Voluntary Simplicity

By Margarette Driscoll

Originally published by the Sunday Times, April 20, 2003

Wendy Bennett can still remember seeing Augill Castle for the first time. Set in the heart of the Eden Valley in Cumbria, the late summer sun seemed to make it glow against a backdrop of rolling hills.

The house, a folly built in the 1840s by John Bagot Pearson, “a gentleman of leisure and considerable means” who wanted to entertain his friends in the style of a medieval banquet, was not derelict but “severely unloved”.

It had been chopped up into flats in the 1970s and, more recently, lain empty for four years. There were 135 burst pipes, dry rot and mushrooms in the roof. But Bennett didn’t care: to her, the house represented escape. In London, she and her husband Simon led a frenetic existence.

As a senior recruitment consultant, Wendy spent long hours in the office and faced a daily grind on the overcrowded Tube. Simon was co-owner of Mayfair’s Curzon Street Restaurant, which often ate up 16 hours of his day.

“It was as if we couldn’t breathe,” says Wendy. “Every day was so busy we hardly saw each other. We were beginning to find London increasingly oppressive.”

Simon was just as unhappy. “The cost of living was ridiculously high,” he says, “and every day there was a new problem. On a Tube strike day it took me 3½ hours to drive four miles from Hammersmith to Mayfair.

I tried cycling but I almost got killed in the traffic. We wanted to start a family but we were both permanently exhausted. I couldn’t see how children could fit into our lives.”

Flicking through Country Life they spotted Augill — 12 bedrooms and 15 acres of land — on sale for just over £200,000, the then price of a three-bedroomed terraced house in west London, where they lived.

All Simon knew about Cumbria was that it “was on the way to Scotland”, but within weeks they had swapped city suits for fleeces, wellies and overalls. Augill is now restored and the Bennetts have turned it into a superior B&B. They now have two children, Oliver, 4, and Emily, 2, and what seems to them a blissfully relaxed existence. “We were lucky; we didn’t think too much about it, we just got on and did it,” says Wendy. “It’s only scary in retrospect.”

They did not know it, but when the Bennetts gave up their high- flying jobs in 1997 they were trailblazers for what has become an established and growing movement. Downshifting — leaving the rat race for a more simple and relaxed, if poverty-stricken lifestyle — has become more than a dream for millions of people in Britain.

Research by Datamonitor, the market analysts, estimates that some 2.6m Britons are “downshifters”, up from 1.7m in 1997, when the “quiet revolt against the culture of getting and spending” began. The movement is now so well established that Datamonitor predicts we will have 3.7m downshifters by 2007, part of a movement of 12m people across Europe.

Such numbers suggest almost a reverse of the industrial revolution, when people flocked to cities to find work. The advance of technology has made working from home a real possibility for many people, but the movement seems to be driven less by the desire for a new career as an emotional meltdown in the cities.

Britons work the longest hours in Europe and as our transport system becomes ever more unreliable — not to say downright dangerous — even getting to work is a source of frustration. Many people feel their lives have been taken over by work. A report by the Mental Health Foundation (MHF), released this week, will say that despite much talk about “work-life balance”, many people are still working 50-60 hours a week and feel their lives are out of control.

Work follows us home. The MHF’s study found a correlation between the number of hours worked and the number of hours spent thinking or worrying about work outside working hours. The more you work, the less free time you have and the more of your free time you spend worrying about work.

Almost half of us say we sacrifice the pleasures of life to work; exercise, quality time with our partners, time with friends, hobbies and entertainment all go by the board. Last year, in a survey for the Department of Trade and Industry, twice as many employees said they would rather work shorter hours than win the lottery.

But it goes deeper even than exhaustion and disillusion. In the wake of September 11 and the war in Iraq, an element of fear has crept into the mix: cities are felt to be most vulnerable to terrorist attack.

The attacks in 2001 also acted as a wake-up call. “If you’re already feeling unhappy, events like September 11 make you focus on what’s really important in your life and for most people that’s their family,” said Dominik Nosalik, the author of the Datamonitor report.

“Being in the cycle of ‘earn more to spend more’ seems meaningless and it may be time to say, ‘Whoah! I need to slow down here’.”

Nosalik points out that changes to family structure have also played a part in increasing stress. In ever smaller family units there are fewer people to share the strain. The internet, e-mails and mobile phones, while improving communication, are extra things to check and worry about each day. Employees can now work anywhere, but feel they are working everywhere.

