What They Forgot to Teach You at School by The School of Life

This book has been one of the most impactful books of my life. It covers a range of topics and teaches a very new perspective towards things which we deal on day to day basis. If you are planning to read only handful of books in your lifetime then this book should definitely be in the list.

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Below are the highlights of the book What They Forgot to Teach You at School by The School of Life

Introduction

The debate is overwhelmingly focused on how best to deliver an education to children, not what they should be educated in.

I. A Suspicion of School

Those who do best at school do not, over the long term, necessarily do well in life. And vice versa.
We're still at the dawn of figuring out what truly works.
They teach us everything other than the two skills that in many ways decisively determine the quality of adult life: knowing how to choose the right job for ourselves and knowing how to form satisfactory relationships.
A good life requires us to do two relatively tricky things: know how to go along with the rules sufficiently well so as not to get mired in needless fights with authority; and simultaneously never to believe too blindly or too passively in the long-term validity of everything we're asked to study. We need to be outwardly obedient and inwardly discerning.
To know some of the following: that there is no guarantee of a path to fulfilment laid out by authority figures. 'They' don't know. No one knows (thankfully).
Our boredom is a vital tool. It is telling us what is slowly killing us - and reminding us that time is short.

II. You Don't Need Permission

There's seemingly no situation that doesn't require a waiting time infinitely longer than one would like.
Being a good adult becomes synonymous with waging a war on our wants. We get very good at being patient. We develop guilt about our desires. We are aware of how much our needs might hurt others.
We imagine that most of what already exists defines what is sensible and plausible; if it hasn't happened by now, there must be very good reasons why it shouldn't in the future.
It can take so long for us to learn that the appropriate rules of engagement with our desires might look rather different from what we were brought up to believe. 1. The desired thing may not be so silly: We can have very big and still very legitimate dreams. 2. What we want might not have an owner 3. Just because it's not done doesn't mean it shouldn't be done 4. Maybe we aren't well served by waiting yet longer: We don't have forever. We could try to do this before sundown.
We don't quite know whom we are asking and we can't say precisely what approval would look like, but in an archaic part of our minds, we're still waiting to be given endorsement for many of our most cherished plans.
We are on our own.
The universe doesn't have a plan for us: it doesn't care what we do or why we do it; it doesn't punish our transgressions or reward our virtues. We're alone, and free with our own decisions.

III. No One Cares

We don't really have evidence for any of this, and yet it can feel like an emotional certainty. It is intuitively clear that our foolishness and less than impressive sides are being noted and dwelt on all the time by everyone at large.
Our everyday lack of care occurs for a perfectly sane and forgivable reason: we need to spend most of our waking energies on navigating, and doing justice to, our own intimate concerns.
We shouldn't merely suffer from being ignored, we should also accept the liberation that comes from being overlooked.
We may fail, but we can believe with new certainty that almost no one will give a damn if we do, an idea that may - above anything else - contribute to our success (about which, as we know, no one will much notice or care anyway).

IV. No One Knows

The whole of formal education feels like a process of catching up.
A central assumption embeds itself in our developing minds: We don't know. But they do.
A very extraordinary thing unfolded in the most ordinary of settings.
However implausible it may sound, we are operating with essentially the same piece of mental hardware as was used by Aristotle, the Buddha and Shakespeare.
The crucial ingredient lies neither in mental equipment nor in training, but in what a person can allow themselves to believe they are capable of; the limiting factor is mental low self-esteem.
'In the minds of geniuses,' he wrote (Ralph Waldo), 'we find - once more - our own neglected thoughts.' So called geniuses don't have thoughts different from those we have. They have just learnt to value them differently. They have had the courage to stick by them, even when these thoughts happened not to chime with those of the majority.
We should revere the art of paying very close attention to what we have already thought and felt: to the accurate recollection and examination of the nuances of our own emotions. To really understand an issue, we may need to go, not to the library, but out for a long walk or to take a long bath, two activities in which we're more likely than normal to think our own thoughts.
Far from practically all the important things being already known, we are collectively still very ignorant about how to do some very basic things in our lives.
In order to give our minds the true respect they deserve, we may need to learn to be a little less respectful of the minds of others.
German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer argued in favour of assuming that everyone we meet is pretty much an idiot - and therefore not worth paying too much attention to - as a way to leave ourselves free to chart our own course: 'Would a musician feel flattered by the loud applause of an audience if he knew that they were nearly all deaf?' After so long of thinking of 'them' as very clever, it might be time, if we are to do ourselves justice, to start to think of ' them' as, occasionally, gloriously, not having much of a clue.

