure.

Whether we should stay in or leave a relationship is one of the most consequential and painful decisions we are ever likely to confront.What makes the issue so hard is that there are no fixed rules for judgement. How can we tell whether a relationship is ‘good enough’ or plain wrong? How do we draw the line between justified longing and naivety? Is sex vital or could it be foregone? Does someone ‘better’ actually exist? How much should the feelings of children be counted (and what might they be in the long term)? Could one’s partner change, perhaps with therapy, or should one assume that who they are now is who they will always be?This paperback edition walks the reader gently through their options and opens their mind to perspectives they might not have considered. It aims to take the reader towards a time, presently hard to imagine, when the choice will no longer feel so agonising. Using its lessons, we can understand ourselves deeply, consider our options, minimise our regrets and find the way ahead.What readers are saying about the hardback edition‘...a wonderfully quick and thought-provoking read.’‘An excellent book to help you make decisions in your personal life...’‘gives an insight into both sides of the relationship and the dynamics which may be at play’.

Although the pleasures of sex are well known, what is less emphasised are the pleasures of talking about sex: what feels nice, what we like to daydream about, what we long for, where our fantasies have come from. There is scarcely anything more interesting. Yet too often, we find ourselves not having as many good conversations about sex as we might. Maybe we don’t know where to start, or we think we should know it all by now. Perhaps some aspects of sex feel tricky, or there is simply not enough time to get around to talking about it.This pack of cards is designed to spark the best kind of pillow talk: the sort where we explore sex with intimacy, playfulness and intellectual curiosity. Here are sixty questions to provoke some of the best conversations possible, guaranteed to leave us with a new sense of liberation and closeness

One of the things we all deeply crave, and all richly deserve, is a more exciting life. We know well enough that many things have to be routine, hard and a little bit boring. But we also rightly sense that, if only we can find a way, our lives could be rendered intermittently more joyful, intense, thrilling and beautiful. This is a guide to the more exciting life we know could be ours. It isn’t about the outward things we might do: travel, parachute out of airplanes or learn a foreign language. This is a book of psychology and about how we can nurture a sense of inner liberation, accept our desires and aspirations and then have the courage to set ourselves free. Perhaps for too long we have resigned ourselves to things that aren’t fair or necessary, we have felt too constricted (and perhaps unloved) to communicate well with others and the proper expansion of our characters has been sacrificed for the sake of compliance. Now is a chance to recover some of our spirit, and to become open to the full intensity, beauty and mystery of life and to the richness of our own possibilities. Here is a guide to that more exciting life we know should – and can – be ours.

From adolescence onwards, one of the great struggles we face is how to reconcile our own desires with those we find socially acceptable. The best encounters with friends are those where we can talk honestly about what’s going on in our lives, sharing triumphs, joys, fears and longings - without the usual shyness or reserve.This game guarantees that the warmest, most fascinating conversations won’t have to be left to chance. With the help of a dice and some cards, the game asks participants to answer a series of questions around career, sex, money, relationships, family, gently inviting everyone to share important bits of themselves in an intimate and playful atmosphere. By thinking of confessions as a game – as a sociable and exploratory activity, as opposed to a risky affair – the cards prompt us to open ourselves up to interesting and exhilarating conversations, allow us to be a little more honest around the most intimate aspects of ourselves. Example Questions: What did you call your partner in your most heated argument?In your most depressed moods, what do you tell yourself about your career?What are you ashamed of people knowing about you and money?Describe in some detail the first time you had sex.What do you hate most about your children?

We sometimes playfully wonder what the meaning of life might be - but it can be hard to kick start a conversation with ourselves (let alone with anyone else) around such a daunting subject.Here are 52 cards that directly and elegantly lead us to some of the largest questions about life and its meaning – cards that help us and our companions to think with exceptional depth about what truly matters, where we see ourselves heading and what gives life its purpose.This is a tool for direction, clarity – and some of the deepest yet most fun and entertaining conversations we’ll ever have.

When trying to deal with our current troubles and anxieties, it can be deeply irritating to be asked to consider our childhoods. They happened so long ago; we can probably barely remember, let alone relate to, the little person we once were. But one of the most powerful explanations for why we may, as adults, be struggling, is that we were denied the opportunity to fully be ourselves in our earliest years. Perhaps we were over-disciplined and cowed, not allowed to be wilful or difficult – and so learnt to tell white lies and people-please. Or perhaps our caregivers were preoccupied or fragile and so we had to assume the role of parent, burying our true needs and desires deep underground.When we thoroughly examine our upbringings, the larger implications for our adult selves are clear to see. Once we understand the roots from which our flaws stem, we can set about correcting the harmful behaviours we mistakenly believe to be innate. This book is a guide to better understanding our younger selves in order to shape who we wish to be in the future. It explores to what extent we can pin our actions in the present to our experiences in the past, and how we might then break free from the learnt patterns of our childhoods.

