Plain Life

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A01=Antonia Pont
Anti-productivity critique
Author_Antonia Pont
Capacity and transformation
Category=DNL
Category=JB
Category=QDTM
Category=QDXB
Category=VXA
Category=VXM
Conscious living in late capitalism
Critique of neoliberal subjectivity
Embodied awareness
Emotional precision and fear
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_mind-body-spirit
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
essays
Ethics of attention
Ethics of plainness
Everyday life under capitalism
Existential reflection
Literary phenomenology
Mindful routines and rituals
Neoliberal anxiety and resistance
Ontological unease
philosophy
Philosophy of everyday life
Political philosophy of care
Practising with Deleuze
Radical kindness and critique
Somatic thinking
Spinozan ethics in daily life
Stillness and presence
Thinking through habit and time
Unlearning optimization culture
Yoga and philosophical inquiry

Product details

  • ISBN 9781761170164
  • Dimensions: 135 x 210mm
  • Publication Date: 01 Aug 2025
  • Publisher: NewSouth Publishing
  • Publication City/Country: AU
  • Product Form: Paperback
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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.

Antonia Pont is Associate Professor in Writing, Literature and Culture at Deakin University, Australia. She publishes poetry, fiction and essays as well as theoretical work across writing, literature, philosophy and the creative arts. Her research is concerned with time, habit, ethical capacity, thought, movement and transformation. She is the author of The Memory Library (Spineless Wonders, 2024), A Philosophy of Practising (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) and a co-author of Practising with Deleuze (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Her collection of poetry You Will Not Know in Advance What You'll Feel was published in 2019. She is the founder of Vijnana Yoga Australia (2009-), where she continues to practise, teach and lead retreats. Her essays have an international following, and have appeared in Lit Hub, The Lifted Brow, Antithesis, Meanjin and Overland.

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