Simple Prosperity

by David Wann

  Neighbors began cooking meals for the Lohres, old friends brought perennials to plant in Julie’s garden, and Julie began to shift into a different mind-set. “I started to look at life’s priorities in a totally different way,” she says. “While I waited for a few weeks to have the surgery, I wanted laughter and music in my life, and I wanted to avoid labeling. Yes, I had a brain tumor, but that shouldn’t prevent me from still feeling good …” She began to slow down and reassess where her time and efforts were going. Her son, Will, asked if she’d play pool with him. “Normally that would be something that would go on my to-do list—‘spend quality time with Will’—but that afternoon, I STOPPED and played pool with him. We had a great time! I found out how good he was, who had taught him to play, and how they sometimes cheated, just a little. When we slow down and look at things differently, we see there’s an underlying rhythm and vividness to everything.” She gets out a card that her daughter Lisi had made for her: “Wherever you are and whatever you do, we will be there with you.”

  As a precaution, after the tumor was removed, Julie was scheduled for thirty-one low-dose radiation treatments over a six-week period—a huge effort, especially since she couldn’t drive. Twenty different people offered to drive her to the hospital and wait for her—at least a two-hour commitment. “The support I got from people was awesome!” she says. “I felt like I was being carried by the positive energy people gave me.” She made each trip to the hospital into a productive healing session. For example, when I took her, our discussion was about visualization. She wanted to clearly and decisively instruct her immune system what to do with all uninvited cells in her body, and we talked about sending them to a virtual compost pile. Julie’s prognosis is excellent, and no doubt all the intentional thoughts and support have played a key role.

  Spending Social Capital in the Neighborhood

  I lived in a rural mountain town for twenty years and rarely interacted with my neighbors, who were scattered throughout the valley in cabins. But when a blizzard hit, our vehicles would get stuck in snowdrifts, and we relied on each other to dig them out. Sometimes the power also went out, and in each little house, families were sitting around woodstoves telling stories the way humans always have. In our little cabin, we always had piles of firewood cut and split, and we’d get out the candles and pop popcorn on the stove. By the end of the storm, we became a closer family in a more supportive community. It felt great.

  The question is, why did it take blizzards and power outages to strengthen natural bonds between people? In many of America’s neighborhoods, we’ve become strangers on our own streets. What can we do to bring those streets back to life? The process of reinventing a neighborhood might begin when you walk out your front door and just say hello to someone you’ve seen before, but never met. After preliminary conversation, the topic of neighborhood security comes up, and maybe you comment how valuable it would be to compile a list of the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of everyone on the block. “That way, if someone gets hurt or just needs help moving a dresser, he can call one of us,” you say. Your neighbor, whose name is Shawn, agrees, adding, “Maybe we could set up a neighborhood e-mail listserv, to provide a forum for news and opinion, and a digital bulletin board for babysitting exchanges, discussion groups, and carpooling …”

  Coincidentally, while the two of you are talking about homeland security at the neighborhood scale, another neighbor—Marion—comes by with her own idea for getting neighbors together—a community picnic in her large backyard. She prepares a homemade flier and takes it door to door to forty-four houses on the block, explaining to those who are home that her intention is to help create a friendlier, livelier neighborhood. All but a few neighbors seem interested, and many of them show up at the barbecue, which includes musical talent from the neighborhood, humorous name tags, and locally grown food.

  The next day you notice neighbors knocking on each other’s doors, following up on conversations, dropping off recipes, and arranging help with lawn watering or pet-sitting while people are on vacation. In the months that follow, a discussion group, book club, a few carpools, and a food co-op form. Matt, a sociology professor, uses the new e-mail listserv to suggest a work-share program enabling neighbors to trade skills like dry walling and landscaping, to save money and continue building community. Sarah, the young woman with the German shepherd, joins him to help coordinate the project, and she also spearheads a community cleanup of the vacant lot at the end of the street. While they pick up McDonald’s wrappers and newspapers, she has an idea: Maybe the absentee owner of the lot would let them have a community garden there. After all, the lot’s been vacant for the last fifteen years, and he would get a tax deduction for it.

  These first few neighborhood-building efforts result in a new way of thinking about your neighborhood. You begin to think outside the boxes of your houses to envision a more productive and useful community. With a handful of successes behind you, you organize a meeting at the elementary school one evening, to talk about visions for the neighborhood. This is an important step because it formalizes neighbors’ intentions to cocreate a place that is supportive and strives to be sustainable. You stand up and report, “Since our first community picnic, I’ve watched less TV, saved time and money by carpooling with Frank, and helped remodel Jerry’s garage, where he will park an old pickup truck that’s available for any of us to borrow. Aren’t these the kind of things that good neighborhoods should be about?” One young adult, Liz, decides to return to the neighborhood to live near her family and friends. The elderly widow, Nancy, rents her the apartment that her late husband created by remodeling the garage into a cottage. So, now Nancy can afford to stay in the neighborhood—and Liz can, too.

