Stop Loving Things and Using People
A reflective, practical school for anyone ready to audit where their real loyalty lies — and rebuild daily life around the people and purposes that actually matter.
"The most important shift I can help you make isn't in your home or your schedule — it's in what you've quietly decided people are for."— David Clilverd
What you'll learn
What you'll be able to do
- Identify the specific patterns in your daily life where you are unconsciously treating people as means and possessions as ends
- Apply a practical values-clarification framework to realign your time, money, and attention with what — and who — truly matters
- Build deeper, more present relationships by practicing the core listening and appreciation habits taught in the school
- Develop a healthy, intentional relationship with material possessions using the school's 'use vs. love' audit method
- Cultivate resilience against consumerist cultural pressure by grounding your identity in people and purpose rather than status objects
- Create a personal 'relational manifesto' — a living document that anchors your daily choices in love-centered values
How it works
A school that adapts to you
This isn't a set of static videos. Every lesson is generated live and tuned to where you actually are.
We learn your level
A quick placement check tailors your starting point so you're never bored or lost.
Lessons adapt as you go
Each lesson is written for your pace and your goal, adjusting as your skills grow.
Your AI coach keeps you moving
Checkpoints, feedback, and gentle nudges turn progress into a real result.
The curriculum
What's inside your school
6 modules · 14 lessons
The Crisis Is Personal: Waking Up to the Inversion
This opening module grounds students in the Dalai Lama's October 24, 2025 teaching — that the world is in chaos because people are being used and things are being loved — and makes the crisis viscerally personal. Before any framework or skill can land, students must first see the inversion operating in their own life. The module moves from intellectual encounter with the teaching to honest, non-judgmental self-diagnosis.
- 1.1The Teaching That Stopped the WorldIncluded
- 1.2Mapping Your Inversion PointsIncluded
Values Clarification: Deciding What Actually Matters
Before students can change behaviour, they need clarity on what they genuinely value — not what they think they should value. This module bridges the diagnostic work of Module 1 with the relational skills of Module 3 by helping students articulate their real priorities and expose the gap between stated values and lived allocation of time, money, and attention. It also introduces the people who matter most — the relational 'anchors' whose presence will make the later manifesto concrete.
- 2.1What You Say vs. What You ScheduleIncluded
- 2.2The Realignment Framework: Time, Money, and AttentionIncluded
- 2.3Naming Your People: Building Your Relational Priority ListIncluded
Deep Connection: The Skills of Loving People Well
Knowing who to love and intending to love them better is not enough — loving people well is a learnable skill set. This module teaches three foundational relational competencies: deep listening, genuine appreciation, and loving repair after conflict or distance. Each skill is taught practically and immediately applied to the relationships students identified in Module 2. This module directly delivers the outcome of building deeper, more present relationships.
- 3.1The Art of Actually ListeningIncluded
- 3.2Genuine Appreciation: Making People Feel SeenIncluded
- 3.3Repair and Return: Loving People Through RuptureIncluded
The 'Use vs. Love' Audit: A Healthy Relationship with Things
This module redeems things — it is not anti-possession but pro-clarity. The goal is not asceticism but intentionality: students learn to relate to material possessions as tools for living and loving rather than as substitutes for connection or markers of identity. The 'Use vs. Love' Audit method is taught in full, and students apply it to their own lives. This module is placed after the relational skills modules because students now have a positive, people-centred vision to orient toward — making the audit purposeful rather than merely reductive.
- 4.1What Does 'Using a Thing' Rightly Actually Look Like?Included
- 4.2The 'Use vs. Love' Audit MethodIncluded
Resilience Against the Current: Staying Counter-Cultural
The inversion is not a personal failure — it is a systemic pressure. This module equips students to sustain their reorientation in a culture that actively, commercially, and algorithmically pushes them back toward loving things and using people. Students move from personal change to cultural discernment, grounding their identity so firmly in people and purpose that consumerist pressure loses its grip. This module is placed here — after all skills and audits are in place — so that students are building resilience around a life they have already begun to reorient, not an abstract ideal.
- 5.1Understanding the System Pulling You BackIncluded
- 5.2Identity Rooted in People and Purpose, Not PossessionsIncluded
Your Relational Manifesto: A Life Anchored in Love
This culminating module draws every thread of the course together into a single, personal, living document: the Relational Manifesto. This is not a theoretical statement — it is a practical, specific, daily-actionable declaration of how the student commits to living the Dalai Lama's teaching in their own life. The module also builds the accountability structures and daily practices that will make the manifesto live beyond the course. Students reopen their 'Honest Confession' letter from Module 1 and measure the distance they have travelled.
- 6.1Drafting the Manifesto: Pulling It All TogetherIncluded
- 6.2Making the Manifesto Live: Daily Practice and AccountabilityIncluded
Who it's for
Is this you?
The Burned-Out Professional
You've built the career, but somewhere in the climb the people in your life became calendar items — this school helps you find your way back to them.
The Spiritual Seeker
You're drawn to wisdom traditions and want a practice that moves beyond philosophy into how you actually live with others every single day.
The Quietly Disconnected Parent
You love your family deeply, but the daily logistics have replaced real presence — and you want the tools to genuinely show up for the people under your roof.
The Reluctant Consumer
You're skeptical of your own shopping habits and the way status objects have crept into your identity, and you want a honest, non-preachy way to audit that.
The Relationship Rebuilder
After a rupture — a drift, a divorce, a falling-out — you're ready to learn what it actually looks like to love people well and repair what matters.
The Meaning-Seeker at Midlife
You're at a point where accumulating more feels hollow, and you want to reorient your remaining decades around people and purpose rather than possessions.
Questions
Frequently asked
Your teacher
A note from your teacher
David Clilverd
If you're here, I suspect you already know something is off — even if you can't quite name it yet.
Maybe you've achieved a version of the life you planned, and it's quieter inside than you expected. Maybe you're surrounded by people you love but somehow feel less connected to them than you did years ago. Maybe you look at your calendar, your bank statements, your screen time, and realize they're all pointing toward something you never consciously chose. That gap — between the life you're living and the one you actually want — is exactly where this school begins.
The teaching at the heart of this school is disarmingly simple: love people, use things. Four words. But sitting with them honestly is one of the more confronting things I know how to invite someone to do, because most of us, if we're truthful, have the order reversed in ways we never intended. We don't mean to treat the people we care about as instruments of our comfort or productivity. We don't mean to organize our self-worth around what we own or what we project. It just happens — slowly, quietly, with the full encouragement of the culture around us.
What I've built here isn't a lecture series, and it isn't therapy, and it definitely isn't a program that asks you to feel bad about how you've been living. It's an honest, structured walk through your own patterns — with practical tools to map the inversion, realign your time and attention, build the real skills of connecting with people, and ground yourself in something the consumer current can't so easily pull away from you. You'll leave with a Relational Manifesto written in your own words: not an aspiration, but a working compass.
The work is gentle. The questions are not easy. And the people I've seen do this work come out the other side with something that is genuinely hard to describe — a kind of quiet, grounded clarity about what they're for and who they're here to love.
I'd be glad to walk through it with you. Come as you are, honest about where you actually are. That's all this requires.
— David Clilverd
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- 6 modules, 14 lessons
- AI-adaptive lessons tuned to your level
- Quizzes & checkpoints to lock in progress
- Your own AI learning coach
- Learn on any device, at your pace
- Full access for as long as you're subscribed