Residential preferences in the context of voluntary simple lifestyles: What motivates contemporary Czech simplifiers to reside in the countryside?

Introduction

Investigating voluntary simplicity (VS) is a continuing area of interest in research on environmentally friendly lifestyles. Duane Elgin (1981), who has played a central role in the research, described VS in the subtitle of his popular book as a “way of life that is outwardly simple, inwardly rich”. According to Elgin, living a simple life involves rejecting a materialistic lifestyle and the consumerist culture: “This way of life embraces frugality of consumption, a strong sense of environmental urgency, a desire to return to living and working environments which are of a more human scale, and an intention to realize our higher human potential—both psychological and spiritual—in community with others” (Elgin & Mitchell, 1977, p. 2). Elgin’s work has been a source of inspiration for the many scholars and authors who have started devoting attention to “voluntary simplifiers”. In the past two decades a considerable amount of literature has emerged around the “simplicity movement” (Alexander & Ussher, 2012) or “downshifting” (Saltzman, 1991; Schor, 2001). Etzioni characterized this broad movement as “choice out of free will (…) to limit expenditures on consumer goods and services, and to cultivate non-materialistic sources of satisfaction and meaning” (1998, p. 620). Although the movement is vaguely defined and formed by divergent socio-cultural groups, voluntary simplicity could be taken as an umbrella term (Iwata, 2006).

Simplifying lifestyles usually entails reducing one’s workload and hence one’s income and level of consumption in exchange for having more free time to devote to the activities one wishes to pursue (Ghazi & Jones, 1997). In Western countries, the simplicity movement is often associated with cities and urban populations (e.g. Slow Movement, Slow Cities etc. – Honore, 2004). Most of the existing research has tended to focus on Western urban simplifiers (Alexander & Ussher, 2012; Huneke, 2005).

In the Czech Republic, the research on voluntary simplicity by Librová (1994, 1999, 2003, 2008) points to a contrasting phenomenon. Although urban living seems in many ways to be less physically demanding and even more environmentally friendly^[2] (see e.g. Owen, 2009), there has been a strong “back to the land” tendency among simplifiers, with two thirds of them moving to the countryside (Librová, 2008, p. 1115; cf. Aarts, 1993; Elgin, 1981). Librová pointed out that her interviewees had been inspired by the stereotype of the virtuous peasant which had motivated them to leave the city and reinstate the farming traditions that were destroyed under state socialism (cf. Bičík, Jeleček, & Štěpánek, 2001). Librová conducted longitudinal qualitative research in three waves in 1992, 2002 and 2015^[3] and discovered that all the families had made their major residential choices in the 1990s. Post-socialist conditions (de-collectivisation of agriculture, privatisation and restitution of land and property, and other legal changes) probably played an important role in the general counter-urbanization process and in changing perceptions of rurality^[4] (Bartoš, Kušová, & Těšitel, 2009; Novotná, Preiss, Kopp, & Bartoš, 2013 among others).

The third wave of research presents us with an opportunity not only to trace the original families, but more importantly to investigate a new sample of households who have adopted a “living lightly” lifestyle and reduced their metabolism—although their motivations may not have been environmental. In these interviews, as in the original research, choice of location appeared to be a prevailing theme, leading us to wonder whether the younger generation of voluntary simplifiers are following the patterns of the previous generation investigated by Librová in the post-socialist era? Or are they more similar to the Western movement given that they were establishing their households under more advanced capitalism?

The main aim of this paper is to compare the residential preferences of this group with those of their predecessors. We pay special attention to their motivations for moving to the countryside and interpret them in the context of what prompted them to pursue voluntary simplicity. After briefly introducing the research methodology, we present four major (analytically distinct but practically interconnected) motivations for moving to the countryside: a distaste for life in the city, the desire to live a nice life, the desire to live in freedom, and the desire to return to roots.

Methodology

Librová referred to her original 1992 sample as “the colourful” because the participants “live modest but otherwise very varied lifestyles” (1999, p. 371). That led us to call our sample “the new colourful” as we used the same selection criteria: a relatively lower level of consumption not imposed by external circumstances. We asked students from different parts of the country whether they knew somebody who met the criteria of low household metabolism and consumed less than he or she could. Based on their own judgement, they identified dozens of families and individuals. We selected those who had already settled and who were practicing a non-radical lifestyle. We also decided to concentrate on those who had established families under the conditions of advanced capitalism to achieve a better intergenerational comparison with Librová’s sample.

