'Tis A Gift To Be Simple

By David Hirning
The Free Press

America is the biggest consumer nation in the world, and no time of year displays this wanton spending mania as blatantly as the Christmas season. Many retailers count on the annual holiday shopathon to provide up to half of their total yearly sales.
This is the time of year when every kid gets the "gimmes," every wallet gets that empty feeling, and everyone gets a headache. As the cash registers ring, the mountain of debt that the average American carries gets higher and higher.
There is, however, a growing movement in the Pacific Northwest and across the country that rejects this mindless consumerism and asks people to examine their relationship with money. This concept, most commonly known as "voluntary simplicity," advocates a year-round, scaled-down lifestyle that allows people to reclaim something precious that they seem to have lost: their own free time.
Perhaps you've heard of this "trend." Voluntary simplicity (AKA "downshifting," "simple living," "dropping out") is everywhere. It has been the subject of multiple feature stories in the New York Times and Seattle Times to name just two major newspapers, and the focus of TV coverage and major monthly and weekly magazine pieces.
Seattle is an especially good place to try to simplify one's life. Several important publications and foundations are based here. At the first and only voluntary simplicity (VS) meeting I attended here, I was accosted by a senior editor from Esquire magazine, of all things. (The scribe didn't end up using my sage opinions in his piece, which was published in last May's issue with a "mid-life crisis, corporate drop-out" spin and the headline, "What Makes Sammy Walk?")
The VS movement, popularly thought to be a response to the consumption-crazed 1980s, is really not new. Henry David Thoreau had it down back in the mid-19th century. In 1845, at the age of 28, Thoreau voluntarily went to live in a shack on the shores of Walden Pond in Massachusetts. There he spent the time reading, thinking and writing what would become Walden, or Life in the Woods, one of the most famous works of American literature.
Even then, Thoreau could see what the American "work and get rich" ethic was doing to people physically and spiritually. In Walden he wrote: "But men [sic] labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before."
Some point out that the hippie culture of the 1960s also advanced the argument that the American way of life was environmentally harmful and aesthetically unappealing. However, that wave of simplicity was largely generational, part of the broader rejection of the values of the ruling class. What makes the 1990s brand of VS different is its growing acceptance among many age groups, from the "How did I get here?" aging boomers to the "Where am I going?" mid-level drones to the "Screw that life" Xers.
All of which begs the question, what is the alternative? Should we all emulate Thoreau, live in a shack and survive literally hand to mouth? (No.) Can we meet our needs without working a distasteful/stressful/back-breaking/time-sucking/polluting/pointless job? (It's possible.) At what price? Do we have to give up our car? Our weekends in Vancouver? Our CD habit? Our microbrews? Our morning mocha?
The answer, which is no shocker, is yes and no. In a basic sense, voluntary simplicity means giving up some things. In a larger sense, however, VS is about a complete change of lifestyle. It is about giving up the American way of life as we know it (a car for every adult, a closet bursting with clothes, a kitchen full of high-tech "labor-saving" appliances, an entertainment center and a wall of media to insert in it, etc.). But in giving up our lifestyle, we get back our life.
In his best-selling book, Europe through the Back Door, author Rick Steves talks about travel and what it can teach people. In particular, he mentions the Italians, who pass the evenings in many towns sitting around the main square, watching the children play. Steves calls it "la dolce far niente" or "the sweetness of doing nothing." It is something that Americans seem incapable of comprehending or practicing. Certainly not in the age of cellular phones, laptop computers, fax machines, and pagers - all machines which have made working all the time that much easier.
Doing nothing may not sound so exciting, but the alternative is the spiral of weekends on the job, parents using the TV as a babysitter, unhealthy eating on the go, limited communication with friends and family members, and stress-induced violence and heart attacks. In this context, nothing is really something.
An attempt to explain this workaholic syndrome is made in another best-seller, Generation X, by Douglas Coupland (like Steves, another writer from this region). Two of the main characters discuss the problem. One complains, "God, Margaret. You really have to wonder why we even bother to get up in the morning. I mean, really: Why work? Simply to buy more stuff? That's just not enough." The other character counters by telling him that he "should realize that the only reason we all go to work in the morning is because we're terrified of what would happen if we stopped. We're not built for free time as a species. We think we are, but we aren't."
I'm sure most people would scoff at this analysis. Who wouldn't love to sleep in every morning? Well, don't be so sure. Sure, everyone would love a week off from their job, but what if you have no job? What if you have no occupational title, which is the equivalent of an identity in latter-day America? What if you have to survive instead by cutting costs and doing freelance work? By bartering with friends and neighbors for goods and services? By moving to a smaller house or apartment?
Free time takes some getting used to, as do alternative measures of making a living. If you think you can handle more free time, and less stress, then try cutting back. Stop working Saturdays. Watch where the money goes. Take a sack lunch. Look into a VS study circle. Sell the second (or third) car. Kill your television. Have a yard sale. Make your own Christmas gifts, or give yourself a strict gift budget and then stick to it. Turn a deaf ear to Madison Avenue and the siren call of the shopping mall this holiday season. Take back your life.

(For more info on voluntary simplicity, there is a nice resource brochure on the subject at the Seattle Public Library, which I might add is a great place to practice VS. To find out more about study circles, look for Simple Living Journal or write to them at 2319 North 45th, Box 149, Seattle 98103.)

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Contents on this page were published in the December/January, 1996 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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