Simplicity is Not For Sale by Vicki Robin

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Source: Tom Atlee email list - April 21, 2000

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SIMPLICITY IS NOT FOR SALE

By Vicki Robin

Watch out. Marketing double-speak is hitting a new high (or low, depending on your point of view). Time Inc., recognizing a trend, is launching on March 27 a new magazine for the harried called RealSimple. They have cleverly reworked the perennial insight of "less is more" into "Do less. Have More." - replacing the true grit of the first with yet another engraved invitation to self-absorption.

What's the harm? It's a free country. "Simplicity" is just a word. Words belong to everyone. If someone wants to call a soap "joy", a tampon "freedom" or underwear "love", why do I find myself bristling when a magazine wants to commandeer "simplicity" and "reality" to sell Gap clothes and Cadillac cars (over half the magazine is devoted to ads)?

Really, shouldn't I be flattered that the kind of shedding of excess I've been promoting for 2 decades has now hit the jackpot? Shouldn't I declare victory that simplicity is now mainstream, not marginal? Shouldn't I even be busy writing articles for RealSimple rather than biting the hand that may feed common sense to millions? I mean, the thought that time-starved house-and-office wives might commune with their inner lives after commuting from their harried lives is really quite wonderful. It is. Why, then, do I cringe when Madison Avenue starts selling "simplicity"?

It's because words are important. Words mean something. They are alive, almost as alive as flowers and forests and finches. They make up the DNA of our living culture. Marketers muck with the genetic material of our souls when they manipulate our emotions by appropriating the very language we use daily to express our highest aspirations and deepest desires. So, sorry folks. I'm drawing the line. I'm declaring a quixotic war on the language looters. I'm arching myself backwards in those canyons of skyscrapers where the best minds of our generation are writing ad copy, and I'm shouting out a big "Yoo hoo. You can't have 'simplicity' to sell your stuff."

Simplicity isn't something you buy. You create it by chipping away the unreal, the useless and the meaningless until, like Michaelangelo's David, you are left with a life that is breathtakingly beautiful. Simplicity is about loving something more than you love "more." It isn't yours by buying a car or a laptop computer or a cigar or a spa-vacation.

In fact, simplicity is far more challenging and rewarding than anything e-commerce can offer. It's about "living simply that others may simply live." It's not about having more and doing less. Just the opposite. It's about "having less and being more" - more quiet, more honest, more compassionate, more real.

Oh dear. Real. There's another word headed for oblivion as marketers co-opt it to sell magazines and, you guessed it, cars. Real isn't something you buy. It's, well, real. It's like the breath that sustains you. The blood in your veins. The soul that remains once everything else is indeed shed.

And yes, in case you were wondering, RealSimple is also dispensing soul in easy-to-swallow insight bites. Hello! No one can sell you your soul. It's yours already. Sure, soul work can go more smoothly in certain circumstances. Quiet. Solitude. Nature. Other seekers. Inspiring teachers. Access to these, in today's world, might mean spending a bit of money.

But souls light up just as often in bad times. Achieving equanimity amidst gridlock, crises and loss often expands the soul in ways that don't disappear the Monday morning after that high-buck vision quest. For peace of mind, watch your breath go in and out. Watch your desires rise and fall. Talk to God. And watch your pennies to see if spending them is getting you any closer to an authentic life.

So watch out for the side-show barkers dressed up like Martha Stewart who promise to simplify your life for a pretty penny. It's like thinking that a cell phone will simplify your life and then finding that everyone can find you 24/7. It's like buying a palm pilot and losing hours trying to figure out all its features. It's like getting on-line while you are exercising to do your email and web searches. Simplicity is slow. It's a bit shy, coming out only in moments of silence, solitude and sanity. You can't get it at the mall. You won't find it on the web. And it sure won't flutter out of an advertising loaded magazine like a bounce-back post card for a free trial of the latest "beautiful you" hair rinse.

So what's my prescription for simplicity? First, if you must now see the real RealSimple, glance through it at the magazine stand but get it at the library. Second, ask yourself what really matters to you, and then coil your life around it and don't let go. Third, tell your children Seuss-like tales of the loony language looters and teach them to know the difference between needs, wants and advertising-induced desires.

