Alain de Botton on existential maturity and what emotional intelligence means

"Maturity is the ability to live fully and fairly in multiple contexts," poet and philosopher David Whyte wrote in one of his most beautiful meditations. A generation before him, Anaïs Nin addressed the subject in her diary, which is itself a work of philosophy: “If you intensify and complete your subjective emotions, your visions, you see their relationship to the emotions of others. It is not a matter of choosing between them, one over the other, but a matter of completion, inclusion, encompassing, unification and integration that makes maturity. And yet, emotional maturity is not something that happens to us as a passive function of time. It is, as Toni Morrison well knew, "tough beauty, intensely earned glory" - the product of intentional character sculpting, the slow, systematic shearing of our childish impulses for tantrums, for sulking, for instant self-gratification. without regard for others, to weaponize our feelings of shame, frustration and loneliness. Like happiness - another life skill we've erroneously classified as a passive abstraction - it requires early nurturing, constant relearning, and relentless practice.

This is what Alain de Botton, one of the most singularly insightful, lyrical and lucid existential contemplatives of our time, offers in The School of Life: An Emotional Education (public library) - the companion book to his marvelous worldwide academy for self-refinement, a decade in the making.

Alain de Botton

De Botton considers the type of learning with which the road to emotional maturity is paved:

The talent of our species lies in our ability to pass on our knowledge accumulated over generations. The slowest among us can, in a matter of hours, capture ideas that...