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Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology (P.S.)
 | Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology (P.S.) Eric Brende Date: 2005-08-01 — Book Rating: |
The starting point for this book was Brende's desire to actively question a lot of things that most of us in modern America take for granted as "the way things are," particularly with regard to technology. Very much along the lines of Neil Postman in Technopoly and elsewhere, Brende recognized the unthinking acceptance of "technological progress" as a process in which as much is lost as is gained. His questions about technology led him, as he neared the end of graduate studies at M.I.T. to take a break from school--and from electricity--for 18 months, to take a critical look through its absence at the effects of technology on our lives and consider how much technology is "enough" for a good life. To this end, Brende and his new wife went and lived among a mixed community of Amish, Mennonites, and fellow transplants from the modern world. These were largely Amish and Mennonites who thought that their own communities were moving too far from their traditional values, if that tells you anything. While there, the couple worked to make a living just as the other members of this motor-and-electricity-abstinent group did, raising their own food plus some cash crops to make their living. His book explores some of the skills he had to learn, the people he met, and the communal and religious life they shared (Brende and his wife attended some services, even though they are Catholic, while the community as a whole was some form of Anabaptists--a group much persecuted by the Catholics, and other Protestants, once upon a time).
What he found--and to be fair, this seemed to be what he expected to find--was that the technology we take for granted often takes from us as much as it gives to us. Much of our technology serves to insulate--and even isolate--us from the people around us, and our time-saving devices often don't save us that much time when you factor in everything else, including the lifestyle that's necessary to purchase and maintain these things. As he and his wife got into the rhythm of this simpler life, they found that they had more free time, closer interactions with each other and with their community, better health, and overall a higher quality of life. In the course of everyday life, they get the exercise that we go to the gym to get. One of the community's most common sayings--and no doubt an important one because of the lack of technology--was "many hands make light work." As a consequence, members of the community were constantly coming together to share labor and consequently for stronger bonds amongst themselves. Did you catch it the first time when I said "more free time"? As counterintuitive as it might seem to us, their agrarian, low-tech lifestyle meant, for them, more free time, not less.
All of this said, I am rather more preachy about all of this than Eric Brende is. He's not trying to knock us all over the head with the Luddite stick. In fact, he currently lives in St. Louis. The experiences that formed this book were an experiment, from which he learned a good deal that he and his wife carried forward into their lives back in the modern world. Although it might do many of us some good, it's probably fair to say that Brende lived the life and wrote the book so that we don't have to--we can inspect his account and take from it what we can. I think, in fact, that we could all take a good deal from it.