“Downshifters are people who make quite radical changes to their lives but even among those not brave or quite interested enough to do that there is an urge to reduce the complexity and clutter of everyday life,” says Nosalik.

There have always been a few people prepared to jack it all in and get back to nature. The hugely popular 1970s sitcom The Good Life, starring Felicity Kendal, was written around the mishaps of one such fictional couple, the twist being that they did not up sticks to the country but went organic in suburban Surbiton, to the dismay of their upwardly mobile neighbours.

This urge to go back to nature, known as “voluntary simplicity”, grew as a revolt against conspicuous consumption in the 1980s in America. But in 1994 the New York-based Trends Research Unit identified a much quieter and more widespread movement that was not politically or environmentally motivated: downshifting.

It was said that it had the potential to be the most fundamental shift in lifestyles since the depression of the 1930s. Standard of living had previously been assumed to be directly linked to quality of life. Now people were actually choosing, en masse, to earn less in order to do something more rewarding, or simply to have more time.

Judy Jones, co-author of Downshifting: The Bestselling Guide to Happier, Simpler Living, was the typical overburdened, burnt-out worker in the mid-1990s when she read about a voluntary simplicity guru who was giving a lecture in London.

Jones was the medical correspondent on a national newspaper that was undergoing hard times. There were lots of redundancies and new people “parachuted in” every five minutes; all very unsettling. When the management asked for a new wave of voluntary redundancies, Jones was first in the queue. “I was splitting up from my bloke — we were both stressed out all the time — and I realised this was my chance to escape corporate slavery,” she says.

She sold her house in Ealing, west London, bought a cottage in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, and was able to put money in the bank. She now lives frugally, paying her way with bits of teaching and writing.

“The downside is that you’re on your own. There’s nobody to fix the computer or pay you while you’re sick. I’ve got used to buying my clothes from the Oxfam shop and looking for bargains in the supermarket.

“But the upside is freedom. I’m not answerable to anyone and if I don’t want to work, I can say no. If the dog wants a walk, off we go. The good life to lots of people still means bigger houses and bigger cars but to me it’s living comfortably. What’s good is that you are more or less in control of your life and that gives you the energy to ride the storms.”

When she left London in 1996, the word downshifting had barely caught on. “Now things have changed immensely,” she says.

“It isn’t necessarily safer to stay where you are any more. The worst thing is to be forced into downshifting and people want to jump before they are pushed. Redundancy used to be a terrible stigma but now people see it as an opportunity to go to college.

“We know the idea of a job for life has gone: now the idea of a career for life is going too. People think to themselves, ‘I’m unhappy, I don’t have to do this’, and as we get more affluent as a society it becomes a practical option for more and more people.”

But dreams of a rural idyll can be unrealistic. Jones says downshifting is difficult for those with children or a large mortgage. Children dragged unwillingly from schools where they are happy are unlikely to settle well in the country.

And if you are used to living on Marks & Spencer ready meals, being miles from the nearest shop can soon lose its charm. Disconsolate townies complain about horse muck on the roads and find the country “too quiet”, “too noisy”, “too dark at night”. “If you decided to downshift too radically, that’s where the problems start,” says Jones. “You have to ask yourself, ‘Do I really want to be a farmer?’” Jan McCourt, 43, a former investment banker earning more than £200,000 a year, really did want to be a farmer — and still is — but he reckons the decision cost him his fortune and his marriage.

McCourt worked for a Swiss bank where he met his wife Tessa, another high-flyer. For the first few years he enjoyed the buzz he got from his job, but when the couple’s first child Charlotte was born, the family dynamic inevitably changed. McCourt was working crazy hours — often out until 3am dining with Japanese businessmen, then back in the office at 7.30am — and began to feel burnt out.

Though materially wealthy, he hardly ever saw Charlotte, now 11, Leo, 9, or Dominic, 7. “It was about taking control,” he says.

“I wanted a better life but I also wanted to be responsible for the outcomes for my family and me, not pushed out by someone high up the corporate ladder.”

The family moved to the country so he could try commuting, but that made matters worse. In 1997 he left the City for good, setting himself up in business at Northfield Farm, Rutland, with half a dozen cattle. The Saab turbo was replaced by an old van. The children, privately educated, swapped to the local state school.

