Working more? Spending more? Enjoying life less?

Maybe it's time to simplify.

 

By Ed Severson
ARIZONA DAILY STAR

"It isn't about self-deprivation," said Andrews, the Seattle-based author of "The Circle of Simplicity: Return to the Good Life" (HarperCollins, $12). "We're saying (to) seek out the things that are really fulfilling."

Her workshops offer alternatives to the work/buy/rush syndrome by showing participants how to live simpler lives.

Andrews is part of a small but enthusiastic voluntary simplicity movement - at most, 10 percent to 12 percent of the population - that began in the late 1980s.

According to Gerald Celente, executive director of the Rhinebeck, N.Y.-based Trends Research Institute, the voluntary simplicity movement is about to get compulsory.

"Involuntary simplicity is going to be one of the top trends in 2001," he said. "We have probably seen the best the economy is going to look in our lifetimes."

However, Celente said people might decide that tighter times aren't so bad.

"It doesn't cost anything to take a hike, but it costs a lot to go to Disneyland," he said. "People are going to realize that working 24/7 is not going to bring you the kind of happiness you want."

Psychologist Alice F. Chang knows. She is among the Tucson professionals who tend to those who have been emotionally scarred and wounded in the increasingly fast-paced fracas of daily life.

"People don't have the time to do everything that seems to be needed to be done," Chang said. "Many feel overwhelmed."

Which is exactly what Andrews hears from people in her simplicity workshops.

"People say that they don't have time for friends and family," Andrews said. "There's a feeling in our culture that 'I've got to hurry up, because I could be making money.' "

According to Andrews, the problem is that people try to fill empty lives with the wrong things.

For instance, she argues that frequently shopping becomes a kind of addiction in people's lives.

"Shopping fills the emptiness," she said. "You might get a kind of brief high over buying something, then you're back there looking for something else."

Which means that besides spending themselves into debt, people aren't leaving time for things that would really fulfill them, such as reading, relaxing in a park or spending time with friends.

"Think of Jesus, Buddha or Gandhi," she said. "None of them would be at the shopping mall spending their money."

As Andrews sees it, the simplicity movement is not about self-deprivation.

"It is the examined life," she said.

That examination is done through simplicity circles, small groups of people who meet regularly to help each other simplify their lifes.

The idea came from Sweden, which started study circles in the 19th century, when the country was suffering from poverty and lack of education.

Those study circles have been credited with helping to create modern Sweden, which has one of the world's highest standards of living.

"The support you get (from a simplicity circle) makes it very effective in simplifying your life," said Randy Hays, a member of St. Mark's Presbyterian Church, who helped lead a simplicty workshop there.

Hays became interested in the simplicity movement when he was working 80- and 90-hour weeks managing a retail store.

"Somewhere between my daughter being a little girl of 3 or 4 and getting to be 14, a lot of that time disappeared," he said.

The message of simplicity sunk in: He cut back his hours.

"I went to my daughter's soccer games and got to see her make her first goal," he said. "There I was on a beautiful day and got to share that with her and with my wife."

Andrews said that taking part in simplicity circles leads to small, steady changes in people's lives.

"When this happens, people begin to feel very good about life," she said.

With the ink newly dried on her Ph.D. from Stanford, Cecile Andrews was merrily climbing the career ladder. She was Director of Continuing Education at North Seattle Community College and was in line for a vice-presidency.

As time went on, however, she grew increasingly restless. She didn't like the long, boring meetings; she didn't like dressing like an administrator. She didn't even like the way "vice president" sounded. ("Everybody's a vice president.")

After a period of soul-searching, Andrews quit her administrative job and is now a freelance "community educator." She downsized her petty cash drawer, rented out some rooms in her house, and spends her day teaching, writing, and simply living. Her story echoes that of a growing minority of people who are reversing the ladder of upward mobility and climbing down to a life that the Joneses would sniff at.

Simplicity exerts a seductive tug when the price tag for "lifestyle" is a life; when "success" spells 60-plus joyless hours a week to buy the toys that there is no time to play with. Simplicity is a fetching notion when the tagline for our times is "the Age of Anxiety" and Prozac is the fin de siecle wonder drug.

After leaving her administrative job, Cecile Andrews wrote The Circle of Simplicity, which advocates a centrist approach to voluntary simplicity and lays the groundwork for 10-week study groups she calls "simplicity circles".

Simplifiers adhering to one or another of these formats meet all over the world. They are a diverse band, from professionals jaded with their frantic lives to bright-eyed students just beginning their professional lives, from those who want to empty their closets to those who want to return to the land.

