The School of Life Dictionary

The School of Life’s dictionary of emotional intelligence, offering the vocabulary required to understand ourselves, others and the world around us.

This dictionary is a tool to help us convey our true intentions with economy and precision. The School of Life – an organisation dedicated to making sense of our emotional lives – offers us a complete vocabulary with which to understand some of our key emotional states and ideas and to express them succinctly and successfully to the world.

A dictionary is a guide to a language. This dictionary is for the distinctive language that The School of Life ‘speaks’: that of emotions. It is an alphabetical selection of some 165 words and phrases that shed light on our feelings about ourselves, other people, and the workings of the modern world. Too often, we struggle to find the right words to explain what we mean; The School of Life’s dictionary is a tool to help us convey our true intentions with economy and precision. Following the 8 central themes of Self-knowledge, Other People, Relationships, Sexuality, Work, Capitalism, Culture and Religion, The School of Life’s dictionary offers us a complete vocabulary with which to understand some of our key emotional states and ideas and to express them succinctly and successfully to the world.

Definitions include:

• Addiction
• Eudaimonia
• FOMO
• Inner Voices
• Meaningful Work
• Philosophical Meditation

Sample entry:

Insomnia is seldom a disease: it’s an inarticulate, maddening but ultimately almost logical plea released by our core self, asking us to confront certain issues we’ve put off for too long. Insomnia isn’t really to do with not being able to sleep; it’s about not having given ourselves a chance to think. It is revenge of all the many thoughts we didn’t take seriously enough in the day.

See also: Philosophical Meditation, Unprocessed Emotion