Love, Meaning, Calm: My Notes from School of Life Conference 2019

I learned how to give up my dreams, lower my expectations, and treat love as a skill through the School of Life.

The School of Life is a media company, most famously known for their YouTube channel, that teaches emotional intelligence. The 3-day event went deep on topics like meaning, happiness, work, calm, and love.

They have a pessimistic view on how to approach life which I actually appreciated. Very Anti Tony Robbins. Below are my notes that I stood out to me the most.

Love

For most of history, the real point of relationships were: children, transfer of property, social status. Not about: your feelings of happiness, great sex life, mutual understanding, “love”

Today the expectations of what “love” are higher than ever. We want our partner to have the same taste in Netflix shows, be great travel partners, have some views on politics and finance, etc. Our standards are too high and our dissatisfactions come from not meeting our expectations.

We also have to acknowledge how deeply flawed all humans are. There is no “perfect” partner and we shouldn’t strive to find someone who is even close to that.

School of Life believes that (a) there is no soul mate. We are all capable of…