Simple Prosperity Read online

  This book is dedicated to all who are ready and able

  to open their hearts and minds to a new era.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgments

  Preface: - A Generation’s Journey Back to Health

  Introduction

  1 - Taking Stock

  Cutting Our Losses and Reinventing the Economy

  Looking Behind the Screen

  Last Rites for a Used-Up American Dream

  It Happened So Quickly

  The Stories Behind the Stuff: Burgers and T-shirts

  How I Became a Terrorist Without Even Trying

  2 - Evolutionary Income

  For the Greatest Good

  Measuring Happiness

  More Than Happy

  Changing Our Mind

  This Way Out

  Personal Assets

  3 - Personal Growth

  Measuring Real Wealth

  How This Skunk Got His Stripes

  Living and Dying Like a Racehorse

  The Value of a Story

  4 - Mindful Money

  The Stuff of Life

  Rethinking Priorities in an Average-Income Household

  Lifestyles of the Unashamedly Poor and Not-So-Famous

  Unconsuming—A New Olympic Sport?

  How High-Income Households Can Help Save the World

  Investing in a Sustainable Future

  5 - The Bonds of Social Capital

  The Healing Power of Social Connection

  “Good Chemistry”

  Making Connections Wherever You Are

  Spending Social Capital in the Neighborhood

  6 - Time Affluence

  Where Time Goes

  The Time Costs of Excessive Spending

  Taking Back Our Work Time

  Time for Quality

  Time to Let Go

  7 - The Stocks of Wellness

  Preventive Pathways to Health

  Steps in the Right Direction

  More Un-American Activities

  Drowning in a Sea of Junk Food

  Avoiding a Prescription for Disaster

  Playing Doubles at Age 96

  8 - The Currency of Nature

  Last Child in the Woods

  Lost Child in the Woods, Found

  Waking Up in the Rain Forest

  The Zen of Gardening

  The Nature of Heaven: Adventures in the Great Beyond

  9 - Precious Work and Play

  “The Peak Justifies the Climb”

  Getting Unstuck: The Playground Is Us

  The Puzzle and Paradox of Work

  Good Work

  Making Work More Playful, and Play More Purposeful

  Public and Cultural Assets

  10 - The Real Wealth of Neighborhoods

  Where Do You Live?

  Boulder’s Holiday Neighborhood: Not Only Sustainable, but Also Affordable

  Neighborhoods on Purpose

  Communities for the Future, Now

  11 - Higher Returns on Investment

  Hitting the Nail on the Head

  Who Needs Wants?

  Getting Full Value

  Wanted: Better Ways to Satisfy Needs

  Do You Get What You Need? Sex, Sleep, Food, and Water

  Efficiency and Sufficiency

  12 - Energy Savings

  Peak Civilization

  The Carbon Conundrum

  The Currents and Currency of Energy

  13 - The Benefits of Right-Sizing

  A House for Good Reasons

  Cutting Your Fuel Bill in Half (and Not with Scissors)

  Priorities for Home Energy Savings

  14 - Trimming the Fat

  Kicking the Habit

  Trashing the Throwaway Economy

  It’s What’s for Dinner

  Monster Thickburger vs. the Mediterranean Diet

  15 - Infinite Information

  What Are Brains For?

  Moldy Couch Potatoes or Spuds with Gusto?

  That Same Old Story

  Toxic Information Cleanup

  Telling a New Story: Information We Can Use

  16 - Historical Dividends

  “Burn Baby, Burn”

  Steady-State Capitalism: Something for Everyone

  The Great Work Ahead

  Don’t Mess with the Mothers and the Others

  17 - Cultural Prosperity

  Culture-Shifts and What They Teach Us

  Alternative Definitions of Success

  Creating a New Culture

  Beyond the China Syndrome

  We Are Trained for This!

  Notes

  Suggested Reading List

  Index

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgments

  I want to express my deepest gratitude and admiration to all the mentors and exceptional humans whose words and actions inspired me over the years. I learned from them that hope is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s true that the challenges that lie ahead are vast, but so are our talents, empathies, and collective imagination. We will do what needs to be done, because anything else is unthinkable.

  Special thanks to the people directly involved in the completion of this book: my industry-savvy agent, Jane Dystel; the book’s intuitive editor, Michael Flamini, his very capable assistant, Vicki Lame, and others at St. Martin’s Press; and all the friends and family who supported me on my two-year journey. Thanks for believing in the project and giving me a chance to knead these thoughts and suggestions together.

  It was such a pleasure to interview the many experts and everyday acquaintances that ground this book in direct experience. What a relief to discover how many of us are asking the same questions about new priorities and how to bring them—quickly—into our lives. My very significant other, Susan, was the manuscript’s constant reality check before submission, and I credit her frank, literate instincts and advice—to throw out the first few, unsteady chapters and start over. The book was also greatly enriched by the librarians at the Golden Public Library, who miraculously met my online requests for more than 250 books and all but read them to me. What a phenomenal network of knowledge we share.

