Lifestyle : Judy Jones
DOWNSHIFTING
Illustrations: Axel Scheffler
In the quest for quality of life
people are seeking voluntary simplicity.
IN THEIR FIRST three years of marriage, Sarah Stevenson and her husband Jamie never once had breakfast together, and communicated via scribbled “Post-It” notes for days on end. Too busy getting on in their careers, selling advertising space in her case, he working as a radio journalist, they were ships that passed in the night.
“I was earning a good salary and getting huge bonuses,” recalls Sarah.
“Whenever anyone hit their sales target, we would play music and dance around the office. We were all so completely focussed on making money.” Increasingly she found her earnings, designer clothes and spending binges did not make up for the sheer stress of working and living in London. “When I first went there I would often give money to homeless people — after a while I was just stepping over them. I was getting harder, as a person, and the bags under my eyes got bigger. I was frequently ill.”
It wasn’t just the way she was working that got to Sarah — it was what she was doing. She was “selling something I didn’t own to clients, who gave me something they didn’t own.” Work became more and more meaningless.
Two years ago, she and Jamie decided to quit London, and bought a cottage overlooking the sea near Portsmouth. Sarah got a new job as the area organizer for the medical charity Action Research, working from home and earning about half her former salary. “I get a far bigger buzz now than I ever did in sales, because what I do now seems more real, and I feel like I’m doing something worthwhile. I don’t miss my salary because there is not the same temptation to spend here. No-one else around here has a Prada handbag, so I don’t need one to keep up with them.” Jamie got a job on a local radio station, but also devotes some of his time to charity work. “We have more time together now. I can’t think of any regrets about what we’ve done.”
THIS YEARNING FOR a simpler, more rounded life finds different expression over successive generations. There’s nothing particularly new about the phenomenon; only the term used to describe people like Sarah and Jamie, who act on it: downshifters. Its roots can be traced back over centuries through various religions and civilizations, certainly back to the Ancient Greeks and most probably before them. In nineteenth-century America, the transcendentalist Henry Thoreau left contemporary society to dwell in the woods by Walden pond, in order to reflect and commune with nature. Along with visionaries such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau helped popularize a simple-living aesthetic that was already well-established after the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers. In Victorian England William Morris, the Arts and Crafts Movement, Robert Blatchford’s best-selling Merrie England, the pastoralist poets and painters left a rich legacy to inspire and educate students of simplicity today. The Industrial Revolution, the steady decline of agricultural communities and the flight to the cities had brought huge social upheaval. Work and leisure, blended over centuries in family and village life were gradually de-coupled into distinct and separate entities. The umbilical link that tied people to the natural world and the rhythms of the seasons became ever thinner and more tenuous, as the business of working in towns and cities became more regimented, mechanical and enclosed.
But it wasn’t until the start of the twentieth century that the
rat race, as we currently recognize it, got under way. The man with the
starting pistol was undoubtedly, for me at least, Frederick Winslow Taylor,
the world’s first management guru. “In our scheme, we do not
ask for the initiative of our men,” said Taylor, in 1906. “All
we want of them is to obey the orders that we give them, do what we say
and do it quick.”
FEW REMEMBER HIM today, but Taylor’s model workplace is still much
in evidence nearly a century later, in cramped call centres, offices and
on soulless assembly lines around the world. But so too is the desire
to escape it, perhaps more now than ever. The theme resonates through
much of our popular culture. Movies such as Local Hero, The Horse Whisperer
and more recently American Beauty (in which the cover of the classic book
Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez makes a fleeting
and apposite appearance), cartoon strips like Dilbert — all these
are constructed on the failure of material success and consumerism to
compensate for the lunacies of corporate life.
How do we describe these people who slip the net of mainstream consumer culture? Terms come and go. Definitions come more easily when the motivation is primarily religious or spiritual — think of the Amish, for example, or the Quakers, where there is a pre-existing community of individuals that one may join, and a ready-made framework of beliefs that one may adopt. Terminology becomes trickier without the religious content. In the 1970s, such people were called hippies, drop-outs or just plain “alternative”. Concerns about ecological damage coalesced into “the environmental movement” and helped to promote an alternative set of values by which to live, regardless of religion.
