With the ink newly dried on her Ph.D. from Stanford, Cecile Andrews was merrily climbing the career ladder. She was Director of Continuing Education at North Seattle Community College and was in line for a vice-presidency.

As time went on, however, she grew increasingly restless. She didn't like the long, boring meetings; she didn't like dressing like an administrator. She didn't even like the way "vice president" sounded. ("Everybody's a vice president.")

After a period of soul-searching, Andrews quit her administrative job and is now a freelance "community educator." She downsized her petty cash drawer, rented out some rooms in her house, and spends her day teaching, writing, and simply living. Her story echoes that of a growing minority of people who are reversing the ladder of upward mobility and climbing down to a life that the Joneses would sniff at.

Simplicity exerts a seductive tug when the price tag for "lifestyle" is a life; when "success" spells 60-plus joyless hours a week to buy the toys that there is no time to play with. Simplicity is a fetching notion when the tagline for our times is "the Age of Anxiety" and Prozac is the fin de siecle wonder drug.

But simplicity can be deceptively complex, both to define and to live. More than being frugal, simplicity also embraces a spiritual clarity of vision. It implies deliberate choices about how one lives, careful discernment about how to invest time as well as money. Those who live simply also value meaningful work, relationships, community. Of late, simplicity has come to include a concern for sustainability--an awareness that humankind cannot consume at its present rate and leave anything healthy or beautiful for its children.

There have always been prophets of simplicity. All the major religions and most of the minor ones have them. Even our brave New World, in all its natural abundance, was tamed by dour Puritans, whose gospel of frugality and hard work could not help but make them rich--and whose wealth eventually distracted them.

Voluntary simplicity is the movement du jour. It repackages the gospel of Thoreau for a millenial time. Duane Elgin named this latest incarnation with his book, Voluntary Simplicity, published in 1981. Newer apostles include radical simplifiers like Vicki Robin and recently deceased Joe Dominguez, authors of Your Money or Your Life, who formulated a strategy for financial freedom.

After leaving her administrative job, Cecile Andrews wrote The Circle of Simplicity, which advocates a centrist approach to voluntary simplicity and lays the groundwork for 10-week study groups she calls "simplicity circles."

Simplifiers adhering to one or another of these formats meet all over the world. They are a diverse band, from professionals jaded with their frantic lives to bright-eyed students just beginning their professional lives, from those who want to empty their closets to those who want to return to the land.

Voluntary simplicity is where Green meets Gandhi. It's the crossroads where sustainability, quality of life, and spirituality intersect. "Outwardly simple, inwardly rich" is the movement's credo. Rather than pursue "more," simplifiers say, be content with "enough." Rather than long hours at a stultifying job, discover your "real work" then downsize your desires to do more of it. As an added perk, your new, simpler lifestyle will be healthier for you and the planet.

The gospel of simplicity is even rattling cages in the marketing meccas. A poll commissioned by the Merck Family Fund found that 28 percent of respondents had "voluntarily made changes . . . which resulted in making less money."

Marketers don't like that attitude. Myra Stark, director of knowledge management at Saatchi & Saatchi, wrote in Brandweek magazine last year: "The impulse behind the simplicity trend isn't only to slow down and gain more time in life for the things that satisfy you and give your life meaning, but it also involves turning away from buying things, much less the specific things that brands represent. And that's a notion that much of our marketing communications, and our consumer products and services industries, may need to address in coming years."

Increasing prosperity; diminishing returns

Consumption is American. We have all absorbed the notion that avid consumers create a robust economy, and what's good for the economy is good for consumers. And in fact, our economy has blossomed breathlessly since the 1950s.

But a funny thing happens on the way to prosperity. We get used to it, and then we want more of it. Since 1970, Ronald Inglehart, director of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, has conducted (with help from a steering committee and an army of investigators) a massive World Values survey that tracks evolving value systems in 43 countries.

Inglehart has found that once people become economically secure enough not to worry about starving, accumulating more and more wealth adds less and less to a person's well-being and contentment. The advantages of getting "more" level out very quickly after everyone gets "enough."

