Book Review and Highlights: "A Simpler Life"

A Simpler Life from The School of Life


At 163 pages, “A Simpler Life,” is a quick-and-breezy read with the ability to force you to question some of what you do and what you presume to value.

The book examines many areas of life, such as careers, marriage, friendships, finances, and more. Reading it is an exercise in reframing and questioning our supposed beliefs. For example:

  • Who set your expectations for your marriage, and are those expectations even what you want?

  • How many friends do you think you need? Why do you believe that? What purpose does friendship actually serve?

  • Why do we own the things we do, and how many of them do we truly value?

The book’s premise is that so much of our unhappiness stems from unmet expectations that aren’t even really ours, coupled with the desire to get “more” or different to feel better.

I really enjoyed it.

The section on travel, for example, really hit me. I am not well-travelled internationally, though I have seen much of the United States. This used to bother me, but actually it really doesn’t. Long flights suck. Travel is often a hassle, and scouring every corner of the globe isn’t really something that interests me. This book helped me realize that.

Kindle notes and Highlights from “A Simpler Life”

  • 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.

  • What’s driving their frustration isn’t that they’ve fallen for an idiot as a mate; it’s rather that we have all inherited needlessly complicated ideas of what a relationship is supposed to be. We are taught that love involves the almost total merging of two lives.

  • If we boil matters down, there might really be just three essential qualities we need from one another:

    • Kindness

    • Shared vulnerability

    • Understanding

  • There is one thing that makes our lives a great deal more complicated than they should be: that is, that we are rarely far from the oppressive worry of ‘what other people think’.

  • ‘what most people think’ isn’t and should never be a reasonable guide to our own lives.

  • The second mechanism for caring less about what others think is to love ourselves a little more.

  • we know every facet of our own laziness, confusion and error. We are experts in the many ways in which we’ve let other people down, bungled our chances and done foolish things, but we have no comparable information on the lives of others (who tend carefully to edit out their flaws from public view).

  • children don’t know what they are supposed to think, they naturally go with their true feelings – and sometimes come out with startlingly insightful and prescient judgements as a result.

  • We can discover for ourselves what manner of life pleases us, and the fact that it may look absurd or ridiculous or frivolous to others won’t particularly bother us.

  • busy social life is looked upon as a primary marker of success.

  • If we don’t really know what friends are for, we can’t tell how many we need.

  • 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.

  • ‘On flows the river ceaselessly, nor does the water ever stay the same. The bubbles that float upon its pools now disappear, now form anew, but never endure long. And so it is with people in this world, and with their dwellings.’

  • The myth is constructed around an innocent-sounding, even exciting, idea: the notion that there is a ‘centre’, a special place on the planet – the right city, or district – and there, and only there, is a real and full life possible.

  • perhaps we would find a selection of nuts, some cheese, a bowl of fruit and a few slices of ham: food for grazing on, that require almost no preparation and leave very little washing up to be done. Choosing these simple foods liberates our lives, and our storage space, from pots and

  • Likewise, the modern monk has only a few books in their apartment. They prioritise depth over extensive, random browsing.

  • The appeal of this monkish simplicity is that

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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.

  • If we possess – and pay attention to – the few things we really love, we’ll not need very many of them.

  • most of what goes wrong in our lives is not due to a failure of raw effort or busyness. We come to grief not because we haven’t rushed around enough or put in a sufficient number of hours at the coalface, but because there has, somewhere along the way, been a shortfall in thinking.

  • history reveals plenty of highly instructive examples of people who made deliberate, unapologetic decisions to embrace a modest income in the name of other goals;

  • 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.

  • we haven’t yet discovered the real reasons why we are alive.

  • One of the reasons we fear a simple, financially modest life is that we rarely take the trouble calmly to examine what it might really be like, and so we are inclined to fear it far more than we should.

  • It is noteworthy that our pretension tends to go in one direction only: away from simplicity and towards complexity.

  • Christians and Muslims located the value of reading in a very specific and narrow goal: the attainment of holiness.

  • We can also hazard an observation: this exhaustive approach to reading does not make us particularly happy. We are drowning in books; we have no time to reread the books we love and we appear condemned to a permanent sense of being under-read compared to our peers and to what the prestigious voices have declared respectable.

  • what am I reading for?

  • The truly well-read person isn’t the one who has read a gargantuan number of books, but someone who has let themselves, and their capacity to live and die well, be profoundly shaped by a very few well-chosen titles.

  • what information do we actually require – and what do we actually require it for?

  • 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.

  • Someone in the prime of life who loses any interest in going to the office, who doesn’t care about promotion and who isn’t trying to accumulate ever more money would standardly be described as a loser. Unless, that is, they declare that what they want to do is ‘retire early’ – at which point they are transformed in our eyes into fascinating and near-saintly figures.

  • it might not even be work that many of us most want to retire from. We might be far keener to retire from, let’s say, late nights, going to the theatre, using social media, holidaying abroad or having sex with new people.

  • we could retire to connect more deeply with our own minds, to develop our creative potential, to keep a handle on anxiety or to explore who we could be if we stopped caring so much about what other people thought of us.

  • 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.