V. Understand Your Childhood

Our chances of leading a fulfilled adult life depend overwhelmingly on our knowledge of, and engagement with, the nature of our own childhoods, for it is in this period that the dominant share of our adult identity is moulded and our characteristic expectations and responses set.
One of the problems of our childhoods is that they are usually surrounded by a misleading implication that they might have been sane.
For a long time, we have nothing to compare our life against. It's just reality in our eyes, rather than a very peculiar and sometimes desperately harmful version of it filled with unique slants and outright dangers.
It's in the nature of madness to strive very hard not to be considered mad. This drift towards unthinking normalisation is compounded by children's natural urge to think well of their parents, even at the cost of looking after their own interests.
The legacy of a difficult childhood - by which one really means a typical childhood - spreads into every corner of adult life. For decades, it can seem as though unhappiness and grief are the norm. It may not be until a person is deep into adulthood, and might have messed up their career substantially or gone through a string of frustrating relationships, that they may become able to think about the connection between what happened to them in the past and how they are living as a grown-up.
Without a proper understanding of our childhoods, it won't matter how brilliant our qualifications, how many fortunes we have made, how stellar our reputation or how outwardly cheerful our families, we will be doomed to founder on our own psychological complexities; we will probably be sunk by anxiety, lack of trust, dread, paranoia, rage and self-loathing, those widespread legacies of distorted and misunderstood pasts.
We would know that the one subject we need to excel at above all is called 'My Childhood'; the sign that we have graduated in the topic with honours is when at last we can know and think non-defensively about how we are (in small ways and large) a little mad, and what exactly in the distant past might have made us so.

VI. Love Yourself

We are, most of us, supremely gifted at the art of self-hatred. If we treated a stranger the way we tend to treat ourselves, we might be arrested for cruelty. In our low moments, we compare the way we are to the way we would ideally want to be - and cannot forgive ourselves for how far we have fallen from our own ideals.
We need to relearn the value of self-compassion. We should regularly turn over in our minds a few thoughts that can correct the worst of our self-accusations. 1. To fail is the norm: We should not feel panicked that we so often fail around love and work, friendship and family, given that we have so few of the tools necessary to live with true wisdom. The point is not whether or not we will mess up but just how badly and in what area. Failure is the ineluctable norm. 2. Everyone is a mess It isn't that we are uniquely stupid. We just know far more ourselves than about others. We don't see much of the inner turmoil, shame or regret of other people; they hide it with skill and we fail to be able to imagine it with enough vigour. We should simply assume that it exists. 3. We aren't properly equipped by our history There are things which happened to us at the hands of others long ago which can help to explain our current failures. We are not responsible for everything that we are and do. We are, in part, victims of forces beyond our control. We are not in complete command of who we are, and shouldn't - therefore - hold ourselves accountable for every last foolish word and deed. 4. Our brains are very faulty Magnificent as they are, they are also deeply unreliable, blind, forgetful and misleading organs. They can make us fall in love just because someone has a pleasing smile. They are engineered to pursue pleasure over duty; they make us fearful of things that pose no danger and fail to alert us when truly large problems loom. They hate to reflect upon experience and are addicted to distraction and the avoidance of all anxiety-inducing, but crucial, insights. We're navigating our way through complicated lives with a very poorly adapted tool. 5. The inner self We are not only our achievements. Material success is one bit of us, but there are other parts too. There are other conditions for love, which we happen to pass well enough; we may be kind, interesting, witty, sensitive, imaginative...We are more than what we 'do'; we should be allowed to tolerate ourselves without worrying about our status. 6. What love might be Genuine love isn't blind to defects; it is compassionate towards them and readily sets them within an awareness of a person's overall qualities and character. Hating ourselves is the easy bit. Learning to give ourselves a break is the true, rare and properly adult achievement.

