A Simpler Life - by The School of Life
Published:
A Simpler Life - by The School of Life
Read: 2024-10-07
Recommend: 10/10
What am I really reading for? It turns out we often do things without fully understanding the purpose. This book made me reflect on why I read so many books and run so many marathons.
Notes
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
Simplicity has become so elusive and desirable because the modern age is so troublingly, infinitely noisy and abundant.
People become frustratingly complicated when they doubt the legitimacy of their desires – and therefore don’t dare to tell the world what they properly want and feel. They may appear to agree with everything we’re saying, but it is likely to emerge that they have a host of reservations that will require an age to uncover and resolve. They will ask you if you’d like another slice of cake when they are pining for one themselves. They will swear that they want to join you for the dinner you suggested, when in reality they are aching for an early night. They will give every impression of being happy with you while crying inside. They will say sorry when they want you to apologise. They feel overlooked but won’t ever push themselves forward or raise a complaint. They are longing to be understood but never speak. When they are attracted to someone, the only outward evidence might be a few sarcastic comments – which leaves the object of their affections bemused or unimpressed. And with sex, they go along with what they feel might be ‘normal’ as opposed to what actually interests them. What could explain such confusing complexity? The root cause is poignant; it springs not from evil or cold manipulativeness, but from fear: the fear of how an audience might respond if one’s true intentions were to be known.
And so this child would grow expert at speaking in emotional code; would become someone who prefers always to imply rather than state, who planes the edge off every truth, who hedges their ideas, who gives up trying to say anything that the audience might not already want to hear; someone who lacks the courage to articulate their own convictions or to make a bid for the affection of another person. Fortunately, none of us is fated to be eternally complicated. We can untangle ourselves by noticing and growing curious about the origins of our evasiveness and inadvertent slyness. We can register how little of our truth was originally acceptable to those who brought us into the world. Simultaneously, we can remind ourselves that our circumstances have changed. The dangers that gave birth to our coded manner of communicating have passed: no one is now going to shout at us, or feel inexplicably hurt, like they once did. Or if they do, we now have agency – we can, as a last but crucial resort, walk away. We can use the freedoms of adulthood to own up to more of who we actually are.
Alternatively, we might stick at it, with growing misery. We may face a lifetime of holidays that never involve the museum visits we crave; resign ourselves to never having the kind of sex we want; or, even more grievously, eventually embark on a furtive life, seeking out the moments when the other is away to pursue the needs we’ve pretended not to have. Until, one day, our double life is exposed – and we drown in bitterness, fury and sorrow. Sadly, the origin of such nightmares is only ever a touching, but risky and painfully flawed, devotion to being an easy match. We want to be simple, and yet we end up mired in a very complicated mess.
In order to be honest when seducing others, we need a basic acceptance of ourselves; we must know that we are not perfect but that we are not for that matter wholly abject or shameful. Our attitude to the kitchen might be a little excessive, but it is not delusional. Our very early rising might be unconventional, but it’s perfectly sane – all things considered. We know that our sexual preferences might be statistically unusual, but they are not evil. An inner conviction that our oddities are essentially reasonable allows us to present ourselves to another person without fear or defensiveness.
We expect that a loving couple must live in the same house, eat the same meals together every night, share the same bed, go to sleep and get up at the same time, only ever have sex with (or even sexual thoughts about) each other, regularly see each other’s families, have all their friends in common – and pretty much think the same thoughts on every topic at every moment. It’s a beautiful vision, but a hellish one, too – for it places an impossibly punitive burden of expectation on another human. We feel that our partner must be right for us in every way, and if they’re not, they should be prodded and cajoled into reform. But there is another perspective: relationships don’t have to be so complicated and ambitious, if only we can keep in mind the things that, in the end, actually make them fulfilling. If we boil matters down, there might really be just three essential qualities we need from one another:
- Kindness
- Shared vulnerability
- Understanding
A few lucky ones among us get on easily with their parents, but for most of us, mothers and fathers are the source of continually complicated and emotionally draining trials. One strategy to simplify matters is to confront them. We may feel that we have said too little for too long and must – finally – get things off our chest. We will pick a moment and then explain how they hurt us and what they still misunderstand. We will lay out the ways in which their inadequacies took a toll on our childhood and continue to damage our chances today.
what are friends for?
