Finding Real Wealth In A Sustainable Lifestyle
By David Wann
Editor’s Note: This article is an excerpt from Simple Prosperity, a new book by David Wann. It was originally published on the Simple Living Network and is reprinted here with the author’s permission.
An Instinct for Happiness
To be genuinely happy, we need to actively create our experiences and our lives, rather than passively letting media and marketers create them for us. The pathway to greatest happiness goes beyond mindless consumption to the heightened, enlightened realm of mindful challenge, where we are engaged, connected, and alive.
To balance the precise, quantitative, and sequential mindset orchestrated for a millennium by the left-brain, here comes a troupe of story-telling, aesthetic, empathetic caregivers, visionaries, and creators. Though still ridiculed by policy-makers and engineers, and sorely neglected by test-crazy school administrators, it appears the right brain is rising. YES!
Creating a Great Life Story
In this world of media and mirage there are significant obstacles to “knowing thyself,” as the Greek sages counseled, because there are so many stories out there! (It’s like a room filled with hundreds of telephones — which one is ringing?) If we’re lucky, we figure out what we’re good at, what we believe in, and what we want to accomplish, joyfully, while we’re here.
I like the analogy of a backpacker when I think about the emerging American lifestyle. The backpacker doesn’t want a lot of junk in her backpack. She wants only items that are ingeniously designed, like a lightweight cookstove, a warm fleece sweater, a good pair of boots that can go the extra miles, and food that’s full of slow-release energy. The backpacker brings along skills she has learned, the stories she can tell, a well-designed tent, maybe a flute or a great book. On her journey, the world is a splash of light and shadow, with mountain peaks in the distance and bighorn sheep standing guard. If we’re smart, the awakening American lifestyle will deliver clarity, a sense of wonder, and great health, as if life itself was an energizing, mind-opening backpacking trip.
Mindful Money
What if an average household’s annual expenditures of roughly $43,000 went to different priorities? What if their purchases (and decisions not to purchase) brought more durability, greater vitality, more satisfying entertainment, greater intellectual growth and more laughter into their houses? Their choices might result in major attitude adjustments — psychological makeovers — that would make discretionary time seem far more valuable and a huge income seem less necessary.
About 32 percent of an average household’s expenditures is spent for housing (that’s the house, utilities, furniture and supplies). The family could win back time, money and vitality by living in a smaller, better-designed house with efficient appliances and good natural daylight, buying well-built furniture that doesn’t need constant replacing, and having a different attitude about what a house is for. If their house becomes more of a healthy verb than a passive noun, there may be a vegetable garden out back, a workshop in the garage, and an accessible place to store well-used bicycles and a scooter.
If the food they eat delivers energy rather than lethargy, they’ll exercise more, walking to the library or bank, and playing sports rather than buying them. Health care costs will be lower and weight-loss programs won’t be necessary. With better food in their lives, they’ll go to the doctor less and require less insurance coverage. They’ll spend more social time eating, reducing their entertainment costs. Almost certainly, they’ll feel a greater sense of contentment and wellness. By slowing down to the speed of life, the average American family can become more than just an “average” family — they can be an exceptional family. Instead of disposing of their income, they can save it, eat it, and live it.
The Benefits of Social Capital
Social capital is the “glue” that binds communities together, creating cultural norms, energetic networks, and reservoirs of trust. When freely and wisely spent, social capital lowers crime rates, makes schools more productive, and helps economies function better. Contracts, leases, and schedules operate more smoothly. In socially abundant communities and nations, individuals don’t have to earn as much money to be comfortable because quality of life is partly provided by the strength of social bonds.
I believe we can and must bring sanctity to our everyday lives by creating I-You relationships, treating even the food we eat or a masterpiece painting with great respect, wonder, and connection, because the people who grew healthy food or created the painting “speak” through it. By changing the way we regard the world, the “me” in each of us becomes a much wider we, and we feel interconnected and complete. Even in a world filled with contradiction and superficiality, we find True North.
