Part essay, part a philosophical Ted Talk, Plain Life by Antonia Pont – which released just last month – dives into what happens when we stop caving into neoliberalism’s pressure to hustle, perform, and optimise every corner of our lives. As young women working in the startup landscape, we know all too well the tolls of hustle and productivity culture. That’s what drew us to this book – and it’s no surprise that it’s been described as ‘Alain de Botton for hot anti-capitalists’.
With sharp wit and honesty, Pont unpacks burnout, hidden fears, and also looks at what it would look like if we all lived a little differently. We sent a list of questions to Antonia to write a feature about the book – but honestly, her answers were so gold that we just had to include all of them.
This book challenges the assumption that a “plain life” is a lesser one. What does the plain life look to you – and how does it contrast with the ideals of ambition or productivity we’re often told to chase, especially as young women?
Firstly, a plain life wouldn’t have any particular “look”; each of our lives is unique. It couldn’t be pursued via any kind of Program of Imitation. Plainness has very little to do with how we appear. The plainness I’ve been curious about is a subtle atmosphere that enters my experience when I slightly un-believe some of the things I’m told to chase desperately. You mention them: productivity, efficiency, a glossy front… ambition (of perhaps a narrow kind…)
I’m not always convinced that our raft of talk about “productivity” and our framings for striving-as-method always unfold as we assume they will. A question I hold open is whether our modes of talking-to-ourselves (or our collective discourse on action, hounding ourselves towards “doing”, etc.) do what we want them to do. It’s tricky to account for what produces action, and hard to know what will topple out of the actions we make.
Plainness, to return to your question, might be invited when I risk playfulness and permit myself a wider scope of weirdness — weirdness I hope I remain capable of! There’s everyday banality too — lots of life is banal — if we’re lucky! A plain life might get less shut out if I can risk cutting myself a bit of ‘slack’, freaking out less when things are ‘ordinary’. Easing up on my commitment to inner put-downs — ha!
The latter are a learned kind of self-talk (and part of our structural make-up)… an internalised pseudo-morality, that probably also serves interests without much love for me or my close, precious relations and possibilities. I try to notice this when it’s going on and just smile at it. Oh [grin] I’m bullying myself in a very typical, and widely-approved of way, using tired, predictable language… I smile at it patiently and then see what I genuinely want to do next. I’ve never been convinced that we are lazy. I find that it’s fun to do things, and then it’s fun to drift, be distracted, while away time. My levels of “health”, as I see it, have to do with my scope of being in all these modes. To be only productive would be cause for alarm.
I seem to have misplaced the words “productivity” and “ambition” — behind the fridge, in the back of the garage? — and don’t feel invested in relocating them. I prefer inventing my own terms for moving, resting, wanting and living. One can decide to stay vigilant about the poetry-for-living that one applies to this rare life.
You write about anxiety as something that proliferates under certain social conditions, sometimes even without us realising it. What do you think are the cultural forces that have made anxiety feel so ever-present?
Wow, a massive question! I’m sure I can only get it wrong — ha! you have brilliant readers, experts in such things — but here goes… I guess I started to notice, maybe a decade ago, that everybody, or a LOT of people I knew personally, and in the wider world, seemed to be describing complex feelings more and more using two basic categories: anxiety and depression. Firstly, as a poet, I found this constricting. We have a raft of nuanced responses to being alive, surely there were more words for how it felt!
That said, we are existing in a world that could shrink our expansive capacities and structural scope by leaving us standing on foundations that seem less and less secure. This is both an enduring quality of any life, yes (life per se is a bit wobbly, impermanent, by definition), but the socio-economic experiment that we’ve embarked on (the left and the right have embarked on it, too naively, too sinisterly etc.) which has many names, ‘neoliberalism’ being one, has really made this precarity shrill. It’s forged a degree of wobble which is nigh-harrowing for us. As normal, squishy organisms, it can be hard to bear or work with it gracefully.
And… there are facets of this where we do contribute (have contributed via omission) to making things too shrill, more deafening. Perhaps, we’ve not contested structural changes, to laws, to policy, to ways of doing business… that have been proposed with seductive sounding lures, that lead to life getting more wobbly/unfair (and more lucrative for a tiny few). The gig economy is one example. There are others. We’ve run at very bad ideas with open arms. Still do. You’ll probably do it later today… eek. Think of any new gig-logic app you’ve embraced for its convenience… It will always promise you more life hacking potential. And you can unbelieve that and delete it… no one can stop you.) Look out for a profiting middle-person. Always look out for where your money ends up.