This is a book that celebrates the most neglected but valuable emotion we can feel: melancholy. Melancholy isn’t depression or anger or bitterness, it’s a serene, accepting, gentle, wise and kindly response to the difficulties and occasional misery of being alive. It steers an ideal mid-way course between despair on the one hand and naïve optimism on the other. But melancholy is a well-kept secret. Those who feel the pull of melancholy moods tend to stay quiet about their tastes. We don’t often hear melancholy being celebrated or accorded the respect that it deserves. Melancholy languishes unexplored in a hyper-competitive, noisy, frantic age. And yet the emotion heartily deserves exploration, it is one that leads to reflection and thoughtfulness. This book carefully collects and interprets a selection of the most universally recognisable melancholy states of mind, and thereby renders us less confused by our precious yet elusive feelings. We hear, among other things, about the melancholy of Sunday evenings and the melancholy of adolescence, the melancholy of high summer and the melancholy of crushes. This book offers a varied portrait of melancholy and it’s range of emotions, leading the reader to both insight and self compassion.

A meal with friends is only ever as good as the questions we ask one another. Too often, we fall back on polite but not so inspired staples: ‘Have you got anything special planned for the weekend?’ ‘What do you do?’, and so on.But there are better kinds of questions - questions that work like magic keys that open up our hearts, draw out our memories and prompt our latent reserves of generosity, fun and interest.This pack collects 80 of these sorts of questions to ensure a meal together can be at once meaningful, entertaining and touching. Laid out on placecards, the questions gently and charmingly pull our fellow diners towards the sort of topics that matter most to our deeper selves - and help us get the most out of one another... Questions Include: What do other people not understand about you?What do you worry about in the middle of the night?Which three adjectives capture important things about you?When you feel upset, how - ideally - would you like to be comforted?

A book to inspire closeness and connection, helping people not only to find love but to make it last.Few things promise us greater happiness than our relationships – yet few things more reliably deliver misery and frustration.Our error is to suppose that we are born knowing how to love and that managing a relationship might therefore be intuitive and easy. This book starts from a different premise: that love is a skill to be learnt, rather than just an emotion to be felt.It calmly and charmingly takes us around the key issues of relationships, from arguments to sex, forgiveness to communication, making sure that success in love need never again be just a matter of luck.Part of a new essential paperback series from The School of Life, covering a range of emotional lessons needed in order to lead fulfilled and happy lives.

So often, we exhaust ourselves and the planet in a search for very large pleasures - while all around us lies a wealth of small pleasures, which - if only we paid more attention - could daily bring us solace and joy at little cost and effort.But we need some encouragement to focus our gaze. This is a book to guide us to the best of life's small pleasures: everything from the distinctive delight of holding a child's hand to the enjoyment of disagreeing with someone, to the joy of the evening sky.An intriguing, evocative mix of small pleasures that will heighten our senses and return us to the world with new-found excitement and enthusiasm.

It’s hard to understand who we really are: what we want, how we feel and why we react as we do. This lack of self-knowledge can be trouble, for it makes us get into the wrong relationships, pick unsatisfactory jobs or spend money unwisely. No wonder Socrates summed up all the counsel of philosophy in just two words: ‘Know Yourself’.These cards are designed to assist us in a journey of self-knowledge; they present us with a range of ideas and questions that can help us to understand ourselves better. Each card carries an exercise on one side and a piece of analysis on the reverse to help you gain insight and clarity on that ever elusive subject: yourself. Example Questions: Who are you?What happened to you in childhood?What is the meaning of life?

Talking properly is the glue that keeps every relationship alive. By regularly checking in with one another, covering how we feel, what we’ve learnt, and how we see the world, we have a chance to build the satisfying, intimate and lively relationships we all deserve.However, in the busy conditions of modern life, it’s easy to fall behind on conversation. This box contains a set of the best talking points that any couple can use to broaden channels of communication and emotion. Accompanied by short explanatory essays that help to lend context and atmosphere, these talking points nudge us towards a mood of fruitful intimacy, understanding and affection. Designed to be used over dinner, for an evening or during a weekend away, this is the perfect tool with which to practise the art of closeness.

