Interview with Betsy Taylor

We do live in an incredibly prosperous time, and there's nothing wrong with consuming. But the scale of consuming in this country is losing proportionality. We're losing a sense of balance. So what's going on? Obviously, we have a more-is-better kind of value system right now-bigger houses, bigger TVs, bigger vehicles, and more of everything. But there's a counter force to that.

There's a whole group of people know who are beginning to question whether more is always better. Huge numbers of Americans actually choosing to downshift, choosing to have more time and maybe a little less money. Is that the path into the future? I think there's always going to be tension around that, especially we live in a time when it's all about who's a millionaire next door, who wants to be a millionaire, who wants to marry a millionaire. And in that context, people aren't comparing themselves to the Joneses, they're comparing themselves to Bill Gates. So it's a difficult time to curb appetites when we're having such a prosperous economy.

At the same time, a lot of people are being, I think, fed up with the waste, the overwhelming stuff in our lives, and are wanting something deeper in their lives. We know statistically that almost 30 percent, and several polls, Gallop--we did a poll ourselves--show that somewhere around a third of Americans claim to have done something in their life to choose not to make more money in order to get more time, which is a huge number. So we know that there is a large group of Americans who are choosing to work less, not go up the career ladder, because they feel they have economic security and they're now looking for fun for meaning for time to do the things that matter to them.