One day late last fall, it suddenly dawned on Randy and Sheri Padal that their lives were so hectic, so overscheduled and so stressful that something had to give.
Commuting from Lockport to demanding jobs at General Motors in LaGrange, shuttling their two young children to day care, cooking, grocery shopping, maintaining their home and other commitments left them with no free time to enjoy reading a book or riding the bikes that were gathering dust in the garage.
Over the long, cold winter the Padals turned off the television set, which freed up hours of time, and began doing some serious reading. In the process they discovered the concept of “voluntary simplicity,” a lifestyle change that is making inroads across America.
This spring the Padals scaled down considerably. They sold their five-bedroom, 2,000-square-foot home on a quarter-acre of land and moved to a three-bedroom, 890-square-foot “fixer-upper” in Romeoville with a lawn that’s easy to mow. They also gave away many of their possessions, such as gadgets they never used and the furniture in rooms of their former house that they rarely entered.
“Possessions tend to expand to fill the space,” Randy Padal says. “Most of our remaining possessions are in storage in the garage right now and we’re finding we can get by with a lot less. When we start putting things in the house we’ll look closely at them. We had to break the cycle of overconsumption.
“You have to be inner-directed when you make a lifestyle change like this. Others may say you’re odd. You have to not care about that.”
Although voluntary simplicity is sometimes perceived (erroneously) as moving to the woods, quitting work or living with severe austerity, everyone who embraces it has his or her own definition, usually involving a change in priorities. Padal calls it “a process of trying to figure out what you value and then how you choose to spend your money and your time.”
Last summer, the Merck Family Fund, a private foundation based in Maryland, announced the results of a research study it had commissioned examining patterns of consumption in the U.S.
Eighty-two percent of the participants in a national sample, surveyed by telephone and in focus groups, agreed that most of us buy and consume more than we need, and 91 percent said that a buy-now-pay-later attitude causes such overconsumption.
The study also showed many Americans have scaled back their lifestyles. Of those polled, 28 percent said they voluntarily made changes in the last five years that resulted in making less money. The most common changes were reducing work hours, switching to lower-paying jobs and quitting work to stay at home.
These “downshifters,” who tend to be younger than the population as a whole, offered a range of reasons for doing so: wanting a more balanced life (68 percent), more time (66 percent), a less stressful life (63 percent) and more time to care for children (53 percent).
Gerald Celente, director of the Trends Research Institute in Rhinebeck, N.Y., which identified voluntary simplicity as one of the major trends of the 1990s, noticed a change in the wake of the 1987 stock market crash, “when all of a sudden the word `yuppie’ started dying and it became unhip to be ostentatious.”
Celente notes that “Yankee frugality” was a sensible way of living in this country until the post-World War II economic boom launched a consumer-dominated society of suburban tract homes, cars, barbecue grills, television sets, hula hoops and all the material excess that followed.
While the philosophy of voluntary simplicity briefly surfaced in the late 1960s “among the Woodstock generation,” Celente says, it didn’t catch hold.
The word is getting out
These days a cottage industry of books and newsletters is largely responsible for getting out the message that overconsumption is wasteful, unnecessary, harmful and unfulfilling. Prominent among the titles is the 1992 “Your Money or Your Life” (Penguin), by Seattle residents Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, which suggests ways of achieving financial independence.
That was one of the books that prompted the Padals to simplify their lives. Another was Duane Elgin’s “Voluntary Simplicity” (Quill), a seminal work first published in 1981 and again in updated form in 1993.
Elgin’s book provides a philosophical underpinning for simplicity and places it in the context of the perennial wisdom of the world’s religions and our nation’s own history, which has included Quakers, Puritans and Transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau.
In Elgin’s words, “Voluntary simplicity (is) a manner of living that is outwardly more simple and inwardly more rich.”
Janet Luhrs of Seattle started Simple Living, a quarterly newsletter, four years ago when she realized those embracing simplicity needed “reinforcement.” A clearinghouse for information and tips, the newsletter has almost 4,000 subscribers, including some in Germany, Argentina and Japan.
Luhrs says she lived simply while growing up and in her 20s as an editor and freelance writer. But when she turned 30 she thought maybe she was missing something and enrolled in law school.
“That’s when things got more complicated,” Luhrs says. “I also got married and got my first credit card. We got a big mortgage and started buying things because we wanted them right now, whether we could afford them or not.
“We were just buried in debt, and it was not the way I wanted to live. About that time I discovered the simplicity movement (through) a one-night seminar in Seattle.”
Luhrs, a non-practicing lawyer who stays home to care for her two children in addition to editing and publishing her newsletter, believes the simplicity movement is a reaction against the consumerist frenzy of the 1980s.