  I took the work very seriously, telling a few close friends that if I were struck by lightning, I would want to have written this book first. (They gave me space to do it, maybe wary that I was having a premonition!) Anyway, I hope the book is useful and empowering. If so, I’m delighted we made the climb together.

  Preface:

  A Generation’s Journey Back to Health

  This is a book about how to recover from the debilitating disease of overconsumption. Although the origins of “affluenza” go back at least to the birth of free-market capitalism several centuries ago, the disease has only become a full-fledged pandemic in the last fifty years. But like other pandemics, it will inevitably run its course, and we’ll create a more sustainable, healthier culture—either by design or by default. The suggestions in this book, including 17 essential assets to beat affluenza, can help bring the fever down, get our strength back, and build up our immune systems.

  Back when I was a teenager in the 1960s, I felt queasiness lurking in the euphoria of the American lifestyle. Gandhi once said, speed is irrelevant if you’re traveling in the wrong direction, and it was obvious to me that the accelerating pace of life in the United States didn’t have a real direction. Everything was becoming automatic, comfortable, and “convenient,” yet other than going to the moon, banishing germs from our kitchens, and scrapping with the communists, we seemed to be floating up and away from reality like soap bubbles. We each wanted to expend as little effort as possible but still get paid handsomely for it so we could live the good life, before we … popped.

&nb
sp; But somehow the cost and dimensions of the good life kept morphing, first into a “new, improved life,” then a “better” life. (There was always a better life.) Americans began to send all household hands into the workplace, and soon we were working longer hours than employees of any other country in the world. In fact, we worked longer hours per year than medieval peasants did! A few politicians in the 1950s and ’60s proposed federally mandated, shorter workweeks, because technology had doubled our productivity and we could have the same standard of living for less work. But instead of choosing the door marked life/time, we chose the one marked money/stuff.

  I began to notice that people whose lifestyle didn’t center on money were often healthier and more interesting. They seemed more caring and unselfish, and they were passionate about doing active, celebratory things like playing music, dancing, playing chess or bridge, embroidering, fly fishing, cooking delicious meals, studying history, gardening, and staying current with political issues. TV wasn’t a central part of their lives; they were less distracted by commercial hype and less detoured by all the products. What they earned seemed less important than what they learned. I watched how they focused directly on the tasks at hand and accomplished them with finesse and artistry. I was fascinated that in many cases, the ordinary, American Dream-life was much more expensive than the extraordinary lives of these unique, self-creating people who lived their lives rather than trying to buy them. They had real wealth, or you might say, the right stuff.

  Still, it was confusing to see most individuals stretching and contorting to climb beyond the good life to the more coveted better life. Was the better life any better, really, or was it just a variation on a theme: creativity as a commodity purchased from various technicians and persuaders who brought us Twinkies, air conditioners, and a Technicolor way of thinking? It seemed like all that was new or improved were the colors and shapes of the products, the increasing number of cars on our streets, and okay, the introduction of breakthrough technologies, some of which were brilliant. (As a guy who first experimented with writing on an Underwood typewriter and compiled research data on index cards with rubber bands around them, I thank the gods for computers and the Internet!)

  But despite the technological miracles, it felt strange and threatening that our world was being shaped by corporate returns on investment rather than by passionate political leaders who listened carefully to us, the people who live here. I wondered how companies and industries could possibly provide a humane, integrated vision of the future and a strategy for getting there, since their focus was both narrow and vested. Yet federal government, increasingly on the leash of big business, seemed to be forbidden to do it.

  And I wondered if this economy that kept accelerating was equipped with brakes … ?

  It boggled my mind to think of the seventy-five million people who hurried to work at roughly the same time each morning, clogging highways, trains, and buses—somewhat like the cholesterol in our arteries. Very few of us had any real sense of what we were building—and more ominously, what we were tearing apart. It felt like we were converting the planet’s richest and finest resources into products of dubious quality, busily drilling holes in the environment and living systems to do it. What was the point of all the commuting and consuming? What was the economy for? We were burning up our time and our lives pursuing happiness but it seemed like we were happier before the pursuit began. For example, the more successful my father was in his work, the less time he had for Boy Scout weekend activities with me or even walks in the nearby forest with the dog, like before—and the same story unfolded in millions of other households. Once we were proud and hardy producers, living by our instincts and skills, but in my generation we’d become passive consumers, living in 115 million overstuffed households that some federal agencies now refer to as “consumer units.”

