All of this has been a savvy move by De Botton, spiritually and financially. His product line targets self-styled intellectuals—people who see themselves as too classy or high-brow to be caught flipping through a self-help book, but still feel practical dissatisfactions. De Botton has become a well-recognized public intellectual in the UK, and bringing The School of Life to the United States may help him raise his profile here.

But even those who are cynical about the combination of profit and philosophy may find The School of Life’s non-fiction series substantive. In these short books, sophisticated wisdom from philosophers and other great thinkers is made digestible and fresh. Old, powerful ideas are re-explained simply and packaged between colorful covers. Each is authored by a different writer with a background in philosophy or an overlapping and related field, like psychotherapy. How To Stay Sane, How To Find Fulfilling Work, How To Change The World, and How To Think More About Sex (by De Botton himself) have a characteristically dry British sense of humor and no-nonsense approach to topics that are often considered taboo or clichéd. Ultimately, De Botton is trying to bring philosophy back to its roots—a source of enlightenment and cure for daily ills, accessible to anyone who can reason and reflect. After all, Socrates, the bearded, barefoot grandfather of much of today’s philosophical thought, did nothing more than wander the streets observing and playfully testing the beliefs and behaviors of those around him—no big words or citations involved.

Even though The School of Life hasn’t fully made its way across the Atlantic yet, it is releasing two of its books in U.S. editions this month: How To Be Alone and How To Deal With Adversity. The first is a clever and surprising analysis of the modern, deep-seated fear of being alone—people tend to unfairly and unwisely brand those who are solitary either “bad, sad, or mad,” the book argues. The author, Sara Maitland, is an expert on solitude—she currently lives alone in a nearly isolated highland in Scotland, where she has been, contentedly, for the past 20 years. Maitland tries to understand the human fear of being alone and how it can be overcome to reap the many rewards of solitude, like creativity, attunement to nature, and a deeper understanding and connection to ourselves.

In Adversity, religion professor Christopher Hamilton systematically and empathetically tackles a selection of the struggles everyone faces: in our families, in love, in our own fragile and vulnerable bodies, even in dying. In his introduction, Hamilton describes the book as a part of the “ancient and noble tradition of philosophy as therapy”; his book shows that the line between the two is blurrier than might be expected. Psychology came out of philosophy, after all—as did all forms of scientific inquiry.