Better Off

Flipping the Switch on Technology

Eric Brende

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780060570057
• eBook ISBN: 9780061738999
• Topic: Scienze biologiche
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito politico

Ditching their car, electric stove, refrigerator, running water and everything else motorized or "hooked to the grid," the Brende family conceives a real life experiment to see if in fact all our cell phones, wide screen TVs, and SUVs have made life easier and better-or whether life would be preferable without them. By turns, the query narrows down to a single question: "What is the least we need to achieve the most?" With this in mind, the Brendes begin an 18-month trial run that will dramatically change the way they live and prove entertaining and surprising to students. Better Off is a smart, often comedic, and always riveting book that also mingles scientific analysis with the human story, demonstrating how a world free of technological excess can shrink stress-and waistlines-and expand happiness, health, and leisure.

"Deftly steering clear of dogma, never sounding like a sanctimonious scold, Eric Brende makes a persuasive case that most of us would enjoy life more by radically minimizing our reliance on modern technology. Better Off is a buoyant, thought-provoking, and very entertaining read."-Jon Krakauer, author of Into the Wild and Into Thin Air

Section II

Growing

Eight

Quickening

As the season progressed, to be sure, there was a discernible quickening in the tempo of activities. Natural time, like light, was not constant but varied according to natural cycles.

At the sun’s gentle insistence each morning, I’d rise at about six-thirty (albeit a little earlier each day until June 21) and stroll over to the barn to milk the cow. The session that at first had produced less than a gallon eventually yielded almost two. Besides increasing the workload, this surge created another challenge.

What would we do with the milk? We didn’t have a refrigerator, but even if we had, there was too much to think of drinking. “Cottage cheese,” said Mrs. Miller. “Cream cheese,” she said. “Butter. Cup cheese. Mozzarella. Monterey Jack. Custard.” Soon Mary had a cookbook open to the cheese section and was boiling vats of milk, hanging socks full of curds from the porch eave, and setting out platters of white ooze to cure. The cottage cheese was easiest and seemed to taste the best.

And still we couldn’t keep up. We were pouring milk into the ground. “You need a pig to drink that up,” somebody said. A pig?

But it was the height of the summer season, and growth and activity were beginning to fill the available space and time. We were busy gardening, zipping up to the Millers’ to tend the pumpkin patch, traversing the community to Sylvan’s to mind the sorghum, and brooding over the canner in the kitchen, even as the Millers continued to entice us with other new opportunities-cum-obligations. We were bent over with armloads of fresh corn, beans, cabbage, and potatoes; we tugged out more surly weeds (hitching up garments that no longer fit us as our waistlines slimmed); cracked open chestfuls of chestnuts from the trees around the garden; learned about grapes and grape jelly; (stealing a few minutes here and there for those sweet, private moments all newlyweds know); loaded up endless jars in the pressure canner; then sorted, labeled, boxed, and—triumphantly—shelved the finished goods in the root cellar (not sure if we loved the homesteading because we loved each other or vice versa).

Knock, knock.

“I can’t believe I forgot to shut the bedroom door.”

Mary looked up in surprise.

“Oops.”

From our bed it was a straight line through the kitchen to the back entrance. And there, peering over the sill of the door, shaded by the brim of a straw hat, were two curious eyes. It was the middle of the afternoon. Mary and I were clothed only in sheets.

Moments later, and a little disheveled, I once again greeted Amos, our regular visitor and farming consultant.

With his slightly beseeching, singsong voice, he made a polite inquiry: “Father wants to know if you’d like to get some apples. There’s a man across the county who needs some help with his, and you get to pick up as many off the ground as you can take.”

“Well, I don’t know. Maybe, but we’re kinda…busy right now.”

“It’d be for next week sometime.”

“Why don’t we wait and see, and maybe we’ll have the chance to do it.”

“That’s up to you.” He turned to go, then hesitated. “By the way, we fixed the hoe.”

One day I heard a muffled sound in the living room and went to the doorway. There was Mary hunched over the armrest of the easy chair, blowing her nose. Were her allergies acting up? She had been taking medication for this.

When she raised her head I realized her eyes were too red for sinus troubles. She was crying.

“This is silly,” she said between sniffles. “It makes no sense. But I miss my mother.”

“Your mother? But you hardly ever saw her even when we were in Boston.”

“I know. It makes no sense.”

