Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic
Page 22
OK, now the moment of truth. In the privacy of your own home, without anyone looking over your shoulder, take the following diagnostic quiz to see if you have affluenza or are susceptible to it. If you have it, reader, you’re not alone! There’s help available in this part of the book, so read on. If you don’t have it, read on anyway to stay healthy.
AFFLUENZA SELF-DIAGNOSIS TEST
SCORING YOUR RESULTS (GULP!)
Each “yes” answer carries a weight of two points. If you’re uncertain as to your answer, or it’s too close to call, give yourself one point. If you score:
0 - 25 You have no serious signs of affluenza, but keep reading to stay healthy
26 - 50 You are already infected—keep reading to boost your immune system.
51 - 75 Your temperature is rising quickly. Take two aspirin and read the next chapters very carefully.
76 - 100 You’ve got affluenza big time! See the doctor, reread the whole book, and take appropriate actions immediately. You may be contagious. There’s no time to lose!
CHAPTER 22
Bed rest
Are you making a living or making a dying?
–JOE DOMINGUEZ
OK. You’ve taken the affluenza self-test and you’re admitting to yourself you’ve got a few of the symptoms, maybe more than a few. You sit back in your chair, wipe the sweat from your brow, cough a couple of times, sneeze mightily, and rummage around for a thermometer. You’re wondering, “What do I do now?”
Remember what the doctor once told you when you had a bad case of the flu? “Go home and go to bed, take some aspirin, and call me in the morning.” (They don’t want you to call them anymore in this age of HMOs, but that’s a different issue.) Well, a case of affluenza calls for bed rest, too. We just define it a little differently. But the point is the same: Stop what you’re doing. Stop now. Cut back. Take stock. Give yourself a break.
FORCED TO REASSESS
Sometimes we have to hit bottom to do that. Fred Brown was once upwardly mobile, the personnel director of a large company. He was earning $100,000 a year. On the outside, it looked as if he had everything—a great job, a big home, and a beautiful family. But on the inside, Fred felt like a prisoner in golden handcuffs. He worked long hours and found little time for his wife and two daughters. Then his marriage broke up. His job was stressful: It was his responsibility to tell other employees they’d been laid off. Then he got a frightening phone call. His own job had been eliminated. “It’s a different experience on the receiving end than on the giving end,” he says, remembering that call.1
Though he was forced into involuntary simplicity, it wasn’t the loss of income that hit Fred hardest. It was the loss of security, “letting go of what I thought I was supposed to do with myself.” At first, Fred sought other opportunities in his field, but to find them, he’d have to move to another part of the country. He was suddenly forced to stop and take stock of his life, and the more he thought about it, the more he realized his work hadn’t been making him happy. “There came a point,” he says, “when I realized I simply had to take the step off the cliff into the unknown.”
In a stunning reversal of occupation and lifestyle, Fred went back to school and became a massage therapist. He earns about $20,000 a year and lives in a small apartment instead of the big house he once owned. But he is, he says, a much more contented man. And despite an 80 percent drop in income, he manages to save a little money and to pay off debts he ran up when he was making five times as much! More important, he has more free time and has renewed his relationship with his daughters. And he’s doing work he finds intrinsically satisfying. “It turns out that for me living simply seems to be leading to more happiness. What a concept!” Fred says with a smile. “I’m thankful now that I was laid off, because I’m doing something that I love. It’s what the Buddhists call right livelihood. It feels to me like I’ve found my right livelihood.”
ONE LIFE TO LIVE
Sometimes the shock that forces us to reexamine our lives is even more devastating than the loss of a job, as Evy McDonald found out. A feisty, cheerful woman, Evy was determined early on to make her mark. “My goal,” she remembers, “was to become the youngest female hospital administrator in the country.” By 1980, she was close to success. Promotions and pay raises were coming her way often, and so was a lavish lifestyle. She bought a new house with each promotion, and a bigger car. “I talked about wanting to help people who were less fortunate than myself, but I had seventy pairs of shoes and a hundred blouses. I had so much more than I needed.”2
Then disaster struck. During an unusual bout of illness, Evy went to the doctor. Tests were done, and the doctor pronounced a grim verdict: Evy had a fatal disease— one from which there were no known survivors. She had, perhaps, only months to live. Stunned, she returned home, only to find that her house had been broken into and practically everything she owned had been stolen. And she had no insurance. Suddenly, both sick and possessionless, Evy was confronted with questions about the meaning of her life.