  I saw so many people pour their energy into making and spending money while other important aspects of life were neglected! Because the better life required so much of their attention, they stopped learning about the way other cultures and other species live; they stopped eating fresh food and cooking traditional family recipes; stopped going to national parks and even neighborhood parks; stopped learning about political candidates; stopped voting. They stopped saving, and they stopped learning how to fix things. They just threw everything away that needed repair and got replacements at discount chain stores.

  Tickling the Bear

  Beginning when I was about four and continuing for several decades beyond that, a lumbering grizzly bear invaded my dreams whenever my life felt out of control—at least a few times a year. The bear was a thousand pounds of snarling, razor-clawed mammal, blundering up the dark stairway toward my bedroom. I told my parents about the bear but they assured me he wasn’t real. (Why then, I wondered, did he have so much power?)

  Thankfully, somewhere in my late twenties, I began to get a grip. One very significant night, I leaped onto the stage of my own nightmare—a lucid dream they call it—and decided to try tickling the bear, of all things. Miraculously, it worked; the bear chuckled like a huge, shy, department store teddy bear! My unconscious mind had staged a coup, asserting my right and power to come out of the shadows and live fearlessly in the light—never mind the horror of rejection slips or credit card interest rates that jump fivefold if you miss a payment by two and a half hours. The confused and defused bear plodded, mumbling, out of my life forever.

  Tickling the bear became a life strategy (and I believe it can be a cultural strategy, too, for taking back our power). It seemed like the bear’s ghostly mission was to terrorize we humans who inhabit a harried, self-destructive Dream of too many choices, too many competitors, and too much to know. I wondered, even then, why didn’t we just start out content and let that be more than enough? Why didn’t we unplug from the fear, the shame, and the fantasy-based expectations, rather than chasing a Dream all our lives? Many remember how the Bomb hung over our lives in those days, but I suspect it really was the chasing that was making the country so nervous.

  How had we become so preoccupied with the quantity of life and so little concerned about preserving our towns, traditions, rivers and forests? How could we be so distracted that we didn’t notice the menace that was creeping into our lives? We let the free market make our decisions, unaware or unconcerned that this abstract mechanism has no compassion and very little foresight. I remember reading a thick, academic book called Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth in the early 1970s, a collection of essays about the effects of human activity throughout history. It made me realize that cutting down all the trees on a mountainside left fish in the streams below choking on sediment; that building a house here required a cumulative house-size hole there and there; that the materials that went into a TV came from twenty or thirty different countries, and that the workers in some of those countries were essentially slaves.

  I began to write earnest letters to the editor and guest editorials about our brakeless economy, to which editors sometimes gave titles like “We’re Being Swallowed by the Growth Machine,” or even—true story—“Chicken Little Says Sky Is Falling.” An equation I came across, I = PAT, made our dilemma alarmingly simple. The Impact of human activities on the environment and people equals Population times the level of Affluence (consumption) times the scale and power of Technology. It was ominously clear that P, A, and T were all expanding like hot-air balloons, with support and subsidy from governments, corporations, churches, and consumers. What had been a stream-size flow of economic activity had become a flood; Impact would inevitably keep growing, too, but few people seemed interested. After all, our “friends” on TV didn’t seem concerned—in fact, their purpose was to help us escape from being concerned. The myths—that “good” would always prevail, God would always protect us, and technology would always provide—seemed to be stronger than the reality. We had learned to hear only what we wanted to hear.

  (The Affluence or consumption variable in the above equati
on is the focus of this book. It’s quite possible and quite necessary to shrink that variable as if it were a tumor—and lead more satisfying lives! My aim here is to give shape to that proposition.)

  Waking Up from the American Dream

  Just to be clear, I’m not talking about a “conspiracy theory” (let others discuss that), just a command and control mentality that has prevailed because of largely uncontested assumptions such as “all growth is good.” My question as a teenager was growth of what? Good for whom, for how long? Everyone was chasing a vision of success, but I kept wondering, mostly to myself in those early days, “Successfully what?” It felt to me like we were only successful enough to bring down the civilization, if we stayed on the same path. When I sensed what an unrestricted free market would ultimately do to our health, the economically disadvantaged, and the environment, I began to swim against the current, confident there would be many others swimming with me, and there are! (Now, we’ll see what we’re made of. We’ll see what we’ve learned as a species.)

  With a keen sense of hope and purpose, I watched public concern for the environment slowly build. We started with the “Keep America Beautiful” days of litter busting and moved on to citizen crusades that would result in cleaner air and water. We recovered from the Love Canal days of industrial wastes and came to the realization that only by changing production and consumption systems could we really prevent pollution. As each new environmental problem had its media moment, the public gained an increasingly wider understanding of the implications of our way of life. “Oh, I see … the toxic pesticides that are sprayed from airplanes wash off the fields into the rivers, into the bodies of fish, then get into our bodies …”