The School Of Life

So what do people make of this?
The School Of Life

The School of Life is a new cultural enterprise based in central London offering intelligent instruction on how to lead a fulfilled life.

We offer evening and weekend courses, holidays to unexpected locations, stigma-free psychotherapy, secular sermons, conversation meals, a floating faculty of experts and a new kind of literary consultancy service called bibliotherapy.

Our faculty is made up of some of the brightest thinkers and artists at work today. They include Alain de Botton, Geoff Dyer, Susan Elderkin, Tom Hodgkinson, Brett Khar, Robert Macfarlane and Martin Parr.

It could either be really interesting, or night school for Idler readers. Thoughts?

what do artists have to do with a fulfilled life? I thought artists were unfulfilled all the time

That list of the "faculty" makes me dubious in the extreme.

de Botton is one smug motherfucker though

This place.

I pass it on the way to the supermarket. Until I stepped closer to read some of the literature in the window, I'd taken it for a kind of polite, dinner party strain of Scientology. It's not, but it still gives me the creeps. Maybe just the name.

Someone in the Guardian readership community just recommended one of their articles: If Love Never Came...

I couldn't reconcile their stated aim:

The School of Life is an organisation built to help us find calm, self-understanding, resilience and connection – especially during troubled times.

with what I was reading.

But time passed; decades went by. We got enmeshed in some very troubling situations that looked like love from the outside but were anything but. We spent far too long extricating ourselves and finding our voice. And at a certain point, we started to apprehend something whose terror we are still grappling with, probably late at night, because such things aren’t easy to look at in daylight: the probability that love isn’t, after all, despite our efforts and insights, ever going to come right for us. We are going to die without ever having known the love we long for.

The reasons are multiple and in their ways entirely banal. Because our past is too complicated; our lack of trust too deep; we are too ugly; we are too unconfident; we don’t meet the right people; our luck is too slim; hope feels too risky. Though we try, harder than we try at anything else, we can’t do this thing. It won’t work out for us.....

Lovelessness will have been our major burden, a grief that endured from adolescence to the end, a problem that was meant to go away and never did. On our secret gravestone, it should say: Love didn’t work out for them, and how they longed that it might: an epitaph to frighten children and reassure our emotional successors. What was meant to be a phase turned into the truest thing about us: that we longed for love – and that it never came, a truth all the more redemptive for being expressed at last with a rare calm unflinching honesty.

Really wondering about this organisation.

sounds suspiciously like a bunch of self-involved drama merchants