VII. Others Are a Lot Like You

Whatever the risks of flattening others' uniqueness, there is an equal risk in believing too strongly in our own singularity.
The best way to get to know the secrets of strangers is to investigate ourselves and duplicate the answers. It may be no bad rule of thumb to imagine that the stranger, with no disrespect to their exclusivity, is just a version of us that we haven't yet got to know.

VIII. Be Kind

The true reason why kindness matters boils down to an idea that we may resist for a long time: because we are all alarmingly, and almost limitlessly, sensitive, by which is meant, hugely unconvinced of our own value, of our right to exist, of our legitimacy, of our claims on love, of our decency and of our capacity to interest anyone in our pains and in our ultimate fate. We need kindness so desperately - even its tiniest increments (a door held open, a compliment, a birthday remembered) - because we are permanently teetering over a precipice of despair and self-loathing. The impression of grown-up self-assurance is a sham; inside, just beneath a layer of competence, we are terrified and lost, unsure and unreassured - and ready to cling avidly on to any sign, however small, that we deserve to continue. No wonder we try to hide this kind of susceptibility from children (and ourselves), and to present the need for kindness as flowing from some kind of abstract requirement for manners. What we don't properly dare to tell children is that if Granny doesn't get the card, she might wake up in the early hours - a few weeks from now - and wonder whether anything she ever does is really worth it, whether she hasn't wasted her whole life and whether this little rejection isn't part of a long-standing pattern of things never working out for her. It may not be edifying, but sadly we are creatures who will add an offhand remark or an unreturned phone call to a lifetime's inventory of slights. Conversely, small acts of kindness are a way of lending others some small change in the currency of hope and courage which we depend on for our emotional survival. We become properly invested in being kind when we realise the power we possess in most situations to rescue another human from self-contempt. We start to be kind, too, when we realise how much we need others to be kind to us in order to shore up our own moods.
Gradually we may come to know our own hearts slightly better, and feel our own pains more sincerely - and, therefore, realise that we are very much at the mercy of all those we interact with.
We don't ultimately grow kind by thinking about manners. We grow kind by thinking about self-doubt and self-hatred. A kinder world would be one that wasn't more decorous, but one more alive to the presence of despair, to our susceptibility to shame and to our craving for any sign (however small) of our right to exist.

IX. Repair Relationships

Repair refers to the work needed for two people to regain each other's trust and restore themselves in the other's mind as someone who is essentially decent and sympathetic and can be a 'good enough' interpreter of their needs.
Good repairs relies on at least four separate skills: 1. The ability to apologise 2. The ability to forgive To do so requires us to extend imaginative sympathy for why good people (which includes us) can end up doing some pretty bad things - not because they are 'evil' but because they are in varied ways tired or sad, worried or weak. A forgiving outlooks lends us energy to look around for the most generous reasons why fundamentally decent people can, at points, behave less than optimally. We cling to rupture because it confirms a story which, though deeply sad at one level, also feels very safe: that big emotional commitments are invariably too risky, that others can't be trusted, that hope is an illusion - and that we are fundamentally alone. 3. The ability to teach Good teachers aren't after miraculous outcomes. They know how resistant the human mind can be to new ideas. They take down their expectations of interpersonal communication a great many notches in order to stay calm and in a good mood around the inevitable frustration relationships. They don't shout because they didn't from the outset allow themselves to believe in total symmetries of mind. When they're trying to get something across, they don't push a point too hard. They give their listener time and know about defensiveness - and as a fallback, they accept that they may have to respect two different realities. They can, in the end, tolerate the fact that they will always be a bit misunderstood even by someone who loves them very much. 4. The ability to learn It can feel so much easier to get offended with someone than to dare to imagine they might have something important to tell us. It isn't easy to have to imagine that we are still beginners in a range of areas. The good repairer is ultimately a good learner: they have a lively and non-humiliating sense of how much they still have left to take on board. They can accept with good grace how flawed they remain. It isn't a surprise or a cause for alarm that someone might level a criticism at them. It's merely a sign that a kindly soul is invested enough in their development to notice areas of immaturity and, in the safety of a relationship, to offer them something almost no one otherwise ever bothers with: feedback. We should do something of the same with our love stories. It is no doubt a fine thing to have a relationship without moments of rupture, but it is a finer and more noble achievement still to know how to patch things up repeatedly with those precious strands of emotional gold: self-acceptance, patience, humility, courage and many careful lessons.

