ABSTRACT
This chapter takes stock of the last quarter century of Voluntary Simplicity as a movement, philosophy, and set of practices to resist consumer culture. We focus on American consumerism, exploring minimalism and decluttering as new manifestations of Voluntary Simplicity that leverage the 21st-century digital media landscape. We analyze a series of extreme lifestyle experiments and introduce the idea of a disillusionment–resistance–commodification cycle. Some of these New Simplifiers channel consumer disaffection into an aesthetic form of minimalism that substitutes one set of goods with a new more refined set of goods. We conclude by asking how anti-consumption movements might resist the power of consumer capitalism to co-opt and commodify and put forward the Buy Nothing Project—a decentralized network of local groups that foster neighborhood gift economies where people freely give and receive items, share stories, and build relationships and community—as a possible example.
