The School of Life

This book explores ideas around minimalism, simplicity and how to live comfortably with less. The modern world can be a complicated, frenzied, and noisy place, filled with too many options, products, ideas and opinions. That explains why what many of us long for is simplicity: a life that can be more pared down, peaceful, and focused on the essentials. But finding simplicity is not always easy; it isn't just a case of emptying out our closets or trimming back commitments in our diaries. True simplicity requires that we understand the roots of our distractions - and develop a canny respect for the stubborn reasons why things can grow complex and overwhelming. This book is a guide to the simpler lives we crave and deserve. It considers how we might achieve simplicity across a range of areas. Along the way, we learn about Zen Buddhism, modernist architecture, monasteries, psychoanalysis, and why we probably don't need more than three good friends or a few treasured belongings. It isn't enough that our lives should look simple; they need to be simple from the inside. This book takes a psychological approach, guiding us towards less contorted hearts and minds. We have for too long been drowning in excess and clutter from a confusion about our aspirations; A Simpler Life helps us tune out the static and focus on what properly matters to us.

A guide to greater serenity, ease, and clarity

A Simpler Life

𝓬𝓱𝓮𝓻𝓲𝓮

Simplicity has become so elusive and desirable because the modern age is so troublingly, infinitely noisy and abundant.

A parent and an adult child are emotionally intertwined, in intricate ways, for reasons that have nothing to do with personal preference. We’re tied by history and biology to a being who was a god-like giant when we were tiny, but whose flaws we have since come to know in great and very painful detail. This never happens outside families: in no other situation are we forced into a death-bound union with someone who – given our divergent temperaments, tastes, habits and attitudes – we would never dream of selecting as a friend. We would do well to accept that as a strange, yet constant and simple, feature of the human condition, we are all emotionally tethered for life to someone who is both an irritating stranger with maddening habits and the person who wept for joy when we were born.

We could weep for anyone if we really knew what they had gone through. The parent loves their child because they understand them. Parents are, for good reason, the least consensus-driven people in the world.

All of us have rich and complex histories. All of us have dazzling minds that can record the most subtle impressions and are filled with tender and poignant scenes accumulated over decades. We all had complicated childhoods, are ambivalent about our careers, troubled by despair and anxiety, worried about our relationships, puzzled by sex – and heading towards decay and death far sooner than we can bear. And yet still we continue to remark on the traffic and ask about each other’s recent holidays.

...the pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to. If only we could apply a travelling mindset to our own rooms and immediate neighbourhoods, we might find that these places become no less interesting than foreign lands.

It’s ironic that life advice for the young so overwhelmingly focuses on what to do in one’s career. In a wiser society, the emphasis would also be on retiring – as early as possible – from a host of supposedly necessary demands that, on closer inspection, are entirely unsuited to who and what we are. Our societies are very keen for us to have busy, competitive, complicated lives. We should express thanks for the well-meaning suggestions and then, as soon as possible and without causing anyone offence, announce our early retirement in the name of the simpler, kinder lives we long for.

Existence becomes overcomplicated when we submit ourselves to tasks or possessions without having a clear sense of their purpose. When we don’t properly know why we’re doing something, we don’t know how much of it we need in our life. Simplicity, therefore, can be defined as the result and precious fruit of clarifying our goals.

Pierre

[O]ur lives grow more complicated the less we stop to ask what things are for, why we are doing them and how we really feel about them. And, correspondingly, that the more we enquire what possessions, careers, relationships, travels, books and so on are actually doing for us, the more we can decide which of them might be dispensed with and which are worth holding on to. It is secure knowledge of our purpose that is our guide to editing down the complexity of our lives

The point of life isn’t to have the ‘right’ reactions, just our own, very honest, ones

Anton Stallbörger

If you had the right things, he argued, you wouldn't need many things.

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