Downshifting: Ways to Adapt to a New Way of Life

This work is a research of the life of downshifters, considering it from the point of view of the attractiveness of this movement for ordinary people, trying to uncover not only the motives for joining the downshifting, but also to identify difficulties and barriers that arise after moving to third world countries and how to solve them. Usually, downshifting is viewed from a position of degradation of social status, correlated with the understanding of the word “down”, as with a downward movement, a fall and a failure. Whereas my research shows the opposite, that downshifting is a movement with different values ​​from corporate success models. Downshifters are representatives of mental labor living in compact communities with a positive perception of themselves, the environment, their community and their employment. The design of the research is a qualitative method, justified by the need to capture the emotional tint of the answers of the informants and to study their biographies in detail, to reveal the underlying motives and evaluate the semantics of their speech. The study used “convenient sampling” and the “snowball” method, since the phenomenon of downshifting is not widespread, which makes it difficult to find informants, which is complicated by the spatial arrangement of these people, which is the main limitation of the study.