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Plain Life: On thinking, feeling and deciding
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.
‘Read this precise, wild and tender offering, and be sure to ask yourself how you feel after ... Plain Life is challenging and generous.’ – Debra Dank
‘Fizzing with energy and ideas, Plain Life is a practical, philosophical heart to heart with your most spirited friend. Alain de Botton for hot anti-capitalists.’ – Briohny Doyle
‘Deeply alert to the challenges of our times, and extraordinarily well read, Antonia Pont delivers us a handbook for life that is politically radical, refreshingly intellectual, and wholly attentive to embodiment and being. Informed and informing, it is a seriously joyful tour de force.’ – Julienne van Loon
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.
‘Read this precise, wild and tender offering, and be sure to ask yourself how you feel after ... Plain Life is challenging and generous.’ – Debra Dank
‘Fizzing with energy and ideas, Plain Life is a practical, philosophical heart to heart with your most spirited friend. Alain de Botton for hot anti-capitalists.’ – Briohny Doyle
‘Deeply alert to the challenges of our times, and extraordinarily well read, Antonia Pont delivers us a handbook for life that is politically radical, refreshingly intellectual, and wholly attentive to embodiment and being. Informed and informing, it is a seriously joyful tour de force.’ – Julienne van Loon
- GenresNonfictionPhilosophy
256 pages, Paperback
Published August 1, 2025
25 people are currently reading
216 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 10, 2025
There are probably only a few hundred people in Melbourne or Berlin who are the right blend of: neurotic but not too unwell, already have critical theory 101 training, and, tolerate this kind of breathless semi ironic late 00s blog era writing style that will benefit from this book, but alas I am one of them.
January 3, 2026
Perhaps a few too many parentheses for my liking but a fantastic book.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews