The Simple Life: Goodbye to having it all.

(2 of 7)

Marsha Bristow Bostick of Columbus remembers noticing with alarm last summer that her three-year-old daughter Betsy had memorized an awful lot of TV commercials. The toddler announced that she planned to take ballet lessons, followed by bride lessons. That helped inspire her mother, then 37, to quit her $150,000-a-year job as a marketing executive. She and her husband, Brent, a bank officer, decided that Betsy and their infant son Andrew needed more parental attention if they were going to develop the right sort of values. Marsha explained, "I found myself wondering, How wealthy do we need to be? I don't care if I have a great car, or if people are impressed with what I'm doing for a living. We have everything we need."

The movement is pervasive. "This is not something simply happening to the burnouts from Wall Street," says sociologist Stephen Warner of the University of Illinois at Chicago. "There is an American phenomenon going on that crosses all social lines. It's true of immigrant groups too, as well as the underprivileged."

Yet the shift in priorities has a surface gloss of stylishness also. Call it thrifty chic. Penny pinching is back in vogue, even among the rich. Jackie O. shops at the Gap. Christie Brinkley wears plain white men's T shirts. Outside B.J.'s Wholesale Club in Medford, Mass., a white stretch limo waits at the curb while its passengers roam the cavernous discount warehouse. At Tom's Barber Shop in Jacksonville, lawyers and executives sit down next to truckers and shipyard workers for a $6 trim. At Deja Vu, a Palm Beach boutique that sells used designer clothes, women who once sent their maids and drivers to the back door with bundles of high-fashion castoffs to sell now bring them by in person and stick around to shop.

The beginnings of the new mind-set probably go back as far as the stock- market crash of 1987, which had little immediate effect on the overall economy but gave many people an uneasy feeling about the Roaring Eighties. The spectacular failures of such '80s heroes as Michael Milken and Donald Trump have discredited the era's role models as well. "The 1980s showed how ugly this country could be, like racism did," says April Gilbert, a Stanford M.B.A. and shipping executive who hopes to join a nonprofit company soon. "In the 1980s I was fed up and almost angry with the behavior of people in this country," says Stuart Winby, manager of Hewlett-Packard's Factory-of-the- Future program. "Those kinds of values are just empty. I'm really sated with gadgets, things, adornments and all that stuff." Many people were awakened by individual experience: the plight of a homeless neighbor, the collapse of a bank, a friend's job loss.

The recession and gulf war have cemented the trend. First, the economic downturn struck some people as a just punishment for a dizzy era of excessive borrowing and spending. Many consumers saw the recession as a warning that their behavior had to change. Cutting back and putting away the plastic seem only prudent. Unemployment, currently at 6.5%, has risen steadily for eight months. Some people who used to ride in limousines are now driving them for a living. Then the life-and-death reality of the war came along and made the pursuit of glitz and status seem even more trivial. Americans saw their country pulling together with a higher purpose and a can-do spirit, and many of them liked the feeling.