VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY: Toward A Way Of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich

New edition available now.  Published January 1, 2010.

Purchase from the Simple Living Network.

Duane has completely revised and updated this classic book.  Voluntary Simplicity is not about living in poverty; it is about living with balance. What does a more balanced and sustainable way of living look like?  There is no “cookbook for sustainable lifestyles” with all of the answers, so how are people freshly inventing their lives?  This is the generation to invent cool lifestyles for living on our hot planet. What kinds of changes are underway, both in the larger world and inside ourselves?  How is community vital to sustainability?  Read "How Times Have Changed" (the new foreword).

Older edition still available

VOLUNTARY SIMPLICITY: Toward a Way of Life that Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich
By Duane Elgin (Ram Dass, introduction)
 (1993 revised edition), New York: Quill / HarperCollins.

This older version is still available from the Simple Living Network

When Voluntary Simplicity was first published in 1981, it quickly became recognized as a powerful and visionary work in the emerging dialogue over sustainable ways of living. This is not a book about living in poverty; it is a book about living with balance. It illuminates the pattern of changes that an increasing number of Americans are making in their everyday lives—adjustments in day-to-day living that are an active, positive response to the critical challenges of our time. By choosing lives of great simplicity, people have the power to develop more satisfying and soulful ways of living, and the power to change the world. As the push of environmental stress combines with the pull toward more meaningful ways of living, Duane Elgin's extensively revised and updated book is more relevant than ever.