Schools Don't Teach Kids How To LIVE... (yet)
The most important subject is missing from every school curriculum. And what happens when we finally add it.
ALIVENESS
A philosophy and practice for living fully in the awareness that life is finite.
Free subscribers receive The Aliveness Practice guide. Paid subs also get access to a growing library of exercises and AI guides designed to help you stop drifting and start living consciously.
Think back to everything you were taught at school: maths. Science. History. Geography. Languages…
Now consider what you weren’t taught.
How to face fear. How to process grief and trauma. How to make scary life-changing decisions. How to choose meaning over status when everyone around you is chasing status. How to love someone well. How to sit with change and uncertainty without it eating you alive. How to understand that your time here is finite and let that truth empower you rather than terrify you.
Stripped right back, we were not taught about the only thing in life that is guaranteed: our mortality. And most of us have spent our entire adult lives trying to figure it all out on our own. That is not an easy task, and when you’re not educated on the subject, it’s usually messy.
Modern education is extraordinary at preparing children to perform, compete, and produce. The system is genuinely impressive if you measure it by those outcomes. But it sends young people out into the world with almost no preparation for the things that will actually shape their lives.
Heartbreak. Loss. Uncertainty. The slow creep of doing what is expected rather than what is true. The strange, disorienting moment somewhere in your thirties or forties when you look up from a life that looks completely fine on paper and think… is this actually what I wanted?
Is this it?
The result are generations of highly capable adults who are, underneath the capability, deep down, adrift and misaligned. I’ve been there. Have you?
“An awareness of death encourages us to live more passionately.”(Dalai Lama)
At the heart of this educational dilemma is one conversation we are still not having. Death.
This does not have to be a morbid conversation. Not in a way that frightens children or sends them spiralling. But an honest, truthful and natural one. After all, isn’t death just part of nature?
Every older culture before ours had a closer relationship with death, until we decided somewhere along the way, as we slowly disconnected ourselves from nature, that the right thing to do was to look away.
When death remains a taboo, fear silently shapes everything (our fears grow from the fear of death). We play safe. We conform. We chase approval and accumulate status and avoid vulnerability and numb whatever discomfort tries to surface. We postpone the things that matter and fill the space with things that don’t.
And we teach our children to do the same. Not intentionally. Just by example. Unconsciously.
Here is what I have come to believe after years of sitting with dying people, studying this question, and building a practice around it.
Mortality awareness is the opposite of morbid. When we understand that life is finite, something lifts. We become less scared and more grateful for what we have. More courageous about what we want. More honest in how we love. More awake to the ordinary moments we would otherwise move through without noticing.
Death is the only thing in life that is guaranteed. Why then, are we not taught more about the only thing in life that is a certainty? And why are we not educated about the incredible benefits that wisdom can have?
"Death is the greatest teacher in all of life…" (Michael Singer)
So here is the question I keep coming back to. If death is the greatest teacher (as so many of the wisest humans have echoed across time) then…
What if we taught this wisdom to young people?
And I don’t mean teach it as a religion or an ideology. Not as anything heavy or frightening. But as a natural part of what it means to be human. Woven through learning the way maths and science are woven through learning. A human curriculum running alongside everything else.
Imagine a curriculum that taught children how to face fear rather than avoid it. How to sit with grief rather than bury it. How to discover what actually matters to them rather than inherit what matters to everyone else. How to understand that their time is precious and finite and worth designing deliberately.
How to be alive, in other words. Really ALIVE.
Imagine generations of young people raised to know that time is precious. Generations who choose work that means something. Who love more openly because they have learned that holding back is a waste of the time they have. Who fear death less and therefore fear life less. Who build healthier families and wiser institutions and care more genuinely for the world they are inheriting.
Less anxiety. Less greed. Less numbness. More aliveness.
I get goosebumps.
This vision is not fantasy. In the same way that Mindfulness is now standard in many curriculums, I have a dream of launching a foundation that introduces Aliveness into schools across the west. That plan is starting to take shape and it starts here and now, with this newsletter. With you.
“Let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life. Let us postpone nothing.” (Seneca)
I believe that our unconscious fear of death, and avoidance of this conversation, is a central blocker to human evolution.
The instinct that kept our ancestors alive, the visceral evolutionary drive to avoid death at all costs, has ironically become, in a world of relative safety, the very thing preventing us from living fully. Our brains are still running caveman survival software designed for a world full of danger, in a life that no longer has wild sabre-tooth tigers hunting us down.
And the thing we are now unconsciously surviving against is the full experience of being alive. Fear of death creates avoidance of life. The desperate clinging to existence produces the half-lived life.
Humanity has evolved physically. We have evolved intellectually. The next leap, if we are paying attention, might be something else. A more conscious way of living. A shift from surviving to actually inhabiting the lives we have been given.
From fear to meaning. From drift to intention. From looking away to looking clearly at the one life we have and deciding, deliberately, what to do with it.
The highest expression of aliveness requires one to have a relationship with mortality. Otherwise, life is being taken for granted.
That shift does not have to wait for a school curriculum to change. It can start now. With you. With the way you talk to your children, if you have them. Or your family. With the questions you are willing to ask yourself. With the things you are willing to stop postponing.
A couple of days ago my four year old was talking about her grandfather, my dad, a man she never met, saying how she missed him. I observed her older brothers (9 and 10 years old) comforting her without my wife or me saying a word. We just never made death a forbidden subject in our house. And in that moment I felt deep down that we’d done something right as parents.
Normalising mortality with your kids is perhaps the greatest gift you can give them. It means they grow up without inheriting the fears of most adults. Imagine your kids as fearless children, unshackled by limiting beliefs, who step deeper into their talents and potential. Able to live life fully and pass that on to their children. What a gift to them and what a powerful gift to humanity.
One question this week.
What is one thing you are living on autopilot right now that deserves a conscious choice?
Let the honest answer come. Don’t rush past it. This is exactly where the Aliveness Practice begins. Each morning, before your phone, before the day gets its hands on you, you pause. You remember this day will not come back. And you choose one thing that would make it matter.
That daily act of choosing, rather than drifting, is the beginning of the education nobody gave us.
Thank you for being here. Don’t postpone your life.
Live happy,
Hoppy
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Events
Live chat: "Philosophy, Mortality and the Art of Living” - join my live conversation with philosopher Paul Musso PhD. Wednesday 13th May @ 9am EDT / 2pm GMT / 6AM PT / Link here.
Guided Ultimate Meditation — Tuesday 19th May @ 6pm GMT / 7pm CET / 1pm EST / 10am PST. A pause in the middle of your week.
Tools
Free subscribers receive the Aliveness Practise guide: a simple daily, weekly and annual practise for living fully in a finite life.
Reverstory: my bespoke AI guide that shows you the life you’re heading towards, so you can avoid future regret and start living with clarity and confidence. Available to paying subscribers.
Live Purpose: my other AI guide that helps you choose your direction and build a life that feels right, meaningful, and aligned with who you are. Available to paying subscribers.
Go deeper: How Mortality Awakens Happiness / Maya Angelou: Famous Last Words / My Story: learning how to live and die
I won't be sending my kiddo to Uni unless the plan is to specialise in any field like law or medicine. Rather I would prefer home schooling with vocational upskilling.
My partner teaches middle school. They have eliminated bullying for kindness they teach exceptance. What more are you looking for?