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To the next chapter - Sustainability: The Current Buzzword
Money Choices
Consumer Choices
Time Choices
Simplicity Choices
Voluntary Simplicity Sites and Workshops
Elgin's Ecological Ways of Living
"No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch on his clothes; yet I am sure that there is a greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and un-patched clothes, than to have a sound conscience." - H. D. Thoreau, "Walden"
"Happiness is not a possession to be prized, it is a quality of thought, a state of mind." - Daphne du Maurier, "Rebecca"
"We can conserve energy and tread more lightly on the earth while we expand our culture's capacity for joy." - Richard Louv "Last Child in the Woods".
Now we come to the first chapter of this book that describes a holistic and committed response to the problems of humanity and Earth. Voluntary simplicity, or living simply, is a choice to turn away from our pervasive consumer lifestyle in order to live a less hectic and more enjoyable life, and perhaps to reduce our individual and collective environmental impact.
I prefer the term "voluntary simplicity" to "simple living" because it emphasizes that this is a voluntary choice of lifestyle, an option, which we are not forced into. Living a life of simplicity is not the same as living in poverty, because poverty is not a choice but a forced necessity. Simplifying one's life does not need to be an all or nothing process. It is not deciding to take a tin cup and wander the streets seeking alms, though that too is a choice some make. It is, rather, a choice to slow down, to live frugally, and to enjoy life free of many of the multitudinous products and demands of our culture.
Simplicity is not simple; it takes deep desire and commitment to resist the incessant drumbeats of advertising, of making more money, and of patriotically buying more than you can afford in order to keep our economy growing. Choices to live more simply will not be maintained without some underlying set of moral or spiritual beliefs. Guy Claxton says "advocacy of 'voluntary simplicity' or any other significant lifestyle change, which does not understand [the requirement] that these habits are the visible tip of a massive and intricate belief system, is bound to increase frustration, guilt, hostility, and thereby generate heat and friction - but not much motion" [quoted "Exploring Deep Ecology" by the Northwest Earth Institute]. Development of such a belief system is the subject of ECOSHIFT's Part 4 "Changing Human Spirituality".
Duane Elgin, author of the classic "Voluntary Simplicity" book, describes voluntary simplicity as leading a life that is outwardly more simple, and inwardly more rich. Freeing ourselves from some of the demands of our culture allows us to enjoy our life more. We may make such choices not necessarily from a desire to reduce our adverse impact on Earth, but maybe just to live a more rewarding, fulfilling, and happier life.
In "Radical Simplicity", Jim Merkel lays out his program for achieving an extreme form of simple living. He uses "Your Money or Your Life" by Dominguez and Robin to plan for financial self-sufficiency, Ecological Footprint Analysis (see the Sustainability chapter) for determining a personal footprint and how to reduce it, and a sense of place for inspiration (see the Bioregionalism chapter).
The remainder of this chapter (and much of this book) describe significant lifestyle changes. However, attempting to make lots of changes all at once is overwhelming and counter-productive. In working toward simplicity you may decide to choose just one area to concentrate on for a year (e.g. time scheduling, travel, job, money, clothes, equipment). By then your new practices in that area will be automatic and natural and you can move on to another area. It is important to remember that we are all in transition, we are each in different places along a continuum of change, and we are all changing at different rates.
The money part of voluntary simplicity involves learning to save instead of to spend, to reduce "wants" that cost money, and to determine the minimum income really needed in order to be satisfied. There seem to me to be three choices of life path:
Obviously there are millions of variations on these three basic scenarios. Dominguez and Robin direct much of their attention to choice A. I chose B. I have many friends who have chosen C. There is no one right way, but the principle is that the more you can reduce your need for income the more likely you are to find satisfying work that can provide that income.
"We rarely have wants for goods that do not exist" Peter Shrag once remarked in the Saturday Review. In other words, we cannot want something until someone produces it and then convinces us that we need it to make our life easier, or happier, or healthier. Shopping is supposedly as American as apple pie, but what a cost it induces in time, indebtedness, and impact on Earth! The Media Foundation, publishers of Adbusters magazine, invented "Buy Nothing Day" on the day after Thanksgiving to help raise awareness of the adverse impacts of consumerism. (I finished writing this book on Buy Nothing Day 2008, the very Black Friday when a Wal-Mart employee was trompled to death by an onrushing horde of consumers.) The Media Foundation wants to create a new media culture that does not have commercialism as its heart and soul.
