at last an app to nourish your mind…
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…and feed your soul
Whilst out walking with a friend in the New Forest last autumn, she mentioned a book she’d read - one from The School Of Life stable titled A Simpler Life. She described it as quite unlike any other book from the pair it back/declutter your life/simple living genre that’s become so popular… and now that I’ve read it, I understand why. I devoured it in about two days and felt somewhat sad to finish it. This is one that’s staying in the bookcase to be re-read over and over.
Having bought a couple of books by Alain de Botton for P over the years, I was familiar with him as an author and also captivated by an interview he gave to Elizabeth Day for her How To Fail podcast some time ago. His philosophical insights are balm for the soul, so I’m amazed it’s taken me until now to discover The School Of Life – a venture that he co-founded with Sophie Howarth back in 2008.
If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a visionary education company with a global reach, set up with the intention of helping humans to learn, heal and grow. Though books, the App, films and therapeutic services, the organisation is “…devoted to bringing you calm, self-understanding, better relationships, deeper friendships, greater effectiveness at work and more fulfilment in your leisure time.” Sounds like a tall order but if the App that I’ve recently subscribed to is any indication then I would say they’re on to something.
I signed up for an annual subscription with 20% off in November 2022 which made it £39.99 for the year – I think there’s also a monthly plan and they sometimes offer free trials too. I wanted to try it as the complete anthesis to Instagram… which I know is free, but it sometimes feels like my mental health is paying more than a hefty fee just by the very act of scrolling it.
Once signed up to The School Of Life, you can tailor topics to your mindset, moods and needs so that each day, or whenever you choose to visit, there’s a curated Homepage of articles of varying length and format designed to help you discover elements of better mental health and emotional maturity. You can hop form topic to topic or read through all articles on the same subject.
I practically inhaled a topic entitled “How Modern Media Destroys Our Minds” – I felt this alone was worth the amount I’d paid for the entire year. The intro by itself was enough of an indication of the wisdom that lay within…
“We are so used to living in a media-saturated world, we hardly notice just how much damage is being done to us daily by the images we see and the articles and posts we read. If we are often anxious or find it hard to sleep, or regularly want to give up on our fellow human beings, the reason may come down to the relentless influence of the modern media.”
And if that wasn’t convincing enough – there’s this as the opener to the first article…
“We begin with a vast and somewhat incendiary claim: that the media amounts to one of the greatest contributors to anxiety, confusion and dread in the modern world, that it is responsible for stoking up overwhelming degrees of hatred and distraction, that it’s business models forces it to exaggerate discord, that our advanced technologies of communication have served to supercharge our tribal impulses, and that our capacity to regain a measure of sanity and serenity now depends on learning to approach the content of much of the media with caution and circumspection.”
As one who has gradually dispensed with watching the news and reading the papers, and also deleted Twitter and Facebook Apps over the last couple of years, I can attest that my mental health is 100% better for it. When I then read through the essays in this topic, it only served to underline that I was doing the exact thing that I needed to live a calmer, less anxious life.
Media rants aside, The School Of Life App contains a satisfyingly wide range of topics from How To Find Sources Of Calm to How To Survive Parties. For me, the best part is that it’s slow content - to be consumed as and when I like and most importantly, it nourishes the mind and leaves me with a sense of hope and positivity. There aren’t many forms of media that do this on the regular.
Take a look here to find out more about the organisation, the multitude of books they’ve published and more info on the App too.
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