Plain living: The search for simplicity

Christian Century, June 30, 1999 by Trudy Bush

THE JONESES ARE surrendering!" a TV news reporter proclaims. "The family with whom we've tried to keep up is throwing in the towel!" The camera pans to four desperate looking people standing in front of a large house. "We've had it," the wife says. "We're exhausted. We never see each other. And we have so much debt that we can't keep up anymore. It's just not worth it."

So begins Beyond Affluenza, a recent public television special made in Seattle. The one-hour program and its prequel, Affluenza, document the current expression of an ideal that recurs throughout American history--simplicity. The Puritans and Quakers emigrated here to live out an austere and simple ethic. The founding fathers believed that civic virtue is accompanied by material restraint. In the 1840s, Henry Thoreau sought to live deliberately at Walden Pond, and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott experimented in simple rural living. That experiment was repeated in the back-to-nature communes of the 1960s and '70s, which were inspired in part by people like Scott and Helen Nearing who had pioneered the simple life of rural homesteading decades earlier.

Many people today are again willing to trade relentless consumption for a more intellectually and spiritually rich life. For most of these people, the pursuit of simplicity means gaining control of their money and their time so that both can be used more intentionally. By downsizing their expectations of material affluence, people are able to discover and invest in what really matters to them, whether that is family, relationships, community involvement, environmental responsibility or a new, more satisfying kind of work.

Who is pursuing the simple life? Among those trying to live more deliberately is a young man who leaves a lucrative position at Microsoft in order to do what he has always wanted--be an actor and help others by volunteering, especially as a Big Brother. A family opts to live on less money after the husband refuses to accept a job transfer that would have him designing weapons and the wife decides she wants to stay at home with their children; to act on these values, the family renovates an old house, relies on bicycles instead of a car, and grows some of its own food. A 50-year-old corporate attorney retires from his practice in order to run an environmental organization; he and his wife recycle and compost so effectively that they fill only one garbage can a month. And a couple who keeps a large home in the suburbs decides to rent out part of it to graduate students from other countries. The rental income frees them to devote fewer hours to paid employment, and they are enriched by their friendship with their tenants.

The idea of living more simply has spawned hundreds of books, videos and seminars. While some of the recent books can be classified with pseudotherapeutic self-help literature, many are both useful and philosophically serious.

What is making this ideal so appealing to people in a time of such conspicuous affluence? The search for a simpler life is usually a response to a crisis like war or economic depression, according to historian David Shi, author of The Simple Life. But Shi thinks there is a "psychological malaise" at work in our culture. "We've never before had such high levels of anxiety and depression among affluent people. Though people are materially well off, they're discovering that their lives seem hollow and meaningless. They're searching for meaning and, in many eases, they're also looking for alternatives to the frenetic pace of their lives."

Shi, president of Furman University, points out that during the '90s the work week actually increased for the first time in more than a century. "Even our leisure time has become scheduled, has lost its spontaneity. And among all the hoopla about our prosperity is the disturbing fact that the three most commonly prescribed drugs are an ulcer medication, an antidepressant and a pain reliever. Underneath the surface of success and material splendor, many Americans are struggling to cope."

If the voluntary simplicity movement has a geographical center, it is the Pacific Northwest, particularly Seattle. That's the home of three of the most dedicated practitioners and eloquent advocates of the simple life--Vicki Robin, Cecile Andrews and Janet Luhrs. Seattle is also the home of Earth Ministry, "a Christian, ecumenical, environmental, nonprofit organization" which has just published Simpler Living, Compassionate Life: A Christian Perspective, an anthology of essays and a curriculum intended to be used by churches. The people in Seattle are, Shi says, developing an infrastructure that the simplicity movement has seldom had.

On the day I visited Robin at her home near the university, the scene was bustling with people who were carrying around furniture and setting up a picnic table in the garden. "A team is here working on something called the `ecological footprint,'" Robin explained. The ecological footprint is a concept developed by Mathis Wackernagel of the University of British Columbia to measure humans' impact on the environment. "He worked out a way to translate objects into the number of acres it would take to produce the material for them," Robin said. "This morning the team weighed the futon on which you're sitting to see how many pounds of cotton it contains. They're now working on a bedroom, and they'll do the kitchen next."