 The evolution in cob will be toward the pursuit of making cob available to as many people as are interested in and in need of cheap, sustainable, and personally fulfilling housing alternatives. In an era when people are more and more disempowered to act with agency in designing their lives, designing and building with cob may be a way back to something elemental in the human heart.


	The concept of simplicity has insinuated itself to the point of ubiquity in 21st century American culture.  The Voluntary Simplicity movement is a precursive factor in this phenomenon, particularly as it constructs a standard of behavior by which individuals might ameliorate the overwork, indebtedness, and bourgeois guilt inherent with conspicuous consumption.  The precepts of the Voluntary Simplicity (VS) movement tend to be fluid, leaving the definition of simplicity open to broad individual interpretation. I will examine different ways that these wide-ranging definitions leave VS vulnerable to co-opting by popular culture, diluting its message of transcendence over materialism. The rhetoric of VS—and several parallel movements—is one in which temporal decrease is equated with intangible gain. I will explore the pseudo-religious nature of VS that can lead to extremism, just as sometimes happens with other forms of utopian or religious beliefs.  
Current western culture, particularly in the United States, is a culture of consumption. As 20th century Americans moved steadily away from an agrarian lifestyle, acquisition of material goods became synonymous with progress and forward momentum. The American ideals of the “self-made man” and “pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps” fed the industrial and technological revolutions. The American Dream, in other words, has generally equated more “stuff” with greater happiness and an improved social status.
 In the 1980s, Reagan-era economics and attitudes elevated material acquisition to a new level. On the heels of the so-called “decade of greed,” the 1990s heralded the information age, catapulting the nation and the world onto the Information Superhighway. The VS movement, still comparatively small in numbers, found a growth niche, primarily among disenchanted, middle-class baby-boomers, and ideologically displaced environmental and back-to-the-land enthusiasts. 
Bob Corbett, a professor of philosophy for 36 years at Webster University, is fairly representative of the VS demographic. Bob and his wife began making conscious lifestyle choices aimed at simplifying family life during the 1960s. In an era when most American families were caught up in the mainstream conventions of the time—namely following the ideals of progress and modernity—the Corbett family chose to forego two American staples: a television set and an automobile. As the parents of seven children, the Corbetts decided that television contributed to a vision of “normal life” that they found skewed, and from which they chose to shield their children.
Typically, the VS movement provides a means of grappling with the frustration of the overwork-overspend cycle. In fact, VSers contend that the trap of spending ever more time working for wages in order to fund consumption, is at the root of many societal ills—environmental chaos, poverty, and spiritual malaise. 