Simple Living in a Complex World
My personal journey to a simpler life was motivated by two factors — fatigue and frustration. I’d been on the fast track ever since taking my first parttime job at the age of 15 working at the library downtown.
Part One
In Lewis Carroll’s childhood classic, Through the Looking-Glass, one of Alice’s misadventures in Wonderland is with the Red Queen who takes her on a wild run through the countryside. But no matter how fast Alice runs she can’t seem to get anywhere. Finally, breathless from her efforts, the Queen allows her to rest long enough for Alice to comment that “Everything is just as it was!” to which the Queen replies, “…here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
Several years ago, I remembered Alice’s predicament, as I stood on the deck outside my home, gazing into a meandering stream threading its way through my back yard. I thought Alice must have felt similar to how I was feeling about my life. I was physically exhausted and emotionally out of breath, running as fast as I could to keep up with an out-of-control lifestyle of my own making. As I gazed across the wooded lot and listened to the bubbling of the water across the rocks, I realized the scene before me had been much of the reason I had purchased the home about a year before. At the time I had imagined spending countless hours out on the deck, basking in the sun, watching the seasons roll by, but the seasons had rolled by without me. I’d not so much as stepped foot on the deck in all that time. I’d been too busy working 50–60 hours a week at my veterinary practice so I could pay the mortgage on the house, not to mention keeping two car payments up, and the three credit cards paid down. Like Alice, I realized something was wrong with this picture. I was running as fast as I could just to keep up.
I’d like to say that out of that realization I put the house on the market, traded the cars in for older models without payments, cut up my credit cards, and started living a simpler life. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that easy. I hadn’t suffered enough yet. It wasn’t until my second marriage ended in divorce and I came close to burn out in my profession before the lesson finally hit home. However, the seed of an idea was planted that day, many years ago, and though it took a while, the harvest of a simple life my new wife and I have designed is sweet and well worth the wait.
THE COMPLEXITIES OF SIMPLE LIVING
My personal journey to a simpler life was motivated by two factors — fatigue and frustration. I’d been on the fast track ever since taking my first parttime job at the age of 15 working at the library downtown. I held my nose to the proverbial grindstone through junior and senior high school, being sure to make the types of grades that would prove to the world that I was worthy of attending veterinary college. I even managed to rush through undergraduate school, completing a four-year pre-vet program in less than three. By the time the mid-eighties rolled around, I’d been hoofing it hot and heavy for over twenty years, and by American standards, I was a success. Yet despite all the success trappings, I kept thinking, “Is this all there is?”
My frustration grew out of a lack of finding meaningful ways to express my natural creative interests. Although my art teachers in high school had urged me to continue studying art in college, I would hear none of it. I knew artists starved and veterinarians didn’t. Yet, by the time I found myself standing on my deck contemplating the similarities between Alice’s predicament and my own, I was starved — creatively and spiritually.
Selling my veterinary practice in 1989 to become a freelance writer seemed like an excellent way to take a long break from running as fast as I could just to stay in the same place. I envisioned sitting on my deck tapping away on the keyboard for a couple of hours each day, but when I realized how much money the deck was costing me, I decided if the little nest egg from the sale of my practice was going to last more than six months, I’d better find a less expensive deck to sit upon.
Although at the time I hadn’t even heard the term “voluntary simplicity,” these moves to simplify my life just “felt right,” even though some of my friends and family thought I must have brain damage from breathing too much anesthetic while performing surgery. About this time Ann and I met and fell in love. Ann not only supported the career change but had a small townhouse — complete with deck. I rented out my home in order to reduce expenses and paid Ann to rent her spare bedroom. Could life be this easy, I thought? On this occasion the answer was no. I discovered over the next year that making a living as a freelance writer wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. After a year of rejection letters and watching my savings rapidly dwindle, I jumped at the chance when a good friend of mine offered me the opportunity to come to work as a business consultant. The regular salary allowed us to move back to the larger home and lease the smaller one. Two years and one marriage later, I realized I had come full circle, once again working a 50 to 60-hour job that paid well but didn’t give me the time for my creative outlet.
A pivotal time came with the arrival of my daughter, Amber. While she was still an infant, I slowed down long enough to notice the families around me. With most of our friends, both the husband and wife worked, and the kids were farmed out to over-flowing daycare centers. Neither Ann nor I wanted that for Amber. It had taken me over forty years to get around to having a child and I wasn’t interested in being an absentee father.
Still, it took me several weeks before I built up enough nerve to discuss my thoughts with Ann. After all, I had a secure job complete with an excellent salary and long term benefits. So what if I wasn’t happy? I was a good provider. Finally, one afternoon while driving home from visiting friends, I poured my feelings out, ending with, “I think I should quit my job and go back to writing. What do you think?” To my astonishment, Ann replied, “I agree.” Instantly, a great burden lifted from my shoulders and we started making plans for “rightsizing” our life to fit our new direction.
