ABSTRACT
Voluntary Simplicity is a value driven consumer lifestyle that was first observed in the post-modern era in the 1970s (Elgin and Mitchell 1977), and which has grown steadily (Shama 1988; Iyer and Muncy 2009), and materialized in various ways. The current societal focus on carbon footprints, sustainability, green lifestyles, food sourcing, and product sharing reflect, to varying degrees, consumers’ desires to simplify their lives in socially responsible ways. This chapter presents the results of an exploratory, discovery-oriented examination of the voluntary simplicity lifestyle trend within the context of ritual consumption practices and purchases associated with the final rite of passage: death. We provide evidence of lifestyle simplification and its underlying, motivating factors through examination of the basic ritual elements proposed by Rook (1985): (1) ritual scripts, (2) ritual artifacts, (3) ritual actors and roles, and (4) ritual audiences. Dramatic and recent changes in the consumption of death have materialized from individuals’ conscious choices to simplify their own endings, with subsequent profound impact on these four elements. However, like any complex consumption phenomenon, we hypothesize that other demographic and psychographic factors also impact the consumption of death today.
