This topic came up in another thread, and it spurred me to mention it here. I wonder if people are interested in the ideas surrounding a fledgeling "movement," which often calls itself "voluntary simplicity."
There are "simplicity cafes" and "simplicity study groups" and things like that all over the web. (Unfortunately none in my area.) I'll post links a while later, after the discussion has got going (if it does).
The idea here is, basically, to reject the consumer culture, realize that with economic wellbeing comes an idea not only of "success" but also of "enough," and learn to manage your resources so that you LIVE a life rather than merely WORK all life long for toys you don't really need, or for dry-cleaning bills that wouldn't be necessary if you weren't working in the first place.
The bibles of this movement are, philosophically, Thoreau's "Walden," and more practically, the Penguin book by Dominguez and Robin entitled "Your Money or Your Life." The latter is a kind of complicated financial workbook in which you learn to master your spending and get out of working until you die. They have an elaborate plan, by which you equate time and energy spent, to something called "life energy," which can be accounted for in terms of units that you then compare to your desired expenditures. It's a sort of reverse-budgeting process, by which you allow your life-priorities to sort out where you WANT to spend your money, and then after-the-fact slowly build your spending habits to where they are in concert with your real goals.
I like it, because it's a smarter way to go about budgeting. Rather than saying, "I can't go out for dessert because I have to be good," which is generally the downfall of traditional ante-hoc budgeting, you end up saying something more like, "I really want to be able to afford piano lessons, and so I ended up going home, and only long after the fact did I realize that in other circumstances I probably would have accidentally gone out and spent too much on dessert." I dislike it because it's convolute and because it's never really fit my actual work style or life.
My life has been a hodgepodge of odd-jobs and poor employment. I am the typical impoverished gentry of America -- English major, brilliant and practical and always successful at any job he does, but also without long-term thrust to a career. I have no formal or certifiable training in any field (never thought I needed it; but then learned the hard way that it mattered more than intelligence or ability), and now am in the box of needing it but not being able to afford it. I have just started a job in publishing, which excites me, in that my smarts and worldly wide-ranging wisdom will actually be used and tangibly valued (as well as merely intangibly), and in that there is actually room for advancement. Which there wasn't, in academia in the medieval vernacular bibliography field, in poetry, in school teaching, in choral singing, in stage-managing, in the many other very skilled and very poorly paid jobs our society tends to deride with laughable salaries. (Edit: I'm of course being a bit offhand and hyperbolic about how brilliant I am. This is tongue-in-cheek, I hope you realize.)
I have to admit, as an aside (but not very tangential), it has always been a shock to me how poorly we pay those whom I personally most value, those whom I would say we SHOULD most value. I didn't really learn about the discrepancies between a lawyer's starting salary and a school-teacher's until well after my undergraduate career was over and I felt it "too late" to go straight to law school. Or any other "certification" course. I can, of course, always go as a "returning" student, but somehow it's not the same. It isn't a "calling."
So the voluntary simplicity movement attracts me because, foremost, of the manner in which my own thoughts tend to run counter to the free market's insistence that profitability is, in itself, an accurate guage of overall "truthful" value. I'd have to say, a market is only one indicator of value, and that economic value OUGHT to be given, in a just society, to things other than marketability. So, you see where I run afoul of the typical laissez-faire or libertarian arguments.
And voluntary simplicity appeals to me for other reasons. The chicks who actually accept those concepts tend to be hotter. Not necessarily skinnier or prettier or better dressed, just, more ... sexual. They aren't looking to their men to be providor / father figures, but instead exude this need for DICK. I like that.
I'm of course being a bit flippant, but you get the point. I like voluntary simplicity because it reduces clutter, and I hate clutter in my life. Perhaps I am rebelling against my parents, who lead a very cluttered life -- children of the depression (barely, they were both born in 38) and the War, they simply accrete masses of things in their house. (As an only, I cringe at a mere THOUGHT of the eventual unaided cleaning up that will fall to me.)
And I'm moving into a new place, a place of my own (thanks to publishing! yay!) for the first time in almost 15 years. I wonder if I will genuinely clean up things. Do people have any suggestions as to how to eliminate clutter? How to go about living a "principle centered" life rather than a "free market centered" one? Anyone else attracted to voluntary simplicity? And, is Jackson Mississippi going to be a good place to do it ... :-P ...