X. Manage Your Moods

We are creatures of mood: that is, our sense of our value as human beings is prone to extraordinary fluctuation. At times, we know how to tolerate ourselves, the future seems benevolent, we can bear who we are in the eyes of others and we can forgive ourselves for the errors of the past. Then, at other points, the mood dips and we lament most of what we've ever done, we see ourselves as natural targets for contempt, we feel undeserving, guilty, weak and headed for retribution and disaster.
We cannot, it appears, ever prevent our moods from being subject to change, but what is open to us all is to learn how to manage the change more effectively so that our downturns can be ever so slightly more gentle, our sadness more containable and our inconstancy less shameful in our own eyes.
Here are some of what we might learn to bear in mind around our capricious moods. 1. Realise our vulnerability We should adjust ourselves to the full consequences of our extraordinary openness to experience. 2. Edit our social life To start to be a friend to ourselves means learning to recognise those people that leave us feeling riled, dispirited or depressed and edit them from our social lives. 3. Consoling friendships The one great solace for a low mood is the right sort of company: people who know how to reassure us that we still belong, that sadness is to be expected and that our errors never put us beyond compassion. 4. Honour the body A wiser interpretation would be that most of what passes through our minds is in some way dependent on particular things going on in our bodies. At points, it isn't that it's all over and that we're the worst person on earth, it's just that we may need to lie down for an hour or urgently have a glass of orange juice. 5. Disrespect a mood Moods are proud, imperious things. They show up and insist that they are telling us total certainties about our identities and our prospects Still, we always have an option of calling their bluff, of realising that they are only a passing state of mind arrogantly pretending to be the whole of us - and that we could, with courage, politely ignore them and change the subject. We might recognise, but not give way to, a mood and put a bit of distance between it and our conscious selves. We might, at times, even do precisely what a mood commands us not to do 6. Historicise our moods We should learn to historicise such voices and differentiate them from a trustworthy verdict in the present. Our low moods are far more about a past we still need to mourn fully than a future that there is any reason to dread. 7. A small pilot light of kindness While we are being rocked by a dark mood, we should strive to keep a little light on, the light of sanity and self-kindness that can tell us, even though the hurricane is insisting otherwise, that we are not appalling. We can strive to keep ourselves plugged into a small pilot light of kindness until a larger sun is ready to rise once more. 8. This too shall pass Though we may be unable to shift a mood, we can at least recognise it for what it is and understand that, in the inestimable words of the prophets, with the help of a few hours or days, it too shall pass...

XI. Listen to the Adult Within

All we need to do, at important moments when our other inner characters will be rushing to get to the microphone of the mind, is to hold them all back purposefully, breathe deeply and ask ourselves one simple but categorical question: what would the adult say here?

XII. Aim for Emotional Maturity

There are three methods which indicate emotionally immature behaviour (we might grade ourselves on a scale of 1-10 according to our propensities) 1. We might sulk 2. We might get furious 3. We might go cold
These three responses point us in turn to the three markers of emotional maturity: 1. The capacity to explain 2. The capacity to stay calm 3. The capacity to be vulnerable In turn, these three traits belong to what we call the three cardinal virtues of emotional maturity: Communication, Trust and Vulnerability.
We may - despite our age - need to go back to school and spend 5 to 10,000 hours learning, with great patience and faith, the beautiful and complex grammar of the language of emotional adulthood.

