Disconnecting from the industrial world helped me discover what reality really is.

Here is the ninth and final text in the series by Mark Boyle, author of The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology (2019), where he shares his experience of living without industrial technology.

You can read the other texts by Mark Boyle here:

1. Technology destroys people and places. I’m rejecting it

2. Lessons of living like a prince outside cyberia

3. Bored? No way. Ditching technology makes life complicated and beautiful

4. Environmentalism used to be about defending the wild – not any more

5. Living without technology taught me about life in society;

6. You don’t need modern medicine to be healthy;

7. Living without technology is not romantic;

8. We must resist, revolt, and rewild ourselves;

9. Disconnecting from the industrial world helped me discover what reality really is.

__________

After two years off-grid, I'm embracing daily letters, good sleep and my DIY hot tub

It was almost midnight when I checked my email for the last time and turned off my phone for what I hoped would be for ever. I had spent the summer of 2016 hand-building a straw bale home on a half-wild smallholding in County Galway, Ireland, and the following morning I intended to begin a new life without modern technology. There would be no running water, no clock, no fossil fuels, no electricity or any of the things it powers; no internet, phone, washing machine, lightbulbs or radio. I had no idea if unplugging myself from the industrial world would mean I’d lose all touch with reality, or finally discover it.

I’m reluctant to write much about the big-picture reasons why I decided to reject tech. We know them too well already, and it’s not for want of information that we continue down the road we’re on. But, over time, I found my reasons slowly changed. Now they’ve less to do with saving the world, and much more to do with savouring the world. The world needs savouring.

No longer having access to social media or the news, my world has become both smaller and more detailed. Sometimes I overhear conversations about backstops or fake news, but I understand little of it, and it feels abstract and remote when there are so many concrete things in front of me every day: fishing for pike, making cider, planting trees, carving spoons and a hundred other things modernity had once done for me. Some suggest that this approach is selfish, that I’m turning my back on global problems, and perhaps they’re right. But I’m not sure a tweet from me about Brexit would help the world more than rolling my sleeves up and doing something that’s useful here and now.


Read the full version:

https://medium.com/the-guardian/after-two-years-off-grid-im-embracing-daily-letters-good-sleep-and-my-diy-hot-tub-9aff9f5c5819