A practical guide to finding fulfilling work by understanding yourself.The idea that work might be fulfilling rather than just necessary is a recent invention. These days, in prosperous areas of the world, we don’t only expect to get paid, we also expect to find meaning and satisfaction.A Job to Love is designed to help us better understand ourselves in order to find a job that is right for us. It explores the myths, traps and confusions that get in our way and shows us how to develop new, effective attitudes and habits.

We are so used to living in a media-saturated world that we do not notice just how much damage is being done to us daily by the images we see and the articles and posts we read. If you are often anxious or find it hard to sleep, or you regularly want to give up on your fellow human beings, the reason may come down to the relentless influence of the modern media.How Modern Media Destroys Our Minds is a guide for navigating the media today. The book encourages the reader to consider the many peculiarities of the modern media: its excessive focus on scandal, its emphasis on novelty, its capacity to breed envy and self-hatred, its high-minded defence of itself, its ever shorter attention span and its obsession with fame.The book teaches us how to liberate ourselves from the media, in order to achieve calm and a more generous, original and imaginative state of mind. We are shown how to redress the balance and emerge with a stronger, more positive outlook on life.

Children are, in many ways, born philosophers.Without prompting, they ask some of the largest questions about time, mortality, happiness and the meaning of it all. Yet too often this inborn curiosity is not developed and, with age, the questions fall away. This is a book designed to harness children's spontaneous philosophical instinct and to develop it through introductions to some of the most vibrant and essential philosophical ideas of history. The book takes us to meet leading figures of philosophy from around the world and from all eras - and shows us how their ideas continue to matter.The book functions as an ideal introduction to philosophy, as well as a charming way to open up conversations between adults and children about the biggest questions we all face.What people are saying about Big Ideas for Curious Minds:“This is an absolute must have for ALL children. It is absolutely fantastic and helps children understand a number of their daily struggles. In fact I take that previous comment back, this is an absolute must for EVERYONE. I have had read it from cover to cover, and as a 40 year old woman I have honestly learnt something new.” Freddies Mummy UK“This is a beautifully produced book published by the School of Life (founded by well known philosopher Alain de Botton). It is a very accessible starting point for exploring philosophy and how philosophical ideas can be applied to everyday life, in fact it is very explicit about this.” Ewingel“I can't stop reading and talking about this book with others. It is easy to follow and great for an introduction to philosophy for kids. Well written, great illustrations, ideas and clever how it relates the philosophers' ideas to the lives and issues that children have. 5 stars!” Thomas Leesa“The book itself is genius with an introduction to leading figures of philosophy from around the world from all eras. Alongside that there are chapters teaching our children crucial lessons about life, about love, and about loss. Topics such as ‘Why you feel lonely’, ‘Politeness matters’, ‘People are unhappy not mean’, and ‘The mind-body problem’ offer invaluable insights into philosophy in a way that our children can really get on board with. When the book arrived and I had a quick glance through it, my immediate reaction was that it was far too old for my children. And yet when I took the time to start reading, and to admire the beautiful illustrations, I found myself still sat there, an hour later, realising that this was exactly the kind of book I want each of my children to read as they grow.” Five Little Doves“The focus of these chapters are incredibly meaningful, some of my favourites include ‘People are unhappy, not mean’, ‘Learn to say what’s on your mind’, ‘Good things are (unexpectedly) hard’ and ‘Politeness matters’. The book has been written by the fantastic School of Life and it is suggested for curious minds aged 9+. I think most adults would also find these ideas incredibly helpful to reflect on; who doesn’t need reminding that when someone is angry, maybe it’s not you who is responsible?” Louise Treherne, Role Models“Although Big Ideas for Curious Minds is aimed at children I have got a lot from it too – and I wish I had read it myself as a child… This book has taught me, and LP, new ways of thinking and new ways of being.” What the Redhead Said

In the third of a series of pocket books, The School of Life has distilled its most essential ideas on serenity in order to produce a bitesize manual that is both useful and entertaining.Knowing how to fight off anxiety and remain calm belong to the greatest skills we can ever aspire to. Only with a serene state of mind are we in any position to enjoy all the other good things in life: friendship, love, family or work. Here is selection of The School of Life’s finest essays on the art of serenity. They teach us how to achieve the correct perspective on our problems, how to understand the worst of our fears and how to surround ourselves with the sort of people who can help us in our quest for a less anxious existence.We have – most of us – already spent far too long on needless worry; here at last is a crucial guide to the less turbulent future we deserve.