A Generation of 'Yawns'

Sean Blagsvedt belongs to the "Young and Wealthy but Normal," or Yawn, demographic. He launched two networking sites in India that link workers with people who need labor.

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They may have disposable income, but whatever they make, they live below their means in a conscious effort to tread lightly on the earth.

They are a new breed of Gen Xers and Ys that go by the name "Young and Wealthy but Normal." Yawns, for short.

The acronym comes from The Sunday Telegraph of London, which noted that an increasing number of rich young Britons are socially aware, concerned about the environment and given less to consuming than to giving money to charity.

Yawns are the new movers and shakers of the world, they say. Now in their 20s, 30s and 40s, they want nothing less than to change the world and save the planet.

Take Sean Blagsvedt, who moved from Seattle to India in 2004 to help build the local office of Microsoft Research. Moved by young children begging on the streets, Blagsvedt quit Microsoft and launched two networking sites, babajob.com and babalife.com, to link India's vast pool of potential workers with the people who need labor. The larger goal — to reduce poverty.

Far from the techie cafe life, Blagsvedt, 32, lives at babajob's headquarters in Bangalore, a 3,000-square-foot apartment where his mother and stepfather also live and 15 workers come and go every day.

''I'm a happy person,'' he says. ''It's great to do something that you believe in doing.''

Yawns can sprout anywhere. In fact, they comprise a subset of a growing global movement of the eco-socially aware. The state of the economy and the state of the planet have inspired people to consider what they buy and how they spend in ways not seen since the ''Small is Beautiful'' and ecology movements of the 1970s.

The movement makes perfect sense, says David Grusky, a sociologist at Stanford University, since society tends to follow cycles — with anti-materialist periods like the hippie movement generating a pro-materialist reaction. Not to mention, he adds, that the evidence of major climate change and a concern with terrorism gives rise to more interest in spiritual as opposed to material objectives, he says.

2008 Toyota Prius

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The upshot is that ''a cultural and demographic 'perfect storm' may well push us decisively toward an extreme form of postmaterialism in the upcoming period," he says.'

That helps explain why Earth Day has become so popular again, why products are going ''green'' and why freecycle.org, an Internet community bulletin board where members offer items for free, has grown in five years from a dozen members in Tucson, Ariz., to a network of more than 3,000 cities in 80 countries.

Deron Beal, the site's founder, counts 4 million members growing by 20,000 to 50,000 members each week.

''People have many reasons for freecycling,'' Beal says. ''But the biggest reason is environmental — reusing and recycling instead of helping create more waste.''

Could it also be that we are sick of buying stuff?

Pam Danziger, a consumer trends expert, thinks so. ''The green thing is just a small part of it,'' says Danziger, whose firm, Unity Marketing, reported research showing luxury spending is way down. ''Americans have been on a buying binge for the last 10 years,'' she says. ''Our closets are full. Our attics are full. Our garages are full. Enough already!''

Yawns live small, but they do own whatever they want.

Rik Wehbring, a 37-year-old dot.com millionaire — he worked for multiple startups — limits himself to living on $50,000 a year. That's no chump change but well below what he could spend in San Francisco, where his rent eats up 40 percent of his allotted spending. Wehbring doesn't own a television, his mp3 player cost $20 (''and it works just fine'') and he drives (when he drives) a Toyota Prius. (Read about what's next for the Prius here).

He buys most of his food from local farmers' markets, is leaving the bulk of his estate to various environmental organizations and donates money to what he considers worthy causes. Every day, he grapples with ''how to live a low-carbon life.''

Wehbring doesn't buy clothes, or much of anything.

''I don't need a lot of material possessions,'' he says. ''I haven't had to buy anything in a while.''

Such frugality seems to run in his circle.

Brad Marshland, 44, the husband of Wehbring's cousin, is a successful filmmaker living near Berkeley, Calif. He and his wife and two sons, ages 10 and 12, dry their clothes on a line, grow their own vegetables and buy what they need at garage sales and second-hand stores. (Second-hand stores are to Yawns what The Gap was to Yuppies.)

''We're pretty low on the stuff scale,'' Marshland says.

Marshland offsets his family's ''carbon footprint'' — how much energy it uses — by donating money to environmental groups online.

Yawns also disdain ostentation.

When Ray Sidney, a software engineer at Google, cashed in his stock options in 2003, they yielded him more money than he could burn through in his lifetime. (Billions? He won't say.) But instead of building himself a 10,000-square-foot mansion in the Googledom of Silicon Valley, he retired to a four-bedroom house in Stateline, Nev., and started giving money away.

He has given $400,000 to a local arts council to help build a new arts center, $1 million to a bus company to help launch a route so that casino workers wouldn't have to rely on private transportation to get to and from work, and $1.7 million for a new football field and track at a local high school, for example.

Sidney also donates millions to charities that try to cure diseases or save the world.

His one rich-guy, carbon-hogging guilt trip: a single-engine plane he flies about once a week to see his girlfriend in San Francisco.

But his pet project these days is pure Yawn. He is building what he calls ''an environmentally friendly affordable housing development'' on 100 acres near his home in Stateline.

''This world and our society and the people in it are good and worthwhile,'' he says. ''I think it's worth spending money to keep it around and try to improve it.''