XIII. Be More Selfish

There isn't a reward in heaven for our renunciations and that we are furious with ourselves for mistaking meekness and self-surrender for kindness.
We cannot be good to anyone else untill we have serviced some of our own inner callings. A lack of selfishness may be the fastest route to turning us into ineffective, embittered and ultimately highly disagreeable people.
In the period of Sannyasa, we live simply; we eat basic food and have few belongings; we cut ties with everyone who has nothing spirit-related to tell us, anyone who is on the make and in too much of a hurry, anyone who doesn't spend a substantial amount of their time reflecting on the meaning of being alive.
There are years when we simply have to keep our heads down and study, years when we have to bring up children and accumulate some capital. But there are also, just as importantly, years when what we need to do above all is say 'enough', enough to material and superficial demands, enough to sexual and romantic entanglements, enough to status and sociability - and, instead, learn to turn our minds inwards and upwards.
We can convey to those around us that we aren't lazy, mad, or callous; we just need to avoid doing expected things for now. We need to fulfil our real promise by casting aside an idea that is only ever superficially wise: invariably putting other people first.

XIV. Give Up on People

We might need occasionally to despair of someone as the price to pay for keeping faith with ourselves.
Children present us with troubling exemplars of the impulse to keep going at any cost with a person who offers one love - even when that love is blended with the darkest and most unhealthy elements. Even when beset by emotional neglect, coldness, unreliability, meanness, brusqueness, broken promises to improve and worse, children will think some of the following: 1. 'Maybe they will change' Whatever the lack of outward evidence, the child imagines the caregiver coming to important realisations, rethinking their position, seeing the light. 2. 'Maybe outwardly they seem bad, but inside they are good' 3. 'Maybe the problem is that I am bad...' The difficulties can't be disputed but their origins are up for grabs. Better to be a monster or wretch oneself than to have ended up in the hands of a parent unworthy of respect. 4. 'No one and nothing else could be better' The best of childhoods is an open prison. Those who have most to complain about don't even raise their voice. In certain unfulfilling relationships, we may have as much skill as the most unfortunate child (probably the child we once were) at the art of justifying why we are here, why we are to blame, why they are innocent and why we cannot move. We need to learn to blame and get annoyed with someone other than ourselves. We need to do something very strange: walk away. This is no sign of cowardice or weakness of character. It's a sign that we have (finally) learnt to love ourselves and so place our needs where they always should have been: at the centre of our consideration.

