Time is a precious and irreplaceable thing, and I wanted to see exactly how much mine sells for.

On a calculator, I punched in my annual after-tax income, then subtracted absolutely everything which could be considered an employment expense. Lunches, snacks, dry cleaning, parking, gas and insurance, car maintenance, bus passes, work clothes.

Try it. Now divide the remainder by the number of ours you spend at work, preparing for work, commuting to and from work, or sitting around worrying about work. The resulting figure is your real hourly wage -- the amount of money you have left after paying for your job.

For me, it totals $4.60 per hour. Anytime I'm out window shopping, that number begs the question: is that shiny bauble worth a couple of ours of my life energy?

My real income, it turns out, is pretty high. On The Oprah Winfrey Show, a woman who had done the same calculation stood up and told 14 million viewers that her hours were selling for 25 cents. Every time she went down to the Coke machine she was spending two hours of her life.

There is a reason that I am so, well, rich. At 20, my friends and I were beginning to enact plans for status quo every-families with financial success as our guiding light and Stuff as our god. Many of these friends are achieving this dream; they have my support and respect but not my complicity. She who dies with the most toys still dies, after all, and there's no second life for leisure.

In my thirtieth year, I am more liberal than ever, making nonsense of a post-adolescent notion that we would all be minimalists until we made some money. I have given up a sensible car in traffic and an apartment with paper-thin walls in favour of perfecting the J-stroke in canoe and renting a cottage with a garden and an ocean view. I work half the number of hours of my friends.

The lure of buying more shares in the mainstream culture of spend-work-spend has lost its flash. The prospect of working 40 or 50 or more hours each week to fill my life with big-screen TVs and leaf blowers doesn't hold much interest when there would be no time left to climb Mt. Finlayson, learn to play the saxophone or develop relationships.

I am pursuing "voluntary simplicity", a fusion of economics, environmental sustainability and personal values, a triangle with three equal sides. Voluntary simplicity is to lifestyles what William Carlos Williams' poetry is to the written word: simple, effective -- and some may say beautiful.

Vicki Robin is one author who does not want you to buy her book.

Make no mistake, she stands by every word, but she'd rather you try the library for a copy of Your Money or Your Life, which she co-wrote with the late Joe Dominguez.

Robin lives in Seattle -- though she grew up on Long Island -- and hasn't had a paying job for years -- though she graduated cum laude from Rhode Island's Brown University. She is capable of speaking in sound bites and has been known -- to her dismay -- to refer to the people of New York as "the New York market." She is middle-aged, laughs a lot, and patiently answers questions she's been asked who knows how many times before. And up until a couple of decades ago, she was "normal."

Then, a dissatisfaction with -- even a suspicion of -- the Road More Travelled drove Robin to give up a job in New York theatre, essentially turning her life upside down and eventually landing her on America's west coast.

Now she is a harbinger of economic freedom, a guru to those aiming to change their relationship with money and stuff. With a freelance assignment and new, frugal insights from Robin's book, however, I found myself with a problem: how does a pilgrim of simplicity get to Seattle to meet her?

Island living encourages planning over impetuosity. Considering that the most leisurely method of travel is often the least expensive, I packed the panniers with homemade cookies, fruit, note pads and a tape recorder and ferried myself and my trusty Norco down to meet the luminaries of this region's awakening simplicity movement.

Vicki Robin and I met in a cafe in Seattle's Ravenna neighbourhood -- for me, a ride of two miles uphill, one mile down. The area is a middle-class hive; nearby, people wander in and out of a used-book store, a dance studio, a hairdresser, sundry boutiques and restaurants, a Unitarian church and a synagogue undergoing renovations. Robin lives here on between $600 and $700 per month, and seems to have no regrets about having exchanged a standard of living many would covet for a quality of life thousands are emulating.

"We don't take a cent personally," Robin says of Your Money or Your Life, "and that's probably part of the reason this thing is so successful -- [readers] know we're not keeping the money."

Proceeds from all sales go to the New Roadmap Foundation, a non-profit, volunteer-run organization set up by Robin and Dominguez to spread the word of "enoughness" through support material, events, even personal contact. First published in 1993, Your Money or Your Life is now printed in five languages and has found a place on about 650,000 desks and book-shelves around the world.

"This book is still hot!" Robin says, forgetting for a moment her borrow-this-book ethic. "It's selling one to two thousand copies a week!"

