Enough already: resisting consumer mania

Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology.

By Eric Brende. HarperCollins, 272 pp., $13.95 paperback.

Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping.

By Judith Levine. Free Press, 288 pp., $25.00.

Give It Up! My Year of Learning to Live Better with Less.

By Mary Carlomagno. William Morrow, 208 pp., $14.95.

DURING THE SPRING semester of my first year of college, my roommate and I determined that we would wear only ten outfits between us. We had just watched the movie Romero, about the Salvadoran archbishop martyred for his work with the poor, and had concluded that we'd had it with the consumptive lifestyles of North Americans, our own included. So we decided to choose one symbol of materialism--an abundance of clothing--from which to declare our independence. We hauled out all of our clothes and sorted through the piles, carefully weighing how versatile each blouse was and which sweaters matched which pants. Then we hung up the chosen pieces, boxed up the rejected ones, and prayed that no one on campus would think us too weird.

Three recently published books that record their authors" experiments in living with less suggest that frugality is more fashionable than my plastic bag-washing Mennonite grandmothers could have guessed. Living simply has long been an ethic for certain religious folks, a necessity for the poor, and an aesthetic for the countercultural privileged, but it is significant that in the era of McMansions and Hummers three major publishers have determined that enough readers would purchase frugality narratives to make their publication profitable (the irony of which is hard to miss). These books join a glut of self-help simplicity manuals, a major publisher's imprint focused on frugal living, and a glossy mag devoted to the aesthetic of simplicity. It's enough to make one wonder whether America is reaching a tipping point of overconsumption and whether not buying stuff is now more fashionable than buying it.

Self-restraint is hardly a hallmark of North American life, but thanks to globalization some consumers can now buy so much stuff that they're becoming sick of it, and skyrocketing consumer debt and job insecurity are pushing many others toward involuntary simplicity. It's hardly surprising, then, that folks who have never heard of the Shakers are checking out Frugal Living for Dummies from the library.

This rising trend toward simplicity in our culture raises several fascinating questions. Do the voluntary simplicity movement and its commercial iterations overlap with the long-standing Christian tradition of living with less? How does one downshift without becoming snooty toward neighbors and friends who are shifting into higher consumer gear--or at least wishing they could? Finally, how should we treat the pesky consumer desire that can dog even the most committed anticonsumer? Is it a sin of greed to be confessed or an opportunity for self-examination to be embraced?

Although none of these writers claim religious motives for their simplifying journeys, they experience a symptom with which many people of faith would identify. Eric Brende calls it cultural indigestion: a disgust with North American devotion to all things mechanized and purchasable.

Brende, a graduate student at MIT when he wrote Better Off. Flipping the Switch on Technology and now a rickshaw driver and soapmaker, defines the malady mostly in terms of Americans" overdependence on technology. For him, the remedy was a year living with people he christened the Minimites because of their commitment to minimizing the tyranny of technology in their lives. While he does not disclose the identity or exact location of the community, he does reveal that it is a collection of Amish, Mennonite and previously mainstream Americans who joined together "somewhere deep in America's heartland" to "reclaim their lives from machines."

Brende and his wife moved into a house in the Minimite community and lived without a refrigerator, a computer, a telephone and, eventually, a car. As they joined their new neighbors in the labors of fieldwork and housekeeping, Brende pursued his central question: "Was there some baseline of minimal machinery needed for human convenience, comfort, and sociability--a line below which physical labor was too demanding and above which machines began to create their own demands?"

Judith Levine's simple-living experiment, as recounted in Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping, was less drastic than Brende's--she retained her Internet access and her car and didn't halt construction on an addition to her house. Instead of focusing on machines as the burglars of people's time, fuel, loyalty and money, Levine hones in on overconsumption. Her case of cultural indigestion came to a head in December 2003, when she had maxed out one credit card and was "tapping the ATM like an Iraqi guerrilla pulling crude from the pipeline."

So Levine and her partner, Paul, decided to spend a year buying only what they defined as necessities, although she admits to sometimes fudging on her own definition of what is truly necessary. During the course of her buy-nothing year, she reflected on everything from $15 socks to a cell-phone tower controversy in rural Vermont, to the burgeoning consumption of security products after 9/11, to the sorry state of publicly funded institutions like libraries. While Levine's commitments were less sweeping than Brende's, her social and political analysis is more incisive and her self-awareness more profound.