XV. Choose a Partner Carefully

The fastest, easiest and most inadvertent technique for messing up one's life remains that of getting into a serious relationship with the wrong person.
It may be rather fun, and in a way sweet, to watch couples on their dates, in their fine grab, downing cocktails, while outside on a mild summer evening boats sail by and music drifts in. But in essence it's more like witnessing a toddler playing with a loaded rifle or ceramic steak knife.
To choose a partner is the most important job interview we are ever asked to carry out. Around half of us get it very wrong, not because we are inept, but because we are wounded.
In fact, our dedication to public safety ends squarely at the door of our dating interview.
It's expecting too much to think that we might have been substantially unloved or troubled as children and then grow up to make any sort of reasonable or successful choices in our adult years. The best we could aim for is an active appreciation that our instincts are liable to be profoundly unreliable guides to our future contentment - which might inspire a commitment to getting someone else, a wise impartial judge, to check and help us with our homework.
This is some of what happens when our interviewing capacity take a hit: 1. We can't sift What singles out the emotionally damaged from the more robustly healthy is not their involvement with mad candidates - these are everywhere and are often irresistibly delightful on the outside - it is their propensity for being unable to spot the problem in due time and extricate themselves with the requisite ruthlessness and decisiveness. Above all, a difficult childhood inducts us into getting interminably stuck. 2. We aren't a friend to ourselves The reason for the stuckness is hugely poignant: that we don't like ourselves very much. Therefore, when someone, blows hot and cold, lets us down, plays games with our minds, makes and then routinely tramples on promises, denies us tenderness and swears they won't do that nasty thing to us again and then promptly does, our first, second and hundredth impulse is never simply to up sticks and leave. Our tendency is to wonder what we might have done to provoke the problem, whether there is something that we have misunderstood and whether we might learn to be more skilful in not upsetting them in the future: Our past gives us a touching but ultimately disastrous tendency to see the flaws in ourselves = and give an unnatural degree of credit to the other. It might take us a decade to come to the conclusion that someone else could have reached in an evening: that they're not worth it. 3. We can't disappoint anyone To remain sane, we may have to say no to a party, decline a friend's suggestion, swerve an invitation - and in love, upset someone else substantially - even when they have, in many areas, been kind to us. Someone who doesn't possess a full tank of inner love may ask, how dare one turn down the love of another, even if it comes wrapped in tricky or poisonous elements? How, given who one is, dare one make someone else cry? 4. We hope too much 5. We are overly scared of being alone Our readiness to exit an unsatisfying relationship is partly a measure of our confidence that being on our own will be bearable and open us up to future, more gratifying partners. 6. We find kindness 'boring' A troubled past will make us unusually unforgiving towards genuine kindness when it comes along. Nice people feel instinctively boring, unsexy, queasiness inducing and eerie. Certain candidates feel wrong because we know they will be unable to inflict upon us the sort of suffering that we've grown up to believe is essential to our sense of feeling loved. They are wrong because they threaten to be kind. For now, many of us should at least be aware of the extent to which our impulses will be profoundly misleading when the early years were filled with suffering. We shouldn't blame ourselves, just accept that we need to learn how to do a very unfamiliar and for us rather extraordinary thing: treat ourselves well.

XVI. Dating Resilience

This is exactly what is meant to happen when we love: it should hurt atrociously and go nowhere.
We will spoil any potentially good impression by heaping a lifetime of self-doubt and loneliness onto the shoulders of an innocent stranger.
Sadness is so much easier to take than hope.
To master the terror of another let-down, we go cold, we respond sarcastically to sincere compliments and insist with aggression that they don't really care for us at all, thereby ensuring that they eventually won't.
We need to accept that we're searching for someone to love us while wrestling with the most fateful of background suspicions: that we don't in any way deserve love.
They're not peculiar; it's just unfair and overwhelming to ask someone you've known for twelve hours to make up for a lifetime of loneliness.
The challenges we set up for ourselves are attempts to get back in touch with a trauma we haven't either understood or mourned.

XVII. There Is Always a Plan B

We are, despite moments of confusion, eminently capable of developing very decent plan Bs.
We have enormous capacities to act and to adapt.
There was no single script for us written at our birth, and nor does there need to be only one going forward.
Crucially, we don't know right now whta our plan Bs might be. We should simply feel confident that we will, if and when we need to, be able to work them out.

