CHAPTER 18

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.” (Actually, they don’t want you to call them anymore in this age of HMOs, but that’s a different issue.) 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.

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.” 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 (very simply—when he died, he was living on $8,000 a year) on his interest. “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.”

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 now 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 countless 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 steps are followed, many higher-income readers find that they can achieve “financial independence” in a decade or so, allowing them to devote 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 told John, “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 hours spent in commuting and other work-related activities to your total workweek, and subtracting money spent on things needed for work (such as commuting, business clothes). Then keep track of every cent that comes into or goes out of your life. 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.

4. Asking yourself whether you’ve received real fulfillment for the life energy you 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.¹

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. But 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. Living in smaller homes is one step that many are finding provides a break for their wallets, and for the environment, while getting them away from “cocooning” and into a more satisfying public life with others. In Seattle and other cities, young single professionals are rejecting suburban megahomes for tiny “apodments,” some of them less than 400 square feet.²

Like Europeans, they don’t expect their homes to provide full entertainment systems or the space to host their five hundred closest friends. That’s what cafés are for. They are stepping back from the rat race, giving themselves a break from affluenza, and generally feeling very good about it.

Bill Powers, a friend of John’s who spent many years working in Bolivia, went even further. He writes about his time living off the grid in a 12-by-12 house.

Surprisingly, I enjoyed life without electricity. No humming refrigerator, no ringing phones, and none of the ubiquitous “stand-by” lights on appliances—those false promises of life inside the machines. Instead: the whippoorwill’s nocturnal call, branches scraping quiet rhythms in the breeze. … Most luxurious of all, each night was blessed with the glow of candles. Sometimes I’d step outside and look in through the windows, a dozen or so candles inside, as cheery as a birthday cake—the 12 × 12 point lit with primordial fire amid dark woods.

But you don’t have to live in a 12 × 12 house to discover more inner joy and contribute to global healing. Each of us, no matter where we live, can ask ourselves, “What’s my 12 × 12?” Even in large cities—I now live in New York—it is possible to scale back from overdevelopment to enough. By planting a windowsill or community garden; doing yoga or meditation; walking and biking; and carrying out at least one positive action for others every day. We decide what gets globalized—consumption or compassion; selfishness or solidarity—by how we cultivate the most valuable space of all: our inner acre.³

More recently, with a new child in the family, Bill and his wife, Melissa, moved to Santa Fe to be a bit closer to nature, but they are still living simply. Colin Beavan, who still lives in New York, scaled back even further, as part of an effort to reduce his “ecological footprint” to as close to zero as possible. For one year, he “swore off plastic and toxins, turned off his electricity, went organic, became a bicycle nut, and tried to save the planet from environmental catastrophe while dragging his young daughter and his Prada-wearing wife along for the ride.”⁴

His adventures are detailed in the book and the film No Impact Man. Beavan and his family engaged in this effort out of what he admits was a liberal’s guilt about the environment and his impact on the planet, but they say they found that “no-impact living is worthwhile—and richer, fuller, and more satisfying in the bargain.” Beavan then created the No Impact Project (www.noimpactproject.org), which encourages students and communities to organize “No Impact Weeks,” and see how it feels. For some, Beavan’s cold-turkey approach goes too far, but most find that even if they can’t keep up a truly no-impact lifestyle, they can cut back appreciably on their consumption and enjoy life more. Beavan himself has concluded that personal efforts like his, while important, aren’t enough to drive the urgent change to a more sustainable lifestyle that we need. In 2012, he ran as a Green Party candidate for office in Brooklyn.

Oh we don’t need anything—we’re already satisfied.

The US News & World Report correspondent Amy Saltzman originally called people like Vicki Robin, Bill Powers, and Colin Beavan “downshifters.” A 1995 poll found that 86 percent of Americans who voluntarily reduced their consumption said they were happier as a result. Only 9 percent reported feeling worse.⁵ 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. Websites offer many more resources.

One of the best is the Center for a New American Dream (www.newdream.org), an organization with tens of thousands of members, which in its words is “providing tools and support to families, citizens, and activists to counter our consumerist culture and to create new social norms about how to have a high quality of life and a reduced ecological footprint.… New Dream’s Beyond Consumerism program strives to create a vision of life beyond over-consumption, disposable lifestyles, and perpetual marketing, and to provide the tools to help families, citizens, educators, and activists rein in consumerism in their own lives and in broader society.”

The New Dream website offers tips for Rethinking “Stuff,” Reclaiming Our Time, Avoiding Advertising, Promoting Self-Reliance, and dealing with Kids and Commercialism. Visually inviting and simple to navigate, it features helpful blogs, videos, and excellent articles, plus a very helpful monthly newsletter.

One important “bed rest” technique is “mindfulness,” an approach similar to meditation. Rick Heller writes that mindfulness “involves slowing down, paying more attention, and taking more pleasure out of the ordinary world around us.… Unless we can learn to be mindful, we’ll be at the mercy of advertisers who crank up the consumer treadmill to run faster and faster. It is the cultivation of attention.”⁶ It works. Kirk Warren Brown, a Virginia Commonwealth University professor, has found that mindfulness training reduces financial desire.⁷

When you’re sick, the first thing to do is take time out.