Living Simply
by Pamela Sparr
Christine Leonard-Osterwalder knew her family had gone over the top. It happened last Christmas.
"My children were wild, surrounded by paper and gifts from family and friends," she said. "They asked for more and couldn’t appreciate anything. They didn’t say thank you. Shocked at their behavior and exhausted by all the preparation, my mother had become angry with me. She even asked for some of the gifts back. It was a sad ending to the most meaningful holiday."
The commercialization of Christmas is perhaps the easiest example of over-consumption to understand and visualize:
For many, the holiday madness produces feelings of emptiness, weariness or sadness. For Ms. Leonard-Osterwalder’s mother, it produced anger.
The pressure to buy and consume takes a heavy emotional toll. And it takes a financial toll as people rack up staggering amounts of debt. The total amount of credit-card debt in the United States is more than $450 billion, growing at twice the rate of wages.
U.S. consumption patterns are also ecologically unsustainable. At 4 percent of the world’s population, people in the United States use about one-third of the world’s natural resources and produce two-thirds of the world’s waste. End-of-the year holiday gift-giving alone produces five tons of trash each year.
This materialistic lifestyle has social and economic consequences. That item from the discount or department store may come at a high price. It may have been made with child labor or under sweat-shop conditions. It may have been produced by a company that does not pay a living wage or one that helps to prop up a dictatorship.
Over-consumption is an addiction that plagues the middle-class and wealthy in the United States. It is an ethos we export to other countries through advertising, media and entertainment. It is a subtle addiction.
Voluntary simplicity
For Ms. Leonard-Osterwalder, the call to change came from anger and hurt. For others, it may be the recognition that life feels unbalanced. For some, it is the recognition that they and their children are perpetually over-scheduled. Some deal with the physical clutter of abundant possessions by buying more organizing bins or boxes or renting a storage space, but even being well-organized is not a lasting solution.
Accumulation of material possessions and being constantly busy can disguise a profound emptiness, a lack of meaning in life. There is no space or silence to listen to one’s heart or to God.
Increasingly, people are responding by seeking simplicity. Athor Doris Janzen Longacre describes voluntary simplicity as five life principles, not rules:
Some people refer to this approach as simpler living because they want to stress this is a process not a destination. One such person is Gerald Iverson, the national coordinator of Alternatives, a Christian non-profit group devoted to helping people move toward simplicity.
The trend to simpler living in the secular world is called downshifting, Mr. Iverson said. We can see it in people who voluntarily leave high-paying, high-pressure jobs for ones that pay less but are less stressful and enable them to have more time for family. Some people change where they live. They buy smaller houses, even move to where the cost of living is lower. Others restructure family life to live on less income, or simply buy and consume less. The primary motivation in all these cases is happiness.
"Stuff is an enormous burden," Mr. Iverson said. "There is a sense of joy when you decide to live with less. You don’t have so much to take care of – to dust, to change batteries, to worry about people stealing."
Voluntary simplicity is about taking personal responsibility for the social, environmental and spiritual consequences of one’s purchases and consumption patterns, he said. He describes the process as wrestling with trade-offs:
"We can’t do what’s right 100 percent of the time. But we can wrestle. We can consider options, read labels, do what we can without letting the struggle consume us, without going about automatically doing what we’ve been taught and are continuously taught by the media."
Simpler living is not about romanticizing poverty or living cheaply. You may actually spend more for some life- and earth-affirming purchases, such as organic food or non-sweatshop-made clothing.
"Living simple is not simple," Mr. Iverson said. "It requires constant vigilance. The temptations of extravagance and waste are constant. It means challenging not just the obvious temptations to splurge but even the everyday habits that we’ve inherited, probably from loving, well-intentioned family and friends."
Pamela Sparr is an economist specializing in economic development and environmental issues, and former staff of the Women's Division.