Traditional money-managing literature does not vary in form: it focuses on how to amass wealth. Your Money or Your Life turns conventional financial planning on its ear while undermining the modern consumer ethic. The book, considered a key tome in the voluntary simplicity canon, helps you determine and locate your personal "rich," while making no attempt to catch you up to the Joneses, who may well be mortgaged up to the lobes of their diamond-decked ears.

It was Robin's partner in esoteric financial policy, Joe Dominguez, who devised a logical and seemingly simple nine-step program (figuring out your real income is part of one step) to reach and maintain economic independence through simple living. Through its implementation Dominguez found himself financially -- and emotionally -- secure enough to leave the paying workforce when he was 31 in 1969, with a small wad of investments which by 1996 were yielding a total of about $6,000 or $7,000 of interest annually. He lived a full and by all accounts interesting life at a fiscal level below that of most whining students -- of which I was one.

My conversation with Vicki Robin is going well. Then, as she gets up to refill her teapot with hot water, I find myself jolted back into Objective Modern Society mode. To a background of classical music, I am sitting in the back of a tea shop in a good neighbourhood in one of the continent's greatest cities with the co-author of a runaway best-seller who lives on the cash equivalent of rent for a nice one-bedroom apartment and now is on her second go-round of the same Irish Breakfast tea leaves.

Vicki Robin is not living the American Dream, or if she is, it is vastly reconfigured from the stock model.

I eat my lunch on a grassy slope, near to both world-famous Pike Place Market and more than one scary alley, rough bar and condemned building.

Less gentrified than Victoria, more willing to gracefully carry its own reality and mythology, the Emerald City seems both ahead of and behind Canada's urban centres on the sustainability curve. Highways dissect the city -- there's one a few metres below my stoop, between me and the water -- but the busy working harbour still occupies most of the view.

There, a series of piers reclaimed for arts, food, shopping and entertainment lie alongside bright but monstrous shipping cranes. Container ships are tousled into dock through a slalom of ships for pelagic pleasure, all of it obscuring the sight of a mill steaming away across the water.

Buses run free of charge in Seattle's core and it's rare to see one without a bike rack. But most bicycles are on the street, filling the space between sidewalks wide enough to accommodate both lunchtime pedestrians and a visiting pilgrim stowing a rain jacket in his panniers. Between all this squeeze awkward-seeming cars, and 140 feet above it all, on the corner of Union and Third, one dozen people are thinking globally and acting bioregionally.

"The Pacific Northwest is the greenest part of the richest society in history and if we cannot establish a pattern of existence that can endure here, then it probably cannot be done anywhere else in North America," says Alan Thein Durning.

Durning is the executive director of Northwest Environment Watch (NEW), a think-tank on simpler, more sustainable living for the Pacific Northwest -- known to some as Cascadia or Ecotopia. The "bioregion" runs from Alaska's Prince William Sound south to Northern California and east to the Continental Divide.

From virtually any point in this area, Durning says, you can leave a big city and in a short time be in a wilderness with every part of the ecosystem intact, from the lowest protozoan to the top of the food chain.

"There is something magical about the place," Durning muses, a foot resting in a desk drawer. "I think there's something about this rainy far coast of North America which as brought about the flowering of voluntary simplicity and related movements ... about living responsibly with each other and with the planet."

Durning's group is having a locked-door potluck lunch when I arrive, but at 1pm sharp they get back to work as living examples of the environmental sustainability side of the voluntary simplicity equation.

"Vicki Robin takes the question of economic sustainability down to the level of a self-help book," says Durning. "We try to do that same thing with messages oriented at the policy level and activists, and to the personal level as well."

NEW is best known for researching and publishing books and papers full of eye-opening sustainability facts, stats and ideas in portions designed not to overwhelm.

One publication, Stuff: The Secret Lives of Everyday Things, is a particularly digestible attack on North America's chosen way of life. Stuff reveals, for example, that it takes about 720 gallons (3,200 litres) to water to make a cheeseburger; that aluminum requires so much energy to produce that it's been dubbed "congealed electricity;" that making a computer chip generates 4,500 times its weight in waste; that 10% of the world's pesticides are used on cotton fields. No flies on you.

In 1974, E.F. Schumacher wrote Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered. In it, he argued that sustainability means living on the world's interest, not on its capital.

"A businessman could not consider a firm to have solved its problems of production and to have achieved viability if he saw that it was rapidly consuming its capital. How then could we overlook this fact when it comes to that very big firm, the economy of Spaceship Earth and, in particular, the economies of its rich passengers [industrialized nations]?"