“Having a lot of stuff doesn’t make you happy,” she says. “It gets you buried and feeling oppressed. A lot of people are attracted to simplicity because they did have a lot of stuff. But I can tell from the letters I get that a lot more people are coming at this involuntarily–retired people, single mothers trying to make it.”
`Oh, I’m not the only one’
Elaine St. James, a former businesswoman, got off track in the 1980s too. But one day in 1990, she and her husband, a writer, decided to simplify their lives. They sold their house in favor of a low-maintenance condominium and “decluttered” their lives.
In the process, St. James, who lives in California, found her life’s work–writing. She wrote a book, “Simplify Your Life” (Hyperion, 1994), detailing practical ways to begin simplifying, after a number of people told her they liked the idea but didn’t know where to start. St. James followed up with “Inner Simplicity” (Hyperion, 1995). Both little anti-consumerist manifestoes became best sellers. This spring St. James has brought out a third book, “Living the Simple Life” (Hyperion), an amplification of the first two books.
The response from her readers, who span the age and socio-economic spectrum, seems to lay waste to the 1980s adage that whoever dies with the most toys wins.
“One of the things I hear most often is, `Thank you for giving me permission not to get a car phone,’ or `Thank you for giving me permission not to lead a hectic life,’ ” St. James says. “And also a lot of people were simplifying, although they didn’t call it that, and they say, `Oh, yeah, I’m not the only one. There’s somebody else. It’s in print. It’s OK.’ “
Jim Slama, publisher of the Chicago-based Conscious Choice, a journal of ecology and natural living, believes much of the force behind the simplicity movement is economic. “Either people have to work 60 hours a week to keep up with what everybody else in the organization is doing or they make a choice to `downsize’ their lives because they don’t want that kind of stress.
“The ecological aspect is certainly part of it because a lot of people are saying this is a totally wasteful, inefficient culture that’s hurtling down the path toward destruction. I’m one of those. The economy needs to shift toward the production of goods in a more efficient, less wasteful manner, rather than frivolously producing goods for product diversification or to increase market share.”
Madison Avenue, beware
Until business leaders change their thinking, more and more Americans are standing up to Madison Avenue’s advertising barrage by trying to live closer to the bone, carefully separating needs from wants.
“The best way to describe our lifestyle is that we’re constantly evaluating what we’re doing,” says Bill Whitney, a computer illustrator who works in a River North studio and lives with his wife and two children in Wheaton.
“There’s a certain saturation point where you can only be duped (by advertising) for so long. Oddly enough, it’s not very difficult to live simply, closer to reality.”
The Whitneys have a large vegetable garden, whose yield they freeze, can and dry for year-round consumption. They also keep a beehive and tap their sugar maple tree every spring. They limit their children’s television viewing in favor of trips to the public library and nature walks in the woods.
“The kids enjoy it; they look forward to it,” Whitney says. “There’s pleasure in the basic, simple aspects of life.”
With many more people–victims of “downsizing” and underemployment–joining the simplicity movement involuntarily and a generation of children being “indoctrinated green” in school and facing a life of diminished job expectations, Celente, of the Trends Research Institute, is predicting “an end to consumer society as we know it. . . . Frugality and thriftiness will be looked upon as virtues.
“It’s not that we’re not going to go out and buy things,” he says. “We’re going to buy different stuff for different reasons, not just to fill an emotional void.”
BAD HABITS, REHABBED
Here are six ways to simplify your life from the journal Simple Living:
Cut up all your credit cards but one. Don’t keep any card unless you can pay it off every month.
Clean your clutter with the one-drawer-at-a-time rule It’s too overwhelming to think of clearing out your entire house. But it’s manageable one drawer at a time. Get rid of everything you haven’t used for a year.
Take 10 minutes a day for reflection. How can you get off the treadmill if you never stop and think about what’s important?
Park your car and walk to your errands. How much time do you spend driving to the gym, parking, working extra hours to pay for gym membership and you don’t have time to walk to the store? Get exercise in the normal course of your day.
Making car payments? Sell the darned thing and buy one you can afford Is your life honestly any better because you drive a fancy car? It’s probably worse, because now you have to work harder to make the payments, it costs more for insurance and taxes and you even get to worry about your fancy car.
Shop with a conscience The next time you’re ready to buy something at the store, ask yourself whether you really need it, what it will really do for your life. Why are you putting your hard-earned money in somebody else’s bank account? Why not put it in yours?
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Simple Living is a quarterly newsletter.A one-year subscription is $14. Write to 2319 N. 45th St., Box 149,Seattle, Wash., 98103. Sample copies are $3.75 (includes postage).
