Voluntary Simplicity

By Martin Vander Weyer

Originally published by The Daily Telegraph, May 10, 2003

The Good Life is back in fashion. The 1970s sitcom of that name, about a suburban couple striving for back-to-nature simplicity, is on our screens for the umprteenth re-run. Alongside it in recent months has been a spate of other programmes like No Going Back and A Place in the Country, about real-life couples leaving stressful urban lives behind to find peace and space in Cumbria and the Dordogne.

As so often, television scheduling is merely reflecting social trends: this one is called “downshifting” – the search for “voluntary simplicity” – and it is all the rage. According to one recent survey, 2.6 million Britons are already doing it. Millions more are daydreaming about it.

There are downshifters from every profession, but the current exodus is led by City types, some 30,000 of whom have suffered in this winter’s savage cull of the financial sector. Many have chosen not to look for another dead-end, short-term trading job, but for a whole new way of life instead. Others have joined the downshifting bandwagon because, having made so much money in the past decade, they need no longer endure the strain of waiting to be culled in the next wave.

Andrew Gordon-Brown, of JP Morgan, last week became one of several prominent investment analysts to throw in the towel voluntarily: he is off to teach economics at Radley, the Oxfordshire public school.

Last month, John Thornton, the chief operating officer at Goldman Sachs and an iconic figure of the global investment banking scene, announced that he was leaving Wall Street before his 50th birthday to teach “leadership skills” at a university in Beijing.

Rather less adventurously, Harry Daswani, an executive of Deutsche Bank in London, has now announced that what he really wanted to be was a plumber in Uxbridge. Working for one of the City’s most prestigious firms “wasn’t what life was about”, he says. “There’s a big world out there.”

I used to be an investment banker, too – a chief operating officer and a managing director, so my business cards said – and I experienced exactly those feelings both before and after I lost my six-figure-salaried job in the depths of the last recession, one fine January day in 1992. Indeed, I was a downshifter before I had even heard the word itself, an import from American marketing-speak.

Back then, when I described to a friend my transition from City big-hitter to rural-dwelling freelance writer, I was puzzled and affronted when she responded, “Oh, you mean you’ve downshifted.”

It sounded almost as though she had accused me of breaking wind. On first hearing, the new word had negative connotations: it suggested slipping quietly off life’s escalator, giving into idleness and semi-retirement. For years I never used it about myself, even though mine seemed to be the very model of the way of life it implied.

I had swapped a daily commute on the District & Circle Line for a morning walk with my dog in the Yorkshire countryside. I had exchanged the ill-tempered atmosphere of the corporate finance department for the sweet air of a book-lined study overlooking my garden. The fat monthly salary payments which I never had time to spend had been replaced by a trickle of modest cheques from newspapers and magazines.

And I was happier. I was free. I was in control of what I was doing in a way that I had never been during my 15-year office career. I no longer had to worry about being spotted leaving the office before 8pm, or about being overtaken for promotion by arrogant young thrusters, or burning out like the sad fortysomethings who were my seniors.

Time seemed to expand: I no longer felt a little bit older each day, and there suddenly seemed to be room to do all sorts of interesting things besides scratching a living. If this is “downshifting”, I finally admitted to myself, then it has certainly been a positive for me.

But there are pitfalls in any quest for the idyllic. I fell into several of them, and that puts me in prime position to offer the new generation of downshifters a list of dos and don’ts.

High among the don’ts, for example, comes: “Don’t burn your boats”. Your downshifting urge may turn out to be as cyclical as the economy itself, and three years hence you may eye the wealth and success of your former workmates and yearn to “upshift” again. One financier friend of mine dropped out in the mid-1990s to study art, swearing he would never be back; he now runs a branch of a German banking giant.

So don’t do as I did and use the opportunity of your new freedom to publish a series of articles so scorchingly rude about your previous profession as to make it impossible for you ever to work in it again. Keep in touch with former colleagues, letting them know that your new life is developing fruitfully (even if it is not) but that, in a free-spirited sort of way, you are keeping open the option of a stylish comeback.

Second: “Don’t over-commit yourself”, in money or time. When I was searching for a new direction, I contemplated buying a local hotel or starting a market garden; a friend suggested enthusiastically, to my complete bafflement, that I should buy a motorcycle repair business. All would have been disasters.

Whatever you do, if you have a nest egg from the sale of your London home plus your redundancy pay or your last bonus, do not sink it into a business which will break your back and go bust in 18 months.

Instead, think hard about setting your household finances on a stable basis for a long-ish period of low income. That was easy for me, because my household consists of me and my dog. For those with children it is more of a challenge – but the rewards will be all the greater, because time to spend with your kids is the most precious commodity downshifting buys.

The trick is to reduce your overheads as low as you can. If you’re moving to the country, it may be wise to buy your new, simple, rural home with an energy-saving Aga and a fertile vegetable patch but without a mortgage, so you do not have to worry about repayments.

You should put some money aside for emergencies, and think about your future pension arrangements, or lack of them. You should invest in enough technology to give you a home office from which to respond smartly to every opportunity that comes along. And having done all that, you can see how much is left for risk capital in new ventures.

But the true downshifter – whether he becomes a plumber, a potter, a performance poet or, as in the case of so many ex-bankers, an unspecified “freelance consultant” – does not want any job which takes him back to a 70-hour week and a sub-half-hour lunchbreak. He wants time to spend with his family, and with himself.

He may unashamedly just want to be idle – a category of downshifter about whom the Financial Times quite uncharacteristically published a feature last weekend, perhaps recognising that many office-bound readers now hanker for the easeful life.

Even the less idle downshifter wants plenty of space in his timetable – space to build an eclectic, even eccentric, portfolio of interests, which gives him stimulus and self-esteem as well as at least a minimal income. The best way to do that is not to take on anything that requires a commitment of more than three or four days a week.

Third: “Don’t take on anything for which you have no basic skill or inclination”. Focus firmly on the things you always secretly wanted to do. I would have been a hopeless hotelier or farmer, but I always knew I wanted to be a writer, and the pleasant surprise was that editors were willing to pay me to do it. The mistake that I made – though it is not one that I especially regret – was to take on too many other commitments as well.

The downshifter, often newly arrived in a rural community, is ideal material for all sorts of local committees and projects. With the zeal of a convert, he is likely to volunteer for almost anything that looks like an interesting way of filling up another slice of the week. If he volunteers once, he will be asked a dozen times. If he happens to be an ex-banker, he will prove to be an ideal committee treasurer, and (a peril truly worth avoiding) the only person in the room who is capable of filling out a Lottery grant application form.

Within a few years of launching my own new life, I found myself the director of the local arts centre, the chairman of the Conservative Association and the music festival, a governor of the primary school and a trustee of a couple of other charities. Last week I capped my community career by being elected to the parish council. People sometimes say they envy me because my time is entirely my own: it is not really, because my diary is chock-a-block with committee meetings from now till Christmas.

On the other hand I have not had a dull day since January 1992, which is no small claim. I still have time to write and think, and I can make a tangible difference to some of these community projects, whereas for months on end in my previous life I made no difference at all to anything except the balance on my own bank statement.