Okay, so I’ve been curious about how a wicked tissue of these factors makes us feel uneasy a lot of the time (which we could call ‘anxiety’), but also how we could also, sometimes, more validly call it fear. I might be simply afraid. (Afraid, although I might not be able to identify yet where that feeling is coming from.) For me, anxiety as a word (see, the poet in me again!) tends to imply that the anxiety is my personal problem. People can even say they are anxious. As if that is what they are. No! We are far more. So, yep. Terrifying: some parts of how it is right now. Yes, but we imagine the remedy to this feeling is something to matching the shrillness in reverse, lurching the other way… We can overdo our remedying (playing into the storm we’re already in). If I feel bludgeoned by circumstances, the urge to ‘fix’ this with a massive show of gloss, perfection, look-at-me, hoarding, demanding excessive recognition, I’ll show them, etc. really just tightens the binds.
This is why we need good brains (aka: maybe you’re not “overthinking”! thinking is your power…) We need skills of analysis, decent influences, critical flair and pluck. It’s an art to spotting seductions that will ensnare you a little later! To extricate oneself wisely, before one is mainly just complaining after the fact.
Maybe the idea of plainness is about measured, often-imperceptible ways of responding. Stop giving your money to organisations, business, dudes (or babes)!, who blatantly consider you gullible and irrelevant. Start giving your money, your time, your love and your allegiance, to pockets of life worthy of you and an imaginable future.
How do you think we can push back on ‘hustle’ culture?
Pushing back is always tricky. Technically a push back can risk giving that same thing more energy. It’s a delicate manoeuvre. Becoming very clear about the moments in which one is really entangled with its logics, might be one way. Or… by pointing out how vulgar it is!? Haha. (I need a grin-emoji, here). I suspect many people feel they have no choice except its starved options.
I’m often trying to connect the dots: how Hustle Culture (does it even deserve upper case; what is the opposite of upper case?) might be part of a cocktail that lures us into being complicit with awful-enough stuff. (Think of working conditions across the gig economy — its impact on workers, and businesses… on everybody basically). To attain the ideals of a hustle culture you find yourself positioned to ‘need’ to scrimp, corner-cut and scheme for maximum ‘efficiency’, which often makes convenience look very appealing, even non-optional. Is our drifting towards convenience logics, I’ve asked myself, what operates as our excuse for getting involved, getting cosy, with exploiting other people? It’s a grim thought. hustle culture, I ask myself, might be the ickier side of our crush on convenience, on hacking life, and comes along as its fallout. We can do the sums.
Everyone will have their own complex relationship with the promises and menaces of hustle culture and how they want to experiment with it. We might, though, be protective of our capacity for weirder wants that fall outside its reach. (Sure, I could want to be efficient, now and then, and also I want many other ornate and glorious modes of creature-ness.) I get worried if my wants aren’t also sometimes strange, meandering and inexplicable. Tidy wants unsettle me.
For many, if we are afraid, we might be hopeful that we’ll get an edge from hustling and we bet on its suffering and strictures paying off ‘in the end’ (whenever this ‘end’ might arrive?…) Thus far, I haven’t been convinced. We seem, to me and thank goodness, odd, blundering, inconsistent, loving, a-bit-tired-today, gracious, timid and fierce creatures. Reactive, too, yes. We are many things. One word only among thousands would be ‘efficient’ — okay. Hustle culture seems to think it knows a bit too much about my desire and the pathways of how things happen. I suspect it is often misinformed. Hustle culture makes mistakes, in other words, about causality.
You ask readers to consider how fear, especially the kind we don’t always name, can limit our capacity to ‘want’ differently. Can you unpack this idea?
Yes, this is my personal experience. Fear hides. It disguises itself. It arrives at the party looking far more put together than it is. Fear, in my experience — and as I explore early in the book — often looks like other things. Like being no nonsense, telling it like it is (to myself), being hard-nosed, etc. When I admit that I’m just quite frightened, then the ripple that fear sends out can’t travel as fast to warp so much the situations I’m in. It might seep less insidiously into my interactions with others. Fear is hard; it makes us glassy and no one loves its vibe. I think some kinds of fear (or degrees of it) singe the very substance of our organism. We find it hard to recover. Or we ‘recover’ using strategies that aren’t themselves so great, or that we later have to work diligently to let go of.
