The School of Life

A guide to modern times that explores the challenges living in the 21st century can pose to our mental wellbeing. The modern world has brought us a range of extraordinary benefits and joys, including technology, medicine and transport. But it can also feel as though modern times have plunged us ever deeper into greed, despair and agitation. Seldom has the world felt more privileged and resource-rich yet also worried, blinkered, furious, panicked and self-absorbed. How to Survive the Modern World is the ultimate guide to navigating our unusual times. It identifies a range of themes that present acute challenges to our mental wellbeing. The book tackles our relationship to the news media, our ideas of love and sex, our assumptions about money and our careers, our attitudes to animals and the natural world, our admiration for science and technology, our belief in individualism and secularism – and our suspicion of quiet and solitude. In all cases, the book helps us to understand how we got to where we are, digging deeply and fascinatingly into the history of ideas, while pointing us towards a saner individual and collective future. The emphasis isn’t just on understanding modern times but also on knowing how we can best relate to the difficulties these present. The book helps us to form a calmer, more authentic, more resilient and sometimes more light-hearted relationship to the follies and obsessions of our age. If modern times are (in part) something of a disease, this is both the diagnostic and the soothing, hope-filled cure.

How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times

Sephyrc 

But the issue is not whether to consume or not (we have plenty of genuine needs to satisfy); it is how we might consume well - that is, in line with our best understanding of the preconditions for individual and collective flourishing.

We're still learning how to discover and stay true to our own identities amid skilfully engineered pressures to conform. 

Rather it was that their success afforded them an opportunity to build a place in our lives and it our eye lines that was out of proportion with their overall contribution to our welfare. Put another way, their commercial importance had grown out of sync with their human importance; they did not deserve the prominence that they could now pay for.

Instead the move was to try to eli an ambition to buy a product catering to a basic need by alluding to a higher one. lt was to imply an offer of a solution to a vital spiritual hunger…

Nearly every advert now is selling us one material thing while, beneath the surface, hinting at the appeasement of another higher need. It may look as though one is buying a bag or a pair of shoes, a stay in a hotel or a kind of drink, but really what is tickling us unconsciously is a secret promise of the spiritual goods we ache for: a need for love and meaning, connection and calm, understanding and freedom.

Goid materlalism suggests that material things can contribute to, but never replace, the arduous psychological work required to achieve fulfilment, Connection, purpose and peace of mind.

However, beauty can only ever be the handmaiden of wisdom; it cannot be its sole catalyst. We should be careful neither to decry nor excessively to celebrate material life. We should ensure that the objects we invest in, and tire ourselves and the plant by manufacturing, are those that stand the best chance of encouraging our higher, better natures.

The most pernicious aspect of life in a democratic society was a constant quiet pressure to conform. to all in line with a majority-based view of what might be 'normal and congruent with what everyone else happened to think

Such mind hated to be different, it had tendencies to squash new and unfamiliar ideas and it cleaved closely to whatever happened to be fashionable. lt was therefore seldom very interesting and it could often be unkind… ‘less independence of mind, and less true freedom of discussion’

We get interesting only when we start to rattle the bars of our socially enforced cages but so seldom give ourselves licence to try.

How to Survive the Modern World: Making sense of, and finding calm in, unsteady times quotes

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