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Buying Time and Getting by: The Voluntary Simplicity Movement

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I hate to say something negative about a book, but this book was not a good guide to living a life of voluntary simplicity.

To give the author credit for truth in advertising, though, right on the back of the book the review reads "Grigsby looks inside the movement at the daily lives of participants and includes their own accounts of their efforts. She also uses reflexive empirical analysis to explore race, class, and gender in relation to the movement."

The book reads like a grad-student thesis on a movement. Grigsby uses long sentences and references almost excessively. For example, a paragraph from page 93 begins "In mixed gender circles, which are most common, men end up coopting circle agendas over time, drawing them back toward a masculine competitive pattern of relating, and establishing themselves as experts and leaders. I theorize that this occurs because of interaction of the following factors: (1) the power men hold over women through the present configurations of institutional structures (Acker 1988, 1990; Dixon 1997; Ferguson 1984; Kleinman 1996; Milkman 1988; Walby 1990) and their desire to both create change and retain power; (2) the poverty of the cultural gender repertoires available ...." This is fine for a dissertation, but I believe most people who start reading about voluntary simplicity would prefer a discussion of what they can do to live more ethically on our planet, not a review of what academics think about voluntary simplicity.

Thus, in summary I would say that this is a fine description of the voluntary simplicity movement from the point of view of a scholarly observer. Given what it is, this is not a bad book. The reader might be disappointed, though, if you order the book expecting a guide to living within the philosophy of voluntary simplicity.

What is the voluntary simplicity movement? Who participates? Why do people join the movement? How do they participate? What has the movement accomplished? Where is it going? Mary Grigsby asks these questions and seeks to answer them in this sociological study.

It's difficult to get a handle on the voluntary simplicity movement because, by its nature as a counterculture, there are no leaders and there is no generally acknowledged definition of the movement, if indeed there is really a movement at all. It is a sort of anarchic trend of downshifting, financial independence, and back-to-the-land. Politically, it embraces bits of socialism, libertarianism, and anti-globalization. Individuals pick and choose the parts of voluntary simplicity that suit them. Some participate in simplicity circles, many don't. Since Grigsby was only able to interview and observe those who participated in simplicity circles, she saw only a sliver of the movement.

What she did see, however, makes for some surprising reading. She mentions several times that she is sympathetic to the ideas of voluntary simplicity, and she participated in at least one circle. She found that as a group, simple-livers are overwhelmingly white, middle-class, and heterosexual. They are mostly middle-aged and have no children, or at least, no children living at home. In other words, this group of anti-establishment pioneers is actually a closed society much like the very people who run things.

Grigsby finds the simple-livers fall into the stereotypes you would expect to find in any other middle-aged, middle-class, white group of North Americans. In simplicity circles, the men tend to take over. Everyone makes excuses for themselves when they don't live up to the expectations they think you have ("I see Costco as a heartless, spiritless, communityless operation, but some things are half-price there.")

The book's conclusion is a comprehensive list of steps the voluntary simplicity movement can take to achieve its goals, for instance, expand the group beyond its heterogeneous boundaries in order to get new input and different ideas on how to make voluntary simplicity work. Grigsby's list is practical and realistic.

Grigsby mentions that this book came out of her work on a dissertation, so there's a fair amount of sociological jargon. Still, it is a readable book on a compelling subject, and her findings should jar some of the more self-satisfied simple-livers. It is original and at times, unexpected. (A comparison of voluntary simplicity with Wicca threw me for a loop until I saw that Grigsby's dissertation advisor has written articles on witchcraft. Aha.)