A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease and clarity

It’s not that it’s impossible to be stimulated in the great urban core – rather it is possible to be inspired anywhere. At root, inspiration is the discovery of the greater meaning of something that seems, initially, unimpressive.

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.

We discover the joys of simple communication when we can accept that what we want is almost never impossible for others to bear; it’s the cover-up that maddens and pains.

However, it’s important to understand that our worry about money is – in most countries at this point in history – typically disconnected from any issues of survival. 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

Simplicity in our familial relationships must spring from a recognition of the inherent complexity of what we’re trying to do – which is to get on well with someone who has unavoidably damaged us and whose outlook on life can never reasonably align with our own.

We crave simplicity not because we are simple, but because we are drowning in complexity.

because parents are a generation older, much of what shaped them stemmed from a world with priorities, values, anxieties and hopes that seem strange – even reprehensible – to their children, but that were, and still are, urgent and real for them.

A ‘simple person’ is someone who speaks plainly about what they really want and who they really are.

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 wr

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. Ou