Given the post-Thanksgiving consumerist frenzy this "Black Friday," in which fights broke out and people were trampled at various stores offering competitive deep discounts, this is a good time to mention Duane Elgin's 1981 book Voluntary Simplicity,
Elgin's work emerges from a concern for the environmental consequences of our mass consumption lifestyles. His book exhorts us to save the planet and our souls by "living with balance in order to find a life of greater purpose."
Elgin was a social scientist at SRI International and had been studying what he perceived as a trend toward voluntary simplicity as a growing alternative lifestyle. He took the term from Richard Gregg's 1936 essay, "The Value of Voluntary Simplicity" (pdf here):
Voluntary simplicity involves both inner and outer condition. It means singleness of purpose, sincerity and honesty within, as well as avoidance of exterior clutter, of many possessions irrelevant to the chief purpose of life. It means an ordering and guiding of our energy and our desires, a partial restraint in some directions in order to secure greater abundance of life in other directions. It involves a deliberate organization of life for a purpose.
Elgin was quick to note that voluntary simplicity is not inherently a life of "...poverty, antagonism to progress, rural living, and the denial of beauty." It's not about renunication of wealth or social engagement; it's about focus.
The Simple Living Network offers "Tools, Examples, & Contacts for Conscious, Simple, Healthy & Restorative Living." The network includes a program based on Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence by the late Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, which focuses on simplifying your life by changing your relationship to money. The network hosts a nine-step program created by the New Road Map Foundation. (There's also a set of audio cassettes from seminars led by Dominguez, called Transforming Your Relationship with Money.)
Dominguez died in 1997, but Vicki Robin is still active through the New Road Map Foundation and its projects, notably Conversation Cafés. Think about the pre-Christmas consumerist frenzy that kicked off yesterday, Black Friday, then read about Robin's perspective:
Indeed, most people in North America engage in the dominant myth of "more is better" without question and even good, caring people rationalize excess as necessity. Because of this, so many people, with a helpless shrug, say they need ever more money to meet the demands of "modern life," citing a vague boogey-person called "cost of living." "More is better" now means "more money is better". This acquiescence to excess then requires putting up thicker and thicker walls between our consciences and the billions of people who live in poverty. If we were selling our time and perhaps our souls to a system that truly fed us, that would be one thing. But the economy is not designed for people; rather, people are trained to serve the economy. In a downturn, the economy sheds people to preserve property and profits. And our relationship with money is intimately tied up with how dependent we are on this economy.
But what's the alternative? We all need money to survive. For money, we need jobs. For jobs, we need a thriving economy. For a thriving economy we need to serve the economy in some ways. Should we go back to the woods and eat nuts and berries? Deprive ourselves of the necessities of life in this complex world phones, computers, cars, televisions, not to speak of houses, a hot shower in the morning and good food? No.
One route out of this dilemma is to redefine money in terms of something real to us, rather than abstracted access to a never-ending stream of goods and services. I offer this alternative to "store of value" and "means of exchange:" money equals our life energy. By this I mean the hours we invest on the job to earn it. Time is all we tangibly have on this earth. In our youth it seems unlimited, but somewhere just south of 40 or so we become aware that our days are numbered. Every hour we invest on the job is an hour not invested directly in our children, our mates, our community, our health, our spiritual development, our search for meaning, or our contribution to the larger life. Our jobs may, in more or less abstract ways, relate to all these other spheres. We earn money to support our family. Our professions are sometimes essential to the social fabric. We learn lessons through our jobs that imprint on our souls.
Voluntary simplicity/simple living movements owe a conceptual debt to E.F. Schumacher, author of Small Is Beautiful : Economics as if People Mattered,
...used to measuring the 'standard of living' by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is 'better off' that a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption. . . . The less toil there is, the more time and strength is left for artistic creativity. Modern economics, on the other hand, considers consumption to be the sole end and purpose of all economic activity.
The E.F. Schumacher Society is actively extending Schumacher's thinking with programs that "demonstrate that both social and environmental sustainability can be achieved by applying the values of human-scale communities and respect for the natural environment to economic issues."