  Neighbors at Tierra Nueva Cohousing Community in Oceano, California, had a party to celebrate the resilience and social wealth of their neighborhood. Credit: Magdy Farahat

  Gradually, your neighborhood gets a well-deserved reputation for being a great place to live. Crime is almost nonexistent, property values go up, and turnover goes down. At a barbecue near the community garden one evening, Marion comments, “It’s funny—when we focus just on ourselves, the world shrinks and our problems seem huge. But when we learn to focus on other people, the world expands and our own problems seem smaller. As our world expands, so does our capacity to care.”

  6

  Time Affluence

  How to Save Time, and Savor It

  The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.

  —Michael Altshuler

  I’m not sure people are meant to work full-time. Life is more complicated than that. We human beings need time to think, make music, weave baskets, play with kids and dogs, bond with each other, and care for friends and family. Those of us with demanding jobs that continually spill over into our personal lives often don’t have the time for those things while we work full-time.

  —Carol Ostram

  Every morning I awake torn between a desire to save the world and an inclination to savor it. This makes it hard to plan the day.

  —E. B. White

  Whether it’s the best of times or the worst of times, it’s the only time we’ve got.

  —Art Buchwald

  Time is a natural resource. Like oil or copper, there’s only so much of it available—eighty-five years for each of us if we’re lucky, divided into twenty-four-hour (sometimes frantic!) parcels. When some new, time-consuming activity comes along, like deleting endless spam e-mails, creating new passwords we’ll soon forget, or waiting in line for three-dollar gas, we don’t usually ask ourselves where the time comes from to do these extra things. The truth is, time is often borrowed from important life functions, such as maintaining strong relationships or cooking healthy meals from fresh ingredients. The more time we need to borrow, the less is available for the things that make us feel great.

  In the essay “Wasted Work, Wasted Time,” social commentator Jonathan Rowe compares the resource of time to
water that’s been diverted for commercial uses. Water and time are judged to be useful—economically—only when they are channeled from their natural flows to become part of the market. But Rowe counters this standard economic evaluation. “Water left in a river or aquifer is working all the time. It sustains fish, forests, wildlife, and ultimately humanity,” he writes. “So it is with time. When we aren’t working for or spending money, we often are doing more genuinely useful things, like working on a project with our kids or attending a town meeting, or fixing a banister for an elderly neighbor. We might just be sitting on a front porch or stoop, providing watchful eyes that help keep the neighborhood safe.”1

  Nature gives us time, but our current work-and-spend lifestyle takes it away. We draw down reserves of time just as we draw down an aquifer or bank account, making constant due-date payments for activities and commitments that keep us too busy. “The market has been claiming more and more of the nation’s time just as it has been claiming more of nature,” Rowe continues. “Never before in history has a society expended so much time and energy on work of dubious value—pitching junk food to kids, for example—while neglecting so much work that really needs to be done. Push junk at kids and you count. Give your time to them and you don’t.”2 Rowe echoes Henry David Thoreau’s sentiments of 160 years ago: “If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen …”3

  Where Time Goes

  The market relies on consumer time as well as consumer dollars. It assumes that we’ll take the time to read the instructions to assemble the fan ourselves that we bought at Target, that we’ll teach ourselves how to operate the new computer from Best Buy, that we’ll maintain our health so we can be more productive workers and also raise future employees-of-the-month. But our busy lifestyles don’t leave much time to do all this unpaid work. “Those hours we spend puzzling over the options of medical insurance, long distance, and investment plans—and then dealing with disputes over bills—are hours not available for other things,” concludes Rowe.4

  With credit cards in our pockets and 20 cubic feet of cargo space in our huge vehicles, we spend a large portion of our time hunting and gathering consumer goods. My least favorite time-consuming consumer activity is penetrating the packaging on products intentionally designed for a short lifetime, such as disposable razor blades. When I recently bought an electric razor to curb the flash flood of disposable blades, I opened its package with trepidation, wondering how many have died opening plastic-encased packaging with sharp scissors and knives! (I also wondered how much energy went into the manufacture of my new “speed shaver,” and why razor blade sharpeners have not yet come into the market. Why can’t we have blades that last at least as long as refrigerator leftovers?)

  I’m fascinated by all the time that’s embedded and programmed into our products. A microwave dinner, for example, appeals to us because it takes only a few minutes to prepare; yet it took nature millions of years to produce the oil for the plastic wrapper and make the soil that grew the trees for the cardboard tray. The packaging for that frozen lasagne is programmed for a cooking time of about four minutes, a shelf life of maybe six months, and a landfill dead time of centuries. In a sense, isn’t packaging insulation from time, enabling and promoting a system of long-distance, energy-rich transportation and storage? Packaging makes buying local products unnecessary, and also prevents the buyer from assessing the quality of an individual product; one packaged item is assumed to be the same as another. As I wrestled with the thick plastic that encased my new razor, I resented the fact that they were making the money but I was spending the time—first the work-time to afford the razor, then the shopping time to buy it, and finally the fluster-time to actually hold the product in my hand—which in the end malfunctioned and had to be returned.5

  For the alleged convenience of such short-time products as razor blades, computer software, paper towels, tape dispensers, batteries, and all the rest, how many hours do we spend prowling supermarket and store aisles in search of replacements? How many salespeople and friends do we talk to about these products, and how many consumer reports do we read on the Web? How much “hidden” time do we spend in the car and at work, to obtain that product? For example, one of the silliest inventions in recent years is prescrambled eggs that you heat up, no muss, no fuss, in a microwave. You save about five minutes by not having to crack a few eggs, stir them up, and cook them yourself. But the prescrambled eggs cost about twenty times as much as fresh eggs do—about twelve minutes in working time for someone making an average salary.

