CHAPTER 19
Affluholics anonymous
Think, for a moment, back to your childhood. You were sick in bed with the flu and Mom came in with a little TLC. Words of comfort and maybe some medicine—aspirin for your fever, lozenges for your cough. And a bowl of hot chicken soup just to make you feel better. But the most important thing was having Mom there with her sympathy, so you wouldn’t have to suffer alone.
The same goes for affluenza. To conquer it, most of us need to know we’re not all by ourselves in the battle. Like alcoholics trying to stay on the wagon, we need support from others who are fighting the disease. Every addiction nowadays seems to have support groups like Alcoholics Anonymous for its victims, and conquering affluenza, the addictive virus, may require them even more, because there isn’t any social pressure to stop consuming—just the opposite. But there is, you might say, an AA for affluenza.
I may be losing the rat race, but at least I’m still a rat.
STUDY CIRCLES CAN SAVE THE WORLD
Cecile Andrews, a former teacher who now lives in Santa Cruz, California, has a childlike sense of awe and wonder—and an ability to make people laugh that any stand-up comedian would envy. She was promoting adult education classes as a community college administrator in Seattle in 1989, when she read a book called Voluntary Simplicity, by Duane Elgin. “I was really excited about it,” she says, “but no one else was talking about it.” She decided to offer a course on the subject. “But only four people signed up, so we had to cancel,” she says with a laugh. “Then we tried it again three years later for a variety of reasons, and that time we got 175.”
Afterward, participants told Cecile that her voluntary simplicity workshop had changed their lives. It wasn’t the kind of thing a community college administrator hears every day, she says. “So I ended up resigning my full-time position and devoting myself to giving these workshops.”
She also remembered an idea she’d learned in Sweden. There, neighbors and friends organize discussion groups, called study circles, which meet in people’s homes. Cecile began to organize her would-be voluntary simplicity students into such groups. Participants started with a short reading list, but most of the discussion focused on their personal experiences. People began to tell their own stories, “why they were there, that they have no time, they are working too much, they have no fun, they’re not laughing anymore.”
Some of the groups that Cecile began in 1992 still continue today. Participants give each other advice and build networks for tool sharing and other activities that increase their sense of community. They find ways to help each other out that reduce their need for a high income. They meet frequently in each other’s homes and share tips, stories, and ideas for action. Everyone is expected to talk, and an egg timer, passed around the room, limits the time each can speak, preventing anyone from monopolizing the conversation.
The discussion often moves from the personal to the political. “People begin to talk about what institutional changes need to happen so they can find community and stop wasting money and resources,” says Andrews. They talk about open space, parks for their kids, improved public transit, longer library hours, more effective local government. “Voluntary simplicity is not just a personal change thing. Study circles can save the world,” Andrews adds with a wink.
SIMPLICITY AS SUBVERSION
Since 1992, Cecile Andrews has helped start hundreds of voluntary simplicity study circles. Her book, The Circle of Simplicity, explains how anyone can start them. Most important, says Andrews, is that participants not see voluntary simplicity as a sacrifice.
“One person I know calls what we’re doing the ‘self-deprivation movement,’ but it’s not,” she argues. “The way to fill up emptiness is not by denying ourselves something. It’s by putting positive things in place of the negative things, by finding out what we really need, and that’s community, creativity, passion in our lives, connection with nature. People help each other figure that out. They learn to meet their real needs instead of the false needs that advertisers create. They learn to live in ways that are high fulfillment, but low environmental impact.”
In the best sense of the word, Andrews sees herself as a subversive (imagine Emma Goldman as Grandma Moses). “The thing about the voluntary simplicity movement is that it looks so benign,” she suggests. “Like, ‘Isn’t that sweet? They’re trying to cut back, to live more simply.’ So people don’t understand how radical it is. It’s the Trojan horse of social change. It’s really getting people to live in a totally different way.”
Andrews is now promoting a similar idea she calls the “living room” revolution. “What needs to happen? It all starts with local,” she says. “And local starts with small groups, meeting in places like people’s living rooms, cafés, meeting rooms, and auditoriums.” Andrews is clear that once people know they want change and take a step back from affluenza—the “bed rest” of the previous chapter—they need to work with others to make progress. And for most, the process needs a small-group component with real connection to others, not simply involvement in big social-change outfits. The anthropologist Margaret Mead once said that we should not underestimate the ability of a small group of committed people to change the world: “Indeed, it’s the only thing that has.” But such groups can take many forms in addition to the free-flowing style promoted by Andrews.
THE ROYS OF DOWNSHIFTING
In Portland, Oregon, Dick and Jeanne Roy used study groups to take the battle against affluenza into unexpected places. Until he reached the age of fifty-three, Dick Roy was a leader in the most traditional fashion: president of his class at Oregon State University; officer in the Navy; and finally, a high-priced corporate attorney in one of America’s most prestigious law firms, with an office on the thirty-second floor overlooking all of Portland. But he was also married to Jeanne, a strong environmentalist and a believer in frugality.
So despite their six-figure income, the Roys lived simply and often had to weather teasing from their friends about their old clothes and used bicycles. They went backpacking on their vacations. Once they took their children to Disneyland—by bus, walking with backpacks on through the streets of Anaheim, California, from the bus station to their motel.
Jeanne, in particular, found many ways to reduce consumption: using a clothesline instead of a dryer; sending junk mail back until it stopped coming; carefully saving paper; buying food in bulk and using her own packaging. Eventually, to the amazement of all her neighbors, she reduced the amount of landfill-bound trash the Roys produced to only one regular-sized garbage can a year! She says it wasn’t a sacrifice. “If you ask people what kinds of activities bring them pleasure, it’s usually contact with nature, things that are creative, and relationships with people, and the things we do to live simply bring us all of those satisfactions.”
