Could you do it? A life without technology
I review a book about a very unmodern lifestyle. Plus, an event!
Hello friends! It’s me, Hannah James, journalist, writer and heavy sweater (no one else seems to actually break a sweat in my ruinously expensive reformer Pilates classes. Not to worry, I do it enough for everyone).
News
There are a few tickets still available to In Conversation: Creative Women tomorrow at North Sydney Community Centre, where, among other interesting chats, I’ll be interviewing artist Karen Black. We had a preliminary phone chat this week and she is absolutely brilliant, so I’m excited for this event! Buy tickets from the link above.
On Wednesday night I went to the official launch of Groundswell, a climate giving circle where members give $1000 per year or $20 per week. When the kitty gets to $50,000, everyone votes on two climate action projects to fund. It’s quite steep, I know, but if you do have the cash available, it’s a brilliant initiative with a really solid team behind it. Plus they centre First Nations voices, which is crucial in the fight against climate change (as Amy Thunig, a First Nations academic I interviewed the other week, said to me: “You don’t get to last for 120,000 years without knowing a thing or two”).
What I’m reading
Online:
Milkwood is a permaculture education business with a brilliantly informative website. Chances are you’re already one of their eleventy zillion Instagram followers, but do read the post they wrote this week about learning your local waterways.
Eshana Bragg, the ecopsychologist I mentioned interviewing in last week’s newsletter, is also passionate about getting to know the land around you – even if it’s smothered in concrete. “Imagine the landscape under your feet,” she told me, when we were talking about how to connect with nature. “It might be a city street, but there’s probably a hill underneath. Imagine the way the land lies, where the creeks might be. They might now be drains, but they’re still there – the water still flows.”
In print:
I’ve been reading Mark Boyle’s The Way Home: Tales from a Life Without Technology. He has previously written The Moneyless Man: A Year of Freeconomic Living, so he’s got form with abandoning things the modern world deems essential. This, though, is radical by anyone’s standards: he built and lives in a cabin on a plot of land in Ireland that’s without electricity, a phone, a computer, light bulbs, a washing machine, running water, television, power tools, gas or a radio. (He’s friends with fellow rural Irelander Paul Kingsnorth, whose latest book I reviewed here.)
He wrote this book with a pencil, communicating with his editor by letter. If you’ve written anything longer than a shopping list in the past 20 years, you will understand what a paradigm shift that is for a writer.
“The real point of unplugging,” he says, is “to deeply explore what it means to be human – in all its beautiful complexities, contradictions and confusions – when you strip away the distractions, the things that disconnect us from what is immediately around us.”
I was initially sceptical about just how much exploration of humanity you can do when you spend most of your time hauling water and scrubbing your socks, but his later explanation made much more sense to me: he wants to avoid technologies that “make me beholden to institutions and forces that have no regard for the principles and values on which I wish to live my life”. He also has the feeling “that something was deeply wrong with modern society, and somehow we needed to reconnect with the natural world again, as much for our own sake as for nature’s”.
Boyle was once an enthusiastic consumer of technology, the first of his friends to get a Commodore 64 and a mobile phone. But, he says, “We didn’t know it at the time but we were all enthusiastically taking part in the largest, most widespread social experiment in the history of human cultures, without any idea of its intended or unintended consequences.” Of those consequences, he says, “I watch a connected world grow ever more disconnected.”
So practically, how does it work? He has to learn to make fire. He has to build his cabin by hand (it looks kinda nice, though!). He makes mistakes. The woman he is with at the beginning of the book (this is a bit of a spoiler) decides she doesn’t want that life, so she leaves him. And he deals with criticism. “Despite knowing little or nothing of the bloody, mucky realities of land-based lives,” Boyle writes, “people sometimes tell me to be careful not to romanticise the past. On this, I agree. But I tell them to be even more careful of romanticising the future.”
On the topic of writing (about which I have so many questions – how does he fact-check? How does he even know of the existence of recent books he references?) he is fascinating: “For the first time in my life I’m actually enjoying the process of writing. My head no longer hurts at the end of a long day. I find myself staring into the orchard for prolonged periods before I even put pen to paper, but when I finally act, I can write 1500 words without stopping. My thinking has got slower. Just as carpenters always recommend measuring twice and cutting once, I think I’m thinking twice and writing once… Sydney J. Harris once said, ‘The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.’ … The pencil has changed how I think, slowed me down, and made my words human again.”
He has so many interesting things to say about community, success, nature, work (technology frees up our time so that we can work to afford our technology). I would have absolutely loved to hear more from the women in his life, however – the domestic technology he eschews changed women’s lives so dramatically that were a woman to make the same choice, it would have a very different resonance. Not to mention the various medical advances that have liberated women – what does a woman who lives without technology do when she gets her period? (Who would go back to rags out of choice?) Or what if she gets pregnant? How does she deal with the completely different social expectations of her? These are topics he can’t address, and that I would love to hear about.
I could keep quoting and discussing – this really was a book that made me question a lot of what I take for granted about the way we live. But I’ll finish with this thought of Boyle’s: “At a time when the UN is declaring that the internet is a basic human right, the most basic right of all – to build a simple shelter where you can feed yourself and your family – seems to be drifting further out of reach than ever.”
Yes, the choice to live without technology is extreme. But we all know that the way most of us in the Western world live is literally destroying the earth. So who’s right? Me, defensively explaining that it’s all very well for him, but it wouldn’t work for me? Or Boyle, whose footprints on the earth are almost as light as a hare’s or a hedgehog’s? Ultimately, he doesn’t really want us to answer that question. He’s not challenging his readers to take up his lifestyle – he’s simply explaining his own choice. Is it selfish? Maybe. Is it the best he can do? Definitely.
Question
I’m trying to think of a name for this newsletter that’s about connecting with nature. Any ideas? Hit me up by replying to this email or DMing me on Instagram!
Until next week, heroes.