It takes a powerful commitment to resist advertising in our time. The commitment can come from the ethical, spiritual basis behind voluntary simplicity. It can come from a belief that humanity must decrease its impact on Earth. Or it can come just from recognition that many commercials are ridiculous and stupid and that the needs the advertised products appear to meet are manufactured by the advertisers themselves. With commitment it is possible to learn to use the TV mute button, to be blind to ads in newspapers and magazines, to eliminate junk mail, and to realize that buying something is not really the route to health and happiness.
A variety of methods exist for reducing junk mail, spam, and junk phone calls:
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Resisting advertising and reducing buying can come easily to a single adult, but becomes more complicated when living as part of a family. I have been married for 48 years and have two daughters and four grandchildren. Though my wife and children (and their spouses) have been very supportive of and join in my efforts to simplify, family desires do make serious lifestyle changes more difficult. The Northwest Earth Institute has developed a new study group program called "Healthy Children, Healthy Planet", which addresses issues of consumerism, advertising, and children. Greg Rowland [quoted by Jonathan Freedland in Resurgence, March/April 2006, p.41] says in response to advertising-induced demands for food and other stuff, "The real question is why are parents not strong enough to say 'No'? It's because they feel guilty. Giving in and buying stuff is the easy way of parenting for 'time-poor' parents."
Our society's great emphasis on gift-giving, not only at Christmas but at manufactured holidays like Valentine's Day and Halloween, drives further buying. Voluntary simplicity greatly reduces purchase of holiday gifts. Alternatives for Simple Living lists a variety of non-consumer alternatives for Christmas, such as monetary gifts to appropriate non-profit groups, service gifts, or home-made certificates for outdoor activities.
Voluntary simplicity involves making purchasing choices that are governed by the Earth-centered and community subject matter of earlier ECOSHIFT chapters on Energy, Food, and Housing. Choices include buying local, American, green, free-trade, indigenous, and recycled products (for instance on the RealGoods web site), as well as support for locally-owned food stores, book stores, hardware stores, etc. But watch out for green-washed items like the "eco-jacket" of 100% organic cotton, which is made in China! Voluntary simplicity tries to avoid the corporate giants who are controlling our lives and destroying Earth's support systems.
For many people, choosing to live more simply involves time rather than possessions. Current American culture, at least, must be the most highly scheduled culture the Earth has ever known. What ever happened to "free time"? We rush to work, taking a lot of time commuting to distant jobs. We ferry children around to the many activities we believe are good for them. We volunteer for many causes that we believe in. And we spend enormous amounts of time, in response to advertising, shopping for things we don't need and won't use. Then we collapse in front of the TV in order to mindlessly recover from our scurrying.
Learning how to manage time better can involve many lifestyle changes and takes the same deep commitment as other forms of simplicity. Simplifying life means learning to make choices, to think before saying YES, to say NO, to give up commitments, to live close to work, to work reasonable hours, and to reduce the scheduling of children.
Simple living involves at least thinking about, if not acting upon, those bumper stickers that say "Kill your TV", "Kill your computer", and "Kill your car". All these are time wasters. All these are interactions with machines rather than with real people like your children. And I would add, "Kill your headphones". It is difficult to be in touch with your surroundings and the Earth with headphones on. Kill them and learn to listen to the birds, the wind, the streams, and, yes, even the traffic.
An important debate within the Great Turning is whether computers and global communication, such as the World-wide Web are good or bad. Jerry Mander, in "In the Absence of the Sacred", argues that such communication is destroying local communities and particularly local native sustainable cultures. On the other hand, Duane Elgin, in "Awakening Earth", argues that global interconnectedness is necessary if we are to move through the present crisis. Obviously, developers of the web sites mentioned in ECOSHIFT believe Elgin rather than Mander. Apparently I do too, or I wouldn't have written this book on the web. I believe the internet, in general, helps to build global community, even though it can also be a tool for disinformation and falsehood. But the computer, which was originally intended to simplify life by eliminating hand calculations and hand-written record-keeping, has actually made life much more complicated. We are now subject to overloads of information on the web and of communication by e-mail. Computers have not even been able to produce the desired "paperless office". According to the New Scientist of November 22, 2003, the world's offices used 43% more paper in 2002 than they did in 1999! Simplicity with respect to computers may mean just keeping their demands on our time in check and using them for "business" rather than for recreation. I respect and admire those few remaining people I know who have resisted getting involved with computers at all.