In the early 1980s, the American Duane Elgin coined the term “voluntary simplicity” to describe a lifestyle choice that could be both sustainable and satisfying. Its tenets were frugal consumption, ecological awareness and personal growth. Change your life and you can help change the world. Anticipating the inevitable criticism, Elgin was careful to make clear the message he was preaching was one of balance, not poverty, and empowerment, not self-denial: “Poverty is involuntary and debilitating, whereas simplicity is voluntary and enabling,” Elgin said.
Voluntary simplicity sounded all well and good in theory, but required seismic shifts of culture if it was to catch on in any significant way. In Western societies, nurtured on the belief that more, bigger and faster are almost always better, the idea of living better with less was largely anathema. Simplifying overburdened lives required not only the taking of risks, but a fundamental change of attitude. The combined forces of economic recession and growing globalization helped kickstart the engine of change.
The economic downturn, and the waves of downsizing that threw thousands of white-collar professionals and middle managers out of work in the early 1990s, made many people feel angry and betrayed. The old psychological contract between worker and employer, the glue that held corporate life together for so long, was exposed as something of a sham. The conspicuous consumption and “shop-till-you-drop” mentality was also increasingly held up to ridicule in television comedies such as Absolutely Fabulous.
A survey published in Fortune magazine in 1989 found that seventy-five per cent of working Americans between the ages of twenty-five and forty-nine wanted to “see our country return to a simpler lifestyle, with less emphasis on material success.” The time was clearly ripe once again to tempt the public palate with visions of a more sustainable, nourishing way of living. For Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez, the key to a richer, more meaningful existence lay in re-negotiating one’s relationship with money. They developed a nine-step plan, which they followed themselves, to help others eliminate personal debt, achieve financial independence, and upgrade the quality of their lives.
Unlike Elgin’s earlier work, which had been essentially philosophical in its perspective, Robin and Dominguez dwelt more on the practicalities of redirecting one’s life onto sustainable tracks. Your Money or Your Life became a best-seller. In America, and later in Britain, the word “downshifting” gradually gained currency as a shorthand to describe this process. When Juliet Schorr, a Harvard University economist, decided to research the extent of downshifting in the usa, she found that one in four Americans she polled said they had opted for a lower income to achieve a better quality of life between 1990 and 1995. According to a later survey of Britons, led by Ian Christie, then an associate director of the Henley Centre for Forecasting, in London, about one in eight people questioned reported that they either had downshifted over the previous two years, or planned to in the next year.
IN EACH CASE, it must be emphasized, the research identified downshifting as a minority interest, but rather more significant than some would have guessed. After all, in terms of conventional market economics and political orthodoxy, the downshifter is something of a subversive. Market economies, as they are currently arranged, must perpetuate a culture of dissatisfaction, if they are to succeed. They depend on most of us feeling driven like lemmings to earn, spend and accumulate ever more money in order to feel better about our lives. So terms such as “consumer confidence” and “gross domestic product”, for example, remain the rusting, creaking barometers of national wellbeing. Meanwhile, more imaginative quality-of-life measurements, such as those put forward by the New Economics Foundation, have yet to receive due prominence.
There are encouraging signs, however, that the downshifting trend is
part of a bigger shift in values, attitudes and our notions of what success
means. First there is a wider recognition that the long hours culture
at work is not only wrecking employees’ health, family life and relationships
— which was always fairly obvious; but also damaging to productivity
and efficiency. Certainly the evidence is piling up, and getting onto
boardroom agendas.
Second, there is greater support for local goods and services. The way
that farmers’ markets have taken off on both sides of the Atlantic,
for example, reflects a certain weariness with the mass-produced, global
brand names. The fact that 1999 was a disastrous year for the world’s
most recognized brand — Coca-Cola — is probably a mere coincidence,
but who knows? Finally, one country at least — Sweden — has
decided to tackle one of the biggest obstacles to downshifting en famille
— pester power. It has banned tv advertising to children.
Let’s not get carried away, though. We still have a long way to go before we catch up with the Ancient Greeks’ ideals of self-development through leisure, recreation and education for its own sake. The “golden mean”, they believed, lay between wealth and poverty. It’s a long haul. But we have made a start.
Judy Jones is co-author, with Polly Ghazi, of Downshifting (Coronet, 1997).
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