Michel de Montaigne was a 16th-century French philosopher who believed that a simpler life

begins when we stop trying to impress others, let go of the roles we perform,

give up desires that aren't truly ours, and worry less about other people's opinions.

Montaigne was a wealthy nobleman and a judge in the Bordeaux parliament.

He spent years around the royal court, watching politicians and aristocrats constantly lying,

scheming, and putting on a public image just to hold onto their position. The more

influential they became, the more complicated, stressful, and fragile their lives seemed.

Montaigne decided he wanted no part of it. So he left public life, retired to a stone tower

on his family's country estate, filled it with books, and devoted himself to living more simply.

Even though he was later dragged back into the political chaos to serve two demanding terms as

the Mayor of Bordeaux, his true focus remained on understanding himself rather than chasing status.

He drew heavily from ancient philosophies like Epicureanism, Pyrrhonian Skepticism,

and Stoicism to build a new, simpler way of living. He recorded this journey

in a collection of writings called the Essays, where he explored his thoughts, doubts, habits,

and everyday experiences with unusual honesty. Today, we may not be caught up in the politics

of a royal court, yet many of us still make life more complicated than it needs to be.

We overthink our careers, our relationships, and our public image. We spend energy trying to

meet other people's expectations and chase goals that don't always reflect what we actually want.

So in this video how to simplify your life from the philosophy of Montaigne.

1. Reject Artificial Desires In Renaissance France,

Montaigne was surrounded by aristocrats who were obsessed with power. They bankrupted themselves

to buy elaborate clothing, chased royal titles for years, and constantly tried to impress the

people around them. Montaigne looked at all of this and realized it was a tragic waste of

a life. Drawing inspiration from the ancient Greek philosophy of Epicureanism, Montaigne

came to believe that human desires fall into two categories: natural desires and artificial ones.

Natural desires are the basic things we need to live well, such as food, shelter, warmth,

and close human relationships. These needs are limited. When you're thirsty, drinking water

satisfies that thirst. When you're hungry, after eating a meal, the desire to eat goes away. Nature

tells you exactly when you have had enough. But artificial desires - things like fame,

luxury, extreme wealth, and social status - are entirely manufactured by society. And because

they are invented, they have no natural limit. There is no biological signal that tells you

when you are "famous enough" or "rich enough." As soon as you hit a financial milestone, the

goalpost moves. As soon as you get the promotion, you start eyeing the next rung on the ladder.

You are essentially signing up for a race that has no finish line, which guarantees a life of

permanent dissatisfaction and endless complexity. And because of that we take on massive debt for a

luxury car, or work eighty-hour weeks for a job title, not because it actually brings us joy,

but because society has conditioned us to believe that this is what success looks like.

Simplifying your life starts with running a brutal audit on the things you are chasing.

Look at your daily to-do list, your goals, and your spending habits, and ask yourself:

“Do I want this, or did society just condition me to want it?”

When you let go of artificial desires, life becomes simpler. Instead of chasing endless wants,

you can focus on the few things that truly matter and are enough to live a good life.

2. Stop worrying about Public Opinion In the 16th century, men would fight to

the death in street duels over a minor insult at a dinner party just to protect their reputation.

Politicians and aristocrats spent every waking hour carefully managing how the public perceived

them, terrified of looking weak or foolish. Montaigne dedicated an entire essay to the topic,

titled Of Glory, and he pointed out that the public is generally irrational, easily distracted,

and completely unreliable. So why on earth would you tie your peace to the opinions of a crowd?

If your worth depends on other people's approval, you are handing your peace of mind over to a group

that constantly changes its mind. We agonize over whether our boss praised us in a meeting,

we stress over how our peers view our career progress, and we carefully curate our lives

online to get validation from strangers. It forces us into a state of constant

performance. And performing all day is exhausting. Montaigne argued that to simplify your life,

you have to build what modern psychologists call an internal scorecard. Montaigne famously wrote

that he didn't care what he was in the eyes of others; he only cared what he was in his own eyes.

So you have to become your own judge. When you do something, ask yourself if you are proud of it,

based on your own standards and your own morals. When you stop needing the crowd to validate your

existence, you stop overthinking how every word you say will be perceived. You stop buying things

just to signal your status to your neighbors. When you stop measuring your life by

other people's opinions, life automatically becomes much simpler

3. Shrink Your Inner Circle Because of his family’s status,

and his later career as the mayor of Bordeaux, Montaigne knew all the local politicians,

the aristocrats, and all wealthy merchants. But he recognized that these were purely transactional

relationships built on mutual advantage, political leverage, and polite faking,

rather than genuine friendship. Keeping up those connections required constant effort,

and he came to see them as another source of unnecessary complexity in his life.

He experienced true friendship exactly once in his life, with a fellow writer

and civil servant named Étienne de La Boétie. When they met, they dropped their public masks and

connected on a deep, unfiltered level. They shared their deep fears, their unpolished thoughts,

and their true selves without any hidden motives. Tragically, La Boétie died young,

and the loss devastated Montaigne. Years later, when people asked Montaigne to explain why their

connection was so unshakeably strong, he didn't give a logical list of reasons. He simply wrote:

"Because it was he, because it was I." Montaigne realized that a single,

soul-level friendship provides more peace of mind than a thousand superficial acquaintances.

