These days it is common to refer to the “marketplace of ideas.” It’s a revealing phrase, implying that rather than becoming deed, speech becomes product.
APRIL 14
Flavio, one of our close friends in the neighborhood, calls. An Italian journalist married to a ceramic artist, Flavio has just filed his taxes. “You know, you do your freelance taxes,” he says. “You may have paid a little estimated and you have some more to pay. Your guy says, ‘Either pay $6,000 to the IRS or you can invest in an IRA $5,000 and only pay $2,000 to the IRS.’ It’s a forced choice. Here’s your choice of saving money on your taxes: give money to General Motors or give money to the pharmaceutical companies. We’re all such a fundamental part of the economy—you can’t escape it.”
As I wade into the world of Voluntary Simplicity, I find that even the Simple Livers can’t escape the market economy. “We’re not out to get your money!” reassures the Simple Living Network Web site. But linking around, I come upon an emerging sector of anti-consumerist entrepreneurs—coupon-clipping coaches, Simplicity Circle facilitators, hawkers of “essential” primers and newsletters. The registration fee for an online course in the nine-step Your Money or Your Life is $50, plus materials totaling about $50. Maybe, as a step toward frugality, I should join Debtors Anonymous. It’s free, and for that I get not nine but twelve steps and all the coffee I can drink.
I receive a catalogue from a mail-order outfit called Northern Sun: Products for Progressives, which offers thousands of posters, bumper stickers, buttons, T-shirts, mugs, and mouse pads that celebrate diversity, Che Guevara, and the polka, and condemn Exxon, malls, and (on one shirt) humans. The environmentalist posters (“Treehugger,” “The Last Fish”) are printed on heavyweight (virtually nonbiodegradable) bleached (poisonous) stock and printed in dark blue, green, and brown ink (the colors of the earth, presumably to leach less conspicuously into the water table). Sometimes you have to destroy the forest to save it.
Janice sends me a refrigerator magnet with a comic-book couple embracing on it. “Oh Darling,” she’s whispering in his ear, “let’s go deep into debt!”
The mainstream market has been alert to the peaceful whisper of the Simplicity shopper’s cash at least since the founding ofMartha Stewart Living in 1990. Although the labor-intensive Martha lifestyle was anything but simple, at least not for anyone who held a job, it took a decade before another major publisher went explicitly Simple. Soon Time Warner’sRealSimple, “the magazine about simplifying your life” by buying new, simple-looking products, spawned a patch of slightly modified offshoots, such as the slightly crunchyOrganic Style and the slightly crunchierOrganic Living. A new entry,MaryJanesFarm, isMartha Stewart Living with dirt under its nails and a clean criminal record.Plenty starts from the premise that you can consume as much as you want as long as you throw it away in a biodegradable plastic bag. And then there’sVegetarian Baby.
No two ways about it, Simplicity sells. I find a trend report online entitled “The consumer quest for simplicity—How financial services providers can assist customers in their quest for simpler lives.” The report, from Datamonitor at $2,795 for a single-user license, instructs businesses on how to “engage mass-market simplicity” by, for instance, setting up a line of “simple and honest” products (quotation marks theirs). It reassures: “Do not be afraid of seemingly anti-business messages.”
APRIL 21
E-mail from Ricki:
How’s Not Buying It? I do admire you for that; I have become such a consumer, you’d be disgusted.
From Prudence:
I broke down yesterday and bought some Lotus Flower bath gel; sorry. But I’m working another simplicity angle: Doubling my flexibility through yoga as a way of in effect doubling the space in my apartment (assuming I can fold myself into the barking cockroach position before long).
People are confessing. I’m not sure I am worthy of hearing their sins. For one thing, no matter how careful I am, I am spending. A week ago, I withdrew $150 from the ATM, expecting it to last two weeks. Twenty bucks went to an eleven-ride subway card, $42.40 to groceries, $11.95 to drugstore items (toothpaste, floss, shampoo), and $55 for a haircut (necessary?). That’s $129.35. What about the remaining $20.65?