We need to elevate love and connection to a higher priority even if that means we make less money and spend less time worrying about it. Researchers say it’s a matter of life and death. Dr. Dean Ornish, author of Love and Survival, says, “Study after study has shown that people who feel lonely, depressed and isolated are 3 to 7 times more likely to get sick and die prematurely than those who have a sense of love, connection, and community in their lives.
Taking Back our Time
We’re discovering how costly consumption really is, in time as well as money — hurrying through our best years partly to overcome the hidden costs of these disposable, poorly designed products. The most effective weapon against all the packaging, payments, and pretense is to fill our time with things that last; and the truth is, quality usually takes time to obtain or achieve. For example, to really take care of our health takes time, just as learning to play the piano does, or reading stories to our kids. Yet all of these uses of time can substitute for consumption.
Lore Rosenthal, a Maryland sign language interpreter, is another example of a person choosing to shorten her workweek. Says Rosenthal, “I recently reduced my hours from 32 to 28 hours per week. I told my boss I needed that extra hour a day, to go work out or do something healthy. To my delight, she granted my request! I am now a 7/8 employee; I still qualify for full benefits, health insurance, 401(k), profit share, Annual Leave, Sick Leave, and Holiday Pay. I immediately went out and joined Curves, an exercise class. I decided to make my health more of a priority and work/money less of a priority.” Lore’s fellow workers are glad she made the switch. When their boss observed that at 32 hours, Lore wasn’t having physical problems but those who worked 40 hours were, the standard workweek became 32 hours. This was also a quality-of-life enticement to keep the interpreters from going to work for other employers.
Stocks of Wellness
The benefits of being healthy cascade through all other aspects of our lives: finances, relationships, discretionary time, ability to work effectively and play passionately, and so on. When we’re healthy, things seem effortless. We have the energy to do what matters most; we can more readily tap into values like clarity, security, connection, caring, and a sense of purpose. Stress levels are lower, bones are sturdier, and senses are sharper. We don’t fuss over ourselves as much — taking this medication, stressing about this ache, or making an appointment to see that specialist — and we give our time more freely to others. We also don’t have to dwell as much on what we need to buy to feel happy, because feeling good generates its own value.
Appleton High School for developmentally challenged students, in Wisconsin: Police officers routinely patrolled the halls of that school to prevent fighting between teachers and students — some of whom carried weapons. But several years later, the atmosphere was completely different. After just a few food-related changes, the students are now “calm and well-behaved,” according to a counselor at the school. Says the school’s principal, “I don’t have the vandalism. I don’t have the litter. I don’t have the need for high security.” What changes did school administrators make? They replaced vending machines with water coolers, and replaced foods high in fats and sugar (like hamburgers, french fries and soft drinks) with fresh vegetables and fruits, whole-grain bread and a salad bar.
Research at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and elsewhere showed that since the 1980s, the vitamin and mineral content in beans has fallen by 60 percent, in potatoes by 70 percent, and in apples by 80 percent. These decreases have occurred in produce from conventional farms that don’t replenish their soil with cover crops, compost, and organic wastes.
Says Walter Willett, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health: “Our studies have shown that with healthy diets, no smoking and regular physical activity, we could prevent about 82 percent of heart attacks, about 70 percent of strokes, and over 90 percent of type 2 diabetes. The best drugs reduce heart attacks by about 20 or 30 percent, yet we put almost all of our resources into promoting drugs rather than healthy lifestyles and nutrition.”
For Ornish, the bottom line is the return to vitality he’s seen in his own patients when they changed to diets lower in saturated fat and sugar and did moderate exercise. “We found that even among people with severe heart disease, 99 percent were able to stop or reverse the progression of their disease… People who couldn’t walk across the street before the light changed without getting chest pains, they couldn’t have sex, they couldn’t take a shower, shave… within a few weeks were essentially pain-free.” (21)
If meat is so heavily implicated in various diseases, and if it takes such a heavy toll on the environment, isn’t it time to question whether we want to be eating it 10 or 15 times a week?