That’s why frightening people (young people, ourselves, each other) is a big question for ethics. Some of the language we use, the entertainments we rate, the experiences we accept, they frighten us terribly. (Or, in the parlance of our times: they expose us to, ramp up, ‘anxiety’…) I don’t find being frightened very useful or nourishing. It’s often deployed with the excuse that it’s ‘motivating’. I don’t find that to be the case. For me, it helps to say plainly that fear’s around: ‘I’m just so frightened right now.’ You can even smile or wince while you admit it. A simple sentence, but it opens something. We can then at least be with each other in the fact of that. To be less alone in our fear. This is not nothing. If we call the fallout of concealed fear ‘living strategically’, ‘being realistic’, however, we can’t do much with it. We just plunder on, deeply isolated, but looking shiny and very … ‘certain’. It’s pretty normal to be quite afraid right now, and it isn’t a mental condition or illness.
Maybe we also feel ‘anxious’ when we are activated by ideologies, behind our own backs, to such an extent that we are distorting how we’d want to live, but we can’t quite see what’s activating us. Yes, that might make us feel very… uneasy. And… feeling uneasy (as I write in the book) is sometimes just how it is. How to become less reactive about that.
In a way, this is a deeply political book – how do you see the plain life as a form of resistance or activism in 2025?
Okay…. the book is political, but taking a wide view of what the political is. It’s political in the sense of asking about what we can do to spot how we end up operating so unkindly and destructively, despite ourselves, and it links this with questions about structural facts, choices, habits etc. At the same time, the book ‘holds the reader’s hand’ (maybe), to ask questions about the aspects we enact unthinkingly, to see that with wider eyes, and in the hope that we could lessen our ongoing complicity in …. well, grimy, distressing stuff. And! I continue to be complicit, and I continue to try imperfectly and with a heart that hurts. I need to see how I am so; there’s no easy way out of that. The heart is central here: could I risk a softening, a stronger being-open? How would I manage that? This is a kind of feminism. For sure.
The book asks this with a view including and beyond our atomised selves, with an eye to collective modes of participating. What happens if we affirm that we like other people; we even have a capacity to like ourselves a little more. Not to congratulate ourselves. Not to be pleased with ourselves. Just to like ourselves, plainly. (For this we’d have to spend a little time with ourselves…) We exist for this life briefly among our fellow humans, animal friends, plant collaborators, cosy lichens, gloriously slow rocks, on wise country and under magnanimous skies, in a place that has come to be called ‘Australia’.
Politics. Yes. Or ethics? The question of our action. What we do. How we behave. What we can. What structures influence us, force our hand. What have we said ‘yes’ to without knowing what that would mean (for us, for others if we glance up from our navels!)? We’ve agreed to plenty. So, yes, the book was looking to explore some angles (pretty open ones, since I really don’t have answers) on ways we might inadvertently increase our personal and collective suffering, and how we could ease up with …. that.
What’s something you’d like readers to take away from the book?
I would love readers to consider unlearning tendencies for scolding ourselves (and others) with such grinding force, when it really is obsolete and uninteresting. To accidentally find themselves operating a little more kindly, pressuring themselves less, and to experience and then act and decide from the feeling of vast, plain spaciousness that can open there.
Practising helps, of course. I’m a yogi and Zen-person since a long time now. Readers will have their own plain practices.
To have a clearer sense that how we/I feel does matter (and doesn’t only matter). To become slightly more literate in our world of feelings, thus more nuanced, and therefore be able to cultivate sincere accountability. It’s about saying sorry, right? But not when it’s not true. I can’t live without saying sorry when I need to say it. A distortion happens in a life that will never apologise for the fact of its mistakes, its hurts, its capacity for obliviousness. Like anyone, those of us called ‘women’ are capable of immense hurt, reactivity and resentment, and a feminism that smears that fact isn’t good for our dignity.
For all of this we need a wider set of names for how it feels to be alive. To risk saying our lives with words that we ourselves determine, rather than inheriting these through an ap or oligopoly.
If the book leaves the reader sterner with what is careless, greedy and hateful, I’d be glad. This takes intelligence, so don’t subcontract that out! I think, basically, I’d hope the book might tip its reader towards a fierce decision to practise gentleness (which bears no relation to weakness, and is an advanced practice) towards anything suffering. Which would be all of us.
Plain Life: On Thinking, Feeling, and Deciding by Antonia Ponton is out now.
Top photo – Pictured: Antonia Ponton, Source: Supplied