I plumb my memory for the image of a hand, my hand, with coins and green paper in it. What is the hand doing? Aha! Reaching over the high counter of the newsstand: a week of newspapers, $9.50. Two quarters here, another quarter there move from pocket to crushed paper cup: beggars. That still leaves $10 and change.
Ann calls it “leakage,” this unaccounted-for trickling of bills from wallet to Limbo, not unlike the migration of socks between clothes dryer and dresser drawer. It’s also a fact of life in New York, where a friend once estimated it costs five bucks an hour just to be—and that was in the Seventies. This week I also wrote a check for $50 for a parking ticket, a tax exacted from auto owners through the arcane New York system of alternate-side-of-the-street parking regulations. Paul and I use our car in the city only to move it across the street—except, that is, when we forget, at $50 per memory lapse.
Maybe I should add a column to my bookkeeping: “Existence, Misc.”
APRIL 22
While attempting to live simply, I collect material on living extravagantly. This is a cinch. From theTimes I clip articles about the $3,200 medicine chest, the $699 kids’ bicycle, the $600 haircut (waiting list: two weeks), the $17,000 gold and diamond flip-flops, the $17 martini. On television, I watch Jessica Simpson justify the purchase of $1,200 bed sheets to her miffed husband (“We sleep on them every night!”) and listen to Robin Leach bellow his unquenchable astonishment at a $40,000-a-day Caribbean resort, a $670,000 Ferrari, and a personal-service agency that caters to the life crises of the rich and famous, such as Madonna’s craving for an exotic American herbal tea at midnight in London (located and delivered within the hour, fee unspecified).
Like pornography and corruption scandals, these reports trade in both lust and prudery, allowing us to gratify our prurience at the same time as we assuage our guilt. What kind of sicko would buy rubber slippers with diamonds on them for nearly half the average annual household budget! A kids’ bike for seven hundred bucks? He’ll outgrow it in a year!
Like other unspeakable crimes about which we cannot cease speaking (child abuse, torture), hyperconsumption renders the spectator virtually normal by comparison, even upright. Nothing you want or buy can compare. A desire for the plain-white $3,200 flip-flops, mentioned further down the paragraph after the $17,000 flip-flops, begins to seem temperate. And the shopper who forks over $40 for rubber shoes in Soho is a bargain-hunter. She has saved $16,960!
While getting my voyeuristic kicks, I indulge in my own gratifying comparisons. I am wearing Nike slides, naked even of paste gems, bought on sale two years ago for a piffling fifteen bucks. I’ll have them at least a year more; amortized, that comes to $5 a year. Never mind the price of my Nikes was $13 more than the pair in the Kmart bin, and a week’s salary for the worker who made them. Next to the vacationer strolling down the $40,000-a-night beach in her diamond flip-flops, I am Gandhi.
APRIL 24
I decline dinner at Bryant Park Café with my classmates at my twenty-fifth journalism school reunion. Paul and I do incur business-related expenses, but we have drawn the line at meals out. Under Debbie’s “don’t buy, don’t tell” policy, I say nothing to the dinner’s organizer about why I won’t be coming.
The $65 tab, not including tax, tip, and wine, would have been a stretch at any time. But the year of living frugally makes me doubly aware of the choice of this restaurant. The guy who arranged the get-together is one of our better-earning classmates. Does he assume we can all afford a $100 meal? It must also be said that he has volunteered many hours to gather us and treated everyone to a generous spread of drinks and hors d’oeuvres at his office. I should be grateful, or at least gracious, but this project sometimes just makes me surly. I stay for the drinks and when the gang leaves for
dinner, say good night, begging an early appointment the next day.
I do have an early appointment. FiveA.M. to be exact, for a bus to the Washington, D.C., March for Women’s Lives, a massive mobilization for abortion rights. Temma and I have planned to travel together and meet the rest of our contingent at Union Station. Over this three-hour trip, I have agonized for three weeks.