XVIII. Time is Short

Part of reason why we mess up our lives is that we don't understand how little time we have left.
Our subjective experience of time bears precious little relation to the way we like to measure it on a clock.
The more we experience new things, the longer every section of time will seem; the more we are navigating the familiar, the more time will fell as if it is rushing past.
The world is filled with incredible things; every minute is dense with wonder.
The aim should be to densify time rather than to try to extract one or two more years from the grip of death.
As we've realised, the more our days are filled with new unpredictable and challenging experiences, the longer they will feel. Conversely, the more one day is exactly like another, the faster it will pass by in an evanescent blur.
We may be middle age certainly have seen a great many things in our own neighbourhoods, but we are - fortunately for us - unlikely to have properly noticed most of them.
We've imagined we understand the city we live in, the people we interact with and, more or less, the point of it all.
The masters at making life feel longer in the way that counts are not dieticians, but artists. Art is a tool that reminds us how little we have fathomed and noticed. It reintroduces us to ordinary things and reopens our eyes to a latent beauty and interest in precisely those areas we had ceased to bother with. We don't need to make art in order to learn the most valuable lesson of artists, which is about noticing properly, living with our eyes open - and thereby, along the way savouring time. Without any intention to create something that could be put in a gallery, we could - as part of a goal of living more deliberately - take a walk in an unfamiliar part of town, ask an old friend about a side of their life we'd never dared to probe before, lie on our back in the garden and look up at the stars or hold our partner in a way we never tried before. It takes a rabid lack of imagination to think we have to of to Machu Picchu to find something new.
It is sensible enough to try to live longer lives, but we are working with a false notion of what 'long' really means. We might live to be a thousand years old and still complain that it had all rushed by too fast. We should be aiming to lead lives that feel long because we have managed to imbue them with the right sort of open-hearted appreciation and unsnobbish receptivity, the kind that five-year-olds know naturally how to bring to bear. We need to pause and look at one another's faces, study the evening sky, wonder at the eddies and colours of the river and dare to ask the kind of questions that open our souls. We don't need to add years; we need to densify the time we have left by ensuring that every day is lived consciously. We can do this via a manoeuvre as simple as it is momentous: by starting to notice all that we have as yet only seen.

XIX. Be Free

We'll be free, we feel, when we don't have anything else to fill our time with.
We become geniuses at elaborating excuses that make our unhappiness look necessary and sane.
It would be founded on a very profound view that others can never ultimately be the best custodians of our lives, for their instincts about what's acceptable haven't been formed on the basis of a deep knowledge of our unique needs.
Freedom really means no longer being beholden to the expectations of others. We may, quite freely, work very hard or stay at home during holidays. The decisive factor is our willingness to disappoint, to upset or to disconcert others in doing so.
Our sense of what our life is about is no longer so confused with the notion of meeting the expectations of others. To be free, ultimately, is to be devoted - in ways that might be strenuous - to meeting our own expectations.
There were bored and constrained people working all around him, but the difference in his case didn't lie in the details of what was being done, but in the reasons why it was so, and in the nature of the choice behind it.
It can look as if we might be simply well-mannered and quiet, but we are something more pernicious and self-harming: ashamed of what we seek and, in the largest sense, of who we are.
We might consider a range of everyday moves that points the way to a more liberated way of living. 1. Taking pleasure in our accomplishments We might try, on occasion, to stop putting ourselves down and open up about a success we have been involved in. 2. Walk into rather than away from a fear Fear, which is (in principle) there to help us take care of our interests, may be shielding us from being properly alive. We might - at selected points - need to hear an alarm, acknowledge its force and walk on. 3. Cause problems for someone else Therefore, we could at moments radically inconvenience someone, not to be bloody-minded, but because there is an important principle at stake which we don't want to give up on. We might learn the subtle art of being, where it really counts, a pain. 4. Flirt There is a loneliness in almost everyone that we may be able to provide a hugely fitting answer to. 5. Stay in bed a bit longer It feels more bearable to be permanently busy and in pain. Still, we might dare to push against our masochism and, in a minor way, try out something we've never dared: a bit of insurrection. We might go home early or take a morning off, we might accept that a bit of self-indulgence, a bit of not-caring-what-they-will-say belongs within the economy of any well-lived life. 6. Treat Yourself 7. You are (a bit) amazing
A deeply heretical set of thoughts rears its head: perhaps you deserve to be here. Perhaps you are not inherently shameful. Perhaps you are allowed to love and, every now and then, to be loved in return. Perhaps you can be at ease with who you are, with what you want and with all the mistakes and embarrassments you have (like all of us) generated. Perhaps no one would complain if you took a few baby steps of freedom.

