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

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The School of Life Press brings together the thinking and ideas of the School of Life creative team under the direction of series editor, Alain de Botton. Our range of books and products explore essential topics in psychological and emotional life, including relationships, parenting, friendship, careers and fulfilment.

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This book explores ideas around minimalism, simplicity and how to live comfortably with less. We live in a complicated, frenzied, and noisy world, filled with too much information, too many products, ideas, and opinions. As a result, many of us long for simplicity: a pared down, more peaceful, and less cluttered life.

This book is a guide to the simpler lives we crave and deserve. In it, we learn about Zen Buddhism, modernist architecture, monasteries, psychoanalysis, and why three good friends and a few treasured belongings are enough. Taking a psychological approach, the book also guides us toward inner simplicity. For too long we've been drowning in excess, clutter, and confusion. A Simpler Life helps us tune out the static and focus on what really matters.

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I. Simpler Relationships

i. Becoming more straightforward

When discussing our aspirations for simplicity, there is something fundamental we should seek, long before we focus on simpler houses and clothes, simpler social lives and holidays: simpler kinds of people.

 
A ‘simple person’ is someone who speaks plainly about what they really want and who they really are. What makes simple people gratifying to be around isn’t that their intentions are always unproblematic for us, it’s that we know exactly what those intentions are from the start. Around simple, straightforward people, there is no need to second-guess, infer, decode, untangle, unscramble or translate. There are no sudden surprises. If they don’t want to do something, they will, politely and in good time, explain that it’s really not for them. If they’re unhappy with our behaviour, they won’t smile sweetly while developing noxious stores of envy or hatred in the recesses of their minds; they will immediately provide a gentle but accurate statement of how we are frustrating them. If they are worried a project is going awry, they won’t pretend that all is well until a catastrophe can no longer be denied; they will speak up and try to fix the problem. If they are attracted to someone, they will find kind and inoffensive ways of making their feelings clear. And in bed, they may want to please, but they can also be honest and unashamed about what actually excites them.

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.

 
There is, as is so often the case, likely to be a childhood origin to this pattern of behaviour. A child becomes complicated – that is, underhand, roundabout or even deceitful – when their earliest caregiver gives the impression that there is no room for honesty. Imagine a child whose needs (for another biscuit, for a run around the garden, for help with homework or for a chance not to see Granny) might have been received with obvious irritation or open anger. This child would never quite know when its parent would get annoyed or angry – or why. Or else the child might sense that a parent would be unbearably saddened if they revealed too many authentic aspirations. Why would any of us say how we feel or what we want, if the result were to be shouting and tears, or a complaint from a loved but fragile grown-up that this was a betrayal or all simply too much?

 
And so this child would grow expert at speaking in emotional code; 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.

 
We can also recognise that our complicated behaviour doesn’t please people as we might have hoped. Most of the people we deal with would far rather be face frustration head-on than be sold a fine tale and then have to suffer disappointment in gradual doses.

 
Human interaction always carries a risk of conflict: we are never far from misaligned goals and divergent desires. The simple and straightforward ones among us are lucky to have known enough love and acceptance early on in their lives to bear the danger of ruffling feathers; they invest their energies in trying to deliver their own truths with thoughtful diplomacy rather than in clumsily burying them beneath temporary saccharine smiles. 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.