 Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin became VS gurus with their seminal work, Your Money or Your Life. Many VSers refer to this state of being stuck on the consumer hamster wheel as “wage slavery.”  This is not just radical rhetoric of East or West Coast liberals. 
There is a certain level of discomfort among VSers with this more extreme end of the simplicity continuum. The vast majority of VSers express an interest, not in eliminating work, but being free to choose work that is fulfilling and personally meaningful, whether financially remunerative or voluntary in nature—an idea compatible with the Buddhist ideal of right livelihood.
Simplicity literature frequently lays out specific steps for downsizing, providing a framework for reaching the ultimate VS goals, typified as financial independence, reduced environmental impact, and the perception of spending one’s time and money wisely and conscientiously. On paper it sounds like a noble aspiration. But, as with all human endeavors, VS is fraught with complications and conundrums. 
The population of the Voluntary Simplicity movement self-identifies largely as white, highly educated, middle class, and, more often than not, heterosexual. It is the upwardly mobile person for whom the question of downsizing becomes an issue. VSers have, according to their own socio-economic identification, reached a point in life that allows them to be concerned with matters beyond issues of survival and the desire to “better” oneself by acquiring material possessions that one equates with status in the dominant culture.
It is not uncommon that individuals and couples take on the mantle of VS after reaching a place of material security and/or income level that allows them to shift their assets into investments before downsizing, thus allowing them certain freedoms and financial security not available to those whose educational and monetary underpinnings are thin or nonexistent.
In Abraham Maslow’s notion of human psychological development, individuals move through a series of conceptual levels, beginning from the most basic physical needs such as food, sleep, water, oxygen, and so forth. When these basic needs are met, the theory states, the individual is then—and only then—able to move to the next level of development. There is a significant relevance in Maslow’s Hierarchy as it applies to the concepts of Voluntary Simplicity. 
When a person is functioning on a hand-to-mouth basis, never having lived above poverty or subsistence level, an entirely different set of motivations surrounds her choices concerning acquisition and consumption. At the first and second levels of the hierarchy, one is striving to meet the most basic hungers of the body, and then gather about oneself a sense of physical safety and security. Acquisitions that represent gross consumption to a VSer—say, a big-screen TV or an expensive designer handbag—could, to a subsistence-oriented person, symbolize the ability to move into the realm of “the haves.” It is easy to extrapolate one’s own sensibilities about consumption onto another, without having tried to survive solely on the lower rungs of Maslow’s Hierarchy. 