True social simplicity means choosing quality over quantity. You have to stop treating your personal

life like a networking event. Stop feeling obligated to stay in touch with people who

drain your energy, and stop feeling guilty for not being accessible to everyone 24/7.

To declutter your social life, you need to shrink your inner circle. Take all the fragmented energy

you currently waste on pleasing hundreds of acquaintances, and pour it entirely into two or

three people who actually understand you. 4. Be Authentic

In the late 1500s, France was being torn apart by religious civil wars. Saying the wrong thing,

laughing at the wrong joke, or showing sympathy to the wrong person could get you exiled,

stripped of your wealth, or even killed. Because of this, the nobles spent their entire

lives acting. They memorized strict rules of etiquette, forced fake smiles for political rivals

they secretly hated, and carefully hid their true opinions behind polite, empty words. They were

trapped in a state of constant performance. When Montaigne retired to his stone tower to

begin writing his Essays, he explicitly warned his readers right in the preface:

I am not putting on a show for you. He wrote, "I am myself the matter of my book."

He openly wrote about his bad eating habits, his terrible memory, his kidney stones, and his

mood swings, even admitting when he was lazy or petty. He did this because lying is exhausting.

If you fake who you are, you need a perfect memory to keep track of your lies and remember

exactly what you told to different people. Today, we have our professional mask,

our carefully curated social media persona, and the sanitized version of ourselves we

show to our acquaintances, not to mention the version we show to certain family members.

We spend hours agonizing over how to word an email so we sound perfectly competent,

or suppressing our actual sense of humor because it doesn't fit the vibe of the room.

So the real question is how do you drop the mask and simplify your life? Well, first,

stop over-sanitizing your communication. Stop rewriting that email five times to make sure you

sound artificially enthusiastic. Just say what you need to say clearly and politely, and hit send.

Second, start owning your interests. If you have a hobby, or you spent the weekend doing

absolutely nothing, and someone asks you about it on Monday morning, tell the truth. Stop inventing

a more impressive version of your weekend just to sound productive to your coworkers.

Finally, you have to accept the trade-off. When you decide to be unapologetically yourself, some

people might not like your actual personality. And that is exactly the point. When you drop the mask,

you create a natural filter. You lose the people who only liked the fake version of you,

which frees up your time and energy. What you are left with is a life that is incredibly simple,

because you never have to stress about slipping out of character. You are just living your life.

5. Establish Your "Arrière-Boutique" You can simplify your mindset, drop your

social masks, and shrink your inner circle, but you are still going to face one massive problem:

the outside world will not stop knocking on your door. Your boss, your family,

and your friends are always going to ask for your time, your favors, and your labor.

When Montaigne walked away from his high-stress political career, he realized that staying at his

family’s massive country estate wasn't going to give him peace. The estate was a demanding

operation, with farm workers, servants, guests, and family members constantly running around and

needing decisions made. If he stayed in the main house, he would constantly be disturbed.

So, he walked out to a stone tower on the edge of his property, climbed up to the third floor,

and claimed the circular room as his own. And he set a non-negotiable rule:

no family, no servants, and no business allowed. He called this concept the arrière-boutique,

which translates to the room behind the shop or the backroom.

He explained it using a very practical analogy. Think about a local shopkeeper. All day long,

they stand at the front counter. They deal with demanding customers, manage the inventory,

and handle the money. If that shopkeeper never leaves the front counter, they will eventually

start to believe that they are the shop. They will completely forget who they were before the

doors opened. To survive, they need a private room in the back where they can close the door,

drop the customer service smile, and just be a human being again.

Today, we have entirely lost the back room. We are accessible to our bosses at 9:00 PM on a

Friday. We are accessible to every acquaintance who wants to text us. We feel a deep, lingering

guilt if we aren't being constantly productive or useful to the people around us. Our lives are

complicated because we belong to everyone else. To achieve simplicity, you have to build an

arrière-boutique. You don't need to inherit a French estate with a stone tower to do this.

Your back room might just be a blocked-out hour early in the morning before anyone else wakes up.

It might be a physical room in your house where the door is closed and the phone is left outside.

It is a strict boundary that belongs to absolutely no one but you.

When you step into that space, you drop the role of employee, parent, partner, or friend

and give yourself permission to be completely and unapologetically useless to the rest of the world.

6. Stop Having an Opinion on Everything Montaigne lived through the French Wars of

Religion. It was a chaotic time where Catholics and Protestants were killing each other in the

streets, because both sides were absolutely convinced they had the ultimate truth. At

the same time, university scholars were acting like they had the entire universe figured out.

Everyone was a hundred percent certain they were right, and they were willing

to tear the country apart to prove it. Montaigne knew human logic is flawed.

Our memories are terrible, and our emotions constantly blind us. With our minds and senses

failing us all the time, how could anyone claim to be totally certain about anything?

To keep his own ego in check, Montaigne had a custom coin made. On it was an engraving of a

balanced scale, along with his personal motto: "Que sais-je?" Which means, "What do I know?"

