TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/040891/0408140.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 23.3 KB | 511 lines

                                                                                LIVING, Page 58

COVER STORIES

The Simple Life


Goodbye to having it all. Tired of trendiness and materialism,
Americans are rediscovering the joys of home life, basic values
and things that last

By JANICE CASTRO -- With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington,
Melissa Ludtke/Boston and William McWhirter/Chicago, with other
bureaus


    These are the humble makings of a revolution in progress:
Macaroni and cheese. Timex watches. Volunteer work. Insulated
underwear. Savings accounts. Roseanne. Domestic beer. Local
activism. Sleds. Pajamas. Sentimental movies. Primary colors.
Mixed-breed dogs. Bicycles. Cloth diapers. Shopping at Wal-Mart.
Small-town ways. Iceberg lettuce. Family reunions. Board games.
Hang-it-yourself wallpaper. Push-it-yourself lawn mowers. Silly
Putty.

    See the pattern? It's as genuine as Grandma's quilt. After
a 10-year bender of gaudy dreams and godless consumerism,
Americans are starting to trade down. They want to reduce their
attachments to status symbols, fast-track careers and great
expectations of Having It All. Upscale is out; downscale is in.
Yuppies are an ancient civilization. Flaunting money is
considered gauche: if you've got it, please keep it to yourself
-- or give some away!

    In place of materialism, many Americans are embracing
simpler pleasures and homier values. They've been thinking hard
about what really matters in their lives, and they've decided
to make some changes. What matters is having time for family and
friends, rest and recreation, good deeds and spirituality. For
some people that means a radical step: changing one's career,
living on less, or packing up and moving to a quieter place. For
others it can mean something as subtle as choosing a cheaper
brand of running shoes or leaving work a little earlier to watch
the kids in a soccer game.

    The pursuit of a simpler life with deeper meaning is a
major shift in America's private agenda. "This is a rapid and
extremely powerful movement," says Ross Goldstein, a San
Francisco psychologist and market researcher. "I'm impressed by
how deep it goes into the fabric of this country." Says noted
theologian Martin Marty of the University of Chicago: "We are
all warned against thinking in terms of trends that correspond
with decades, but this one is a cinch. I think that people are
going to look back at today as a hinge period in the country's
history." Some social observers have already dubbed the 1990s
the "We decade."

    The mood is palpable. In a TIME/CNN poll of 500 adults,
69% of the people surveyed said they would like to "slow down
and live a more relaxed life," in contrast to only 19% who said
they would like to "live a more exciting, faster-paced life." A
majority of those polled, 61%, agreed that "earning a living
today requires so much effort that it's difficult to find time
to enjoy life." When asked about their priorities, 89% said it
was more important these days to spend time with their
families, and 56% felt strongly about finding time for personal
interests and hobbies. But only 13% saw importance in keeping
up with fashions and trends, and just 7% thought it was worth
bothering to shop for status-symbol products.

    Marsha Bristow Bostick of Columbus remembers noticing with
alarm last summer that her three-year-old daughter Betsy had
memorized an awful lot of TV commercials. The toddler announced
that she planned to take ballet lessons, followed by bride
lessons. That helped inspire her mother, then 37, to quit her
$150,000-a-year job as a marketing executive. She and her
husband, Brent, a bank officer, decided that Betsy and their
infant son Andrew needed more parental attention if they were
going to develop the right sort of values. Marsha explained, "I
found myself wondering, How wealthy do we need to be? I don't
care if I have a great car, or if people are impressed with what
I'm doing for a living. We have everything we need."

    The movement is pervasive. "This is not something simply
happening to the burnouts from Wall Street," says sociologist
Stephen Warner of the University of Illinois at Chicago. "There
is an American phenomenon going on that crosses all social
lines. It's true of immigrant groups too, as well as the
underprivileged."

    Yet the shift in priorities has a surface gloss of
stylishness also. Call it thrifty chic. Penny pinching is back
in vogue, even among the rich. Jackie O. shops at the Gap.
Christie Brinkley wears plain white men's T shirts. Outside
B.J.'s Wholesale Club in Medford, Mass., a white stretch limo
waits at the curb while its passengers roam the cavernous
discount warehouse. At Tom's Barber Shop in Jacksonville,
lawyers and executives sit down next to truckers and shipyard
workers for a $6 trim. At Deja Vu, a Palm Beach boutique that
sells used designer clothes, women who once sent their maids and
drivers to the back door with bundles of high-fashion castoffs
to sell now bring them by in person and stick around to shop.

    The beginnings of the new mind-set probably go back as far
as the stock-market crash of 1987, which had little immediate
effect on the overall economy but gave many people an uneasy
feeling about the Roaring Eighties. The spectacular failures of
such '80s heroes as Michael Milken and Donald Trump have
discredited the era's role models as well. "The 1980s showed how
ugly this country could be, like racism did," says April
Gilbert, a Stanford M.B.A. and shipping executive who hopes to
join a nonprofit company soon. "In the 1980s I was fed up and
almost angry with the behavior of people in this country," says
Stuart Winby, manager of Hewlett-Packard's Factory-of-the-Future
program. "Those kinds of values are just empty. I'm really sated
with gadgets, things, adornments and all that stuff." Many
people were awakened by individual experience: the plight of a
homeless neighbor, the collapse of a bank, a friend's job loss.

    The recession and gulf war have cemented the trend. First,
the economic downturn struck some people as a just punishment
for a dizzy era of excessive borrowing and spending. Many
consumers saw the recession as a warning that their behavior had
to change. Cutting back and putting away the plastic seem only
prudent. Unemployment, currently at 6.5%, has risen steadily for
eight months. Some people who used to ride in limousines are now
driving them for a living. Then the life-and-death reality of
the war came along and made the pursuit of glitz and status seem
even more trivial. Americans saw their country pulling together
with a higher purpose and a can-do spirit, and many of them
liked the feeling.

    In scaling down their tastes, most Americans are making a
virtue out of necessity. Contrary to perceptions, the past
decade was an era of downward mobility for the majority of U.S.
families, who kept up their spending by borrowing and relying
on two incomes. Only the wealthiest 20% of Americans
significantly increased their real income during the Reagan era,
and the poor slipped further behind. After adjustment for
inflation, the national standard of living has actually fallen
since 1973; the real average hourly pay for U.S. workers has
gone from $8.55 then to $7.54 today. Says Barry Bosworth, an
economist at the Brookings Institution: "Americans are not
becoming pessimistic. They are becoming realistic. It is right
to think of cutting back."

    At the same time, the baby-boom generation, which
accounted for much of the spending binge of the '80s, is
reaching middle age. Here come 75 million aching backs. A
generation of reluctant grown-ups is raising children, caring
for aging parents and beginning to think about retirement.
Instead of pumping iron, preening and networking, they are
worrying about orthodontists, skateboards and college tuitions.
The backyard now has more appeal than the boardroom.

    So forget those champagne wishes and caviar dreams, the
right car, vodka, watch, cuisine and music system. Consumers no
longer feel they absolutely must have the latest luxury product.
Who would be impressed, anyway? "People don't think being
square is synonymous with being a sucker anymore," says Dan Fox,
marketing planning director of the Foote, Cone & Belding ad
agency. Besides, they no longer seem to get a kick from spending
borrowed money. Consumer installment credit dropped $342 million
in December, or 0.6%, in what would ordinarily have been a busy
shopping season, and a huge $2.4 billion in January.

    Not everyone believes America has changed its stripes,
however. "If the pres ent generation has learned anything, it
is that talk is cheap. But are they really doing anything
different?" asks Stanford economist Victor Fuchs. "The baby
boomers are just growing up and playing out a predictable
life-cycle change." Elmer Johnson, a Chicago lawyer and former
executive vice president of General Motors, sees "a hardness of
heart that has not yet begun to be broken." John Kenneth
Galbraith, the eminent liberal economist, dismisses the trend
as a bicoastal fad among fast-trackers. Says he, with amused
cynicism: "I just think it's pure horse."