- They broaden our sense of normality
- They help us be less vague
- They ease us out of our defensive postures
Once we have a clearer sense of what we’re looking for in our social life, we can, with relief, politely back out of so many of our less fruitful acquaintanceships and concentrate our affection and interest on the very small number of people who properly honour the core functions of friendship. We should feel extremely lucky if we manage to lay claim to three friends worthy of the title in a lifetime.
How many sincere revelations might we discover in our new companions if only we could: what happened in their childhoods, how they found their way through adolescence, what they make of their parents, what they dislike about themselves, what makes them fall into bed sobbing, whether they have ever thought of suicide. Sadly, the codes governing our social interactions ensure that we will never come close to any such enquiries. We may have been asked along to the evening, but our deeper selves have not been invited.
We must cease to be ashamed of our buried longings to remain by ourselves. It is very normal, and highly understandable, for properly social people – that is, people who really wish their souls to connect with those of others – to feel anxious about parties, and to prefer to see people very seldom and then only in the smallest and most intimate of contexts. If we really crave the love and understanding of other people, it is too much to bear the humiliations and betrayals involved in the average get-together. We should restrict our social lives to the occasional, exceptional evening out with a true friend who can both laugh and cry with us, sympathise with us and exchange authentic and heartfelt notes with us on the fleeting ecstasies and long-running sorrows of being human. That will be a ‘party’ worth breaking our isolation for.
- Beauty is very important
- Time is more important than money
- Everything is transient
- ‘Worldly’ people are less happy than they seem
The idea of having to cope with constant ugliness is part of what makes a lower-level economic life so frightening. Chōmei’s antidote is to stress the continuing opportunities for visual delight, even on the most minimal of incomes.
Our lives are brief, and so it is the quality of our experiences, rather than the extent of our possessions, that matters. The more things we own, the more we are exposed to misfortune: a fashionable home will soon be outdated, our prestige in the eyes of others will fluctuate for trivial reasons and the monuments we hope to be remembered by will be misinterpreted or torn down.
What these cabin- and hut-dwelling people have to teach us isn’t that we should actually live in miniscule cabins or single small rooms. Rather, they are showing us that it’s possible to live in materially minimal conditions, while being good-humoured, ambitious and in search of true fulfilment. They are dismantling our fear that material modesty has to mean degradation and squalor. We can, if we embrace their ideas, live more simply anywhere – including a hut. And in the meantime, we do not need to be so afraid.
We believe we cannot be content living just anywhere; we gird ourselves to make a bid for life at the ‘centre’, in one of the world’s current hotspots. As a result, we face intense competition and have to work incredibly hard just to survive. Soon we come to think that it’s not simply living in the right city that counts; we have to be in the right part, be invited to certain parties, attend particular events and know certain key people. This harsh contrast between the dull provinces and the glorious centre isn’t merely the eccentric preoccupation of a few individuals. There’s a surprisingly objective measure to the degree in which a place is considered provincial: property prices. Located in a highly fashionable metropolitan district, a lovely house will command a vast price, while a similarly charming mansion in a pleasant but deeply provincial area will cost only a fraction of the same sum.
In reality, whether we find someone interesting or not depends more on us than it does on them. Every life, properly engaged with, is endlessly complex, remarkable and informative.
This cult of busyness insists that a good life, indeed the only life worthy of a capable and intelligent person, is one of continuous activity and application; we must strive relentlessly to fulfil every ambition, and every hour of the day must be filled with intense activity.
Instead of being blissfully satisfied with our hectic lives, we are liable to feel permanently nervous and strained, though we are careful to conceal this as much as possible from others (and from ourselves). Our irritability is cast as rightful impatience with slackers and mediocrities, and our frustration and disappointment are interpreted as necessary spurs to greater activity. We tell ourselves that our growing gloom and sadness (beneath the zestful demeanour) will disappear when finally we get on top of everything we have to do and attain the level of success that will guarantee our happiness.
The cult of busyness demands that we take on more than we can properly cope with; it ignores or denies our actual fragility until we have a breakdown and want nothing more than to lock ourselves away, smash our phones, lie on the floor and weep.
