A Path to Simplicity

The Gift to be Simple, part 3

The Greeks had a concept of paideia. They meant that life at its best was a continuous self-transformation of our person; that this lifelong project of transformation was an art form. In 1987, for the first time in this country, the number of shopping centers exceeded the number of high schools. A life of shopping – and working so that we can get the money to do the shopping – is not conducive to the practice of the art of lifelong transformation.

How did we get in this mess?

Humans have been around, as roughly the species that we are, for about 3 million years. We were designed to solve certain problems – find food, shelter, a mate, get the children raised, interact socially. So, of course, when, in the last 9,999 ten-thousandths of those 3 million years, the rich societies of the world developed technology to meet those basic needs more plentifully than we ever had before, we had to use it. It’s what we were designed to do. We were designed to try to solve those problems – built to spend our lives working on them. We weren’t designed to know what to do with ourselves after actually solving them. We’re built to seek more because for all those generations, more numerous that we can conceive, seeking more improved our survival odds.

We’re also built to compare ourselves to our neighbors. Financial advisor Dave Ramsey said, “We buy things we don’t need, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t like.” Why do we do that?

Robert Frank, Cornell economics professor has pointed out that our relative income is more important to us than our absolute buying power. Most of humans would rather make a $100,000 a year in a world in which everyone else was making $90,000 than make $110,000 in a world in which everybody else is making $120,000. Why are we like that?

UCLA neuroscientist Michael McGuire and colleagues have done a number of studies on vervet monkeys that suggest part of the answer. Serotonin levels correlate with position in the social hierarchy, both as cause and effect. If you artificially raise their serotonin levels with drugs, they become more likely to ascend the social hierarchy; and if you remove the most dominant monkeys, then the next ones down become the new top, and their serotonin level goes up. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that regulates mood and behavior; it enhances feelings of well-being. Writes Robert Frank:

“Suffice it to say that no matter how the relevant mechanisms work, there is compelling evidence that concern about relative position is a deep-rooted and ineradicable element of human nature.”

I think we have to have our eyes open to the sort of beings that we evolved to be. But that relative position that by our nature we attend to does not have to be a hierarchically-ordered position. I know not what options may be available to those vervet monkeys, but humans, at least, have powerful cultural concepts, ideas, learning, spiritual cultivation to interact with our genetic construction. We, at least, can have status without having to have a higher position in a hierarchy, without having to accumulate wealth, without having to impress people we don’t like.

We can learn to recognize and feel status as an equal, making an equal’s contribution to the community. The development of closer-knit communities is thus essential.

We need status, but if we don’t have a close sense of community, then the only path open to us with be the trappings of status, the symbols of status, which we accumulate in order to feel a status in which we cannot be secure because it is conferred partly in our imaginations, and by others whose deference we cannot trust, whose love we do not believe in, and whose eyes we do meet.

There’s another way.

We can live deliberately. There are people intentionally deciding to cut back work hours, cut back clutter, cut back consumption. For instance, there’s a tiny house movement – houses less than 400 square feet are popping up around the country.

The best hope is not to go to the woods, like Thoreau, nor to embrace the hardships of subsistence farming. The best hope is, however, to live deliberately in community. In community, we can share. The co-housing idea, for instance, I find more encouraging than isolated tiny houses. Co-housing communities don’t have all property held in common. But they hold in common some property – maybe a shared garden plot, and shared power tools, for instance. They may have some shared meals – where people take turns fixing a dinner for the whole community – say three times a week. While most of the cohousing communities built in the 1990’s and early 2000’s were suburban, there is now a surge in urban cohousing. That’s a hopeful direction for lives of greater richness and sharing and connection, less stress and alienation, more encountering life more consciously.

Whatever the path toward simplicity might be for you, it requires intention, deliberately breaking with some of the forces that have been pulling you along. There probably is a better way for you. May the path be found, and the courage to take it, step by step.

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This is part 3 of 3 of "The Gift to be Simple"
See also
Part 1: Our Sordid Boon
Part 2: Consumption Up, Well-Being Down

Consumption Up, Well-Being Down

The Gift to be Simple, part 2

Despite the great recession of 2007-2009, and despite the slowness of a number of economic measures of recovery, U.S. per capita consumption, is still rising. Adjusted for inflation, in the 20 years 1976 to 1996, US per capita consumption rose 36 percent. In the next 20 years, from 1996 to 2016, it rose another 32 percent – barely slowed down.