Our interviewees have a relatively higher cultural capital; they mainly come from middle-class backgrounds; two thirds of them have university degrees and most of them have good general knowledge. However, they are rather sceptical about formal education and tend to prefer alternative forms of schooling for their children. Although many of them downshift (work fewer hours, from home or give up paid employment) and have lower earnings, they do not take out loans or mortgages as is popular among the general population. Although the fathers are generally actively involved in child care, parental leave is still predominantly taken by women. Although they are on relatively low incomes they are able to save money for no particular purpose (despite investing in and maintaining their property). They are usually quite immune to fashion, preferring to reuse things (furnishings, clothing etc.) or buy durable items. They tend to dislike consumer items such as microwaves, dishwashers, smartphones or televisions, but do not object to buying work-related devices for agriculture (tractors, circular saws etc.) or communication (cell-phones or PCs).

Most of the participants were in their 30s and 40s. The interviews were conducted in 20 households inhabited by 17 males and 19 females with a mean age of 40 and 38 respectively. Around a quarter of the participants lived in towns or cities with over 10,000 inhabitants, one third lived in solitary houses outside towns or villages and the remainder were living in small towns^[5] or villages. This particular study included 12 families living in rural areas. The characteristics of the households are summed up in Table 1.

The data were collected through in-depth biographic interviews combined with household observation. Topics included environmentally-friendly aspects of lifestyle, value-orientations, motivations for adopting a voluntary simple life and the narratives through which the residential histories are framed. The sources of motivation for relocating to the countryside or staying in the city are interpreted retrospectively. The interviews were fully recorded and transcribed. Our initial analysis was based on grounded theory interpretative techniques (Charmaz, 2006) that reveal the main concepts and categories. However, for the purposes of this study a more narrative-based approach was adopted to enable us to reconstruct the reasoning behind the residential history and to identify the underlying narrative plotlines, since grounded theory is not suitable for this (Bryman, 2008). The analytical comments were written individually and then compared by the research team to examine and clarify the interpretation of data. Finally, we identified overarching narratives and described how our interviewees reflected on their decisions (Feldman, Sköldberg, Brown, & Horner, 2004).

City or countryside: why stay and why move?

Before presenting the motivations of the families living in the countryside, we would like to briefly describe the contrasting group of those who reside in the big cities (about a quarter of the interviewees). They could be characterized as having generally higher incomes and emphasising self-fulfilment through vocation and being more pressed for time than their non-urban peers. Some of “the urban colourful” group had either considered moving to the countryside in past or were thinking about it as a future possibility. However, they were generally satisfied with their current location. A person’s career can also be considered as one of the main motivating factors for staying in an urban area. The city dwellers among our simplifiers also liked the wide range of alternative consumption options (such as farmers’ markets) or the availability of services (forest kindergarten clubs, cultural facilities). They stressed the richness of social life in the city and the ease with which “elective affinities” of like-minded people could be established.

Figure 1

The migration trajectories of the families

Those who had deliberately moved from the city to the countryside or to a small town in a rural region were central to the aim of this paper. Although their families had not generally originated from the countryside and they had no experience of farming (including grandparents), they were inclined to follow more traditional ways of life tied to the land, nature and the changing seasons, and had more children than the Czech average (usually three or more compared to the mean of 1.57). On the other hand they cannot be labelled as “mere traditionalists” since they are mostly individualists, liberal and non-religious, and use modern technologies for work and communication. In contrast to the original sample, which contained many families who had started their rural activities on restituted family land, “the new colourful” do not usually return to the land or region where their ancestors lived. In contrast to the urban simplifiers, moving to the rural area meant changing careers—some of them left promising jobs and had to learn the new skills they would require to achieve at least partial self-sufficiency. In the following section, we present the four dominant (but overlapping) narratives they use to frame their decisions to live in the countryside.

Narrative of distaste for city life

Librová pointed out that many of those in the original sample who had decided to live in the countryside had previous experience of life in the country but had spent an interim period in an urban environment, and some of them would settle down on restituted family land (Librová, 1999). This is not the case with the new generation—none of them stated that they had obtained their land through restitution. Where the similarity lies is in the strong anti-urban narrative. Dissatisfaction with life in the city has two main sources. Some participants feel that they were forced out of the cities by the poor environment (noise, dust, smog, or heat) combined with a lack of space in their apartments and a stressful urban life.