Natural Capital
The truth is that humans used to value nature as the greatest and most sacred wealth of all, but now it’s being traded for convenience, comfort, and perceived security. In our current way of seeing the world, the environment is just a collection of problems. We won’t protect it until we correctly see nature as a collection of solutions, a regenerating form of wealth we literally can’t live without. If we let it, nature can take care of us, energize and delight us, for free! In research studies, when people view slides of nature, their blood pressure counts fall, and when those with ADHD spend time in nature, the results are often as effective as if they’d taken the widely used drug, Ritalin. A classic ten-year study reported in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine documented that hospital patients with a view of trees went home sooner than those who viewed a brick wall.
Sure, we can read about the rainforest and see it on TV, but until we spend quality time there, letting ourselves slow down, we don’t really grasp what tropical biology is all about. It struck me on a Costa Rican rainforest retreat that we over-consuming humans need to somehow absorb these colors, this bold brilliance, into our hearts, and re-value nature’s wealth all over the planet. There’s so much more to life than the gray of concrete and the drab green of paper currency! My feeling is that until we acknowledge the butterfly, orchid, maple, and wisteria colors inside each of us, we can’t feel truly at home in ourselves.
Precious Work and Play
A large and very diverse mix of variables determines what work will make us happy. We crave work that has meaning beyond the paycheck, that challenges our creativity and aptitudes, that gives us a sense of being recognized and remembered, that connects us with people, that’s safe and secure (both physically and fiscally), and that doesn’t strip away all our energy. Much of our enjoyment of work depends on who we are and how we perceive the world.
Personally, if I were going to work in a car factory, for example, I’d rather it be a factory that manufactures hybrids, safe and durable cars. Traveling salesman Peter Gilbert recently donated his 1989 Saab 900 SPG to a museum after a million miles of service; I’d want to be part of that assembly line or engineering team! If I were going to work as an investment counselor, I’d want to steer clients toward investments that are good for people as well as the environment — so-called “socially responsible investing” that now screens trillions of dollars.
We’re socially conditioned to believe that passive relaxation yields the greatest happiness, and that consumption and possessions help us relax. We imagine them to make our lives so convenient, so easy. By using various machines, media, and consumer products, we believe we can remove “distractions” like cooking, walking, and even thinking, so we can fully relax. But there’s a critical difference between passive relaxation and restorative relaxation. But when we are simply under the spell of commercial stimuli on the tube or at the mall, we aren’t creating ourselves but rather allowing ourselves to be created. We aren’t aligning our actions with our values, but aligning our inactions with someone else’s values.
The Real Wealth of Neighborhoods
I believe that neighborhoods and communities offer the best counterweight to the corporate dominance that takes away our voices. Whether or not we realize it yet, the grassroots power we collectively wield in our communities can tilt civilization in a more sensible, peaceful, democratic direction. Neighborhoods can be places where Americans make the transition from “me” to “we,” getting our priorities straight and becoming citizens again.
We use the question, “Where do you live?” automatically, without really thinking about it. Sometimes the question just means, “How far do I have to drive to get there, and how long will it take?” Too often “where you live” means where you park your car, consume energy, watch three or four hours of TV a day, and generate four pounds of trash. Hopefully, in your case, it means something far more magnificent: where you have your best relationships, and your most creative ideas. Where you feel the most content and energized. Where you come to life.
Return on Investment
In our current economic paradigm, profits and prices are often the only variables considered in a given decision or transaction: “If it makes monetary sense, let’s go with it.” But in the next era — now coming clearly into focus — ecological efficiency will be the dominant accounting tool, because resource realities have radically changed in our generation.
We’ll base our economy on things like nutrition per molecule of food, and the quality of work accomplished per unit of energy. We’ll buy houses based on how well they satisfy our needs per square foot, and evaluate the efficiency of a car not just by miles per gallon, but by the number of people-miles per gallon. These new ways of living won’t be thought of as sacrifices, they’ll just become part of a new everyday ethic: the way we do it now. In all likelihood, future generations will look back at our high-consumption era — before the change — and ask, “What the hell were they thinking? How could they be so sloppy?” (They may even include us in a lumped-together era known as The Dark Ages.)