I pondered this strange turn for a few days. At the same time Mary began to grow unaccountably tired. She was losing enthusiasm for gardening. She wanted to sleep in. She also noticed she was late with her period…

Now we were in deep.

At first Mary panicked a little. The Minimites all had close relatives in the immediate vicinity who tutored their young mothers and fathers through the delicate pre- and postnatal changes. We didn’t. That was why morning sickness had triggered homesickness for relatives and old friends. But there was more to it than this. Mary admitted missing going to church. There was no recognizable center of Catholic life in this area, and for all the problems the church was going through, she felt a need to grasp hold of the familiar and the solid.

I panicked a little at Mary’s panic. It was as if she suddenly had drawn a blank on everything we’d learned and experienced here. The fear began to eat at me that she might be unable to last out the eighteen-month commitment. To me, this was unthinkable. To head off a possible disaster, I had an inspiration. I proposed a diversion: to take a little scouting trip to places where we might live once the year-and-a-half stint was over. As we had agreed, of course, that at that time it would be Mary’s turn to pick our home.

Luckily the sorghum was tall and the pumpkin leaves thick, so it was barely necessary to weed them anymore. The canning was done and the rains had abated. My beard had almost filled in. There was hardly anything to do. The quickening had crested, and we were in the midsummer lull. It was the perfect time to get away. I had resolved to use the Escort only if truly necessary, but I thought, given our special conditions and requirements, the time had come.

I took one parting look at the pumpkin patch. With diligent hoeing and regular rain, the vines had all crept together to form an impenetrable green tangle. Were any actual pumpkins growing under all those flopping tendrils? I lifted my leg, thrust it through the leafy canopy, and set it down gingerly, toe first. Repeating this maneuver several times and moving toward the interior of the field, I finally spotted something interesting. What was it? Was the green bulge under the yellow blossom a cucurbit wart, a symptom of some dread disease? I bent closer. No, it seemed too evenly rounded and striped to be pathological. My heartbeat quickened. I took a few more steps, then stubbed my toe on something bigger. It was large, round, and green, with ridges like a huge grenade. I drew back and parted the leaves.

It was six inches, no, eight inches across! After only a month? I gazed at it with the adoration of a father beholding his firstborn child.

The first stage of our search took us east. After further discussions, Mary and I had worked up a short wish list: (1) Close to friends and/or relatives; (2) Church in vicinity; (3) Walk or bike to centers of life; (4) Amish nearby; (5) College (as an employment possibility for someone with a postgraduate degree; I had little desire to join in the race for tenure or prestige, but I didn’t mind the thought of teaching part-time at a quiet liberal arts school). We realized it might be hard to find a place that would fit all the criteria, but meeting some was better than none. The hunt for a nice college town led us to Steubenville, Ohio.

Steubenville was the home of Franciscan University, a small Catholic school lately enjoying a resurgence. Several friends of ours were affiliates of the institution. There was even an Amish settlement not too far away, which we hoped might provide some tie to an agrarian existence. Steubenville seemed to offer a little bit of everything we were looking for.

As soon as we arrived, our hearts sank. The former steel-manufacturing municipality on the upper Ohio River, across from West Virginia, looked down-at-the-heels. Where a bustling commercial district must once have been, near the water, was a collection of mostly derelict brick buildings. Worse, this bare and depressed-looking downtown sat isolated from the rest of the community, which was scattered in clumps high on the hills overlooking the industrial river. You could get from river to hill only by car. Nor was the university well situated with respect to the rest of the town, but again on its separate hilltop site that could be approached only by automobile. The college architecture was modern and functional, built obviously with a mind to cost savings above all else. Everyone we came in contact with was friendly and outgoing but openly bewailed the ugliness of the environment. It seemed to lack a certain minimal human appeal or accessibility.

Moving eastward, we came to the next stop on our journey. Front Royal, Virginia, a town about sixty miles from Washington, D. C., was home to Christendom College, another school that offered the prospect of a ready-made social life. Several of our friends had graduated from Christendom, and the names of some of the faculty were familiar to us. But it would have been a rather closed circle because Christendom, like the Franciscan school, was isolated from the surrounding community. In fact, it wasn’t really in Front Royal. It was out in the country, miles away on a twisting back road too narrow for anything but motor travel. Not that anyone in the town appeared to walk anywhere. Aside from a rather nondescript huddle of commercial buildings and a few traffic lights, there was no sign of a true center or of face-to-face human contact.

