Voluntary Simplicity as a Well-Being Attitude Zegers Hein (Manuscript MOOC)
0. Introduction Once upon a time, in a Country Where The Sun Always Shines, there was a good Queen. This good Queen wished her People to be well. To make sure this would happen, the good Queen turned to her Counselors. She asked them to find out the most typical features of People with the highest wellbeing. The Counselors embarked on an extensive research. Eventually, they found out that in their country, People with the highest well-being turned out to be wearing fine silk dresses. Upon hearing this, the good Queen immediately ordered fine silk dresses for all her People, hoping they would now all be well. Yet there were still People who were not well in the Country Where The Sun Always Shines. So the good Queen started thinking again. She wondered: ‘What is it that makes me be well? Well, wearing a golden crown feels like something crucial to my well-being.’ So she turned to her Counselors again, with the question: ‘Does wearing a crown increase People’s well-being?’ The Counselors randomly gathered People from all over the country and randomly divided them into two groups. In one group, everybody received a golden crown. The other group received nothing. Lo and behold: the People with a golden crown had a larger increase in well-being than the People without. Upon hearing this, the good Queen immediately ordered golden crowns for all her People, hoping they would now all be well. Yet there were still People who were not well in the Country Where The Sun Always Shines. The good Queen was truly desperate. So desperate, that she eventually stepped down from her throne and went into the field. First she was blinded by the sun, but then she spotted a group of farmers toiling the land. She went up to the farmers and simply asked them: ‘Dear people, what would make you be well?’ ‘Good Queen’, the farmers replied, ‘thank you for asking. What would really make us be well, here in the field, in the Sun That Always Shines? That would be a hat. A hat offering us some shade. A simple straw hat.’ (Zegers, 2010a)
1. Correlational Well-Being Research Every year, all over the world, March 20th is being celebrated as the International Day of Happiness. Alongside with this United Nations initiative, a World Happiness Report (Helliwell et al., 2016) is being released on a regular basis. For anybody interested in international Well-Being research, these reports are a treasure trove. They show us research that indicates that Well-Being goes along (‘correlates’) with e.g. social support. That means that the higher the average social support in a country, the higher the average WellBeing of its inhabitants. Similar research also shows us that e.g. ‘perceptions of corruption’ generally are inversely associated (‘inversely correlate’) with Well-Being: the higher the perception of corruption in a country, the lower the average Well-Being (Helliwell et al., 2016).
Fascinating as they are, correlational research such as this should be handled with care, especially when we are on the lookout for Well-Being Attitudes to fit into our personal lives. On the one hand, correlational research does not say anything about causes. Take for instance the correlation between life satisfaction and parenthood: ‘Using a large sample of individuals from more than 100 countries, we find that life satisfaction is higher, ceteris paribus, among those without children’ (Heliwell et al., 2016). The finding that people without children are, on average, more satisfied with their lives than people with children may be controversial, but consistently appears time and again in independent research. However, does this mean that we should all stop getting children if we want to be happy? No, because research like this cannot possibly prove that getting children will cause a decrease in Well-Being, we can only observe the correlation. This is similar to a notorious research that looked at the correlation between the birth rate in several villages and the number of storks in these villages. This research showed a strong correlation, yet obviously this does not prove that birds like storks cause babies to be born (Yule, 1911). On the other hand, in this kind of correlational research, we are always talking about averages. The observation that parents are less satisfied with their lives than non-parents ON AVERAGE, does not prove that YOU will be less satisfied with your life if you get children. On the basis of this kind of research, we just cannot know this for sure, because, simply put, ‘a person is no average’ (Zegers, 2010b). This is also illustrated in the introductory story. The observation that happy people are wearing fine silk dresses does not mean that wearing silk dresses will make everybody happier. That would be an example of misusing correlational Well-Being research. If we want to find out which activities and attitudes cause an increase in Well-Being, we need another kind of research: Experimental WellBeing Research.
2. Experimental Well-Being Research Which activities and attitudes are favorable for our Well-Being? Within Positive Psychology, there is a flourishing branch of research that investigates this very question: Positive Psychology Interventions research. The KU Leuven research presented in this MOOC can be seen as fitting within this paradigm. The question at hand here is about a causal relationship: On average, does X cause our Well-Being to increase? Therefore, to correctly answer this question, we cannot use correlational research as discussed above, but we have to use experimental research. This is the kind of research that our introductory story illustrates with the wearing of a golden crown: define intervention X, take a random (preferably representative) sample from your population, randomly assign participants to two groups, pre-test both groups for Well-Being, have one group do intervention X, assign the other (‘control’) group to a neutral condition, then post-test for Well-Being. If an increase in Well-Being in the Intervention group is significantly larger than in the Control group, only then you have a scientifically backed indication that on average, intervention X can be favorable for this population’s Well-Being.