Whenever he felt himself getting dragged into a heated argument, or felt the urge to aggressively

defend his pride, he would remember that phrase. He leaned heavily on an ancient Greek school of

thought called Pyrrhonism. The basic idea is that since absolute certainty is impossible, we don't

have to form a strong opinion about absolutely everything. Sometimes, choosing not to judge or

argue is the simplest path to peace of mind. It means giving yourself permission to just

opt out. It is incredibly freeing to look at a complicated global event, an internet outrage,

or some messy drama between two coworkers, and just say, "I honestly don't know enough

about this to have an opinion." You don't have to spend the next

three hours fighting to defend your position. You just get to step back,

protect your peace, and move on with your day. 7. Communicate Plainly and Honestly

In Montaigne’s time, scholars and philosophers gatekept their knowledge by writing in dense,

complicated Latin. They stuffed their books with heavy jargon, abstractive theories,

and convoluted sentences. The goal wasn't to actually communicate a clear idea to the reader;

it was to prove how educated and superior the writer was compared to the common peasant.

Montaigne rightly found this ridiculous. He believed that hiding behind big words

was usually just a cover for lazy thinking. If you had to use twenty complicated words to

explain a basic concept, it meant you didn’t truly understand it yourself.

So, when he wrote his Essays, he ditched academic Latin and wrote in everyday,

conversational French. He wrote exactly the way he spoke, as a regular guy having an

honest conversation with a friend across a table. Similarly, today, we use dense corporate jargon

to appear more capable at work. In our personal lives, we avoid saying what we really mean. We

drop subtle hints, expect others to read between the lines, or rely on passive-aggressive behavior

instead of expressing our needs honestly. Then, when people misunderstand us, we get upset. To

simplify your life, you have to strip the unnecessary complexity out of your words.

For example, if you don't understand a project at work , just say, "I need clarification on

this." If you made a mistake, don't write a three-paragraph email deflecting the blame;

just say, "Ya,I messed this up, and here is how I am going to fix it."

In your relationships, drop the passive-aggressiveness.

If you want something, ask for it directly. If you are upset, state exactly why, calmly and clearly,

without making the other person have to guess. When your words finally align with your thoughts,

life becomes much simpler. You simply say what you mean, ask for what you want, and move on.

8. Accept the Natural Rhythm of Reality When Montaigne was young, he was terrified

of the future. He read a lot of Stoic philosophy, which taught that the best way to handle life was

to constantly prepare for the worst. This specific Stoic practice is known as negative visualization.

You visualise the worst case scenarios like losing your money, getting sick, or even dying,

with the goal of being emotionally prepared when disaster hits for real.

For a long time, Montaigne worried about protecting his estate and stressed over

his eventual death. But as he got older, he noticed that trying to perfectly manage the

future didn't prevent bad things from happening. It just meant that he suffered twice—once in his

imagination, and then again in reality. He realized that nature has a way of

handling things when the time comes, and constantly preparing for disaster just

ruins the perfectly good days you have right now. He captured this perfectly when he wrote:

"We are never in ourselves; we are always beyond. Fear, desire, and hope push us toward the future."

In his late forties, Montaigne developed kidney stones, an extremely painful condition and often

fatal in the 16th century. Medical treatments at the time were harsh. The doctors of his

day tried to cure people by aggressively bleeding them, prescribing toxic potions,

and forcing them through incredibly painful, experimental procedures to "fix" the body.

Montaigne eventually stopped relying on these treatments.

He realized that all this frantic intervention and the medical "cures" were actually making him more

miserable than the disease itself. Instead of aggressively fighting his illness and panicking

over the pain, he decided to step back and let nature take its course. He accepted that pain,

aging, and sickness are not mistakes. They are just the natural, unavoidable rhythms of

being a biological creature. Just a quick sidenote, while this is a great allegory,

if you do have kidney stones, go and see a doctor. It's not the 16th century anymore.

Anyway let’s carry on with the video. Today, if we get tired, we don't just

rest—we drink more coffee and force ourselves to keep going. We make strict five-year plans,

stress over the news, and lie in bed at 2 AM playing out everything that could possibly

go wrong. If life doesn't go exactly how we planned it, we feel like we failed. We waste a

ton of energy fighting reality, simply because we hate admitting that we can't control everything.

Simplifying your life means you stop wasting your energy fighting things you can't control.

It means accepting that life is messy and unpredictable. It means accepting that

sometimes your plans will fail, your energy will fall, and people will disappoint you.

Instead of wasting your energy resisting what you can't change, you can learn to adapt to it,

to flow with it. Deal with the reality right in front of you, and let the future handle itself.

And that’s our video! So what did you think? Which of Montaigne’s 8 principles resonated with you the

most? And do you have a ‘Back Room’? And if so what does it look like? Maybe you’re ready to

drop one of your ‘artificial desires’? But which one and why? As always, I’ve been Dan, you’ve been

awesome and if you enjoyed what you saw or found it helpful at all, why not check out our full

philosophies for life playlist? And of course for more videos to help you find success and happiness

using beautiful philosophical wisdom, don’t forget to subscribe. Thanks so much for watching.