Trimming the Fat
Americans consume the most packaged drinks of any country in the world, and after the beverages are guzzled (and only the belches and containers remain), we go through over 650 plastic, aluminum, and glass containers per person, annually. Less than half of these containers are recycled, a lost opportunity for the national economy. About 350 of our annual share of containers are aluminum cans, compared with only 14 containers per person in France. Despite the fact that recycling an aluminum can save three-fourths of the energy it takes to make a new can, we throw away more than half of them, wasting the energy equivalent of powering a million homes!
A full 3% of the world’s electricity goes into manufacturing aluminum cans, but the U.S. market continues to treat them like dirt. CRI’s research director Jenny Gitlitz comments, “The irony is that while Americans are trashing almost three quarters of a million tons of cans a year, the major aluminum companies are forging ahead with plans to build new aluminum smelters and hydroelectric dams for power in environmentally-sensitive areas including Brazil, Malaysia, and Iceland.”
Infinite Information
In the transition to a less consumptive yet culturally more abundant world, the brain is like an empty stage set, right before opening night. The new story — our new way of viewing the world — will be created on that stage as the play progresses, and a new, more ingenious lifestyle will unfold. By changing just one line of script — that the brain’s highest use is to create limitless economic growth — we can ensure rave reviews in the history books of future generations. Let’s face it: our descendants won’t be especially impressed with the size of our GDP or the fast pace of our life, but they will be ecstatic (we hope!) that we cared enough to stop tearing things apart for cheap burgers and infinite varieties of soap and underwear. That we learned how to use relevant information to cut waste, create an aesthetically rich way of life, and balance the biological budget so the future could be abundant, too.
A whole new universe of natural solutions is waiting for us if we study the way other species meet their needs without any monetary system at all. By studying how the lotus leaf stays clean without detergents (a bumpy surface that doesn’t enable dirt to accumulate), engineers have invented bio-inspired, bumpy-layered paints. By seeing how peacocks and Morphos butterflies create pigment without dyes (they use transparent layers to refract light), we learn how to make our world more colorful, naturally.
If we are smart enough to redirect the flow of information, we can learn to create a benign economy that doesn’t require so much money, that creates wealth — real wealth — the way a bee creates honey. Without harming the flower.
Cultural Prosperity
The heart and soul of a culture are its values, and how it meets them. Core values — expressed in words like diversity, moderation, responsibility, respect, durability, equality, quality, trust, prevention, care, and regeneration — translate directly into tangible goals like “clean energy,” “great neighborhoods” and “wellness.” In turn, these goals can drive specific policies and actions like “expand the use of public transit,” or “reduce the consumption of cigarettes, gasoline, and saturated fats.”
When we ask ourselves if we’re meeting our real needs with a given product, we start to understand that it’s not the stuff we want, but the values the stuff is trying to satisfy. We buy a sporty car to attract a partner so we won’t feel lonely. We eat a quart of ice cream in one sitting, but the real hunger is for something worthwhile to be doing.
The secret of success at the national and global scale is not really a secret: it’s in plain sight, and it’s called moderation. We’ll get more value from less stuff and better stuff, by tapping into riches like quality products, brilliant design and redesign of cities and towns, cultural and aesthetic greatness, curiosity and fascination about how nature really works, cooperation with co-workers and neighbors, and generosity, just because it feels right. We’ve always loved the idea of rising to the occasion, of being heroes in the last minutes of a game. We’ve practiced heroism for many thousands of years in our myths and scriptures. We’re ready in these most critical times to continue the transition, individually and culturally, from the “love of consumption” to the “love of life.”
About The Author
David Wann is President of the Sustainable Futures Society; a board member of the Cohousing Association of the U.S.; a fellow of the Simplicity Forum; and recipient of various lifetime achievement awards for his work on sustainability. He’s been a passionate gardener for 25 years and now coordinates a neighborhood garden in the cohousing community in which he’s lived for 11 years — Harmony Village in Golden, Colorado.
Dave is the author of many books, including Affluenza and the new Simple Prosperity: Finding Real Wealth in a Sustainable Lifestyle. He will be on tour in early 2008 in Colorado and California, among other places. Dave can be reached at davewann@comcast.net.
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