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

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

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

no human is ever simply their worst moment – and every worst moment has a long history, which invariably merits a high degree of sympathy.

Earlier epochs didn’t emphasise simplicity because there was no need to; a life with few possessions and plain food, early nights and plenty of time in the fresh air was available to everyone. But for us, simplicity plays the role that splendour once did for the aristocrats at Versailles or that rugged individualism did for the urban 20th-century a

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

What if our real problem is not that we haven’t had time to travel enough – but that we don’t know how to make the most of what is already to hand?

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.

the pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.

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