Compared to 20 years ago, we own 70 percent more cars per person -- and we drive 30 percent more miles.

Our houses are getting bigger and bigger. In 1950, the median size of a new single-family house built in the U.S. was 1100 square feet. Wasn’t that enough? In 1973, the median was up to 1,525 square feet; twenty-five years later, 1998, the median reached 2000 square feet. Last year, median square feet of new houses broke 2500. That’s median, not mean, so this is not a product of the upper echelons building enormous mansions. It means half of all new houses built today are twice or more the size of the median new house in 1960.

The percentage of the world’s population comprised of Americans totals less than 4.5 percent. The percentage of the world’s resources consumed by Americans totals 30 percent. That means the average American is consuming 10 times the resources of the average rest-of-the-world.

In 2012, American children were receiving allowances averaging $780 per year. The same year, more than an eighth of the world population was living on that much per year. That’s almost a billion people getting by on what the average American child gets in allowance.

We aren’t happy with all this wealth. While that per capita consumption was rising and rising, the percent of Americans reporting they were “very happy” has stayed right about the same as it was in 1957. Standard of living is going up, but quality of life is not.

There is an index of social health. It combines 16 indicators:

• infant mortality,
• child abuse,
• child poverty,
• teenage suicide,
• teenage drug abuse,
• high school dropouts,
• unemployment,
• weekly wages,
• health insurance coverage,
• poverty among the elderly,
• out-of-pocket health-care costs among the elderly,
• homicides,
• alcohol-related traffic fatalities,
• food insecurity,
• affordable housing, and
• income inequality.

According to this index, the social health in the US peaked in 1973, then steadily fell until 1981. Since then, it has bounced around a bit and essentially stayed flat.

We’re consuming more and more resources, but our national social health is staying lower than in was 43 years ago.

And to support these consumption rates, we work frenetically. A Gallup poll last December “found that 61 percent of working Americans said they did not have enough time to do the things they wanted to do.”

It’s true that we probably exaggerate our own busy-ness. A 2011 study from Monthly Labor Review found that “people estimating 75-plus hour workweeks were off, on average, by about 25 hours.” OK, but something about modern life makes us feel very, very busy.

Having more money really doesn’t make us any happier – except for the very poor. If you're trying to get by on less than $10,000 a year, then more money really would make life better. For those making the US median or more, any further increase in income would have no real relation to the quality of life. Doctors are the highest income group in the U.S. Lawyers aren’t far behind. But what are the professions with the highest proportion of unhappy people? Doctors and lawyers. Of course, I know some very happy, emotionally healthy people who are doctors and lawyers. But there are also a lot of unhappy ones out there, leading lives of quiet desperation. The point is that wealth isn’t really what we want. It’s only what we so often act like we want.

The life of simplicity is richer than modern consuming lifestyles. As Duane Elgin wrote thirty-five years ago,

“We cannot be deliberate when we are distracted from our critical life circumstances. We cannot be intentional when we are not paying attention. We cannot be purposeful when we are not being present. Therefore, crucial to acting in a voluntary manner is being aware of ourselves as we move through life” (Voluntary Simplicity 32).

Our normal waking consciousness is so embedded within a stream of inner-fantasy dialogue that little attention can be paid to the moment-to-moment experiencing of ourselves. We aren’t continuously and consciously ‘tasting’ our experience of ourselves. “Getting and spending we lay waste our powers,” as Wordsworth put it.

Simplicity is not turning away from progress, but is crucial to progress. Elgin writes:

“The West has pursued material and social growth without a balanced regard for the development of interior human potentials. The result has been the emergence of a life-denying and self-serving order that has exhausted both its vitality and its sense of direction.” (233).

We can learn

“to touch the Earth ever more lightly with our material demands...to touch others ever more gently and responsively with our social institutions...to live our daily lives with ever less complexity and clutter...the skills of touching life ever more lightly be releasing habitual patterns of thinking and behaving that make our passage through life weighty and cloudy rather than light and spacious; to ‘touch and go’ – not to hold on – but to allow each moment to arise with newness and freshness;...to be in the world with a quiet mind and an open heart....Who we are as an entire human family is much greater than who we are as the sum of isolated cultures” (234-236).

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This is part 2 of 3 of "The Gift to be Simple"
See also
Part 1: Our Sordid Boon
Part 3: A Path to Simplicity

Our Sordid Boon

The Gift to be Simple, part 1

Two hundred fourteen years ago, about, William Wordsworth’s 1802 poem said:

“The world is too much with us, late and soon
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers
Little we see in nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon.”

One hundred sixty-two years ago, Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book, Walden, asked: “Why should we live in such a hurry and waste of life?” Thoreau said he wished to live deliberately, which, for him, meant fronting “only the essential facts of life.” Only the essential. Elsewhere in Walden he wrote:

“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand.
Instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion.”

Thirty-five years ago, Duane Elgin’s 1981 book, Voluntary Simplicity, expanded on Wordsworth’s and Thoreau’s desire for “a way of life that is outwardly simple, inwardly rich.” To choose simplicity, as opposed to being swept along in consumeristic habits that we never stop and think carefully about, never question, “means encountering life more consciously. To live more simply is to encounter life more directly.”

It’s about living with a purpose; mindfully and consciously emphasizing spiritual wholeness. It’s about de-emphasizing materialism and using less of the world's natural resources and promoting a humane, sustainable future -- as integral parts of an approach to developing authentic selves and beloved communities.

Like Earth Day, which began a little earlier, voluntary simplicity represents values that have only grown more important. Intentionally building a life of simplicity requires careful attention.

I need to be clear that simply having less money doesn’t get there. I returned from Honduras Thursday night, where I spent a week of my time there in a tiny and very poor village of fewer than 100 people. This village, Mabita, is in the Moskitia region. The Moskitan people are an indigenous people. They speak Spanish with visitors but speak Moskitan among themselves. The region is supposed to be set aside for them, though there is little actual protection from the gradual encroachment of outsiders cutting down the forest and pine savanna to make cattle pasture. I have some anger about that, and so I do have to mention to you that if you eat beef then you probably are supporting the market forces that are making that happen. In any case, the Moskitan people have been subsistence farmers for centuries, and they are still basically subsistence farmers. The village just a couple years ago constructed a small water tower with about a 1,000-gallon plastic barrel on top, and PVC pipes now provide running water to some of the houses. For the rest, household water still comes from carrying a bucket to the town well. There are no electric lines bringing power from a power plant. Last year a UN grant allowed them to get a few solar panels, so now they have a few electric lights – but before that, no electricity. There’s no telephone service. Never have been any landlines. Many of the residents have cell phones, but to use them they have to go outside of town a couple kilometers, and go up on hill where they pick up a signal from a cell tower in Nicaragua.

There’s a need there for cash. Subsistence farming doesn’t pay for health care. A large part of what money they can get will be sent to a sick or hurt relative in some other village to help with their care. They used to get a large part of their cash income from poaching macaw chicks in the area. Now, thanks to LoraKim and One Earth Conservation, the nonprofit she founded, they earn money helping to preserve the macaws.

This is not the kind of simple living that I’m talking about. Even if health-care were provided, even if their life were a little less fraught and arduous, and even if they weren’t under constant threat of losing more land to cattle ranchers, what I learned was, it’s a complicated little society. They don’t have email, or websites, or newspapers or newsletters or any way of letting each other know what’s going on. Transparency about the making of decisions that affect the village is difficult. So there’s constant gossip and innuendo about who did what. Subterranean resentments fester. It’s complicated and kind of stressful in its own way.

Turning now to the other end of the spectrum, there is, well, most of us. We have known for some time that much of the US suffers from “affluenza” – defined as

1. the bloated, sluggish and unfulfilled feeling that results from efforts to keep up with the Joneses.
2. An epidemic of stress, overwork, waste and indebtedness caused by dogged pursuit of the American Dream.
3. An unsustainable addiction to economic growth.

If the Moskitan people are impoverished the old-fashioned way, by lack of wealth, we are often impoverished by wealth itself.

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This is part 1 of 3 of "The Gift to be Simple"
See also
Part 2: Consumption Up, Well-Being Down
Part 3: A Path to Simplicity