    Yet a lot of business people who stake their livelihood on
shifts in consumer behavior see thousands of small changes that
they believe are adding up to something. At a Brookstone store
in Boston, a man exchanges a gift, trading in a $99 executive
fountain pen ("I'll never use it") for a car-care kit. Suddenly
people want to buy toys that don't take batteries. Sales of
dolls are up. Power dressing is out. One sign: shoulder pads,
standard issue for the female corporate warrior, are finally
disappearing from women's clothing. Even designers are getting
into the act: Donna Karan and Bill Blass offer more congenially
priced ready-to-wear fashion lines. Revlon's Charles of the Ritz
has sprouted the cheaper Ritz Express skin-care line (1 oz. of
Perfect Finish makeup: $10, vs. $25 for an ounce of Revenescence
liquid foundation).

    The change in consumer psychology is shaking many
merchants to their roots. Traditional department stores ranging
from Saks Fifth Avenue to Neiman Marcus have suffered from poor
business as customers flock to discounters and back-to-basics
stores, notably the Limited, the Gap, Wal-Mart and K Mart. The
75-store Sharper Image chain, which made its reputation in the
'80s with high-tech gadgets, has been blurring its image to
include more low-cost, practical goods. Example: a $19.95
aluminum-can crusher for recyclers.

    In fact, that's another reason for rejecting rampant
materialism: its impact on the environment. "Whenever I use
something or buy something now, I'm thinking, Where is this
going to end up?" says Debbie Worthley, 46, a student adviser
at the University of Vermont. "I'm not as interested in buying
gadgets as I was a few years ago." Seventh Generation, a
two-year-old Colchester, Vt., mail-order firm that specializes
in goods for the environmentally conscious, has an essay in its
catalog titled "Why You Should Buy Less Stuff." Recycling has
taken hold as a voguish and satisfying pursuit. People who used
to meet at trendy bars now trade bons mots while sorting their
garbage into the appropriate bins at the public dump. Even the
smaller luxuries are giving way to environmental vigilance. If
last year's popular orange juice was a quart of premium with
extra pulp, this year's is canned concentrate, which requires
less packaging.

    The buzz word among marketers is "value" products, meaning
quality at a low price. The Campbell Soup Co. has introduced
discount frozen foods, including Swanson budget dinners (average
cost: $1.39). In the hope of stemming a decline in business that
typically reached 20% in the past year, restaurants are adding
such moderately priced classics as fried chicken, meat loaf and
bread pudding. Restaurateurs have coined a phrase for it:
"casualization." In fast food, price is the object. After Taco
Bell won new fans by pricing about half its items at 99 cents
or less, Burger King began offering Burger Buddies cheeseburgers
at 29 cents for customers who buy fries and a drink.

    Sales of the ultimate yuppie symbol, the BMW, fell to
63,600 in the U.S. last year, a drop of 28% from 1985 levels.
Meanwhile, Honda sales increased 29.7%, to 716,500. The sales
pitch for autos today would have bored the driving gloves off
an '80s car buff: safety features (antilock brakes, air bags),
versatility (four doors, built-in child seats) and value. A 1991
Pontiac Grand Prix model sells for under $20,000 but looks (on
the outside, anyway) like last year's sporty $26,000 Turbo
model.

    Even trendiness itself, or at least the slavish
chronicling of consumer ephemera, has the taint of the passe.
Many magazines that served as arbiters of hipness have gone out
of business, including Egg, 7 Days, Smart and Fame. In the
meantime, Vanity Fair thrives by sticking to cover subjects that
have the rosy glow of maturity: Farrah and Ryan, Sly Stallone,
Madonna. At the same time, such magazines as Workbench,
Homeowner and 1001 Home Ideas are briskly building up their
circulation. One of the hottest newcomers is Countryside, a
Hearst glossy about the virtues of conservation, rural
landscapes and life in the exurbs.

