PERILS OF THE SIMPLE LIFE

By Jesse Birnbaum

Our life is frittered away by detail... Simplify, simplify. --Henry David Thoreau, Walden

PITY THE POOR VICTIM OF DOWNSIZING. If he was upscale, he's got to downshift by downparing and downspending. If he's lucky, he can get a part-time job outsourcing. If he was downscale, he can forget about upclimbing. It's enough to drive anybody bend-arounding.

Trouble is, life is too complicated. Everybody's running computers, shopping, working 80 hours a week, worrying about Clinton and Gingrich and the sorry New York Jets. What they need to do is scrape off the barnacles of quotidian life and get simple.

As it happens, a solution is available in the form of inspirational aids that have propelled the new fad for less stuff into a prospering self-help industry. It's called the Simplicity Business. Anybody can learn how to shed frustrations by sifting through a near torrent of books, CD-ROMS, audiotapes and newsletters, all of them exalting the simple life.

Mike Lenich, from South Holland, Illinois, is learning. A quality-control supervisor for a public utility, Lenich shucked his $350-a-year health-club membership and takes daily walks instead. He and his wife Linda also trim costs by scissoring the Christmas cards they receive and making postcards from the unused parts. They buy most of their food in bulk and reuse their plastic sandwich bags. Patricia O'Leary, a bookkeeper from East Brunswick, New Jersey, has read 20 simple-living books and subscribes to three simplicity newsletters, which she says have helped her and her husband Daniel wipe out a $19,000 credit-card debt. "We're happier now," she says, "and we have more time for the kids [who get new toys only for Christmas and birthdays]. We used to have take-out food three nights a week. Now we usually get a pizza delivered on Fridays."

But, oddly enough, it is the gurus of the new simplicity who are discovering that success brings unexpected complexities. The industry leaders are Vicki Robin and her friend Joe Dominguez, who wrote Your Money or Your Life, which has grossed $3.5 million and sold 350,000 copies in just three years. In that time, Robin has given more than 600 press interviews, plowed through two 10-city book tours, appeared twice on Oprah and co-conducted financial seminars around North America. Before the book was written, she hadn't been on an airplane in 20 years. Now she has more frequent-flyer miles than a Boeing 727. Though her publisher books her into classy hotels when she is on the road, she buys food at a local market and takes it to her room. The result, reports her publisher, Viking Penguin, is "the cheapest book tour on record."

Robin and Dominguez live in Seattle on only $13,000 a year, honoring some of the precepts in Your Money (repair your own car, shop at garage sales), while ignoring others (sell your house and live in a motor home, eat beans). They have put the profits they have netted into a charitable foundation. "We're delighted by the commercial success," says Robin, "but people have been hounding us for money. We want to give it out, but at our discretion."

Meanwhile, Sara Orem and her husband Larry Demarest, authors of Living Simply (14,000 copies in print), are simply living in chaos. Orem has moved from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to suburban Detroit, where she has a new job with a bank. Demarest, a self-employed consultant, doesn't know whether to join her or continue to have a commuter marriage. "I'm very conflicted," he says, "because I was ready to have a simpler life when my wife took this job. We're not living simply right now, but it doesn't contradict the message of the book. Making long-term decisions requires short-term difficulties if you want to get to the place you want to be."

Elaine St. James' books, Simplify Your Life and Inner Simplicity (386,000 copies in print), stress spiritual downshifting. Cry a lot, she advises. Drop call waiting. Laugh a lot. Imagine your own death. Smile a lot. Chant. Don't answer the doorbell. Dance. Stop making the bed. Sell the damn boat. Take off your plastic nails and dump the nail polish.

St. James, who lives in Santa Barbara, California, declines to say how much she has earned promoting simplicity, except to point out that she has turned down several marketing propositions, including one from a pharmaceutical company that wanted her to endorse an antistress remedy. "I told them that if people made changes in their life-style, they wouldn't need these products." To prove it she chucked out all her medications except aspirin, cropped her hair to save time blow drying, traded in her big house for a little condo, discarded her Cuisinart and downsized her wardrobe to two skirts, two blazers, two pairs of slacks, five T shirts and six turtlenecks. Her only apparent luxury is a used BMW, which, for some, she says, "would be a dichotomy, but it adds something to my life." She admits that "it's an ongoing challenge to stay simple."

St. James is now working on another book, Living the Simple Life. If she expects to finish it on time, she will have to quit answering the doorbell. And cry a lot. And laugh a lot. On the way to the bank. In her BMW.

--Reported by Wendy Cole/Minneapolis

With reporting by WENDY COLE/MINNEAPOLIS