The environmental problems and stress connected with the urban environment played a substantial role in many stories. Family 2 lived close to a city industrial zone and this was the main reason for relocating as they saw it as the cause of mental health problems and partnership difficulties. They remembered this period as follows: “You couldn’t really open the window because of the smell of hot asphalt, dust and cars. We became mentally ill and looked for something else. It was an escape, we didn’t think a lot about where to relocate to. We just knew that we couldn’t live like this. We are very grateful for the land (accidentally found, a. n.), for the beauty of the place, for the night sky with its shining stars.” Both spouses agreed that although they have less free time and a more complicated lifestyle after relocating to a solitary house on a hill, they are happier and their relationship is faring better. Similar statements can be found in the narratives of other participants. For example, family 3 moved from the city because of “internal pressure” caused by their urban life. They maintain that “the city is isolated compared to the countryside which forms a kind of womb for humans”. They are still searching for an ideal place to live. However, they did not hesitate to leave the city, where they had relatively secure support from their families, for a provisional life in a village house. Some narratives present the relocation decision as a step into uncertainty, as a need to escape rather than a desire to live in the countryside.

The narrative of distaste for life in the city also appears in psychological explanations for relocating. “I would rather die under a bridge than turn bad in a pre-fab flat. I had bouts of deep depression there. I couldn’t breathe. I think these buildings are charged with a negative spiritual power. I felt like I was in a cage there”, said the man (family 4). Family 5 found “the town was too much” and “stole their peace” when they “needed to slow down”.

As we can see, the “narrative of distaste for life in the city” does not only convey disgust of a polluted and noisy environment. It also reflects the non-materialistic orientation of “the new colourful” and an idealized notion that living in the countryside may lead to personal fulfilment and a happiness that urban life cannot offer. Many of them moved to the countryside because they wanted to be self-reliant and believed that independence could be a source of happiness. During the early years they usually reconsidered this because of various problems caused by a lack of farming know-how, romantic visions and a general unpreparedness. However, they considered these experiences to be crucial to finding happiness and satisfaction after some time. According to some statements the humility and thinking time (or boredom) helped them to overcome initial difficulties. “We thought that we would move to the ‘paseky’ [forest clearing] and that we would soon be happy”, reflected the man (family 9) and adds: “maybe, the traditional ‘pasekáři’ [settlers]^[6] were never really happy. We were searching for something we could find in our souls and not in the ‘paseky’. They learned that “a happy person is a humble man, not someone who beats his head against the wall.” Many others describe a similar shift to non-material values. While searching for a dream place to live those seeking voluntary simplicity often did not know where to look exactly. They relied more on luck than strategy, as is clearly demonstrated in this statement by a farmer (family 7): “I had a vision, a nice piece of land with no close neighbours and a potentially peaceful home. A friend of mine recommended I try the Southern Bohemian settlement of Paseky. When I chanced upon it and got to the last cottage, I totally fell in love with the place.” The motivation for finding an ideal place to live might also be related to the search for some kind of authenticity, as in the following quotation:

Internally, I like the city, but I don’t like the superficial side of it. The urban way of life doesn’t suit me. I feel sick when I come to town, the people and shops; it doesn’t do me good physically. We left the city because our way of life, living closer to nature, wasn’t possible there. We tried living in the suburbs because we wanted a house, but we still felt the closeness of the city. We felt it was a bit kitsch. We had a nice little house, a beautiful garden, two children – a boy and a girl, a dog and a cat, we both had good jobs and the satellite suburbia around us, it was weird. We didn’t feel good. It wasn’t for us, so we decided to move further out. (family 1)

This narrative emphasizes a sincerity of life that was not possible to achieve in the city or in suburbia. There was a sense of non-authenticity resulting from living there. The main motive behind relocating was more of an emotional or even aesthetic one, as they did not want to spend the rest of their lives in what they called “kitsch”. Their suburban house was sold before they were lucky enough to find a place in “paseky”.