    The pop-culture machine is rushing to catch up with the
times. Gilded '80s shows such as Dynasty and Falcon Crest are
gone, swept away by a wave of proudly downscale fare, including
Roseanne, The Simpsons and Married . . . with Children. Campy
hobnobber Robin Leach of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous has
been replaced in the hearts of viewers by chatty Jeff Smith of
The Frugal Gourmet and nonaerobic carpenter Norm Abram of The
New Yankee Workshop. Love stories, melodramas and family films
have taken over Hollywood. Home Alone, Ghost and Pretty Woman,
for example, collectively reaped more than $500 million in total
revenues last year. Get set for an onslaught of films about
people waking up and smelling the coffee.

    For many Americans the most startling realization is how
much they have given up for their careers. In her new book
Down-Shifting, author Amy Saltzman maintains that baby boomers
have grown increasingly skeptical about the payoff for devoting
so much time to the fast track. As their huge generation crowds
toward the top of the corporate pyramid, many are getting
stalled. At the same time, companies have been slashing the
ranks of middle managers.

    For Karen Glance, 36, it came down to all those little
packets of shampoo. She remembers the morning she opened her
bathroom cabinet in St. Paul and counted 150 that had followed
her home from hotels in dozens of cities. Says the former
apparel executive: "I was a workaholic, a crazy, crazy woman.
I was on a plane four times a week. I just wanted to get to the
top. All of a sudden, I realized that I was reaching that goal
but I wasn't happy. A year would go by and I wouldn't know what
had happened."

    A few months ago, Glance was shopping in a neighborhood
grocery store when she learned that its owner was about to
retire. Something fell into place. She looked around the
old-fashioned shop, where clerks still climb ladders to retrieve
goods from the upper shelves, and she decided on the spot to buy
the place. The new proprietor of the Crocus Hill market may
never come anywhere near to matching her old $100,000-plus
yearly income, but she couldn't care less. Says Glance: "It
really comes down to saying, `Slow down. The value of life might
not be in making money.' "

    Mostly, though, what people want now is more time around
home and hearth. Most parents of small children work outside
the home. More than 7 million Americans hold down two or even
three jobs to make ends meet. "Nobody seems to have any damn
time anymore," says Winby, the Hewlett-Packard executive.
"People can't manage their home, work and personal life." As a
result, many working mothers (and some fathers) are giving up
full-time careers to devote more time to homelife. "There is a
sense of an enormous trade-off between a fast-track career and
family well-being," says economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett, author
of the forthcoming When the Bough Breaks: The Cost of Neglecting
Our Children. "Women can see the damage all around them and are
making different choices than they did a few years ago."

    Some couples are even thinking twice about divorce in
light of the problems it can pose for children, the financial
damage it does to families and other consequences. The U.S.
divorce rate, which reached a high of 5.3 per 1,000 people in
1979, is now 4.7 and may still be falling.

    Of all those rejecting the rat race to spend more time
with their families, perhaps the most famous is Peter Lynch.
While the 47-year-old investment superstar was busy building the
Fidelity Magellan mutual fund into a $13 billion behemoth, his
youngest daughter got to be seven years old, and he felt he
hardly knew her. Last spring he stunned Wall Street when he
decided to give up his 14-hour workdays. With a nest egg
estimated at $50 million, Lynch could well afford to quit. But
many ordinary people evidently felt a connection with what he
did, for he received more than 1,000 letters of support for his
move. These days, while other investment managers are scanning
their market data at dawn, Lynch is making school lunches. Says
he: "I loved what I was doing, but I came to a conclusion, and
so did some others: What in the hell are we doing this for? I
don't know anyone who wished on his deathbed that he had spent
more time at the office."

    The stay-at-home urge, also known as "cocooning," has
produced a boom of its own. Consumers spent more than $9 billion
renting videotapes in 1990, up 13% from the previous year and
nearly twice the $5 billion they paid to see new releases at
theaters. Home entertaining is decidedly back to basics.
Remember onion dip? The Mom Rule has re-emerged as America's
primary meal-planning guide: if she never heard of it, don't
serve it. With a couple of children in tow, mothers and fathers
simply don't have time to hunt for goat cheese and sun-dried
tomatoes in the supermarket. Marsha Bristow Bostick fondly
recalls the leisurely evenings she spent at home before her
children were born, "cooking wonderful things with my husband
while we sipped white wine." Now? "We're eating SpaghettiO's,
fried chicken, lots of terrible-for-you casseroles covered in
cheese."