By contrast, it’s moving to think of an attentive mother who settles her child down for an afternoon nap after an exciting morning. The child doesn’t know it’s worn out, but the mother understands the need for tranquillity and rest. If the child had its way, it would be zooming around the garden, going to another birthday party or watching a frenetic video – before having a tantrum. The maternal function, so to speak, is to calm the child’s days, when the child itself is unable or unwilling to recognise its own overwrought state. As adults, we need the maternal part of ourselves to step in and prescribe slower, quieter days – and to rescue us from the oppressive ideal of the busy life, which is slowly destroying us.
It’s one of the strangest features of being human: we have a completely clear sense that how we’re behaving is bad and counterproductive, but it doesn’t get us to stop. Harsh criticism is the utterly entrenched human tactic for getting people to change, just as self-condemnation is our instinctive strategy for self-improvement – yet it doesn’t actually work. It induces panic, shame and despair but doesn’t bring about the desired alteration.
Yet in a limited, though significant and very unexpected, way we perhaps do wish to become more like monks. That’s because at its core (if we strip away the elaborate theology) monasticism points to a moving ideal: the possibility of uniting simplicity with dignity. It fuses minimalistic external presentation with beauty and spiritual elevation.
Choosing these simple foods liberates our lives, and our storage space, from pots and pans, blenders and pressure cookers. They appeal to the quick, light pleasures of the palate rather than the heavy fullness of the stomach – they are the culinary equivalent of a modernist steel and leather sofa.
Today, the cultured person is imagined as possessing a substantial personal library – whatever book is mentioned in conversation, they should be able to find a copy somewhere on their many shelves. The monastic ideal, by contrast, prefers an intimate relationship with a very limited number of ‘sacred’ works, which eventually the monk will know almost by heart. Likewise, the modern monk has only a few books in their apartment. They prioritise depth over extensive, random browsing. As with the stomach, it’s not the quantity of matter that passes through our brains that feeds or cultivates us; it’s how we digest it.
The appeal of this monkish simplicity is that it has a positive, rather than a negative, motive. Rather than miserably forgoing the comforts of life, as we might expect, the aim is deliberately to seek out what we are really interested in, helped by or excited by – and to pare down our life so as to let what really counts finally emerge.
All religions are obsessed by a standard weakness of the human mind: we forget in practice the important things that, in theory, we know already. The person paying homage to the bronze head already ‘knows’ that they dither, procrastinate and hold back from self-assertion – but their leaky brain requires constant reinforcement. Material objects – silent though they are – can be eloquent sources of important psychological messages; they can prompt, encourage, upbraid and generally remind us of our better selves – and by doing so they make a powerful, positive contribution to our lives.
I’m not lazy, though I do value rest and repose. I know that serious thinking is hard – we forget how taxing it is on the body. Sometimes what’s needed is to have a lie-down – that’s when the resistance to big ideas starts to fall away. I’m not merely an addition to the world of interior decoration; I’m a modern aid to self-exploration and imagination.
Ironically, it turns out that ‘bad’ materialism isn’t really an excessive fondness for objects and possessions; rather, it stems from a failure to appreciate objects properly. Truly ‘good’ materialism leads us to want fewer things and to choose them with care, while bad materialism results in us filling our homes with needless stuff that we have no room for in our hearts. We clutter up our wardrobes, homes and lives because the messages our possessions are sending us aren’t being listened to.
If we possess – and pay attention to – the few things we really love, we’ll not need very many of them. Imagine it like having a great conversation with one precious person, which is far more rewarding than trying to chat with twenty other people who are all saying different things at the same time. The material objects that really speak to us need time and space to get their messages across to us. We become more sparing and selective in adding possessions when we are properly attuned to the contributions that material things can make to our lives. The solution to the ills of materialism – and the path to a less muddled and chaotic home – isn’t renunciation; it’s a deeper and more selective kind of love.
By sitting in bed for an extra hour with a pen and paper, we can stress-test our plans long before they make fateful contact with an impatient and highly competitive world.
Good thinking requires us to put ourselves on both sides of an argument, considering the contra case as imaginatively and creatively as we do the pro. We must move from the charming initial suggestion to a cynical objection, then to the formation of a new stance that has been intelligently revised by opposition – and on and on through continuing rounds of refinement until, through a dialectical sequence of mental battles, we start to home in on a mature, workable version of our initial hunch.