  We’re discovering how costly consumption really is, in time as well as money—hurrying through our best years partly to overcome the hidden costs of these disposable, poorly designed products. The most effective weapon against all the packaging, payments, and pretense is to fill our time with things that last; and the truth is, quality usually takes time to obtain or achieve. For example, to really take care of our health takes time, just as learning to play the piano does, or reading stories to our kids. Yet all of these uses of time can substitute for consumption.

  The Time Costs of Excessive Spending

  We tend to think about time only when face to face with it—eyeball to eyeball with a deadline or unachievable to-do list. Yet author Jerome Segal takes a wider look at time, pointing out that we work from New Year’s Day to March 10 just to pay for our cars, which lately have become a full sixth of the average household budget. On an average income, we spend about two minutes working per mile of annual travel.6 And the average American then spends more time in the car than he or she does for activities like reading, having conversations, exercising, or having sex.

  Social critic Ivan Illich once evaluated car travel in a slightly different way: When we add the time spent in our car (an average of 445 hours a year) with time spent to purchase and maintain the car, we’re going less than five miles an hour. (Compared to the average human pace of 3-4 mph, in which the walker gets exercise). Even the actual speed of the average car amounts to less than 30 miles an hour, including stoplight respites, where in nonhybrid cars the motor is turning but the wheels are not.

  Partly because people think “time is money,” our world is teeming with time thieves, lurking like pickpockets at a mall. For example, a bank or insurance company that installs an automated phone tree not only steals the jobs of employees but robs customers of their time, too, as they listen for the right “branch”; press 3 for account questions, 9 for more options; listen to the Muzak for ten minutes; and finally hang up in frustration. According to a recent survey conducted by Harris Interactive, the typical American will spend six months of his or her life sitting at red lights, eight months opening junk mail, one year searching for misplaced items, two years trying to return calls to people who aren’t there, four years cleaning house, and five years waiting in line—all activities that relate at least in part to our lives as consumers.7

  Certainly, there are opportunities to save years of time in the above categories by rearranging the details of one’s lifestyle. Author and Simplicity Forum chair Vicki Robin proposes that we can gain time and improve our lives by rethinking the “time cost of stuff,” to change our priorities and enrich our lives. Robin offers the example of a young single person who makes $20 an hour yet can’t seem to make ends meet. Here’s why: From $800 a week she earns, she needs to subtract weekly transportation costs of $20, the portion of her upgraded car payment that relates to her new job—$25 a week, restaurant lunches at $30 more than brown-bag lunches, $25 a week for clothes appropriate for work, monthly seminars to improve her chances for advancement—another $50 a week, and then income taxes for another $125 a week.8

  So she has $525 in her purse as she begins to consider the actual time she spends on work-related activities: ten hours a week just getti
ng dressed, fed, and out the door in the morning; and another ten hours a week to recover from the workday; three hours a week for the monthly training sessions; seven hours for work-related reading; three hours a week for the monthly seminar; and ten hours, easily, for “dribs and drabs” of unpaid overtime—an extra half hour a day at her desk; weekend calls and a steady stream of e-mails and text messages. Dividing the $525 she’s got left by eighty actual work hours, the young professional is really making $6.50 an hour. Writes Robin, “A new car at $6.50 an hour becomes over three thousand hours—a year and a half on the job. A daily “double tall skinny” latte ends up costing over hundred hours a year—over two weeks of work.” She concludes that any $6.50 item must be worth more than an hour with a friend or with a good book, or why bother with it?9

  Thoughts like these make us wonder how to recover some of that work-related time. In the book Your Money or Your Life, Robin and coauthor Joe Dominguez lay out a financial strategy that will enable conscious consumers and investors to retire years early.

  Taking Back Our Work Time

  Many others are asking a similar question about regaining time before retirement, including John de Graaf, who edited the anthology Take Back Your Time, in which Vicki Robin’s “time cost” thoughts, above, appear. He is also national coordinator of the organization Take Back Your Time, and has thoroughly documented the American syndrome of overworking. (He has many suggestions for what to do about it, too. See www.Timeday.org.) De Graaf notes that 57 percent of employed adults say they don’t always leave work on time, and less than one out of five are “very satisfied” with their current work/life balance.10 “More than half of Americans say they’d be willing to trade a day off a week for a day’s pay a week,” says de Graaf. 11