St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church

From Alternet: Working less is Better for the Globe

Devoting his career to what drives materialism, Tim Kasser, associate professor of psychology at Knox College and author of "The High Price of Materialism," has sought scientific explanations, examining the relationship between materialism and psychological well-being.

"Materialism is driven by an underlying sense of insecurity," says Kasser, who conducted a study where subjects were randomly assigned writing about death or writing about listening to music. The former experience an increased desire for consumption and were "greedier," according to Kasser. "Death is the ultimate end of time; it's interpreted as that feeling of not having enough time. In the last decade politicians have played off that insecurity. It keeps getting people elected, but it also drives us to think we need to work harder and harder," he says, noting the signs of insecurity around us are numerous: We don't know our neighbors and suffer from high divorce rates; our social safety nets have been dismantled; we have no mandatory overtime laws and minimal vacation. "All these work to create an underlying sense of insecurity, and we need to break out of that cycle," he says.

Interestingly, Kasser conducted an empirical study comparing 200 adherents of Voluntary Simplicity to a control group of 200 mainstream Americans and found the Voluntary Simplicity group was "simultaneously happier while using fewer resources," and that their happiness was derived from "less materialistic, intrinsic goals, such as personal growth, family and community." While the Voluntary Simplicity group was "still awfully far from having a sustainable ecological footprint," Kasser feels it's a positive start. "The correlation between the VS group being happy was due to those no-consumeristic, intrinsic values, and the reason they're living in a more ecologically sustainable fashion is also due to those values."