For Earth-centered people, simplicity means spending less time watching television and playing video games, less time in team sports, less time in shopping, and more time in nature, especially with the whole family. It means taking walks in the woods and fields, learning the birds, the flowers, the trees, the clouds, and the stars. It may involve hiking, backpacking, and camping out. It involves staying in your own bioregion and getting to know it really well (see the Bioregionalism chapter).
A frequent first step into simplicity involves getting rid of "clutter". All the stuff that we are talked into buying accumulates. It seems that no matter how much we have, it is never enough to satisfy. There is always a new gadget, a new technology, without which life will not be worth living. Exercise and recreational equipment is bought and not used or used only briefly. (All my cross country skis come from the Dover, Massachusetts, town dump where they are left, still in fine condition, by their too wealthy former owners.) New furniture gets bought but the old furniture is kept. People rent space at storage facilities, build additions, or even move to bigger houses in order to store their accumulations. Getting rid of clutter takes time and commitment to do right by selling things or giving them away, by trying to find the right new home for each item, and only in the last resort by recycling or discarding to a landfill. The rewards for reducing clutter include the satisfaction of disposing of things that we will probably never use, the knowledge that we have saved our children a lot of hassle after we die, and the reduction of temptation to buy more useless things in the future.
Simplicity means avoiding the latest technological tools, kitchen apparatuses, plastic battery-operated toys, media and communications equipment, and other modern marvels that sooner or later break. In our throwaway culture repair shops have become scarce and most broken items are chucked and replaced by newer but not necessarily better versions. Simplicity means walking and running, which are practically free, instead of buying expensive indoor and outdoor recreational and exercise equipment. Simplicity often means using manual tools, which rarely break and last almost forever. Though it may take longer, manual tools provide both exercise and greater satisfaction than using the latest gadget machine.
Simplicity can help to create REAL family time. This does not mean standing by chatting with other adults while your child plays soccer. It means exercising together: running, playing tennis, swimming, hiking, or orienteering. It means eating meals together with the TV off. It means playing games together. It means getting out in nature, not watching Animal Planet or the Discovery Channel. For the importance of nature time for children see the Ecopsychology chapter and Richard Louv's "Last Child in the Woods".
When we spend less money on stuff and junk food and watch less television and spend less time on the computer, what will we do with our time and money? Society needs to find other ways to circulate money. It needs to change the Gross National Product from a record of how fast we can buy stuff and trash it to what activities we support and what we learn. We can start to change the economy by spending our new-found time and money on theater and the arts, on lifelong education, on nature study, and on exercise. The result will be a different kind of life, one that is more enjoyable, more relaxed and healthier, more studious and knowledgeable, and more rewarding.
Solo BackpackingI have found solo backpacking to be excellent practice for living simply. I learned how little a person really NEEDS in training for and then through-hiking the Appalachian Trail in 1995. Though I backpacked only small parts of the Trail (my expedition with Warren Doyle is another story), I have since enjoyed light-weight backpacking on numerous multi-day trips. Everything I need for up to seven days outdoors I can carry in a pack that weighs less than 30 pounds, including food and water. By resupplying food at 5 to 7 day intervals I can go on indefinitely except in winter. The goal of minimizing pack weight creates simplification by eliminating "wants". And I really enjoy being alone in what I call the "real" world, as opposed to the artificial human-created one. |
Although prophets have preached the virtues of voluntary simplicity for millennia, the current simplicity movement has a sounder base in opposition to the consumer culture and in respect for all of creation on Earth. An increasing number of resources and organizations are available to help with learning to live more simply.
The Simple Living Network is a fine source for links and books. Choose "Resources" for the many books you can order directly. Choose "Beginners" and cruise the Web of Simplicity. This is a very rich site. Financial Integrity, founded by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, has study guides on low consumption and simple living. Alternatives for Simple Living has comments, links, and books and is especially good around Christmas.
Curricula for simplicity study groups are available from the EcoTeam program of the Empowerment Institute, Cecile Andrews' Circle of Simplicity, and the Northwest Earth Institute. The Granite Earth Institute, with which I am associated, is the New Hampshire affiliate of NWEI. Such groups create a community of like-minded people who support each other in the difficult and lengthy process of changing personal lifestyles. I have heard this called "preaching to the choir", but even the choir needs continued motivation and support to be permanent .
Much more could be, and has been said about choosing to live more simply. I will just paraphrase Duane Elgin's "Common Expressions of Ecological Ways of Living" from his classic book, "Voluntary Simplicity" [p. 32-35]. Those choosing to simplify life tend to think and act in a number of the following ways:
ECOSHIFT: Voluntary Simplicity - by Tony Federer