PERILS OF THE SIMPLE LIFE

Our life is frittered away by detail... Simplify, simplify. --Henry David Thoreau, Walden

PITY THE POOR VICTIM OF DOWNSIZING. If he was upscale, he's got to downshift by downparing and downspending. If he's lucky, he can get a part-time job outsourcing. If he was downscale, he can forget about upclimbing. It's enough to drive anybody bend-arounding.

Trouble is, life is too complicated. Everybody's running computers, shopping, working 80 hours a week, worrying about Clinton and Gingrich and the sorry New York Jets. What they need to do is scrape off the barnacles of quotidian life and get simple.

As it happens, a solution is available in the form of inspirational aids that have propelled the new fad for less stuff into a prospering self-help industry. It's called the Simplicity Business. Anybody can learn how to shed frustrations by sifting through a near torrent of books, CD-ROMS, audiotapes and newsletters, all of them exalting the simple life.

Mike Lenich, from South Holland, Illinois, is learning. A quality-control supervisor for a public utility, Lenich shucked his $350-a-year health-club membership and takes daily walks instead. He and his wife Linda also trim costs by scissoring the Christmas cards they receive and making postcards from the unused parts. They buy most of their food in bulk and reuse their plastic sandwich bags. Patricia O'Leary, a bookkeeper from East Brunswick, New Jersey, has read 20 simple-living books and subscribes to three simplicity newsletters, which she says have helped her and her husband Daniel wipe out a $19,000 credit-card debt. "We're happier now," she says, "and we have more time for the kids [who get new toys only for Christmas and birthdays]. We used to have take-out food three nights a week. Now we usually get a pizza delivered on Fridays."

But, oddly enough, it is the gurus of the new simplicity who are discovering that success brings unexpected complexities. The industry leaders are Vicki Robin and her friend Joe Dominguez, who wrote Your Money or Your Life, which has grossed $3.5 million and sold 350,000 copies in just three years. In that time, Robin has given more than 600 press interviews, plowed through two 10-city book tours, appeared twice on Oprah and co-conducted financial seminars around North America. Before the book was written, she hadn't been on an airplane in 20 years. Now she has more frequent-flyer miles than a Boeing 727. Though her publisher books her into classy hotels when she is on the road, she buys food at a local market and takes it to her room. The result, reports her publisher, Viking Penguin, is "the cheapest book tour on record."

Robin and Dominguez live in Seattle on only $13,000 a year, honoring some of the precepts in Your Money (repair your own car, shop at garage sales), while ignoring others (sell your house and live in a motor home, eat beans). They have put the profits they have netted into a charitable foundation. "We're delighted by the commercial success," says Robin, "but people have been hounding us for money. We want to give it out, but at our discretion."