Voluntary Simplicity

Substantial research indicates a negative relationship between excessive consumption, namely materialism, and consumer well-being (CWB). Since anti-consumption is contradictory to materialism, and materialism has a negative relationship with CWB, logically, anti-consumption should have a positive influence on CWB. To explore this relationship, we review the literature on anti-consumption, materialism, and CWB, and ascertain the most prominent values by which anti-consumption and materialism differ. We then develop a framework based on four constructs (1. Control over consumption; 2. Scope of concerns; 3. Material desire; 4. Source of happiness), conceptually highlighting how anti-consumption and materialism differ in terms of CWB. Qualitative data and content analysis of online blogs, forums, and websites provide preliminary support for our propositions. Finally, we conclude with some implications for managers and policymakers.

Voluntary simplicity is often considered to be a sustainable lifestyle phenomenon buttressed by environment-friendly consumption practices. Voluntary simplicity is shaped by the individual as well as the society, and marketplace interactions often impact voluntarily simplified approaches to consumption. Pertinent, therefore, is a consideration of how voluntary simplifiers negotiate the tensions between marketplace interactions and decisions (not) to consume, as the exploration of interactions between consumption and non-consumption choices has relevant implications for the advancement of sustainable consumption. Specifically, we seek to answer the following question: how have voluntary simplifiers in a rural context negotiated the relationship between voluntary simplicity and market-based (non-) consumption? This paper reports on a study of 28 rural voluntary simplifiers to explore the intersections between voluntary simplicity and rural markets. Findings highlight the convoluted nature and the multiple manifestations of voluntary simplicity, while the rural context allows an exploration of such tensions in relation to individual voluntary simplicity, local economy, supermarkets, fair trade and consumer culture.

The book examines frugality as an ideal and an ‘art de vivre’ which implies a low level of material consumption and a simple lifestyle, to open the mind for spiritual goods as inner freedom, social peace and justice or the quest for God or ‘ultimate reality’. By rational choice we can develop a more frugal and sufficient way of life, but material temptations can always overwrite our ecological, social and ethical considerations. But the spiritual case for frugality is strong enough. Spiritually based frugal practices may lead to rational outcomes such as reducing ecological destruction, social disintegration and the exploitation of future generations

Myriad lines surround our day-to-day lives, exiting and entering our homes. Wires connect to electricity posts which power and heat our dwellings. Cables hook us to telephone and internet networks. Other lines stretch the world closer to us and our homes closer to the world: paved driveways link us with roads and highways, mains tap us into common water reserves and flow into municipal sewers, satellite beams reach into the atmosphere to download television signals into our living rooms. Together these lines—and possibly many others—constitute extensive and powerful webs of material and cultural significance in which our lives are suspended. These webs are the grids upon which society is pegged, the grids through which our material and social relations are entangled.       
Not everyone, however, is reliant on these grids. People who—for a variety of motives—have spun alternative webs have come to know their lifestyle as “off-the-grid.”  Off-the-grid dwelling refers to ways of living marked by disconnection from the infrastructural assemblages (or grids) that provide societies with the potential for power, light, and speed.
Grids of light, speed, and power can make our life comfortable and convenient but they are also troublesome companions. Grids deeply shape social relations and entrench them in differential access to power. In light of this, off-the-grid dwelling has recently emerged as an oppositional (but often negotiated and contradictory) everyday life practice. By delinking from one or more grids, an individual, group, or community needs to reinvent a different way of life and practice a different way of living.
Couched in cultural studies, cultural geography, and cultural sociology, this book aims to uncover the day-to-day practice off-grid living across Canada in order to understand why and how a person or community chooses to live off-grid; how off-the-grid dwellers cope with a world increasingly governed by the grid logic of light, power, and speed; what distinguishes off-grid dwellers' technologies and material cultures; how they accomplish comfort and convenience in their everyday life; and in what ways off-the-grid dwelling constitutes a sustainable, environmentally and culturally, lifestyle practice. In order to document the diversity of ways of life off-the-grid, the book unfolds as a series of ethnographic narratives focusing on individuals and groups who dwell in households and/or communities removed from roads, electricity, sewage, garbage collection, natural gas pipelines, water mains, telephone, internet, and television.
In addition to shedding light on off-grid lifestyles, however, this book prompts us to reflect on often taken-for-granted aspects of modern living. It aims to shows us what it means and what resources it takes to do the things we do every day: from bathing and washing and cleaning to cooking and refrigerating, from heating to cooling, from growing and hunting food to disposing of it in garbage cans and toilets, from switching on the light to flicking on appliances.

“The Faithful and the Reasonable: Chapters on Ecological Foolishness” follows the successful titles “The Colourful and the Green: Chapters on Voluntary Simplicity” and “The Half-Hearted and the Hesitant: Chapters on Ecological Luxury.” The author poses the question of why, at a time of continuing devastation of nature, people’s interest in nature conservation has been decreasing. Are the media to blame or is our numbness toward ecological problems rooted in our mental makeup that tends to supress unpleasant realities? The author also wants to find out why some people have remained faithful to nature. To get to the answers, she applies sociological, philosophical, psychological, and theological perspectives. An unexpected question that may surprise some readers then becomes: Actually, why should we protect nature when it can take care of itself? It is not weak; it is strong and cruel. The empirical part of the book takes readers into the field, among birds of prey conservationists. Mainly, however, this part focuses on people’s faithfulness to nature, a faithfulness based on environmentally-friendly everyday living and low consumption of material goods. The author visits “the Colourful” again, first it was ten, now it is twenty-three years later. Moreover, Librová’s students Vojtěch Pelikán, Lucie Galčanová, and Lukáš Kala interview the children of “the Colourful,” too: have they inherited their parents’ modest lifestyle? Who is in fact reasonable and who is foolish in today’s world? Those who shrug their shoulders and give up on tackling nature’s problems, pursuing instead the pleasures that a virtual world might bring? Or those who, by experiencing the so called environmental grief, search for a catharsis that might lead them toward active engagement in nature conservation?

From a conference paper: “Coping with Scarcity: Energy Shortages, Food Crises, Drought and Critical Materials in the Modern World (c. 1800 to the present)” CalTech University, November 2015

I argue that poverty and shortage are not absolute terms that can be universally measured. Certainly poverty and shortages, even starvation and neglect are important issues - still daily problems for more than a billion of us. But poverty, as Amartya Sen said many years ago, is a product of a system of distribution, not a natural state. And the most severe issue in poverty is the ability of people to change things. True poverty is a lack of freedom, an exclusion from the tools of choice, and it is this state of mind that cannot be measured in dollars or even surveys of "happiness."

These research notes explore the political potential of online storytelling for the incipient downshifting movement in Romania. Qualitative content analysis techniques are used on a series of articles published in December 2012-January 2014 on www.totb.ro in order to reveal the political stake of the act of storytelling in cases of individual lifestyle changes. This political stake is the empowerment of citizens through individual change that catalyzes everyday dystopian experiences into utopia, into eu-topos, the good spaces where life and living are desired. The current notes summarize some key concepts on downshifting and make an introduction to the sociology of storytelling, while also elaborating some analytical observations on the empirical acts of storytelling in mediated environments.