The School of Life by Alain De Botton - A Book Review

The School of Life is a beautiful book written by Alain De Botton with wonderful insights on each page. The book has five sections Self, Others, Relationships, Work, and Culture. Sharing a few of the snippets from the book here.

The School of Life by Alain De Botton

Alain maps many of our life habits and reactions to our childhood upbringing. He says, “Children can’t go anywhere. They have no extended social network. Even when things are going right, childhood is a gentle open prison.” A volatile parent may be the reason for our current meekness. A continually busy, inattentive parent was the catalyst for someone to be an exhausting attention seeker.

The markers of emotional health are self-love, candour, and communication. A few signs of self-love are not pleasing others indiscriminately and being willing to leave an abusive union. Candour is the ability to accept negative feedback about ourselves because valuable lessons come in painful guises. Communication is not to think that others can read our minds and thoughts. One needs to know how to formulate one’s complaints into a convincing, perhaps humorously framed point that has a chance of winning over its target.

Alain beautifully talks about fame and its invariable negative impacts in four pages. He says, “One wants to be famous out of a desire for kindness. But the world isn’t generally kind to the famous for long. This is because the celebrity of a few people will always contrast painfully with the obscurity of the many. So, soon enough the world will comment negatively on their appearance, it will pore over their setbacks, it will judge their relationships, and it will mock their new ventures. The assessments will flood in from people who will express from the safety of the newspaper office or screen.”

As a cure, Alain says that appreciation and understanding are only available through individuals one knows and cares about, not via groups of thousands or millions of strangers. There is no shortcut to friendship – which is what the famous person is in effect seeking. A famous person can market and advocate for their products in public but ignore the good and bad comments of strangers in the wider world.

In a debate between materialism and virtue, he talks about The Fable of the Bees written by Bernard Mandeville. In the book, Bernard mentions that shopping for pleasure and vanities helped the economy to grow. It was the consumption of Mandeville called “fripperies” – hats, bonnets, gloves, butter dishes, soup tureens, shoehorns, and hair clips – that provided the engine for national prosperity and made a genuine difference to the lives of the weak and the poor.

Alain talks about the 12 ingredients of wisdom. In that, he says the following about Regret. In our ambitious age, it is common to begin with dreams of being able to pull off an unblemished life, where one can hope to get the major decisions, in love and work, right. But the wise realize that it is impossible to fashion a spotless life. We will make some extremely large and utterly uncorrectable errors in a number of areas. Perfectionism is a wicked illusion. Regret is unavoidable. The errors in life are not coincidental but structural.

The book has 295 pages. Apart from the book, the YouTube channel by the same name, The School of Life, @theschooloflifetv has wonderful videos. The videos have so many animations and graphics and are well presented. I have been handing out copies of School of Life book to my family and friends and I’m sure you will too once you read the book. Go for it!