We could keep going on much less than we have – as almost everyone who ever lived has done. What drives us to accumulate is a psychological necessity, not a material one. We are under the sway of a powerful cultural force: our ability to think well of ourselves has become equated with an ability to generate an impressive income. Earning healthy sums isn’t so much practically important as emotionally significant; it’s grown to be our chief marker of decency. We operate with the background conviction that a failure to make money could only arise from some form of moral and metaphysical inadequacy: poverty must be a sign that someone is too unreliable, self-indulgent, timid, irresponsible or stupid to thrive in the marketplace.
These people are followers of a concept known as ‘voluntary poverty’. If the term sounds paradoxical, or even perverse, it is because our own era has difficulty imagining that anyone could sanely enter into a voluntary relationship with something as appalling as having little money. We can only picture ourselves as having to bravely put up with poverty, never as choosing it.
Our preoccupation with money feels highly respectable, but its true cause is poignant and unexpected: we keep wanting more money because we haven’t yet identified a passion that matters enough to us that it replaces money-making in our minds. Most of us haven’t found what farming was to Cincinnatus or painting was to Martin; we haven’t yet discovered the real reasons why we are alive.
Our fear of that difficult question suggests the path we can take to free ourselves. The clearer we can be in our own minds as to our true passions, the more we can start to see money (and the socially sanctioned praise it brings with it) from a realistic perspective. Money is a mechanism or a means that, at best, enables us to do the things we love, nothing more or less. It is not, or should not, be a route to liking ourselves, or an end in itself.
However, while rich, Seneca was keen never to let the thought of poverty frighten him. So, in his large town house, next to his magnificent bedroom, Seneca built a small chamber not unlike a prison cell. Once a week or so he would sleep there, on a bare bunk, eating only old bread and olives and drinking water. This activity was part of what he called a ‘premeditation’ – a rehearsal of what it would be like actually to face his fears. ‘We suffer more often in imagination than in reality,’ he wrote. Seneca understood that by making ourselves think carefully and in detail about what we dread, we can reduce our fears to their correct and manageable proportions.
Involuntary simplification frightens us more than it should because we’ve constructed for ourselves inaccurate ideas of what a basic life would really entail. By exploring realistic versions, we can increase our courage and reduce our wilder panics. We can tap into the basic truth that throughout history almost everyone lived a more materially modest life than we currently do. Their lives weren’t worthless or pointless, and nor will ours be – even if what we fear does ever come to pass.
we may remain pretentious in the true and essential sense of the term; that is, we pretend – far more regularly than we should – to be more sophisticated, stylish and in the know than we actually are. We’re not attempting to fool others in a directly egregious way – we’re not inventing qualifications or distorting our CV – but what we are often doing, in a multitude of minor instances, is ceasing to listen closely to our own authentic responses. Whether it’s our opinion on books, holiday destinations, acquaintances, leisure pursuits or political views, we find ourselves deferring to, and parroting, the attitudes of established and prestigious others.
Rather than blame ourselves for being spineless, we might ask ourselves why we tend to back away from our own preferences. As is often the case, the reason is fear. We lie because we worry about how we would be judged if what we actually liked was revealed. Behind this fear usually lies a certain sort of childhood: the archetypal upbringing of the pretentious adult. Here, at formative moments, our caregivers and educators gave us the impression that our own thoughts and feelings were wholly inadequate and unreliable guides to life: we didn’t know enough, we were in no position to decide, we were too young. The message could be delivered harshly or gently, but it was still the same: we should defer to the ‘proper’ views of others. We were taught to be ashamed of our spontaneous responses.
We’d hear from people we respect that no one really knows what’s right and wrong and that everyone is a bit silly at heart. We would be able to deduce that the point of life isn’t to have the ‘right’ reactions, just our own, very honest, ones.