After struggling to keep two different houses for over two years, we sold the larger house within a few short months, in the process consolidating two houses of furniture into one. The more we sold and gave away, the more freedom we experienced.
Looking back, I realize now that there was a certain “chicken or the egg” phenomenon to simplifying my life. There was an inner as well as an outer process that seemed to work simultaneously or were so interwoven that it’s difficult to tell which came first.
Richard Gregg, who coined the term “voluntary simplicity” back in 1936 points to this outward slowing down process that frees up one's time to pursue the inner work that continues the cycle. One of the first things our decision to slow down gave us was time — time to take long walks with Amber in the stroller; time to get to know each other better and to explore our values. Fortunately, we discovered we shared many of the same values. With each discovery, our relationship grew stronger. Gregg, himself an interesting mixture of Eastern and Western cultures, having lived in India as a student of Gandhi as well as attending Harvard, describes this inner and outer work in this way:
“Voluntary simplicity involves both inner and outer conditions. It means singleness of purpose, sincerity, and honesty within, as well as avoidance of exterior clutter, of many possessions irrelevant to the chief purpose of life. It means an ordering and guiding of our energy and our desires, a partial restraint in some directions in order to secure a greater abundance of life in other directions. It involves a deliberate organization of life for a purpose.”
While I wasn’t sure what my life purpose was yet, the urge to write was too strong to ignore, and it became increasingly clear that we were willing to reduce our material wants so I could focus more on my writing and so we would have time together as a family. Ann learned from reading The Tightwad Gazette by Amy Dacyzyn that we could save significantly by buying our food in bulk and storing it under our bed. We cut back on eating out as well as our movie-going. Instead, we waited a few months for the movies we wanted to see to come out on video. Then we discovered if we waited a few more months, we could find the same videos for rent at a local discount store for one-third the price. Each discovery was a small victory for our new lifestyle.
Although these steps might sound like a move to deprivation and austerity, we didn’t find it to be so. “That is the greatest misconception about what simple living is about,” says Bo Lozoff, co-founder with his wife, Sita, of the Human Kindness Foundation. The Lozoff’s have practiced voluntary simplicity for close to thirty years, after living on a boat while in their twenties and realizing the joys of such simple living. “If someone approaches it in that way, they will feel poor,” says Bo. “The whole point of giving things up is that you feel the richness that results, a psychic release of just not having a bunch of stuff, and not having to be on this constant treadmill to keep the stuff. Simplicity is a great joy, not a punishment or stern discipline.”
Meanwhile, we continued making inner discoveries as well, including that we shared an intense interest in further developing our spirituality. A whole new dimension of simple living began to unfold. Having turned my back on my southern Baptist background around the fourth grade, I had missed Jesus’ message to “not store up treasures on earth,” but to share our wealth and ourselves with others.
I’ve since learned that Jesus wasn’t the only spiritual leader who advocated the virtues of simple living. Buddha also urged a balanced path between indulgence and deprivation, and Confucius, Lao-tzu, Mohammed, and many others also taught the value of simplicity as well as finding a balance between the inner and outer aspects of our lives.
The idea of simple living isn’t new in our American culture, dating back at least to the days of Thoreau’s two-plus years at Walden Pond, as well as to the frugal, self-reliant lifestyles of the Puritans. The idea has, at times, struggled with its own identity crisis, being called many different names including, “the frugality phenomenon,” “creative simplicity,” and more recently “downsizing,” “rightsizing” and “downshifting.”
Although we weren’t sure what to call what we were doing either, we did notice that the more steps we took to simplify, including purging the clutter around us through yards sales and through donating boxes upon boxes of clothes, knick-knacks, and household items to the Salvation Army, the more time we had to explore what truly satisfied us.
We began volunteering some of our newly found time to organizations and causes we believed in. Again, many of our friends didn’t understand what we were doing. “You spend that much time working without pay?” they’d ask incredulously. We tried to explain that, although our pay could not be socked away in the bank, we were being more than adequately compensated by being able to contribute to others. Some understood, others walked away shaking their heads. In this way we slowly found ourselves encircled with people who understood and supported our efforts, and we started to notice there were more people interested in living a simple life than we’d first imagined.
Then one day, while reading a book review in the newspaper, I found out what we had become — DOMOs. According to the book, Trash Cash, Fizzbos, and Flatliners: A Dictionary of Today’s Words, DOMOs are “downwardly mobile professionals, typically under 40, who abandon a successful or promising career to concentrate on more meaningful or spiritual activities.” It was a relief to realize that there were enough other people out there doing what we were doing to finally be named. Down with Yuppies, up with DOMOs.