XX. There is No Destination

We pin our hopes for security ona. shifting array of targets: a happy relationship, a house, children, a good profession, public respect, a certain sum of money... When these are ours, we fervently believe, we will finally be at peace.
We will still worry in the arms of a kind and interesting partner; we will still fret in a well-appointed kitchen; our terrors won't cease whatever income we have. It sounds implausible - especially when these goods are still far out of our grasp - but we should trust this fundamental truth in order to make an honest peace with the forbidding facts of the human condition. We can never properly be secure, because so long as we are alive, we will be alert to danger and in some way at risk. The only people with full security are the dead; the only people who can be truly at peace are under the ground; cemeteries are the only definitively calm places around. There is a certain nobility in coming to accept this fact - and the unending nature of worry in our lives. We should both recognise the intensity of our desire for a happy endpoint and at the same time acknowledge the inbuilt reasons why it cannot be ours.
It isn't that these places don't exist. It's just that they aren't places that we can pull up at, settle in, feel adequately sheltered by and never want to leave again. None of these zones will afford us a sense that we have properly arrived. We will soon enough discover threats and restlessness anew. One response is to imagine that we may be craving the wrong things, that we should look elsewhere, perhaps to something more esoteric or high-minded: philosophy or beauty, community or art. But that is just as illusory. It doesn't matter what goals we have: they will never be enough. Life is a process of replacing one anxiety and one desire with another. No goal spares us renewed goal-seeking. The only stable element in our lives is craving: the only destination is the journey. What are the implications of fully accepting the arrival fallacy? We may still have ambitions, but we'll have a certain ironic detachment about what is likely to happen when we fulfil them. We'll know the itch will start up again soon enough. Knowing the arrival fallacy, we'll be subject to illusion, but at least aware of the fact.
We should try to give the journey more attention: we should look out of the window and appreciate the view whenever we can. We should also understand why this can only ever be a partial solution. Our longing is too powerful a force. The greatest wisdom we're capable of is to know why true wisdom won't be fully possible and instead pride ourselves on having at least a slight vantage point on our madness.
Our goal should not be to banish anxiety but to learn to manage, live well around and when we can - heartily laugh at our anxious cravings.

XXI. Live Light-heartedly

There might still be a way to live light-heartedly amidst catastrophe.
This is the laughter that comes not when one has never really cried, but when one has cried for years, when every pretty hope has been trampled on, when one has made some properly dreadful mistakes and suffered amply for them, and when one has fully considered ending it all, but then decided at the last moment to keep going, not because of anything one can expect of oneself, not because one holds on to any standard belief in a good life, but because amidst the shitshow one can't help but notice that the sky is a delightful azure blue, that there's a Bach cello concerto to listen to and that there's a sweet four-year-old holding on to her mother's hand asking how ducks sleep at night. So, despite everything - the loneliness, the shame, the compromise, the self hatred and the sure knowledge that the agony isn't over yet - one turns to the light and says a big rebellious obstinate joyful yes' to the universe (which naturally doesn't give a damn).
We might build ourselves up by accepting with grace that, naturally and non-negotiably, we are total idiots, others are mostly horrid and almost nothing ever really comes right... and yet we're going to keep at it anyway.
'Life's a piece of shit, when you look at it.'
Freud recounted how a man being led out to be hanged at dawn commented, 'Well, the day is certainly starting well.'
True light-heartedness begins with an appreciation of one's utter cosmic unimportance and nullity: nothing we have ever done, said or thought matters in any way. It's only the monstrous illusions of our ego which give us the impression that we count, and then torture us that we don't count enough. Furthermore, no one will ever particularly understand us or love us properly - and that isn't a personal curse, but an iron-clad fact of nature we would do well to stop kicking against and being constantly disappointed by. Everything we deeply want either will not happen or will be unsatisfying when it does. We must stop crying as if any of it really mattered or there ever was another way. We must pity ourselves and then change tack. The tragic view is obvious. Being miserable is the default. Everything makes very little sense. Now let's surprise ourselves with a little irresponsible laughter, the kind it can take a lifetime of sorrow to perfect.

Thank you so much for reading so for.

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