So which interventions seem to ‘work’, according to all this research on Positive Psychology Interventions? In a large-scale meta-analysis, Bolier et al. (2013) includes research on interventions on e.g. doing acts of kindness (measuring the effect on Well-Being of a person who does an act of kindness towards others) (Buchanan & Bardi, 2010), Savoring the moment (Hurley & Kwon, 2012), and a seminal article by Seligman et al. (2005) on e.g. using your signature strengths. However, one Positive Psychology Intervention seems to have been researched more than any other: expressing gratitude (see Bolier et al. [2013] for a list of articles). Therefore, we have chosen to elaborate on keeping a gratitude diary in this MOOC. Within scientific Well-Being research, Experimental Research is the gold standard. However, experimental research also has its limitations. One huge limitation is that a lot of actions and attitudes that may be favorable to our Well-Being, cannot possibly be pressed into the mould of experimental research. Let us take the example of Voluntary Simplicity: choosing to live a life with less possessions and/or less activities. It may very well be that Voluntary Simplicity is favorable to our Well-Being. Yet it is very hard to put this to the test in an experiment. This is for the simple reason that in an experiment, you have to make a group of people do X, and how could you oblige somebody to do something voluntarily (as in ‘Voluntary’ Simplicity)? For experimental research on a voluntary activity, you would have to force a group of people into wanting something of their own accord. Which, apart from being ethically questionable, would be really hard. This is one of the main reasons why in our research on Voluntary Simplicity as a Well-Being Attitude, we had to add another approach: Qualitative Well-Being Research.
3. Qualitative Well-Being Research For our research 1 on Voluntary Simplicity as a Well-Being Attitude, I looked for and managed to find more than 500 Voluntary Simplifiers from all over the world. Thereby, a short definition of a Voluntary Simplifier is a person who, at some stage in her/his life, has consciously chosen to leave out certain items or activities. So Voluntary Simplifying can happen in space (less physical possessions, ‘less stuff’) as well as in time (less activities, less on the ‘To Do-list’). I then approached these Voluntary Simplifiers for qualitative interviewing. This qualitative interviewing consciously chooses a phenomenological perspective: a perspective that aims to respect as much as possible the way a person experiences a certain phenomenon (in this case: living a life of Voluntary Simplicity). This approach is very much in line with the general Person-centered Experiential approach in this MOOC. In the introductory story, this approach is illustrated in the third paragraph: the good Queen stepping from her throne, going into the field and asking people for the way they experience the question at hand from their very own perspective.
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With my special thanks to Peter Derkx and Wander van der Vaart from UvH University Utrecht.
4. The BASICS of Voluntary Simplicity as a Well-Being Attitude These 500+ Voluntary Simplifiers kindly provided us with a wealth of qualitative data. We then performed an in-depth analysis of these data. During this process, a striking pattern started to emerge. It turns out that during their process of Voluntary Simplifying, our participants seem to repeatedly go through several typical steps. The first letters of these steps form the acronym BASICS: Back, Attention, Select, Invest, Cut, Sense. 4.1. Back At a certain moment, our Voluntary Simplifiers experience a moment where they take a step back. Sometimes, this is caused by some sort of crisis, sometimes this is the result of a nagging feeling. They step back, take a look at their lives from a distance and ask themselves questions such as: ‘What on earth am I doing here?’, ‘What is the point of all this?’, ‘Is that all there is to life?’. 4.2. Attention Typically, Voluntary Simplifiers are well-versed in directing their attention. They often seem to pay attention to what they see, hear, feel, smell and taste in the outer world. They also often mention paying attention to their inner feelings and ‘listen to their body more’. On this note, there may very well be links with the Focusing exercises that will be further explored in this MOOC. 4.3. Select Often based on the previous step of paying attention (‘what feels right’), Voluntary Simplifiers consciously select what really matters to them. They select what they want their life to stand for. They consciously select their values. 4.4. Invest Upon having selected their values, Voluntary Simplifiers typically report that they start to invest more into choices, activities and attitudes that are aligned with the values that started to emerge in the previous steps. 4.5. Cut Similarly, Voluntary Simplifiers also report cutting back in activities and attitudes that are not in line with their values. It is important to notice, though, that this is not a matter of ‘I don’t want/need this, so I cut it away’, as propagated by some hard-core minimalism proponents. The cutting as done by our Voluntary Simplifiers only appears after they have gone through the BASICS process as described here. 4.6. Sense Eventually, a vast majority of our Voluntary Simplifiers reports a life that ‘makes sense’. Of everything they say, one of the things they mention most frequently is something along the lines of: ‘I have more time and/or resources for what really matters’.
5. Conclusion In this way, it looks like going for BASICS may have been favorable to the existential well-being of the Voluntary Simplifiers from our research sample. However, this is no experimental research. Therefore, based on this research, we cannot possibly claim that going for BASICS will have the same effect for you. Nevertheless, if you step back, and feel like it might be according to what you value, these steps taken by Voluntary Simplifiers might be worth exploring for you.
References Bolier, L., Haverman, M., Westerhof, G. J., Riper, H., Smit, F., & Bohlmeijer, E. (2013). Positive psychology interventions: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled studies. BMC public health, 13(1), 1. Buchanan, K. E., & Bardi, A. (2010). Acts of kindness and acts of novelty affect life satisfaction. The Journal of social psychology, 150(3), 235-237. Helliwell, J., Layard, R., & Sachs, J. (2016). World Happiness Report 2016, Update (Vol. I). New York: Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Hurley, D. B., & Kwon, P. (2012). Results of a study to increase savoring the moment: Differential impact on positive and negative outcomes. Journal of Happiness Studies, 13(4), 579-588. Seligman, M. E., Steen, T. A., Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2005). Positive psychology progress: empirical validation of interventions. American psychologist, 60(5), 410. Yule, G.U. (1911). Introduction to the theory of statistics. London: Griffin. Zegers, H. (2010a). Positive Psychology Interventions: A Cross-Cultural Exploratory Study. Presentation on the 5th European Conference on Positive Psychology, Copenhagen, 2010. Zegers, H. (2010b). A person is no average. Article in Bormans, L. (2010): The World Book of Happiness. Tielt: Lannoo.
