The School of Life Dictionary

Where does responsibility for success and failure lie? Nowadays, the answer tends to be: squarely with the individual concerned. That’s why failure isn’t just hard (as it has always been), it is a catastrophe. There is no metaphysical consolation, no possibility of appealing to the idea of ‘bad luck’, no one to blame but oneself. Suicide rates clim

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At work, the good adult also faces problems. As a child, it was enough to follow the rules, never to make trouble and to avoid provoking the merest frustration. But a cautious approach cannot tide one satisfactorily across an adult life. Almost everything interesting, worth doing or important will meet with a degree of opposition. The greatest plan

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What’s surprising is how little consumer capitalism has, until now, been in any way ambitious about many of the things that deliver higher sorts of satisfaction. Business has helped us to be warm, safe and distracted. It has been markedly indifferent to our flourishing. This is the task ahead of us. The true destiny of and millennial opportunity fo

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Modern society’s mania is to emphasize buoyancy and cheerfulness. It wishes either to medicalize melancholy states – and therefore ‘solve’ them – or to deny their legitimacy altogether. Yet melancholy springs from a rightful awareness of the tragic structure of every life. We can, in melancholy states, understand without fury or sentimentality that

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