Simplicity has become so elusive and desirable because the modern age is so troublingly, infinitely noisy and abundant. Industrialisation has made a vast array of products available to almost anyone at very low cost. 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.

In this respect, we should remember to be more childlike. As 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. Trusting their own minds, they tell us that Granny is a bit selfish or that spiders are pretty; they blurt out that a lavish wedding was very boring or that the nicest thing in the world is to lie on the floor looking at the ceiling.

More recently, in 1845, the American writer Henry David Thoreau – then 27 years old, a graduate of Harvard University and heir to a prosperous pencil manufacturing business – moved into a wooden cabin by the side of a small lake in Massachusetts, where he would spend the next two years. It was marginally bigger than Chōmei’s modest home, as well as being more stoutly constructed and better equipped (having the luxuries of a fireplace and a writing desk), but the moral Thoreau drew was almost identical: to those who are inwardly free, there are riches enough available in a hut.

This cult of busyness insists that a good life, indeed the only life worthy of a capable and intelligent person, is one of continuous activity and application; we must strive relentlessly to fulfil every ambition, and every hour of the day must be filled with intense activity.

Instead of being blissfully satisfied with our hectic lives, we are liable to feel permanently nervous and strained, though we are careful to conceal this as much as possible from others (and from ourselves). Our irritability is cast as rightful impatience with slackers and mediocrities, and our frustration and disappointment are interpreted as necessary spurs to greater activity. We tell ourselves that our growing gloom and sadness (beneath the zestful demeanour) will disappear when finally we get on top of everything we have to do and attain the level of success that will guarantee our happiness.

In a traditional cell, a monk would only have had a handful of books. Their view on reading is somewhat at odds with our current vision of culture. Today, the cultured person is imagined as possessing a substantial personal library – whatever book is mentioned in conversation, they should be able to find a copy somewhere on their many shelves. The monastic ideal, by contrast, prefers an intimate relationship with a very limited number of ‘sacred’ works, which eventually the monk will know almost by heart. Likewise, the modern monk has only a few books in their apartment. They prioritise depth over extensive, random browsing. As with the stomach, it’s not the quantity of matter that passes through our brains that feeds or cultivates us; it’s how we digest it. [A good counterpoint to my reading habits.]

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. We do not allow ourselves the requisite number of hours in which we might – to a critical outside eye – look as if we were doing ‘nothing’: gazing out of the window, following a trail of clouds across the evening sky, lying in a bath, walking around a park or writing down a few notes in a journal. It is precisely during these apparently empty hours of reflection that life’s real work unfolds – hours in which our worst mistakes can be caught, and our best opportunities identified.

It might sound easy enough to do this, but it is in truth an arduous process to deliberately subject our most cherished thoughts and exciting projects to relentless, hostile crossfire. Good thinking requires us to put ourselves on both sides of an argument, considering the contra case as imaginatively and creatively as we do the pro. We must move from the charming initial suggestion to a cynical objection, then to the formation of a new stance that has been intelligently revised by opposition – and on and on through continuing rounds of refinement until, through a dialectical sequence of mental battles, we start to home in on a mature, workable version of our initial hunch.

Earning healthy sums isn’t so much practically important as emotionally significant; it’s grown to be our chief marker of decency.

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The outstanding representative of voluntary poverty in the Classical period was the Roman statesman Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus (c. 519–c. 430 BCE), in honour of whom the US city of Cincinnati is named. Cincinnatus came from a prestigious, but impoverished, family; he’d had a very successful public career, but, being honourable and very honest, had never made any money out of his service. Tiring of the shabby deals and devious self-seeking of his colleagues, he retired early to a small farm, where he worked his own land and eked out a modest living.

At this point, Rome was still a republic – but a far from mighty one. In 458 BCE, as had often happened before, one of the neighbouring tribes launched a major invasion that threatened to annihilate the state. In desperation, a government envoy was dispatched to Cincinnatus, begging him to return to Rome, where he could adopt unlimited powers and see off the threat. Cincinnatus was ploughing his field bare-chested when the envoy arrived. He considered the offer for a few minutes, weighing up his longing for a quiet, agricultural life against the urgent needs of his nation, and then asked his wife, Racilia, to fetch his toga from their simple cottage. He accepted the role of temporary dictator and rapidly succeeded in repelling the attack on Rome. Given his triumph, everything was now open to him: Cincinnatus could have held onto his position as dictator and accumulated boundless wealth. But this was not his way. He loved his family and his life as a farmer far too much. So, he resigned and returned home to his plough and his few acres. He chose voluntary poverty over luxury and grandeur.

What motivated Cincinnatus was an intelligent and discerning sense of what truly brought him contentment. Marble palaces and gold might have carried prestige, but when Cincinnatus examined his subjective sources of pleasure, he realised that what actually satisfied him was getting up early in the morning to water his oxen, watching his fields slowly ripen and chatting with his wife and children after a physically exhausting but rewarding day under the sun. Cincinnatus’ enduring legacy was to be a man of opportunity who took the trouble to realise that there were things he loved more than money.

Our preoccupation with money feels highly respectable, but its true cause is poignant and unexpected: 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. Most of us haven’t found what farming was to Cincinnatus or painting was to Martin; we haven’t yet discovered the real reasons why we are alive.

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The thinkers of the premodern world cared so little about the quantity of books one read because they were obsessed by a question that modernity likes to dodge: what is the point of reading? And they had answers. To take a supreme example, Christians and Muslims located the value of reading in a very specific and narrow goal: the attainment of holiness. To read was to try to approximate the mind of God. In each case this meant that one book – and one book only, the Bible or the Koran – was held up as vastly and incomparably more important than any other. To read this book, repeatedly and with great attention, was thought more crucial than to rush through a whole library every week; in fact, reading widely would have been regarded with suspicion, because most other books would – to some extent – have been thought misleading and distracting.

Similarly, in the ancient Greek world, readers were encouraged to focus on gaining a close knowledge of just two books: Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad. These books were deemed the perfect repository of the Greek code of honour and the best guides to action in military and civilian affairs. Much later, in 18th-century England, the ideal of reading came to be focused on Virgil’s Aeneid. Knowing this epic poem by heart was all a gentleman needed to do to pass as cultivated. To read much more was viewed as eccentric – and probably a little unhealthy, too.

The modern world has dramatically parted ways with this minimalist premodern approach to reading. We have instead adopted an Enlightenment mantra that drives us in the opposite direction. It states that there should be no limit to how much we read, because there is only one answer to the question of why we read that can be ambitious enough: we read in order to know everything. We’re not reading to understand God or to follow civic virtue or to calm our minds. We are reading to understand the whole of human existence, the full inventory of our trajectory through time, the complete account of all of planetary progress and the entirety of cosmic history. We are collective believers in the idea of totalising knowledge; the more books we have produced and digested, the closer we will be to grasping everything.

The more we understand what reading is for us, the more we can enjoy intimate relationships with just a few important works. Our libraries can be simple. Instead of always broaching new material, we can spend time rereading, paying attention to the reinforcement of what we already know but tend so often to forget. 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.

A key theme that has pursued us throughout this book is that our lives grow more complicated the less we stop to ask what things are for, why we are doing them and how we really feel about them. And, correspondingly, that the more we enquire what possessions, careers, relationships, travels, books and so on are actually doing for us, the more we can decide which of them might be dispensed with and which are worth holding on to. It is secure knowledge of our purpose that is our guide to editing down the complexity of our lives.