Eventually, Jeanne took a leadership role in Portland’s recycling program, conducting group workshops in people’s homes to teach them how to save energy and water and use resources to maximum effectiveness. Meanwhile, Dick raised a few eyebrows at work by putting in the fewest billable hours of anyone in the firm so that he could spend more time with his family. Such behavior almost brands you as a heretic in the legal profession, but Dick was a darned good lawyer and he got along well with his colleagues, so they overlooked his transgressions. Yet eventually he grew tired of corporate law. His children were grown and he wanted to do something that more directly expressed his values, especially his concern for the environment. In 1993, Dick Roy left his job to live on his savings and devote his time to saving the earth.
WIDENING THE CIRCLES
The Roys founded the Northwest Earth Institute in Portland (www.nwei.org), an organization that promotes simple living and environmental awareness by running discussion groups in existing institutions. Dick Roy’s corporate connections helped him bring workshops—Voluntary Simplicity, Choices for Sustainable Living, and Discovering a Sense of Place—into many of Portland’s largest corporations. Interested employees were encouraged to meet during lunch hours, in groups of a dozen or so, and conduct structured conversations that, Dick hoped, would lead to personal, social, and political action.
While the Roys have moved on to other projects, two decades later, the Northwest Earth Institute can look back at a surprising track record of success:
• Hundreds of discussion courses conducted in private businesses (including such giants as Nike and Hewlett-Packard), government agencies, schools, and nonprofits throughout the Pacific Northwest
• Dozens of church discussion groups in the Northwest
• Establishment of outreach courses and sister Earth Institutes in all fifty states
• Involvement of more than 25,000 people in its courses
One difference between Cecile Andrews’s study circles and the Earth Institute groups is that Andrews starts hers with a conversation of what a happy but less consumptive life would look like for people, while the initial impetus at Earth Institutes is on the environment. Another is that the Earth Institute groups use a more traditional approach, incorporating intensive study guides, including a multiplicity of reading materials and other resources, to get the conversation going. They also focus on changing behavior, not merely thinking. Northwest Earth Institute points out that while 88 percent of Americans say recycling is important, only 51 percent actually do it; 81 percent advocate taking your own reusable bag to the grocery story, but only 33 percent do; 76 percent like the idea of buying locally grown food, but only 26 percent actually do so; and 76 percent think it’s better to walk or bike than drive, but only 15 percent practice what they preach.
We leave the choice of what kind of small-group Affluholics Anonymous study model is best for you. The point is not to go it alone. Find others to help you combat your own affluenza and change our social and economics priorities at the same time.
FINDING EACH OTHER
One place to begin to find folks to team up with is the Internet. Twenty years ago, when Cecile Andrews and the Roys began their voluntary simplicity work, only 0.02 percent of the world’s people had access to the Net (which then contained very little information). Today, 35 percent have Internet access, and in countries like the United States coverage is near total. Search engines like Google and social networking sites like Facebook and Meetup allow the opportunity to find potential collaborators in your community to a degree unimaginable in the past. An Internet search on voluntary simplicity, for example, immediately turns up a million references to the term. Add the word Facebook and you find a hundred thousand connections, while adding Meetup brings in 17,000 more. Adding support groups churns up another 180,000 references, many of them being groups of people who are actually getting together! Surely one is near you. Get creative. Try a combination of key words. Or start your own group.
PROGRESSIVE SIMPLIFICATION
In the late seventies, Duane Elgin conducted a study for the Stanford Research Institute of people who were choosing simpler, less consumptive lives. He found they were “eating lower on the food chain”; tending to vegetarian diets; wearing simple, utilitarian clothing; buying smaller, fuel-efficient cars; and cultivating their “inner” lives—living “consciously, deliberately, intentionally,” mindful of the impacts of their activities. Naturally, we interviewed him for the Affluenza documentary and have remained in contact since then.
Elgin published his findings in the book Voluntary Simplicity. His timing was off by a bit. The book came out in 1981, just as Ronald Reagan was encouraging a return to excess and trend watchers were discovering the yuppies. By 2000, Elgin, a gentle man with a gray beard and twinkling eyes, was an acknowledged leader in the new voluntary simplicity movement. Elgin believes that “the power of commercial mass media to distract us from real ecological crises and focus our attention on shampoo” are “creating a mindset for catastrophe.”
But he now sees hopeful signs that weren’t there during the seventies’ emphasis on simplicity. Elgin points to the countless ways that seekers of a cure for affluenza can now connect with one another: a plethora of magazines, some real, some merely opportunistic; valuable Internet resources; websites for dozens of simple-living organizations; chat groups; radio programs; books filled with practical tips and inspiration. Ten percent of the population, Elgin says, is making changes. “For a long time, they felt alone, but now they’re beginning to find each other.”
The change will take a generation, he feels, and he fears that’s about all the time we have before we run into an ecological wall. “The leading edge of those people choosing a simple life,” Elgin says, “have been relatively affluent. They’ve had a taste of the good life and have found it wanting, and now they’re looking for a different kind of life.” In that sense, the movement might be seen by some people as elitist. Yet, says Elgin, “it’s only when such people begin moderating their consumption that there is going to be more available for people that now don’t have enough.”
Elgin likes to talk about Arnold Toynbee’s law of progressive simplification. He points out that the great British historian studied the rise and fall of twenty-two civilizations and “summarized everything he knew about the growth of human civilizations in one law: The measure of a civilization’s growth is its ability to shift energy and attention from the material side to the spiritual and aesthetic and cultural and artistic side.”
Thousands of Americans are coming together in small groups all across the country, trying to bring about that shift. Like Uncle Sam pointing from a World War II “Wanted” poster, they need you.