Narrative of a nice life

Some of the participants structured their stories beginning with a revelation that came to them in a dream about living somewhere else, in the countryside. They also mentioned that these dreams may have been based on childhood memories. The woman from family 5 regretfully recalls memories that she “was always in an enclosed space” (in school, at after school club). She felt “cut off from the real life outside” and remembered her weekends at the cottage as a wonderful time when she was finally with her parents. She decided to live her adulthood differently and “be present in the children’s upbringing”.

A similar reflection was echoed by the woman from family 9 who described her childhood as one of living in two worlds—in the “disgusting” city during the week and in the “amazing countryside” at weekends. She nostalgically recalls her memories: “I remember that I didn’t want to wash my hands so I could keep something from that pure life on them. I feel that life there was real, from the fresh cow’s milk to people’s relationships. Even as a five-year old girl I decided to live in a wooden cottage.” She wanted her children to live an authentic life such as this: “When our daughter was born, we decided to leave Prague. We didn’t want to spend her childhood there.” The efforts at arranging a good and authentic life for their children reoccur in their narratives about their motivations for relocating. The man from family 8 made having a family dependent on desirable living conditions: “A man should have children when he can make a life for them like the one he wished for himself [when he was a child].”

Besides this dislike of the urban environment, children are a frequent motive for moving to the countryside. Most of our interviewees mentioned that they had deliberately chosen a lifestyle that would allow them to spend more time with the family during the working week and also to spend more time outdoors. For many of them this led on to home-schooling as it allows the children and parents to fully participate in their daily activities and experience the closeness and rhythms of nature as well.

I really like this place and being in the heart of nature. It is a dream. Every day is beautiful here, even if the weather is nasty. The countryside is so pretty. It’s horrible in the city, you’re always holed up at home. Here, I can let the kids go off freely. Anyway we have to go outside to the toilet, the cellar or for wood. So quite often we’re outdoors, a lot together, it really suits us. (family 10)

Nevertheless, the narratives of closeness to nature are not ideologically based. It was not environmental awareness that immediately led to the voluntary simplifiers’ motivations for living simply. It was more about enjoying the general way of life, and details like working around the house, chopping wood, the fresh air, or more complex ways of taking care of the landscape. This often includes doing things in the “old way” without technology, which is not seen as a waste of time but as having its own charm and great practical advantages. Woodchopping, for example, is perceived in terms of outdoor exercise and it could be understood as a luxury. On the other hand, the non-ideological nature of their thinking—they do not use traditional methods dogmatically, nor do they mind using modern communication technologies and social media (some of them are active bloggers or Facebook users). Their relationship with technologies is ambivalent—they do not reject them entirely, but prefer ones that relieve them (or the animals) of hard work over those that just save time. Doing things faster is not an issue; one of the qualities of their way of life is the abundance of time and the way it is structured differently, its specific pace that, although tied to natural rhythms, is still at their own disposal. Having control over time is one aspect of the appreciation of the feeling of freedom that will be addressed in the following section.

Narrative about living in freedom

The narrative about living in freedom is repeated in various forms when our interviewees talk about their reasons for moving to the countryside. They refer both to the positive and negative freedoms which motivated them into moving. Our interviewees greatly appreciate the opportunity to take back responsibility for educating their children, growing food and for their livelihoods in general. We frequently heard that to have a sense of freedom, it is important that you can take care of yourself. One participant from family 3 said in the context of a discussion on system failure: “It makes me feel good knowing I can do everything myself.” Usually, an important source of this type of freedom for our participants was land ownership.

According to the man from family 9, most of the new ‘pasekář’ had migrated to the Beskydy mountain region because of a need to have the freedom to achieve personal fulfilment. The “freedom gave them energy to start again”, to learn how to look after the farmhouse and teach the children. “The joy of having freedom outweighed all the difficulties. I still do everything for freedom”, he explains.

Many of them see the socio-economic system as a problem. They interpreted moving to the countryside as a means of liberating themselves from their obligations to the system. They attempt to achieve independence from it in different ways. As mentioned, some of them do not send their children to state schools or kindergartens, search for private alternatives or prefer home-schooling. Many of them do not vote. The fact that they are able to produce some products themselves opens up opportunities for them to participate in the informal economy (especially bartering). They also turn down opportunities to borrow money, even when needed. Basically, they do not believe in that it is possible to have a simple life with debts. “We chose a more modest way of life and greater freedom, others have more comfortable lives, but they have to pay for them. Freedom and high levels of consumption cannot go together”, said the woman from family 8.