Despite having trouble coming up with a term that satisfies everyone, we may look back at the nineties as the decade when simple living finally caught on as an “idea whose time has come.” According to a recent study, Yearning for Balance, prepared for the Merck Family Fund by The Harwood Group, the road to DOMOdom is filled with former Yuppie baby-boomers with 72% of people aged 40–49 agreeing with the survey statement, “I would like to simplify my life.” Of course, that doesn’t mean everyone who would like to simplify has taken the necessary steps, but many of them appear to be moving in that direction. Twenty-eight percent of all the respondents said that “in the last five years, they had voluntarily made changes in their life which resulted in making less money — not including those who had taken a regularly scheduled retirement.”
THE OUTER ROADS OF SIMPLICITY
“It’s not a cookie-cutter lifestyle,” says Vicki Robin of the New Road Map Foundation and co-author of the book, Your Money or Your Life, referring to the varied approaches people have taken to simplify their lives. Vicki and her partner, Joe Dominguez, have lived for over twenty years on about $6,000 of annual investment income each, even though their book has been a top seller since being published in 1992. The proceeds of the book go to organizations that promote a sustainable future for our country and the world, such as the Northwest Earth Institute which offers classes on voluntary simplicity.
Along with Joe and Vicki, many other DOMOs are simplifying their life by becoming debt-free. According to John Cummuta, president and founder of Financial Independence Network Limited, Inc. (F.I.N.L.), the Yuppie model of the eighties has turned up empty for many people living it, and the next generation that would be expected to step into that lifestyle is rejecting it, saying, “No, these people aren’t happy.”
Up until a few years ago, Cummuta led such a lifestyle, working in a top paying position for a company that was doing very well. “I thought, ‘this is it, we’ve achieved the American Dream.’” At the time Cummuta drove a leased Corvette, his wife a leased Oldsmobile Regency Brougham, and they were making payments on an airplane they kept at the airport not far from their large home. “We did it all on credit,” admits Cummuta, “but we could make all the payments. We were not being irresponsible in terms of our culture’s norms.”
Then the company Cummuta worked for suddenly went out of business, and he found himself without any income. “It was the worst two years of my life, and also the best two years of my life because it burned into me an understanding that I was not a success. I didn’t own anything. I was renting a lifestyle and when I could no longer afford the rent payment, I was evicted from the lifestyle.” Out of that experience, Cummuta developed a system that allows people to get completely out of debt, including their mortgage, in about five to seven years and F.I.N.L. was born. Even though Cummuta’s company has experienced rapid growth and was listed as one of INC. Magazine’s 500 hundred fastest-growing companies in 1994, he continues to run the company with no debt.
Cummuta’s approach to debt elimination is simple. Start by cutting up your credit cards. When I heard this, it made sense. If you have a patient who is bleeding to death, first stop the bleeding. But I found doing it not so easy. “What if an emergency arises? I’ll need that credit,” was just one of several excuses. When I listened to myself justify keeping my cards intact, I realized how hooked I was on them. Instead of going “cold turkey,” I weaned myself off of them, keeping one card safely tucked away in a safe deposit box to avoid impulse spending.
Once you’ve stopped the bleeding, Cummuta’s Financial Freedom Strategy has three major stages: Pay off ALL debt first, operate strictly on a cash basis, and then focus all available cash on wealth-building. A fourth stage that Cummuta claims more and more Americans are choosing is to move to a cheaper, safer, and more enjoyable location.
This was the case for Frank Levering and Wanda Urbanska, who acknowledge they were ‘fast trackers’ living in Los Angeles. Frank was a successful, though harried, screenwriter and freelance journalist, and Wanda a newspaper reporter for the Examiner. But after seven years of LA living, they realized they were miserable. “It reached a point that the marriage wasn’t going to make it without more time for each other and other pursuits,” says Levering.
When Frank’s father, who owned an orchard in Virginia, suffered a serious heart attack and none of the other six kids expressed an interest in taking over the orchard, Frank and Wanda decided to move back east. While they were fortunate to have such a place to move to, the orchard also came with a debt of over $100,000 and was going downhill. “Those two factors forced us to simplify,” admits Levering, and with such a large debt, all their spare cash went to paying it off. “We were looking for ways to cut costs and save money. In a number of areas, we started cutting costs and found out that we liked it.”
After moving into an old farmhouse, they decided, rather than go deeper in debt to furnish it, to live with what they had and economize wherever they could. “We discovered that we liked the whole process and we were feeling better about ourselves, despite the hard work,” in part because they often worked together which gave them back time for their relationship which had been missing in L. A. Since they were both writers, they eventually decided to write about their experiences, and co-authored Simple Living: One Couple’s Search for a Better Life.
Part Two coming tomorrow.
