The School of Life Dictionary

Life is a struggle. It’s human nature to want a reward for our pain and effort. Most of the time we are rewarded, but there is no certainty about when the reward will come or what it will be. This is the law of the universe, and it requires us to have faith in the future. But X tells us we’re special, and we needn’t be subject to the law. We have a

everyone is in deep need of reassurance. Life is a more or less ongoing emergency for everyone. We are invariably haunted by doubts about our value, concerns for our future, shapeless anxiety and dread about things we’ve done, and feelings of guilt and embarrassment about ourselves.

Our society emphasizes the tangible “masculine” values—aggression, power, winning, success, facts, intellectual abilities, concrete proof. The less tangible “feminine” values carry little weight. As a result many women today feel that there is no place for the Dionysian experience in their lives.