Should I take the bus chartered by the restaurant Florent ($55 round trip, including breakfast, lunch, and pre–return trip cocktails)? Should I opt for the unreserved Amtrak train ($145 with NOW discount), which leaves at 7 and doesn’t guarantee a seat? Should I accompany Temma on the Metroliner, which leaves one civilized hour later, arrives at the same time, and has reserved seats—for $100 more? Temma, a professor, has offered to pay the difference.
But it’s not that I can’t afford the Metroliner. It’s that the Metroliner is a luxury, according to “the rules”: the price premium is for nothing but convenience. Why then would the NOW train not be a luxury compared to the bus? The rules are fluid. I am making them up as I go along.
So what do I do? What else: I torment Temma with my indecision. After extensive waffling, I accept her offer. She picks up the tickets and pays for them on her credit card. Several e-mails ensue, during which I waffle again, then change my mind decisively. She goes back to Penn Station to return the tickets. On her way there, I change my mind again and call her on her cell phone, but reach her too late.
In the end, Temma and I travel separately. She takes the Metroliner, I take the bus. I rise at 4A.M. and call a cab to Manhattan when I realize the subway isn’t stopping at my station before 5A.M. on the weekend. As I pull in at Florent, clubgoers in miniskirts and heels are staggering in for eggs Benedict and Bloody Marys. The bus is an hour late arriving. Half its seats do not recline and its toilet stinks.
The march is a triumph, but I am a wreck. Before getting back on the bus, I down three of Florent’s free vodkas, hoping they will make me sleepy. Instead, they make me nervous and nauseated. Rain and traffic delay our return to Manhattan until midnight, but I don’t hail a cab to Brooklyn. I trudge four blocks to the subway station only to watch the A train pull out as I descend the stairs. The next one doesn’t come for twenty-five minutes, by which time I am in tears of exhaustion.
APRIL 29
The topic for the second Voluntary Simplicity meeting is Transforming Personal Consumption. Along with Beryl’s assigned texts (e.g., “The American Dream on a Shoestring”) I have been reading a critique of Voluntary Simplicity by Allegheny College political scientist and environmental activist Michael Maniates. Maniates gives the movement its due, but he cautions against the personal focus such groups can adopt. If VS pays no attention to public policy, workplace issues, or political power, he warns, “simplicity becomes a zealous conversation about what one buys and why, to the exclusion of almost everything else.”
As it turns out, the group isn’t ready to talk about what one buys and why. At the last meeting Beryl issued her own warning. Her previous group, she said, “could never get itself beyond decluttering.” Now it looks as if ours too may get stuck permanently in a zealous and exclusive conversation about what one throws away and why.
Marlene reports that she has decluttered two of her apartment’s four rooms. Nobuko, whose fastidiousness is evident from her shoe polish to her posture, has decluttered her office. “I filed all past projects,” she informs us. “Now I am moving on to current projects.” Gail, an experienced Simplifier, is entering the second year of “clutter-cleaning.” She lives in a three-room apartment.
Irwin, who always speaks in a tone suggesting long and deep thought, says that he too is “very interested in clutter. I believe a cluttered life is a cluttered mind.” Noticing he has at least two of everything, Irwin has removed one of two figurines each of St. Jude and “the BVM” (“Blessed Virgin Mary,” Paul, former altar boy, whispers when I shoot him a puzzled look). “So I took one St. Jude to St. Francis of Assisi and one BVM to St. Edmund’s.” Everyone congratulates him. Maybe he should have kept both Judes, though, as his decluttering appears to be a lost cause. He confesses, “I went to buy a book on clutter and bought three.”
Lionel’s clutter comes in two principle forms: food and paper. He and his wife buy too much of the former and shove it into the refrigerator, where it gets lost and spoils. They end up eating in restaurants and ordering takeout and paying the financial and caloric consequences. He is also trying to clear the junk from what he has several times referred to as “our eighty-six-inch dining room table.” The problem, he avers, is mostly his wife’s. An immigrant who adores shopping, she keeps bringing home new things and putting them in the refrigerator and on the table.
But Lionel has a solution: he will buya bigger refrigerator! His wife is resisting, pointing out that a new refrigerator will require a kitchen renovation to make room for it. No one mentions that a bigger refrigerator will also use much more electricity, with graver impact on his budget (not to mention the ozone layer) than lettuce growing slime in the crisper.
