VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY

Voluntary Simplicity

Voluntary Simplicity: To Reevaluate What It Means To Be Happy And Fulfilled

The logic of "Voluntary Simplicity" indicates different things in our minds. Specially, when we compare the value of a dollar or the average US household imcome in the current scenario. When economists began checking twice to see how this year's American consumer answered the call to prime the fiscal pump with commercial Yuletide cheer, the news was less than festive: Holiday sales appeared to be the worst in several years, and may not even meet the 4.5 percent increase that some had predicted beforehand, that in itself a grim projection compared with the 7 percent growth retailers have clocked for each of the previous three seasons.

If we look into the facts about juvenile devience then we may find that the toll of young offenders is increasing day by day. In light of this new found frugality, one wonders how many stockings were stuffed with the self-help tomes of what has become known as the "voluntary simplicity" movement. (Doherty and Etzioni, 2003) Judging by sales figures, quite a few. Ranging from Elaine St. James's Simplify Your Life and Inner Simplicity to Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin's Your Money or Your Life, no fewer than five of these books have been published in the past few years, most landing squarely on the best-seller lists. And so a grass-roots movement expressed in newsletters like "The Tightwad Gazette" has itself become a big business, with its editors pulling in hefty royalties, touring the country, running infomercial-like seminars and earning a blessing from the twin lions flanking the doorway to the national conscience: The New York Times and Oprah.

The ethos of the voluntary simplicity movement is, appropriately enough, simple. In the eighties, it holds, much of America went astray, indulging in a sybaritic romp of frivolous luxury consumption, frittering away time and money in wasteful habits and services, toiling in lucrative but ultimately unfulfilling jobs to pay for things we only thought we needed. To escape this cycle, proponents of the simplified life offer scores of tips (most sounding like the mundane exhortations of Life s Little Instruction Book and other bookstore-counter trifles, e.g., "Pack your own lunch") aimed at liberating the individual from the monetary and time constraints of work and leisure, allowing more time to spend with family, appreciate nature or, as St. James puts it, seek "the serenity and clarity that come from silence and quiet contemplation."

At first blush, the voluntary-simplicity movement seems a welcome, if preeningly New Age, corrective to the century's full-on march toward ritual consumptionism and profligate excess. But if the message seems laudable, its messengers deserve another look as does their intended target audience. For most people, after all, simplicity is not "just another lifestyle choice." Its recent popularity in the media, with St. James opening to Oprah her stripped-down closet in her Santa Barbara home (displaying the Gap-ish garb befitting an acolyte of simplicity), may only represent the "outing" of ...