These days, it’s easy to get the impression that people are really very anxious. Who? you ask. Well, people you hear about. People who tell you they are. Friends. Lovers. Acquaintances. Colleagues. The Youth. The term is around and people are applying it to themselves, or having it applied to them, willy-nilly.

What would it mean to be able to live a plain life? Would a plain life just be an unambitious one – a drab or routine life, without colour, variation, unknowing or luck? Or would a plain life be one in which we’d fret slightly less, suspect ourselves less, and thus listen to ourselves and others in new ways? We may not need to do more and be more – in the quiet spaces already within us, lurking in the interstices of our days and conversations, there are ways and choreographies to nurture a plainer, saner, odder, less reactive and therefore less terrifying life.

In Plain Life, Antonia Pont questions our thinking about capacities, virtue, envy, wanting, love and kindness – suggesting that it might be fine, more than enough, indeed so much, to live a plain life.