    Far from becoming hermits, many Americans are reaching out
to strengthen their ties beyond the home. Instead of defining
themselves mostly by their possessions and work, more Americans
in big cities as well as small towns are getting involved with
their communities. "I don't think God puts you on this earth
just to make millions of dollars and ignore everyone else,"
says Chris Amundsen of Minneapolis, a commercial real estate
expert who took a 34% pay cut when he became the chief financial
officer of a nonprofit housing agency.

    Lately, charitable agencies and community groups have seen
an upsurge in the willingness of Americans to help the less
fortunate. In 1989 citizens gave a record $114.7 billion to
charitable causes across the U.S., a 10% increase from the
previous year, despite the stagnating economy. Instead of
exchanging Christmas presents, many have started making
contributions in the names of their friends. Even more
impressive, more than 98 million Americans -- about half of all
adults -- volunteered their time to charitable organizations in
1989, a 23% increase from two years earlier. Voluntary efforts
range from the spectacular to the simply heartwarming. In Los
Angeles real estate broker Eric Broida regularly volunteers at
the Union Rescue Mission, where he serves meals to the homeless.
"A couple of years ago, I went down one night to help out, and
it just felt right," he says. "I felt good. I've been going back
ever since."

    In their search for more enduring gratification in life,
many people are seeking spirituality, if not a born-again
commitment to organized religion. "Spirituality is in," says
theologian Marty, "so much so that I get embarrassed by it."
Says Milton Walsh, a Roman Catholic priest who is pastor of St.
Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco: "People want some kind of
direction and purpose, the basic `Who am I? Where am I going?'
"

    The mood has influenced the career choices of college
students and recent graduates. Many are spurning high-powered
corporate careers to train for teaching, nursing and other
community-service jobs. Joe Holland turned down generous offers
after graduating from Harvard Law School a few years ago to move
to Harlem to help build up the community. Now the owner of a
restaurant and a travel agency, Holland has also founded a
shelter for the homeless. "I know that coming to Harlem shut the
door to Wall Street," says he. "But I can look at a healthy man,
a full-time travel agent, who came through my homeless program
two years ago strung out on crack. I have absolutely no
regrets."

    By some analyses, the 1990s will be an anxious era of dues
paying for the excesses of the '80s. That may be true in a
public sense, but in private lives, how much fun was the past
decade? For most Americans it was a time of struggling to keep
up with everyone who seemed to be making it big. Now that the
bubble of financial speculation has burst, people should -- and
do -- feel entitled to accept more modest aspirations. The real
estate market was a prime example of a 1980s torture track.
Americans started thinking of housing as a vehicle for getting
rich, rather than as just shelter, and it became an obsession.
Author Ann Beattie, a chronicler of the baby boom, fled
Manhattan in the mid-1980s for Charlottesville, Va., declaring,
"I could not spend the rest of my life listening to people talk
about real estate. It's a constant, boring, hysterical subject."

    Now that the conversation has changed to more humane
topics, how will it affect the economy? During the past month,
consumer confidence has shaken off the worst of the recession
blues, according to studies by the University of Michigan and
the Conference Board. Over the long haul, prudent consumers who
feel optimistic about the future could help build a stronger
foundation for the economy. For one thing, the U.S.
personal-savings rate, which dropped from 9% in the mid-1970s
to a low of 2.3% in late 1987, is now about 4% and climbing.
That will provide a larger pool of investment capital and could
help the U.S. regain its competitive footing. The poor may also
eventually benefit if the notion of a kinder, gentler America
is translated into concrete action.

    But the final question is this: Is the simple life just a
passing fancy, a stylish flashback of the 1960s? Not so, say
people who have studied both eras. Contends Berkeley sociologist
Robert Bellah: "It's no longer messianic, the way it was in the
'60s, but relatively pragmatic. That may give the present mood
a greater staying power." That's good, because the American
generation now reaching middle age has a lot of promises to keep
-- not to mention mortgages to carry, tuition to pay and lawns
to mow. No wonder they want to keep it simple.