Today, most of us recognize -- with a sense of hopelessness -- that the global pantry may soon be lower than Mother Hubbard's. "There's a lot of concern about the global future," says Durning, "but there isn't a feeling of personal connection to it."

Schumacher again: "An attitude of life which seeks fulfillment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth -- in short, materialism -- does not fit into this world, because it contains within itself no limiting principle, while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited."

NEW is providing the information to turn public ambivalence about the single-minded pursuit of wealth into action. John Ryan, the organization's research director, knows better than most that or society's fixation on stuff cannot be maintained.

"People think that living in a greener way is a financial or lifestyle sacrifice. It's really not a sacrifice, it's a kind of indulgence," Ryan explains.

"Car owners spend a quarter of their income on transportation," he notes. "There's a lot of slavery there ... there's nothing liberating about sitting in traffic for an hour twice a day. I ride my bike to work and it feels great not to pollute, to say I did nothing harmful to the environment today."

In exchange for his "sacrifice," Ryan has allowed himself his "indulgences": he eats organic food, lives in a nicer place closer to work and has money to give to causes he supports.

By choosing simplicity, I am now making purchases based on needs, not on advertising-driven manipulations of my desires.

Do I really need an electric can-opener when my fingers and the hand-cranker work just fine? And would that $39.95 plus tax be better spent some other way or put into the bank? "Buy now and save" has revealed itself as a magnificent oxymoron!
What else? I live in a nation blessed with more empty and open space than almost any other place, with more leisure options, perhaps, even than ancient Rome in its hedonistic heyday. Yet I also know that [the mighty] we will spend one entire year of our lives, on average, watching commercials on TV.

I no longer pay for the services of a cable company.

The people at NEW have confirmed that the bicycle is the most efficient vehicle ever built, smoother running even than a fish through water, so I have begun cycling more, rarely dropping 30 bucks (6.5 hours of my life energy) into the tank of my pickup.

Is that it? There must be more to voluntary simplicity. Should I now sell my truck? Do I begin to meditate, eat lentils, read Thoreau by candlelight, wear hair shirts, find a guru?

Before I give all my remaining clutter to charity, I consider that Mohandas Ghandi, an early advocate of treading softly and living deeply, advised that if not having something will bring great sorrow, it should probably be kept until you are ready to live without it.

In 1994, New York's Trend Research Institute identified voluntary simplicity as one of the top 10 trends of the '90s, with an estimated 15% of all boomers taking part in some sort of life simplification.

In 1995, they remembered that far more people are living with less because they have no other choice. That year, involuntary simplicity made the top 10.

The pull towards a simpler life can come from environmental or justice concerns, from poverty, from religion or from a general feeling of koyaanisqatsi -- a life out of balance. The awareness garden has many gates but each entrance is entwined with the same vine.

"The object is to get more and more peace of mind," says Jackie Robson, a Victoria resident who, along with her husband Bill, has chosen to pursue simplicity. Robson heads up the city's chapter of the Northwest Earth Institute, which offers guidance and support to neophytes in the struggle against their own consumption.

"For us to live a simpler lifestyle, to consume less, has a tremendous impact on the planet," Robson says. "We're doing everything we can not to be destructive."

"The average Canadian throws out two kilograms of garbage every day. The Robsons fill a nine-litre garbage can twice a month. Their home is comfortable, decorated with personal treasures, simple, functional furniture and with many windows looking out onto gardens which grow, as Bill puts it, "food and pretty things."

Over a breakfast meeting of pancakes and home-canned preserves, the two don't stand out as being too dissimilar from any other urban couple. If there was a sport utility vehicle in the driveway, they could be mistaken for yuppies -- but their consumption habits are much, much different.

"It's a piece of work to disconnect from the environment of advertising and being told what to buy," says Bill.

"We may look like big consumers, but we're not," adds Jackie. "People could probably live on quite a bit less than what they're living on now. But, of course, that number would be different for everybody. There's no set figure. And there are no secrets."

Everyone interviewed for this article was asked at least this one question: "What is the one thing a person could do to move towards voluntary simplicity?"

The answers took me back through the equilateral triangle of simpler living: thoughtful economics, environmental sustainability, and personal values.

"Live so that your joy-to-stuff ratio increases," said Vicki Robin.

At Northwest Environment Watch, John Ryan answered before the question could be asked: "Drive your car less," he urged.

Here in Victoria, over buckwheat pancakes, the debate rolls on for some time. We agree on "doing it locally as much as possible." Later, Bill brings a thoughtful pause with, "Just notice what's so." And finally, Jackie finds the simple heart of the matter: "Fall in love with your world."