The modern world has dramatically parted ways with this minimalist premodern approach to reading. We have instead adopted an Enlightenment mantra that drives us in the opposite direction. It states that there should be no limit to how much we read, because there is only one answer to the question of why we read that can be ambitious enough: we read in order to know everything. We’re not reading to understand God or to follow civic virtue or to calm our minds. We are reading to understand the whole of human existence, the full inventory of our trajectory through time, the complete account of all of planetary progress and the entirety of cosmic history. We are collective believers in the idea of totalising knowledge; the more books we have produced and digested, the closer we will be to grasping everything.
In order to ease and simplify our lives, we might dare to ask the same question that St Jerome and his premodern contemporaries considered: what am I reading for? And this time, rather than answering, ‘In order to know everything,’ we might decide on a much more limited, focused and useful goal. We might decide that while society as a whole is on a search for total knowledge, all we really need is to gather the knowledge that is going to be useful to us as we lead our own lives. We might decide on a new mantra to guide our reading henceforth: I read so I can learn to be content. Nothing more, nothing less.
To construct a wiser relationship to the news and to simplify how much of it we might need, we should focus on a much-neglected but critical question: what information do we actually require – and what do we actually require it for? News organisations are deeply resistant to such enquiries and would likely stress that the news is important per se, and that there is no limit to how much of it anyone needs. In a perfect world, we would know everything from everywhere, all at once. But the reality is that the news we really need isn’t just any information that has happened to seize the attention of journalists around the world in the last few hours – it is the information that we need in order to flourish as individuals.
Another thing we can do in our own rooms is to return to journeys we have already taken. This is not a fashionable idea. Most of the time, we are given powerful encouragement to engineer new kinds of travel experiences. The idea of revisiting a journey in memory sounds a little strange – or simply sad. This is an enormous pity. We are careless curators of our own pasts; we push the important scenes from our memories to the back of the cupboard of our minds and don’t particularly expect to see them again.
Our experiences have not disappeared just because they are no longer unfolding right in front of our eyes; we can remain in touch with so much of what made them pleasurable simply through the art of evocation. We talk endlessly of virtual reality, yet we don’t need gadgets – we have the finest virtual reality machines already in our own heads. We can – right now – shut our eyes and travel into, and linger among, the very best and most consoling, life-enhancing moments of our pasts.
However playful, de Maistre’s work springs from a profound insight: that 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. What, then, is a travelling mindset? Receptivity, appreciation and gratitude might be its chief characteristics. And, crucially, this mindset doesn’t need to wait for a faraway journey to be deployed.
It cannot be a coincidence that many of the world’s greatest thinkers have spent unusual amounts of time very simply, alone in their rooms. Silence gives us an opportunity to appreciate a great deal of what we generally see without ever properly noticing, and to understand what we have felt but not yet adequately processed. When we lead quiet and simple lives, we aren’t deprived; we have been granted the privilege of being able to travel the unfamiliar, sometimes daunting, but essentially wondrous continents inside our own minds.
Strikingly, at present, we only invoke the idea of retirement in regards to employment. This is a profound pity, because there are so many other things that it might be extremely important for us to stop doing, but which we feel obliged to continue with because we are under punishing pressure from others to conform. ‘Retirement’ is the word we should learn to use to explain quitting a host of activities otherwise deemed crucial without forfeiting our claim to be classed as honourable and dignified.
When we retire from work, people don’t feel we’re letting them down – our colleagues will perhaps throw a party for us, congratulate us and say how much they’ll miss us. Likewise, by announcing our retirement from social life or relationships, we’re making it clear that there’s no suppressed personal hatred at play in our decision. We’re just rejigging our priorities.
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.
One reason why we often don’t dare to adopt the simple life we want is that doing so has rarely been made to seem very glamorous. The perceived glamour of the world is overwhelmingly held to lie in noisy and costly ways of living.
A key theme that has pursued us throughout this book is that our 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.
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.
This is why, ultimately, modern existence feels so complicated. Millions of possibilities are offered to us, but we are never encouraged to stop and ask what any of them might actually be for.
The crucial step towards leading a simpler life isn’t – as we might initially suppose – to get rid of things. It’s to ask ourselves what our true longings are and what are the ends at which we are aiming. Simplicity isn’t so much a life with few things and commitments in it, as a life with the right, necessary things, attuned to our flourishing. Our lives will feel – and be – simpler when we’ve probed our minds to yield up their most secret and precious insight: the knowledge of what we truly want.