Voluntary simplicity is where Green meets Gandhi. It's the crossroads where sustainability, quality of life, and spirituality intersect. "Outwardly simple, inwardly rich" is the movement's credo. Rather than pursue "more," simplifiers say, be content with "enough." Rather than long hours at a stultifying job, discover your "real work" then downsize your desires to do more of it. As an added perk, your new, simpler lifestyle will be healthier for you and the planet.

The gospel of simplicity is even rattling cages in the marketing meccas. A poll commissioned by the Merck Family Fund found that 28 percent of respondents had "voluntarily made changes . . . which resulted in making less money."

Increasing prosperity; diminishing returns

Consumption is American. We have all absorbed the notion that avid consumers create a robust economy, and what's good for the economy is good for consumers. And in fact, our economy has blossomed breathlessly since the 1950s.

Inglehart has found that once people become economically secure enough not to worry about starving, accumulating more and more wealth adds less and less to a person's well-being and contentment. The advantages of getting "more" level out very quickly after everyone gets "enough."

"Once you get two cars in every garage, are three cars better still? You get to a point of diminishing return, and in some cases, a counter-productive return. We're in that situation now in rich countries," he says. Check out any metropolitan freeway during rush hour for a demonstration of diminishing returns.

Why do we accumulate relentlessly when it makes us sick and miserable? Is it a fatal flaw of humankind, or do we shop for some other reason? In a Merck poll, 75 percent of women and 69 percent of men agreed that buying things is a "substitute for what's missing in our lives."

In a society that many people experience as competitive and uncaring, accumulating the trappings of wealth and prestige is a shaky finger in the dike of self-esteem. Our title and the lifestyle we can sustain become the barometer of our worth and success.

Redefining success

When Andrews considered quitting her administrative job, her biggest stumbling block wasn't the insecurity of a freelance income. It was the loss of her title. "Who will I be when I don't have a title? That was a big one for me. I didn't want to be a nobody."

Work, and the identity it bestows, is the fulcrum upon which most of our lives are balanced. It provides for our necessities and supports our excess. It defines who we are and apportions our lives into neat eight-hour chunks. It can add satisfaction and significance to our lives, or it can be monotonous, meaningless, or demeaning.

Discovering the work you love to do and having more time to do it is part of the message of simplicity. Or simply having more time to spend with friends and family, or more time to garden or hunt for beach glass. If happiness becomes the yardstick of success, the simplicity-seekers say, it's worth sacrifice.

How to find your passion, follow your bliss, and earn money, too

Something deep in human nature desires meaningful work. A lucky few are paid for doing work they love; most of us accommodate. We cram meaning into the cracks of professional and personal responsibility. We write poetry or build model trains late at night when the work and the kids are put to bed.

Most of us can't quit our jobs to do the things we love. But we can make changes that will allow us to do more of what we love. Here are three steps offered by Cecile Andrews to help you follow your bliss.

1. Discover your passion. This is the pasttime that utterly absorbs you. Some people describe it as their "real work," the work they were meant to do. Think about it. What do you really love to do?

2. Do less of what you don't like; do more of what you like. This is the strategic part. Set up a freedom strategy. How can you free up time to do your real work? Reducing your expenses will reduce your need for income, and that may allow you to work fewer hours. Can you make money doing what you like? Can you incorporate more of what you like into your present job?


3. Make your present work more enjoyable. "There are two ways to be happy," says Inglehart. "One is to get what you like, and the other is to like what you get. They both work."

Discovering the work you love to do and having more time to do it is part of the message of simplicity. Or simply having more time to spend with friends and family, or more time to garden or hunt for beach glass. If happiness becomes the yardstick of success, the simplicity-seekers say, it's worth sacrifice.

"I know people who have attended top law schools and started out with huge salaries, but with the expectation of 80-hour weeks and no personal life at all. A number of them have dropped out and chosen other lives, even if they make much less. These people have probably made wise choices in light of their personal lives," says Inglehart.

Back at the firm, however, their colleagues were probably shaking their heads in consternation. But that's the point, isn't it? To confound the conventional wisdom that equates success with power and acquisition. To think independently enough to determine your own success yardstick, which may have everything to do with time and work and relationships, but probably very little to do, really, with acquiring things.

While living simply isn't a happiness guarantee, it can clear away the distractions and the excuses. It can frame the big questions from a new perspective and offer different kinds of options. If you don't need a five bedroom house on the golf course, what would you do with the finances liberated from real estate? If a used Toyota would serve your transportation needs as well as a new SUV, could you take that trip to Africa? If you decide you have enough, could you stop working so hard for more?

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