Excellent small book that reads like a manifesto on simple living from The School of Life and its founder, Alain de Botton. The contents page (below) reads like a guide to removing unnecessary excess and stress from one’s life. A couple of quotes. On purpose:

The crucial step towards leading a simpler life isn’t – as we might initially suppose – to get rid of things. It’s to ask ourselves what our true longings are and what are the ends at which we are aiming. Simplicity isn’t so much a life with few things and commitments in it, as a life with the right, necessary things, attuned to our flourishing. Our lives will feel – and be – simpler when we’ve probed our minds to yield up their most secret and precious insight: the knowledge of what we truly want.

And on preoccupation with 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.