"Real" and "simple" cost nothing more than attention to our beautiful world. Can you "buy" that?

# # # #

Vicki Robin is co-author with Joe Dominguez of Your Money or Your Life (Penguin Putnam 1992, 1999), President of the New Road Map Foundation (www.newroadmap.org) and on the Board of the Center for a New American Dream (www.newdream.org).

-- Anonymous, April 22, 2000

Answers

Zen is simple.

Very well written! Thanks.

Diane

-- Anonymous, April 22, 2000


Tome Atlee's comments...

Subject: realigning our lives towards real aliveness
Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2000 10:59:46 -0700
From: Tom Atlee < cii@igc.org >

Dear friends,

I want to notice what a difference it would make to have a system whereby councils of highly diverse citizens deliberate on important social issues -- very visibly on the public stage -- with the kind of information sources provided to Danish citizen technology panels and the kind of leading- edge group process provided to Wisdom Councils! The evidence is strong that we would get more dependable, useful and exciting insights and options about our mounting social and economic problems than we get from either the corporate media and our legislative bodies -- or the "alternative world" of non-mainstream media and advocacy groups. (For more on such councils, see http://www.co-intelligence.org/P-citizenCC.html .)

Until that day comes, however, we have each other. We can think, read, listen, talk with each other, and filter the informational flows of the world for each other as best we can, sharing with each other what we find that is useful. We can stay connected with people who share our values, seeing what we can learn together.

That's a major purpose of this email list. Contrary to what many people imagine, I don't do much active Web surfing. I'm just lucky enough to be on some very interesting communication lines and involved with some very interesting people (including many of you) who email me stuff. It is way too much stuff for me to handle as well as I'd like, but it does provide me with a glimpse of some very interesting ideas and options. I pass on bits and pieces I think might interest you, and post some of them on my website.

What's below are three such emails, all offering things we can think about and do regarding the degradation of our lives and our environments. The first two raise the issue of simplifying our lives in a civilization so surreal that it tries to sell simplification as a commodity, while ignoring the fact that More Sales of More Commodities is driving us to the brink. Simplicity is one of those "things anyone can do to make the world a better place" -- a point made abundantly clear in the second email about how thoroughly PBS missed the point in its documentary on global warming. The third email reminds us that more than individual simplicity is required to make these better lives we want so much: we need (among other things) some ways to measure our collective well-being that are better than "how much money we all spend" (which is the current main national statistic, called Gross Domestic Product, or GDP) (see http://www.co-intelligence.org/P-qualtylifeindicators.html ). The third email below tells us that proposed legislation in Canada (which could be adapted to any country) would involve citizens in creating statistical indicators that really measure what's important to them -- a vibrantly safe natural and social environment, good prospects for their children, and so on.

I like the idea that this creation of new statistics could happen all over the globe -- hand in hand with people scaling down the consumptive, frenetic, meaningless parts of their lives while vastly increasing their alive, sustainable engagement in what's really important to them and their world. Both of these would help improve the lot of poorer people and ecosystems. The statistics would encourage sane individual behavior, and the individual behavior would create a culture where such statistics made sense. This dynamic could make this world a whole lot better.

So this is just a reminder that that could happen -- and that we could make it happen....

Coheartedly,

Tom

-- Anonymous, April 22, 2000


In the corruption of language catagory lets highlight DEVELOPMENT. If any other organism did to the environment what developers do when they "develop a piece of property, in the exercise of 'personal property rights' there would be a national control program as with other pernicious pests.

When habitat destruction is wrapped in the positive attributes that the word develop has associated with it the battle is half lost. Flatland mind at work again, imagining that wealth is carved out of the void, that there is empty, undeveloped land needing the improving hand of man.

In the global-local thinking/acting paradigm the same applies. We are a collecting, environment shaping species, like many others. There are deep seated reasons for what humans want and do to their living space, hardly any of it benign from a non-human view point.

-- Anonymous, April 23, 2000


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