Elisa has no need to declutter; her apartment is almost obsessively spare. But she is downsizing. She has let go her cleaning lady and discontinued her premier cable service; she’s looking for a stripped-down telephone contract. Another large item has been removed from Elisa’s life since we last met, too. As expected, she has lost her job.
A third of the group is now jobless.
As we leave Elisa’s apartment building, Irwin holds the door so Paul and I can roll our bikes out. He shakes his head. “People are going to have to start making do with less,” he says. Paul and I make “hope-not” and “too-bad” noises. But Irwin’s is a different kind of dismay. “They want too much,” he declares. “People have been making too much for too long.”
This to me is a depressing statement coming from a lifelong union man. But then, Irwin is also a devout Catholic. I’d bet he is banking his salvation on the inheritance of the meek, not the revolution of the proletariat. But like a hellfire-and-damnation preacher, he seems almost to relish the punishments that will come with the next Great Depression—or the Second Coming.
If the renunciative aspects of Voluntary Simplicity appeal to Irwin’s religious nature, he is not alone in this group, or in the movement. “The greatest sin is greed,” Marlene pronounced at our first meeting, right after telling us her name. “I believe we will all be punished for it.” Sal says she is too tired to go to church on Sunday (she works six days, including Saturday), but picks up spiritual wisdom wherever she can. “We have gotten off the track because of our secular lives. Religion always speaks of balance,” she tells us, quoting Mel Gibson preaching on David Letterman.
The VS gurus are equally “spiritual.” Cecile Andrews begins her book with “Saving Our Souls” and the spirit hovers over nearly the entire text. Voluntary Simplicity, she claims, keeps a person “in touch with nature and the universal life force.” Duane Elgin roots VS in religious traditions from Catholicism to Transcendentalism and speaks often of the mystical, of “reverence” for nature, and the “miracle of creation.” He adamantly wants to figure out how to put less trash in the landfill, but his most heartfelt goal is to clear the trash from the path toward truth—and God—within ourselves. Even the ultra-practical Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin can’t help exhorting, “We also need to deepen our identity by reconnecting with our spirituality.”
Is all this talk about spirituality simply a New Age metaphor for the good? After all, policy, whether social, economic, or environmental, is the pragmatic codification of values and priorities, and many of the VS gurus are also political activists for environmental conservation and consumer protections. How is the good defined by the Voluntary Simplicity movement?
A fine articulation of its tenets can be found in a 1999 interview of the writer Bill McKibben, one of the preeminent moral philosophers of what might be called spiritual environmentalism (he’s also a Methodist Sunday school teacher). “The market forces pus
hing convenience, individualism, and comfort are still stronger than the attraction of community, fellowship, and connection with the natural world,” McKibben told journalist Jay Walljasper. The environmental crisis is also a “spiritual crisis,” he says, “a crisis of desire.”
Calling the crisis both environmental and spiritual—you might say immanent and transcendent—McKibben reveals what Michael Maniates identifies as a confounded message of anticonsumerism. Writes Maniates, paraphrasing anticonsumerist propaganda, “In the scheme of moral corrupters, advertising is bad, but people are weak in succumbing to it,” SUVs harm the environment, but the people who drive them are selfish. According to this rhetoric, he continues, consumers are “both the victims and the agents of their own moral destruction.”
Maniates points out the strategic trouble for a movement that is confused about assigning blame for the problem: it doesn’t know where to locate agency for the solution. If environmental decline is the consequence of personal weakness and selfishness, there is no remedy but self-discipline. Irwin indicts advertising and credit cards for creating “a society of instant gratification.” But his solution is to gird his desires, not demand regulation of the credit card industry. McKibben, on the other hand, is an indefatigable political activist for energy efficiency and environmental regulation. But in almost all his work, he argues from the position of less-is-more right living, laying out his own life as exemplary of the “alternative desires” he would offer to replace those being created by Disney or GM, from having only one child to killing your television.
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