The college, admittedly, was different. Its architecture was traditional and inviting, the campus intimate and pastoral on bluffs high over the Shenandoah River. However, the isolation from the surrounding community, or what passed for a community, was troubling. Its location again presupposed use of the car as a primary form of transportation, dooming its associates to technological dependency.

It was perhaps poetic justice that, in opting to take a car on this hunt, it led us only to places amenable to cars.

Beyond Virginia the terrain up the coast towards Boston grew ever more expensive and congested. After quickly canvassing a few other places no less problematic, we turned around for home.

Home. Viewed from afar, our residence next door to the Millers took on a new and nostalgic meaning. After comparing it to some of the alternatives, we had to admit it was looking better than when we had left.

The diversion succeeded beyond my expectations. The compass of Mary’s homesickness reversed its arrow.

Nine

A Church Meeting

Perhaps our flight from the Minimites had been too quick, too single-minded—this might explain how little it achieved. Until this point we had been rather ambling, if not aimless, in our daily course of duties. Not a very fruitful route, you would have thought, except that the thing we ultimately sought, leisure, was itself less a movement than a kind of centering. Its motions were slow and imperceptible, like growth, gradually enlarging from the core, quietly drinking in one’s surroundings and commingling with other growing beings, joining together in forms of mutual nourishment. Given what it was, perhaps, the slower you moved, the more you achieved.

This ambling approach did not easily lead to instant end-results. There was no button you could push to get them, no device you could procure to hasten their manufacture. I couldn’t help wondering if the places we visited, though, suffered from this very wish on the part of their inhabitants—to bottle peace and quiet, to package pastoralism. In particular Front Royal, the last haven for Washingtonians fleeing the big city, was devoid of a sense of cohesion or place. As the famous line goes, when we got there, there was no there, there. The sixty-mile-per-hour search for a nice place to live had nipped its possibility in the bud.

One of the great comforts of our present home, on the other hand, was that we hadn’t chosen it. It had chosen us. Inevitability is surely part of the sense of home, the irreplaceable something for which the heart yearns. We fell through a doorway from a place we never knew into one we didn’t choose. We yield irresistibly to forces beyond our control. The result is not merely a place to live; it is who we are, a deep and abiding mystery in the formation of self that can never be fully unraveled.

Admittedly, upon first arriving, our expectations had not been too high. We had tread lightly, hoping to steal our way into what appeared to be a closed cultural enclave. But now that we were in its midst, the surprise was on us. Even more obliquely, almost like the pumpkin vines, the Minimites were angling and ambling their way into our habits of mind and being. Our clothing, now half-Minimite, prompted us to wonder: had we pulled the cloth over them, or had they pulled it over us? Our hosts had perhaps one advantage: their beguilement was unintended.

One of their favorite sayings was “Do not let the right hand know what the left hand is doing.” Another was “He who seeks to save his life loses it; and he who gives up his life saves it.” These adages, of course, came from the Bible, and they gave expression to the disposition the Minimites held chief among Christian attitudes, Gelassenheit, or self-surrender. Gelassenheit referred less to any particular aim than to acceptance of what may be, a larger and partly hidden design that they did not fully understand.

Modern technology, I suspect, far from being neutral in its effects, has more than one underlying purpose or built-in tendency: besides reducing the need for physical effort (a kind of material surrender), it helps us avoid the need for cooperation or social flexibility (a kind of social or metaphysical surrender). All too readily it countermands the uncertainty that goes with Gelassenheit. Cars, telephones, message machines, caller ID, and e-mail grant us unprecedented powers to associate with whom we want, when we want, to the degree we want, under the terms we want, finessing and filtering out those we don’t want—and thin out the possibilities of social growth accordingly.

Mary and I had delayed paying a visit to our neighbors’ church, I suppose because we feared deeper social entanglements. Why wasn’t there a “delete” button we could push to eliminate this part of our exploration? We dreaded an awkward theolo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Explanatory Note
• Contents
• Cast of Neighbors
• Prologue: Taking Orders
• Section I: Planting
• Section II: Growing
• Section III: Harvesting
• Epilogue: Recipe for a Leisurely, Laborsaving Life
• Acknowledgments
• E-Book Extra
• E-Book Extra
• About the Author
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher