A simpler life

My harvested quince and Andy Goldsworthy inspired tabletop still life

I shared in a recent newsletter that I hoped to live off the land more, growing my own. I guess this could be considered as seeking a simpler life, though it’s a way of life that’s physically much harder, and it got me thinking about what a simpler life really means.

This week I started reading ‘A Simpler Life: A guide to greater serenity, ease and clarity’ published by The School of Life. It promises an explanation for why I - and so many others apparently - long for simpler, pared down and more peaceful life.

The authors state that simplicity has grown more central to our society’s vision of life, and how this wasn’t the case back in the day when other than those considered too poor, sought out busier, fancier, more ostentatious livestyles. So why the change?

“Simplicity has become so elusive and desirable because the modern age is so troublingly, infinitely noisy and abundant….We are bathed in options, surrounded by too much information with too many competing visions of happiness. We crave simplicity not because we are simple, but because we are drowning in complexity.” (p20)

I hear you.

My own happiness mantra is aboutd aligning what I think, say and do (the footer of this newsletter contains the full Gandhi quote my happiness mantra is taken from), and I’m interested to explore the crossover between happiness and living a simpler life, and how that might manifest itself. Is it the decluttered home I increasingly aspire to; the more streamlined work routine I’ve been trying to establish; being clearer, and more honest, about what I do and don’t want to do with my life; and is it finally time to start thinking about when I want to retire?

The book suggests 5 areas of life we could look to simplify: our relationships, social life, lifestyle, work and culture. However, it strongly encourages us to prioritise seeking simpler kinds of people first and foremost - those who speak plainly about what they really want and who they really are. From there, it seems, much of the rest will follow.

In the book’s conclusion, it talks about How to retire early. I guess retirement is something many of us - me included - have held up as promising a simpler, perhaps slower, life than we’ve known. But what does early retirement even mean these days now that most of us don’t get our state pension until we’re 70? I skipped forward to sneak a peek.

The book takes a broad view of retirement, proposing that it’s not only work we can retire from, though that’s usually what’s assumed. We could, for example, choose to retire from social media or the consumer society to spend more time on developing our creative potential or exploring who we could be if we stopped caring so much about what other people thought of us (echoes of The Artist’s Way message here). This broader vision of retirement appears to be more about changing priorities than stopping work: a version of retirement that can begin at any age.

One of the most common and deeply cherished fantasies of our times is the idea that we might ‘retire early’. Websites promising to help us achieve this dream abound - including managing our finances, working out where we might live and helping us to decide how close we might want too be to the beach - or perhaps a mountain.

The word ‘retirement’ holds an element of fear for me. I know the reality is I’ll always be busy doing something, that’s just who I am, but what? The Simple Life seems to suggest that my retirement could simply be about doing more of what I love; that sounds much less scary!

The crucial step towards leading a simpler life isn’t, I read on to discover, to get rid of things (my decluttering isn’t going to cut it alone) but to ask ourselves what our true longings are, and what ends we’re aiming for. It’s about a life with the right and necessary things, rather than simply with fewer things. It reminds me of something renowned designer Terence Conran once said about redecorating, “Take everything out of your living room. Move back only the furniture you really love.”

For those of us seeking a simpler life, it seems we will only find it by first clarifying our goals, and knowing what we truly want.