How Alain de Botton's School of Life helped 100,000 fix love woes
Writer known for his acute observations has had global success with classes training people to manage the complexities of modern life and relationships - something he's telling Hong Kong audiences about this week
Philosophers have been pondering for millennia the best way to live. To try to answer that central question in today's context, Alain de Botton has been examining the intriguing details about our lives.
De Botton, 45, looked at how we travel by once spending a week hanging out at London's Heathrow Airport (and writing a book about it). He has studied how we look at art, how we think about sex, how anxious we are about status, what and how we use what we learned at school, how we can be changed by what we read (especially if it's Proust) and what kinds of spaces we choose to live in.
Then he does something about the information he's gained, which distinguishes him from just about every other philosophical writer.
He's opened a school, for example.
In 2008, de Botton helped set up an establishment in a shop near London's King's Cross that he called The School of Life. The idea was to offer courses on subjects that were more interesting and relevant to our real lives than the subjects you usually find being taught.
Subjects such as (and this is from the current curriculum) the risks and rewards of friendship, how to manage stress, how to be confident, and even the increasingly relevant "how to get better at online dating".