"Who did I want to be when I died?” she asked herself. “And what I discovered was that I didn’t want to have the most things. What I wanted my life to be about was understanding love, understanding service, and feeling whole and complete.” Miraculously perhaps, Evy’s disease went into remission, and she recovered her strength and energy, though doctors have warned her that the disease could always come back.
"And on my road to health,” she says now, “I saw that I needed to integrate my life. I needed to become a whole person, and part of that was bringing my financial life, how I spent my money, what I did with it, into alignment with my values and life purpose.” It was then that she met a couple whose ideas moved her so deeply she spent most of the next two decades working with them.
YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE
Joe Dominguez was a former stockbroker, Vicki Robin a former actress. Believers in frugality and simple living, they taught others to get out of debt, save money, and work on saving the world. John got to know Joe Dominguez and had a chance to interview him less than a year before Dominguez died in 1997. By that time, Joe was a frail man, weak from fighting cancer for many years. But he had not lost any of the passion, moral courage, and biting sense of humor that had helped him influence the lives of thousands of people.
During one interview, Joe described the turnaround in his thinking that occurred while he was still a stock market analyst. “When I was on Wall Street,” he said, “I saw that people who had more money were not necessarily happier and that they had just as many problems as the folks that lived in my ghetto neighborhood [in Harlem] where I grew up. So it began to dawn on me that money didn’t buy happiness, a very simple finding.”3 Simple indeed, but mighty rare in the Age of Affluenza.
Dominguez tried frugality. He found he enjoyed life more and he found a way to save so much that he was able to retire at the age of thirty-one and live on his interest (when he died, he was living on $8,000 a year). “A lot of people would ask me, How did you do it?” Joe recalled. “How did you handle your finances so you’re not an indentured slave like the rest of us?”
So with his newfound time, he set out to teach other people how to cut their spending sharply. He soon met Vicki Robin, who became his partner for the rest of his life. Says Robin, “I found that I needed to learn how to fix things, and I became fascinated with living life directly and developing my skills and capacities and ingenuity, rather than just earning more money and throwing money at problems.”4
Together, Dominguez and Robin resettled in Seattle and went from conducting workshops in people’s homes to producing an audiotape course that thousands of people ordered. “Then the publishing industry came to us to write a book,” Joe remembered, “and the rest is history.” The book, Your Money or Your Life, was published in 1992 and soon became a best seller that has sold nearly a million copies. If the letters from readers that Joe and Vicki have received are to be believed, Your Money or Your Life has transformed countl
ess lives.
Dominguez contrasted Your Money or Your Life with the plethora of financial self-help books on the market. “It’s not about making a killing in the stock market. It’s not about how to buy real estate with no money down or anything of that sort. It’s just the opposite. It’s about how to handle your existing paycheck in a much more intelligent way that creates savings instead of leading you deeper and deeper into debt. It’s the stuff our grandparents knew but we’ve forgotten or been taught to forget.”
NINE STEPS TO FINANCIAL INTEGRITY
The book offers a nine-step “new frugality” program by which readers can get their financial feet back on the ground. When all the steps are followed, many higher-income readers find that they can achieve “financial independence” in a decade or so, allowing them to devote their time to work they find more meaningful than their current jobs. But even lower-income readers have found they can cut their expenses sharply. “In fact, the steps will be most useful to low-income people,” Dominguez said, “because they’re the ones who really need to know how to stretch a buck.” Even following a few of the initial steps makes a big difference for many readers, who, on average, cut their spending by about 25 percent.