The farm ate money and after Jan hurt his back Tessa had to do all the manual work. “All of a sudden I was broke and I still feel pretty broke now,” says McCourt. “It would be glib to say the move had ruined our marriage — there are plenty of divorced investment bankers — but we were both under intense pressure. I knew it would be tough, but I didn’t know it would be as tough as it has been.”

But ironically — and against the grain — McCourt has turned a dilapidated old farm into a thriving business producing top-quality rare breed beef, pork and lamb. His farm shop is renowned for good food, he has a second outlet in Borough market, London, and is now masterminding the setting up of a farmers’ market as part of the redevelopment of Basingstoke.

All in all, he is almost as busy as he was in the City. “But it’s a different kind of pressure,” he says. “In a small way you’re making a difference, something you never feel in a corporate structure. And it’s been wonderful for the children. All three have delivered lambs and piglets and bottle-fed calves. It’s not idyllic but it’s still a pretty stunning way to bring up a child.”

For some, a simple move to the countryside or a less-demanding job isn’t enough; last September a poll showed that 54% of Britons would emigrate given the chance and some 200,000 British expats are now living in France. Many are retired, taking advantage of France’s sunshine and lower property prices. But an increasing number are downshifters.

Jenny Luesby and Ross Tieman, who worked for newspapers in London for more than 15 years, moved to Aveyron in southwest France in 1999 to open a training school for business journalists.

“We hit a structural problem that many professional couples hit, in that everything’s great, you love your job, you’re dedicated, you work crazy hours and then you have a baby and it doesn’t work any more. You haven’t got a big enough flat to have a live-in nanny, childcare’s expensive and you just chase your tail. We were beginning to be miserable,” says Luesby.

“When we actually handed in our notice it was like we were heroes — everybody said, ‘Wow, you’re really doing it, we’ve always wanted to do this, fantastic!’ It was like we’d found the escape tunnel. And then people went away and started thinking, ‘Maybe I could do that’, thought of all the reasons why they couldn’t or weren’t going to do it, and in the last few weeks people said, ‘You’re crazy’. Attitudes changed: I think people felt a bit threat- ened once we were really doing it.”

Though the business has gone well, settling in has not always been easy, especially for Jethro, 5, who did not learn French as easily as most people might suppose. Tieman also admits to feeling isolated at first.

“It was scary because we’d both been in institutions and had that structure. It wasn’t the England/France thing, it was the downshifting,” says Luesby. “When we first came over I couldn’t sit down, I couldn’t sit still — I was wired. And that’s only gradually, over the years, melted away.

In the financial services industry, adult gap years are becoming a way of relieving pressure. A British banker working on Wall Street, where such arrangements are common, is currently taking a year off to surf in Hawaii. Changing your working arrangements can also be a simple route to destressing without moving an inch.

Donna Hoath, 35, an associate in commercial litigation with Eversheds, a large law firm in Leeds, recently elected to work a four-day week. She was finding her job dealing with big corporate clients overwhelming.

She had no children but felt her life was out of balance. “I had no time to see my family, go to the gym or go horseriding,” she says. “My job is intense and deadline-driven, but I felt I could do it equally well in four days as I would have more energy and that has proved to be the case. I am more effective because I have got my life back: I skip into the office now. “Yes, there are losses; saying goodbye to one-fifth of your salary seems daunting, but remember it is your gross not your net salary so the blow isn’t as huge as you think.”

Downshifters on a much grander scale are David Weimer, an Emmy-award-winning Hollywood screenwriter and producer, and his companion Paul Turner, a doctor who was until recently head of the infectious diseases department at the Kaiser Permanente hospital in California.

Nine weeks ago they arrived in Britain to take over the village post office in Bourton-on-the-Water, Gloucestershire. Weimer had fallen in love with the Cotswolds on numerous trips to Britain. Though he could mainly work from home, keeping stressed-out studio executives at bay through fax and e-mail, for Turner it was a high-pressure life of commuting and long hospital hours.

“Paul was making life-and-death decisions on a daily basis. He said to me, ‘Retirement’s 16 or 17 years away; I’m never going to make it’,” says Weimer. “Our dream was to come to Britain and we wanted something that would bring us right into the community. The post office was perfect. I’ve been here two months and I already know everybody in town.”

But while he has found a beautiful spot to settle, Weimer has broken the golden rule of downshifting. Since arriving, he has been up at 5am every day to sort the newspapers and he and Turner have yet to have a day off. “I love it,” he says, “but I’ve never been busier in my life.”