Affluence takes up time, explained some participants. Family 8 reflected that when they got rid of things and obligations they gained time which is very valuable to them: “We gradually got rid of everything we had. And suddenly, we have a lot of time to think, allowing us to discover ourselves.” Evidently, the narrative about self-actualization (finding one’s “true self”) is interconnected with a non-materialistic approach. Nonetheless, the enthusiasm of our participants to not possess much does not apply to land ownership.

Narrative of return to roots

The motivation for relocating to places where land was available could be understood in identity terms because it is connected with their endeavours to achieve self-fulfilment. The narrative of returning to one’s roots has to be interpreted in an abstract way because most of them settled on land which had not belonged to their ancestors and they were not usually from the same region or even farmers. While the roots were an important motivation factor in their narratives, the roots were those of strangers: “We built our house on the old foundations. Once somebody farmed here and it was nice knowing that people had lived there. It was not like building something new on a green field. Here you can feel energy.” (family 1) The majority of those who were interviewed did not settle on green fields. They were generally well accepted by the local community because of their diligence and sensitivity to the place. Locals often associated them with people who had lived there before. Mostly, they did not feel like incomers or strangers, although they did feel there was a difference between themselves and the locals. As family 8 said: “We were ‘the [American] Indians’ at the beginning and after a few years we became ‘our Indians’ to the locals.” Many of them have been living on their homesteads for longer than decade now. “Although I am a townie, I think people understand that I have roots here and that I belong here”, says the woman from family 10. On the other hand, they did not tend to participate fully in the local social life—as mentioned above, they are not politically active and often do not send their children to the local school or participate in other aspects of local civic life. With some simplification, we can say that they are accepted but (willingly) not fully integrated, as their lifestyles differ from the more consumption oriented lives of their neighbours.

Conclusion

The main goal of the paper was to describe the sources of motivation for relocating to the countryside among voluntary simplifiers in the Czech Republic today, a tendency that is not stressed by research in Western Europe and the US—on the contrary—voluntary simplicity is presented as a social movement and primarily as an urban phenomenon (e.g. Alexander & Ussher, 2012). In general we can conclude that although there is a growing tendency to live an environmentally friendlier life in urban environments, the inclination to leave the city generally did not differ from the results of preceding research (Librová, 1999). We focused on relocation narratives in order to understand how voluntary simplifiers make sense of their motivations and how they interpret them retrospectively. Some of the motives do not differ from wider counter-urbanization trends (Bartoš, Kušová, & Těšitel, 2009)—being close to nature was intertwined with a rejection of urban life, especially by interviewees who had experienced life in more polluted areas. Other common negative features of urban life were mentioned, such as a lack of space or pressure caused by the stressful life and its pace. In that respect, the voluntary simplifier migrants do not differ from other post-socialist groups of rural or suburban migrants (cf. Šimon, 2014). However, what does distinguish them from other Czech city-leavers is their willingness to downshift, consume less and their prevailing motivation to establish at least a degree of self-sufficiency. They only partially bring their urban lifestyles with them as is manifested in their preferences for more homogenous social relations with like-minded people and for creating what can be called “parallel social structures”, mostly connected with the education of their children. The tendency not to have “traditional” rural social ties and reject formal educational structures and in some cases formal employment and political structures is part of the wider “anti-system” reasoning that underpins a strong motivation and distinguishes them from their predecessors, who, according to Librová, were actively involved in local political and civic life (1999). The freedom narrative that was often associated with spiritual freedom, personal fulfilment, aesthetics and the conception of a “good life”, on the other hand, links them strongly to Western voluntary simplifiers (e.g. Ghazi & Jones, 1997). For our participants, urban and rural, the decision about where to live equated a choice about how to live. However, our research is based on a limited sample and the results should be interpreted cautiously, taking account of the non-representative nature of the sample and the fact that the forms of voluntary simplicity lifestyles are heterogeneous and change over time. However, the research revealed important motivations for relocating within the specific context of voluntary simplicity and form the basis for further research—both longitudinal (for interviewing the same families over time in different life-cycle stages) and comparative. In regard to the latter, research on the voluntary simplicity phenomenon in non-Western affluent countries is almost non-existent but crucial.