Voluntary simplicity
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Voluntary simplicity is a lifestyle considered by its adherents to be a sustainable, ecologically sensitive alternative to the typical, western consumerist lifestyle. The term "downshifting" is often used to describe the act of moving toward a lifestyle based on voluntary simplicity.
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Overview
People who practise voluntary simplicity act consciously to reduce their need for purchased services or goods and, by extension, their need to sell their time for money. Quite often, this means that people who practise this lifestyle must do many things for themselves, such as gardening and cooking, sewing, and constructing or maintaining a home (DIY). However, it is important to note that money is not the major reason to practise this lifestyle. Reducing consumer choice also reduces the stress and anxiety of decision making. People practise voluntary simplicity to improve their quality of life in one of many dimensions: psychological, financial, spiritual, interpersonal relationships, family, etc.
Roots
Monks in the Middle Ages were possibly the earliest practitioners of organised lifestyles of voluntary poverty in Europe, though the use of fasts of short duration is common in many cultures throughout history. 2500 years ago in Asia, Buddhism had already established a voluntarily simplified spiritual lifestyle.
The Luddites, a group of English weavers who smashed automated looms during the industrial revolution, held similar views.
In North America, religious groups including the Shakers, Mennonites, Amish, and some Quakers have for centuries practised lifestyles where some forms of wealth or technology are excluded for religious or philosophical reasons. Henry David Thoreau, a naturalist, ethicist, and writer, is often considered to have made the classic non-sectarian American statement of this sensibility in his book Walden.
From the 1920s to the 1960s, a number of fairly prominent modern writers (in English) articulated both the theory and practice of lifestyles of this sort, among them Gandhian Richard Gregg, economists Ralph Borsodi and Scott Nearing, anthropologist-poet Gary Snyder, and utopian fiction writer Ernest Callenbach. The modern version of Voluntary Simplicity was named in the 1970s by the seminal book of the same title by Duane Elgin. There are eco-anarchist groups in the United States and Canada today promoting lifestyles of simplicity.
Advocacy by Greens
The Green Parties have been much influenced by the above groups and often advocate voluntary simplicity as a consequence of their four pillars or Ten Key Values. This includes in policy terms rejection of genetic modification and nuclear weapons and other potentially hazardous technologies beyond human control.
Many with similar views avoid involvement even with green politics as compromising simplicity, however, and advocate forms of green anarchism that attempt to implement these principles at smaller scale than modern nations, e.g. the ecovillage.
Electronics
Eliminating the role of television in one's life is a dominant theme in many recent essays regarding simplicity. Writers of these essays see television both as a waste of time and as an implicit advocate of consumerism. Advertising in particular seems to be regarded as an evil by most of the authors. Some see community radio or pirate radio as a viable alternative without the visual distraction; one can, after all, work while listening, but not while watching.
Computer addiction is also a subject of recent interest. Some see computers as sources of instant knowledge. Others see them as necessarily distracting from the local immediate people and places, and providing a form of false community called "virtual community", which is all too often distracting from body, family and life as lived within same.
Electronics of all kinds require a complex industrial base and knowledge of physics and materials science, which may be part of a military-industrial complex, and so may defeat some of the purposes of voluntary simplicity movements, or lead in the long run to other forms of domination.
References
- Voluntary Simplicity (1980), Duane Elgin, ISBN 0688121195 — foundational text of modern voluntary simplicity movement
- New Age Politics (1979), Mark Satin, ISBN 0440557003 — articulates a politics focused on voluntary simplicity and humanistic psychology; builds on two important Elgin articles from the 1970s
- Your Money or Your Life (1992), Joe Dominguez & Vicki Robin, ISBN 0140167153 — another classic voluntary simplicity text
- Affluenza (2002), John de Graaf et al., ISBN 1576751996 — popularized approach to voluntary simplicity