No bills, so many riches: the lessons of living like a prince outside cyberia

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/06/life-without-technology-tech

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People defend that on which they depend. This has been the way since time immemorial. So while the “uncivilised savages” of indigenous and tribal lands defend mundane, unimportant things like the animal herds, rivers and forests that their lives depend on – often with their bodies – e-Homo sapiens defends a progressive way of life – with its factories, supermarkets, cheap flights and online shopping – forgetting what this Mumfordian megamachine depends on. It’s a tendency within us that’s as problematic as it is understandable.

For a start, the old ways have become alien to us – tanning buckskins by using deer brains, to make clothes not dependent on deforestation and mass extinction, is no longer part of our economic lexicon, and is especially difficult for an ex-vegan such as myself who has witnessed the impact that industrial civilisation has had on wildernesses and the animal kingdom. Polyester, after all, is hardly vegan.

Growing lemon balm and sage, instead of importing chai from India, makes little sense within the ecologically idiotic, financially clever economic theories of the Enlightenment era that still tyrannically rule our lives today. Even walking long distances and toughing out the seasons in all their glory seem lost arts.

In giving up complex technology and moving towards preindustrial and primitive ways, I wanted to explore these issues without agenda or addiction. The lessons have come thick and fast.

Lesson 1

Things take longer. Much longer. Take cooking Christmas dinner. Usually: turn tap, click electric kettle, light gas oven, cook bought food. Not any more. My day begins by fetching water from the spring, wood from the stack, vegetables from the garden, tea from the herb patch, and doing other unglamorous jobs that weave me into the fabric of the particular place where I live.

The brutally efficient chainsaw has been replaced, in a sort of reverse adolescence, by the gym-eliminating qualities of the crosscut saw. Instead of petrol lawn mowers, think scythe or a horse – which is being trained up to pull a cart for transporting wood and people. There are no quick showers (only long baths). Sitting watching the real-life drama of a war between two ant colonies (no doubt caused by Britain’s divide-and-rule policy) can take an age – and, like the rest, doesn’t pay the bills. Which is fine, because I don’t have any.

Lesson 2

Once you get rid of the aforementioned bills, effectively rejecting Benjamin Franklin’s tightfisted, minute-pinching idea that “Time is money”, you find yourself slowly having more time to do the things you love, free from modernity’s relentless financial demands. I’ve no idea what that means for you, but for me it’s reading Henry David Thoreau by the fire, fishing for rainbow trout, playing chess over blackberry wine in our moneyless pub, and blathering on in the Guardian about our minute-wise, millenniums-foolish culture.

It’s an odd logic but it works. Let me explain. Replying to the 10 or so letters I receive each week (which is enjoyable) and making the 12km weekly jaunt to the post office (even more enjoyable) is much slower than firing out the equivalent amount of emails. Yet it still takes less time than dealing with the 10 emails I’d get every single day while living in cyberia. And, as Thoreau knew long before me, the jaunt is quicker than working the months it takes to pay for the tax, insurance, fuel, MOT, and inevitable mechanical problems of a car.

The little prince, in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic, understood this better than most adults. When he asked the merchant what he could do with the 53 minutes experts claimed he would save by buying his pill (which eradicated the need to drink water), the merchant replied: “Whatever one wishes.” And the little prince decided he would like nothing more than to spend the time slowly walking towards a spring of fresh water.

Lesson 3

Our industrial culture is more genocidal and ecocidal than Adolf Hitler or Tony Blair. Yes, even Tony ... Living without tech, you become more sensitive to its violent, unhealthy, toxic ways. But we’ve made a Faustian pact with complex technology, and as a few e-sacks of letters in reaction to my last article might suggest, the dependency runs as deep in the psyche as it does in the oceans and land.

You become more acutely aware that industrial culture has replaced craft with efficiency, distinctiveness with standardisation, aspiration with ambition, rootedness with transience, contentment with progress, attentiveness with speed, and the natural rhythms of life with tight schedules. This manifests in the everyday – how we eat, build dwellings, even our erotic lives. Nothing is sacred in industrialism’s insatiable need for speed.

Still, the overwhelming defence of the technological regime speaks of a rock-and-a-hard-place reality and the ecological illiteracy at the heart of our culture. Take this (paraphrased) comment from a reader, Andrea Sermon: “Why all or nothing? I use iPad/mobile for the odd text/call and eschew the rest. I don’t use social media. But to shop or read several papers a day, I use tech; I’m not a slave to it.”

While I admire the likes of Andrea for not being a slave to tech, I wish the same could be said for the souls who spend their precious lives in factories producing it. (You could argue it is their choice, if their healthier choices hadn’t been exterminated.)

It also seems to ignore the ecological consequences of producing the ipad/mobile – regardless how much we use it – that I raised in that article. Or is that, perhaps, a side-effect of the time-poor Twitter generation’s inability to read articles in full? (Commenting below this article? Prove you’ve read it in full by ending your comment with “Who was Aldo Leopold?”)

Everything takes time. Speaking with the lovable, characterful rogues I call neighbours takes – well, time. This is unproductive time to the city mind, which sees each minute idled away as money lost. But when the shit hits the fan, as it can sometimes do, people here know that help is always at hand for that tried and tested price: friendship.

So the question is, how do we want to spend the moments given to us in a way that feels fair to the rest of this enchanting, generous planet?

On that note, I put down my pencil, and am off to walk very slowly towards a spring of fresh water, with absolutely no idea what clock-time it is.

• This article was written by hand and posted to an editor at the Guardian, who transcribed it to go online. Get in touch with Mark Boyle here or in the comments below, a selection of which will be posted to him.