the simple life | living unplugged | a review of “Better Off”

Last week I was given a book to read by a friend, who had read this series of posts on living simply. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of writing and especially the ideas which author Eric Brende covers in his book, Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology.

The basic premise is, Eric gets fed up with technology while studying at MIT. So he decides to live within a Mennonite/Amish community for 18 months. He happens upon a Amish-looking man who leads to a perfect contact for entering this community.The author lives with his newly married wife in a rented cabin, without electricity or automatic tools of any kind.

image by cindy47452

While the adaptation to that drastic change is remarkable in-itself, the contrast of ideologies is most interesting. He explores and tries to explain his experience of work, among other things. The work that he explains is very different than what one does in the city.

He beautiful describes experience after experience, where it is work that brings the community together, building relationships through laboring alongside each other. There are some clear reasons for this. One of the simplest; without the noise of power tools one is able to continue dialogue through the work. I’ve experienced this time and again, except it usually involves the roar of an engine stifling communication.

Secondly, he savours the opportunity to live and work in the same environment, right next to his wife. In this environment, you don’t have to leave your home everyday to work somewhere else. Your work is tied very close to the homestead.

He also realises that the work isn’t as hard as he would of expected. He describes the late summer threshing of wheat, some of the hardest work of the season. It was hard work, but the work environment continued to enable both numerous breaks and continued conversation; which enables work to stop feeling like work and simply hanging out with friends. He actually took a log on a few occasions of this work; he found that over a 9 hour work period, he had breaks totalling 4 hours. Some of these breaks were planned, some simply a result of poor organisation.

The point is that, even during the hardest work there was much leisure involved. The idea of leisure is close to this community’s heart. They don’t want to get caught up in the rat race of production. Though this doesn’t mean they are backward or stupid. They are highly thoughtful of the means by which they work. They want efficiency but not at the cost of one’s soul.

It is amazing how very wise the Amish are at discerning the influence that our tools have upon how we live, both positively and negatively. They are very slow to adopt any new tool into the community, only through much deliberation on the benefits and drawbacks of any given thing.

As I was reading, I couldn’t help but think of Marshall McLuhan, his ideas about how technologies shapes our thoughts and different media issuing different responses. There is such a parallel between the Mennonites and McLuhan in perspective, that I shouldn’t be surprised at the fact Shane Hipps (author of Flickering Pixels, which is McLuhan translated for the Christian community) is pastoring a Mennonite community.

{This book has definitely inspired me to push my level of simplicity to a higher level. Eric Brende concludes the book, by describing his current simplistic living. They have moved to a small community, neither him or his wife have ‘jobs’ except the small collection of things they make or do for a means of living. When you live simply, it becomes much simpler to live.}