These are the humble makings of a revolution in progress: Macaroni and cheese. Timex watches. Volunteer work. Insulated underwear. Savings accounts. Roseanne. Domestic beer. Local activism. Sleds. Pajamas. Sentimental movies. Primary colors. Mixed-breed dogs. Bicycles. Cloth diapers. Shopping at Wal- Mart. Small-town ways. Iceberg lettuce. Family reunions. Board games. Hang- it-yourself wallpaper. Push-it-yourself lawn mowers. Silly Putty.
See the pattern? It's as genuine as Grandma's quilt. After a 10-year bender of gaudy dreams and godless consumerism, Americans are starting to trade down. They want to reduce their attachments to status symbols, fast-track careers and great expectations of Having It All. Upscale is out; downscale is in. Yuppies are an ancient civilization. Flaunting money is considered gauche: if you've got it, please keep it to yourself — or give some away!
In place of materialism, many Americans are embracing simpler pleasures and homier values. They've been thinking hard about what really matters in their lives, and they've decided to make some changes. What matters is having time for family and friends, rest and recreation, good deeds and spirituality. For some people that means a radical step: changing one's career, living on less, or packing up and moving to a quieter place. For others it can mean something as subtle as choosing a cheaper brand of running shoes or leaving work a little earlier to watch the kids in a soccer game.
The pursuit of a simpler life with deeper meaning is a major shift in America's private agenda. ''This is a rapid and extremely powerful movement,'' says Ross Goldstein, a San Francisco psychologist and market researcher. ''I'm impressed by how deep it goes into the fabric of this country.'' Says noted theologian Martin Marty of the University of Chicago: ''We are all warned against thinking in terms of trends that correspond with decades, but this one is a cinch. I think that people are going to look back at today as a hinge period in the country's history.'' Some social observers have already dubbed the 1990s the ''We decade.''
The mood is palpable. In a TIME/CNN poll of 500 adults, 69% of the people surveyed said they would like to ''slow down and live a more relaxed life,'' in contrast to only 19% who said they would like to ''live a more exciting, faster-paced life.'' A majority of those polled, 61%, agreed that ''earning a living today requires so much effort that it's difficult to find time to enjoy life.'' When asked about their priorities, 89% said it was more important these days to spend time with their families, and 56% felt strongly about finding time for personal interests and hobbies. But only 13% saw importance in keeping up with fashions and trends, and just 7% thought it was worth bothering to shop for status-symbol products.
Marsha Bristow Bostick of Columbus remembers noticing with alarm last summer that her three-year-old daughter Betsy had memorized an awful lot of TV commercials. The toddler announced that she planned to take ballet lessons, followed by bride lessons. That helped inspire her mother, then 37, to quit her $150,000-a-year job as a marketing executive. She and her husband, Brent, a bank officer, decided that Betsy and their infant son Andrew needed more parental attention if they were going to develop the right sort of values. Marsha explained, ''I found myself wondering, How wealthy do we need to be? I don't care if I have a great car, or if people are impressed with what I'm doing for a living. We have everything we need.''
The movement is pervasive. ''This is not something simply happening to the burnouts from Wall Street,'' says sociologist Stephen Warner of the University of Illinois at Chicago. ''There is an American phenomenon going on that crosses all social lines. It's true of immigrant groups too, as well as the underprivileged.''
Yet the shift in priorities has a surface gloss of stylishness also. Call it thrifty chic. Penny pinching is back in vogue, even among the rich. Jackie O. shops at the Gap. Christie Brinkley wears plain white men's T shirts. Outside B.J.'s Wholesale Club in Medford, Mass., a white stretch limo waits at the curb while its passengers roam the cavernous discount warehouse. At Tom's Barber Shop in Jacksonville, lawyers and executives sit down next to truckers and shipyard workers for a $6 trim. At Deja Vu, a Palm Beach boutique that sells used designer clothes, women who once sent their maids and drivers to the back door with bundles of high-fashion castoffs to sell now bring them by in person and stick around to shop.
The beginnings of the new mind-set probably go back as far as the stock- market crash of 1987, which had little immediate effect on the overall economy but gave many people an uneasy feeling about the Roaring Eighties. The spectacular failures of such '80s heroes as Michael Milken and Donald Trump have discredited the era's role models as well. ''The 1980s showed how ugly this country could be, like racism did,'' says April Gilbert, a Stanford M.B.A. and shipping executive who hopes to join a nonprofit company soon. ''In the 1980s I was fed up and almost angry with the behavior of people in this country,'' says Stuart Winby, manager of Hewlett-Packard's Factory-of-the- Future program. ''Those kinds of values are just empty. I'm really sated with gadgets, things, adornments and all that stuff.'' Many people were awakened by individual experience: the plight of a homeless neighbor, the collapse of a bank, a friend's job loss.
The recession and gulf war have cemented the trend. First, the economic downturn struck some people as a just punishment for a dizzy era of excessive borrowing and spending. Many consumers saw the recession as a warning that their behavior had to change. Cutting back and putting away the plastic seem only prudent. Unemployment, currently at 6.5%, has risen steadily for eight months. Some people who used to ride in limousines are now driving them for a living. Then the life-and-death reality of the war came along and made the pursuit of glitz and status seem even more trivial. Americans saw their country pulling together with a higher purpose and a can-do spirit, and many of them liked the feeling.
In scaling down their tastes, most Americans are making a virtue out of necessity. Contrary to perceptions, the past decade was an era of downward mobility for the majority of U.S. families, who kept up their spending by borrowing and relying on two incomes. Only the wealthiest 20% of Americans significantly increased their real income during the Reagan era, and the poor slipped further behind. After adjustment for inflation, the national standard of living has actually fallen since 1973; the real average hourly pay for U.S. workers has gone from $8.55 then to $7.54 today. Says Barry Bosworth, an economist at the Brookings Institution: ''Americans are not becoming pessimistic. They are becoming realistic. It is right to think of cutting back.''
At the same time, the baby-boom generation, which accounted for much of the spending binge of the '80s, is reaching middle age. Here come 75 million aching backs. A generation of reluctant grown-ups is raising children, caring for aging parents and beginning to think about retirement. Instead of pumping iron, preening and networking, they are worrying about orthodontists, skateboards and college tuitions. The backyard now has more appeal than the boardroom.
So forget those champagne wishes and caviar dreams, the right car, vodka, watch, cuisine and music system. Consumers no longer feel they absolutely must have the latest luxury product. Who would be impressed, anyway? ''People don't think being square is synonymous with being a sucker anymore,'' says Dan Fox, marketing planning director of the Foote, Cone & Belding ad agency. Besides, they no longer seem to get a kick from spending borrowed money. Consumer installment credit dropped $342 million in December, or 0.6%, in what would ordinarily have been a busy shopping season, and a huge $2.4 billion in January.