Better Off: Flipping The Switch -
An InterviewWhen Eric and Mary Brende left the hi-tech world of M.I.T. and moved into a primitive Amish community, friends were incredulous. But the Brendes had a mission. Long suspicious that modern men and women were shrinking their lives to fit their machines, they wanted to find out how much technology is really necessary, and what life looked like before it took over. ...
* Eric has written a fascinating account of his first-hand investigation of the limits of technology. ... he pushed back against technology, deciding to spend a year living as our ancestors all did—growing crops and harvesting them by hand, plowing fields with a horse, jarring fruit, singing and praying with a community of primitive Amish.
* The very absence of technology is a catalyst for close bonds among neighbors, for several reasons simultaneously. In a real sense you depend upon your neighbor, especially in times of crisis, but also because the work is by its nature communal. People get together not just because they like each other, but because they need each other. There's a strong incentive not to sweat the small stuff.
There's another whole layer of more subtle dynamics at work. When you are working with your hands, or whatever limbs, out in the field, pretty soon that work becomes self-automating. It thereby frees up the mind for conversation. Meanwhile, the labor serves as a kind of musical undercurrent that gives a certain depth to the experience. It's like the difference between hearing a choir singing in unison, and one singing in harmonies, with basses at the bottom. That lower level of tonality gives so much depth to the sound.
Likewise, shared manual labor gives that richness to conversation. It creates a kind of symphony of layered experiences. You're experiencing nature, hearing the birds, feeling the breeze, watching the clouds go by. Compare that to sitting virtually motionless at a video monitor watching two dimensions of reality, damaging your back and not getting any exercise for your heart, growing more socially isolated.
* ... if machines do everything for us, then what's left for us to do? What meaning do we have left?
If we have machines to live life for us, then we don't have to live. Life eventually seems not worth the trouble of living. Have a machine do it—or spend life skimming off the frosting of experience, without including any of the substance. The social problems, the plague of depression, social disarray in our society—it's all related directly or indirectly to this takeover by technology. Ironically, our lives become less convenient as a result of our conveniences, since we're always trying to recover what technology took away from us.
* "What has
technology taken from us, and what are we trying to get back?"
As I see it, it falls into two main categories, the first being
physical exercise. Look at the car. Here's something we have to work many hours to pay for, maintain, fuel. Over a lifetime we spend more on our cars than on our houses. That money translates into work we have to do. Then we sit in this vehicle a couple of hours a day, and miss out on the exercise we would have gotten if we walked or biked. Then, on top of it all, we have to go to a gym, or jogging, to recover the exercise that we missed. Or else suffer terrible medical consequences. So if we'd simply done what came naturally in the first place—used our bodies to do work and to travel—we'd have avoided a whole chain of inter-related inconveniences.
The second is
social interaction: People are always talking about the need for quality time. Sitting in front of a PC, TV, or in a car, you're missing out on all the human interaction which comes from work that is social, and draws you into a human network of relationships. Now we have to artificially re-create all those things we lost—through online dating, chat rooms, and so on.
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