The initial steps include these four practices:
1. Making peace with your past. Calculate how much money you’ve earned in your life, and then what you have to show for it, your current net worth. You may be shocked at the total you’ve squandered, what we might call the toll of affluenza.
2. Tracking your life energy. Calculate your real hourly income by adding the hours spent in commuting and other work-related activities to your total workweek, and subtracting money spent on things needed for work (for example, business clothing and commuting). Your working time is an expenditure of your essential life energy. What are you getting for it and using it for?
3. Tabulating all of your income and spending for one month. Then keep track of every cent that comes into or goes out of your life.
4. Asking yourself whether you’ve received real fulfillment for the life energy you have spent. Joe and Vicki recommend plotting a “fulfillment curve,” which rises as you spend for essential needs, then begins to fall as you spend on luxuries that aren’t that important to you. The top of the curve is the point called “enough"—the point when you should stop spending and start saving.5
Doing these things means stopping your regular routine of activity to take stock. When you’ve got the flu, go to bed. When you’re walking off the edge of a cliff, step back. When you’ve got affluenza, stop and think it over.
Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin gave away all the money they earned from their popular book. Though she still lives extremely frugally, no one who knows Vicki Robin would ever consider her poor. Money can most certainly be a blessing, not a curse, she would argue, most of all when it is used to make the world a better place.
DOWNSHIFTING
Of course, the “Your Money or Your Life” model isn’t the only bed to rest in. Thousands of Americans have found other helpful ways to slow down, cut back, and reassess. They’ve taken personal steps to live better on less income. U.S. News & World Report correspondent Amy Saltzman calls them “downshifters.” A 1995 poll found that 86 percent of them say they are happier as a result. Only 9 percent report feeling worse.6 People choosing to downshift can find tips for living more simply and less stressfully from dozens of journals and books, many of which are included in our bibliography. You can find others at your library or local bookstore. Web sites offer many more resources. Among the best are www.newdream.org (the Center for a New American Dream) and www.simpleliving.net (the Simple Living Network).
CHAPTER 23
Aspirin and Chicken soup
Study circles are beginning to develop,
newsletters, magazines, Internet resources
on the computer and so on, and that is now
beginning to create a culture of simplicity,
a culture of ecological living.
—DUANE ELGIN,
author, Voluntary Simplicity
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. We need support from others who are fighting the disease as well. Every addiction nowadays seems to have support groups 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—the voluntary simplicity movement.
VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY
“In our seventeen years of trend tracking,” Gerald Celente of the Trends Research Institute said in 1996, “never have we seen an issue that’s gaining such global acceptance as voluntary simplicity.” He estimated that 5 percent of American baby boomers were practicing a “strong form of voluntary simplicity” and expected that number to reach 15 percent by the year 2000. “They’re finding a cure for affluenza,” Celente declared. “They get rid of their stress and they say, ‘You know, I like living this way a lot better. How did I ever live like that before?’”1
Voluntary simplicity took a bit of a hit from the prosperity of the late 1990s. Nonetheless, millions of Americans are still attracted to the idea of simpler, more environmentally friendly living. The voluntary simplicity “movement,” if one wants to call it that, is alive, well, and still growing, if not quite as quickly as Celente predicted. It’s a movement that’s centered in discussion groups of many varieties, beginning with the kind Cecile Andrews first started nearly a decade ago.
STUDY CIRCLES CAN SAVE THE WORLD
Andrews, a Seattle teacher with a childlike sense of awe and wonder, and an ability to make people laugh that any stand-up comedian would envy, was promoting adult education classes as a community college administrator 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.”2
Afterward, participants told Andrews 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, that meet in people’s homes. Andrews 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 Andrews began in 1992 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 high incomes. 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,” Andrews says. 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. Seeds of Simplicity, a national organization she codirects, has started many more. Her book, 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 good 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.”
STUDY GROUPS IN CHURCHES
The voluntary simplicity discussion groups that began with Cecile Andrews can be found in a variety of forms throughout the United States. One place where they’re especially popular is in churches, many of whose leaders recognize that if we are indeed our brothers’ keepers, Americans must “live simply so that others can simply live.”