"Once you get two cars in every garage, are three cars better still? You get to a point of diminishing return, and in some cases, a counter-productive return. We're in that situation now in rich countries," he says. Check out any metropolitan freeway during rush hour for a demonstration of diminishing returns.

According to Inglehart, Western industrialized societies are in the midst of a culture shift to "postmodern" values in which individuality, freedom of expression, and quality of life become more important than economic security. That shifting of our cultural tectonic plates is yet to be realized, and we continue to pay the piper when the things we consume clog our spiritual as well as our concrete arteries and tether us to debt, anxiety, and a diminished quality of life.

Why do we do this? Why do we accumulate relentlessly when it makes us sick and miserable? Is it a fatal flaw of humankind, or do we shop for some other reason? In the Merck poll, 75 percent of women and 69 percent of men agreed that buying things is a "substitute for what's missing in our lives."

In a society that many people experience as competitive and uncaring, accumulating the trappings of wealth and prestige is a shaky finger in the dike of self-esteem. Our title and the lifestyle we can sustain become the barometer of our worth and success.

Redefining success

When Andrews considered quitting her administrative job, her biggest stumbling block wasn't the insecurity of a freelance income. It was the loss of her title. "Who will I be when I don't have a title? That was a big one for me. I didn't want to be a nobody."

Work, and the identity it bestows, is the fulcrum upon which most of our lives are balanced. It provides for our necessities and supports our excess. It defines who we are and apportions our lives into neat eight-hour chunks. It can add satisfaction and significance to our lives, or it can be monotonous, meaningless, or demeaning.

Discovering the work you love to do and having more time to do it is part of the message of simplicity. Or simply having more time to spend with friends and family, or more time to garden or hunt for beach glass. If happiness becomes the yardstick of success, the simplicity-seekers say, it's worth sacrifice.

How to find your passion, follow your bliss, and earn money, too

Something deep in human nature desires meaningful work. A lucky few are paid for doing work they love; most of us accommodate. We cram meaning into the cracks of professional and personal responsibility. We write poetry or build model trains late at night when the work and the kids are put to bed.

Most of us can't quit our jobs to do the things we love. But we can make changes that will allow us to do more of what we love. Here are three steps offered by Cecile Andrews to help you follow your bliss.

1. Discover your passion. This is the pasttime that utterly absorbs you. Some people describe it as their "real work," the work they were meant to do. Think about it. What do you really love to do?

2. Do less of what you don't like; do more of what you like. This is the strategic part. Set up a freedom strategy. How can you free up time to do your real work? Reducing your expenses will reduce your need for income, and that may allow you to work fewer hours. Can you make money doing what you like? Can you incorporate more of what you like into your present job?
3. Make your present work more enjoyable. "There are two ways to be happy," says Inglehart. "One is to get what you like, and the other is to like what you get. They both work."

Discovering the work you love to do and having more time to do it is part of the message of simplicity. Or simply having more time to spend with friends and family, or more time to garden or hunt for beach glass. If happiness becomes the yardstick of success, the simplicity-seekers say, it's worth sacrifice.

"I know people who have attended top law schools and started out with huge salaries, but with the expectation of 80-hour weeks and no personal life at all. A number of them have dropped out and chosen other lives, even if they make much less. These people have probably made wise choices in light of their personal lives," says Inglehart.

Back at the firm, however, their colleagues were probably shaking their heads in consternation. But that's the point, isn't it? To confound the conventional wisdom that equates success with power and acquisition. To think independently enough to determine your own success yardstick, which may have everything to do with time and work and relationships, but probably very little to do, really, with acquiring things.

While living simply isn't a happiness guarantee, it can clear away the distractions and the excuses. It can frame the big questions from a new perspective and offer different kinds of options. If you don't need a five bedroom house on the golf course, what would you do with the finances liberated from real estate? If a used Toyota would serve your transportation needs as well as a new SUV, could you take that trip to Africa? If you decide you have enough, could you stop working so hard for more?

KATE CONVISSOR writes about everything from diaper rash to ergonomics for corporate and national magazines from her home office, where she carries on a passionate love/hate relationship with her computer.