The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology

by Mark Boyle

Instead it’s an invitation to immerse yourself in your own landscape, to foster an intimate relationship with it, to come to depend upon it; to find your own place within your own place.

What I have learned since is that the hard work is never done, especially when you reject all the things that fool you into thinking that self-reliant lives are meant to be simple.

we’re surrounded by fields of grass and tufts of dark green rush, the latter hinting at the clay beneath. This area is commonly considered to be marginal land, but I prefer to think of it as land misused by a society with marginal ecological understanding.

I’ll never get to read the article, online or in print. I’ll never know how many people ‘liked’ it or shared it. Which is exactly the way it should be. For as soon as journalism becomes a popularity contest – rewarding sensationalism, groupthink and deceit over honest exploration of complex matters – people and places lose, and those who need to be held to account win. Win, that is, for a short-sighted moment.

I didn’t want to live in a place where everything had to be locked, and I wondered why I had chosen to live among people whom I clearly didn’t trust. I sometimes thought about whether I owned the things I locked up, or if they were slowly starting to own me.

The more worrying aspect is that many of the heads of Silicon Valley’s Big Tech companies (some of whom, apparently, want be the heads-in-a-jar of Big Tech companies after they die) are powerful and wealthy transhumanists, and that they and others are pumping billions of dollars into a future for us as cyborgs. Those involved include PayPal co-founder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel, Google’s Director of Engineering Ray Kurzweil and its former CEO Eric Schmidt, now technical advisor to its parent company Alphabet. The latter has said, ‘Eventually, you’ll have an implant, where if you just think about a fact, it will tell you the answer.’ I wonder who is going to be programming these implants, and what their answers will be.

Those who write the algorithms will rule the world. Perhaps they already do.

I’m reading Robert Colvile’s The Great Acceleration, in which he looks at how the world is getting faster by the day hour minute second nanosecond. In it, he quotes an advertising slogan for the BlackBerry Playbook. It goes: ‘Anything worth doing is worth doing faster.’ Good point, BlackBerry. Why spend an hour or two slowly making love when you can

Ray Mears’ Outdoor Survival Handbook,

Next month I will plant some oca, another type of tuber which makes for a blight-free alternative to the potato. I’ve not grown it before, so I am interested to see how it will do. Strength in diversity, and all that. We will see.

It seemed to me, as I got older, that environmentalism was becoming preoccupied with taming these wild places – deserts, oceans, mountains – in order to harness green energy to fuel our way of life, and that of a small percentage of the world’s people in particular. Paul Kingsnorth, in his essay collection Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist, describes modern environmentalism as ‘the catalytic converter on the silver SUV of the global economy’, and suggests that it seems to be moved these days by a strange sort of equation: ‘Destruction minus carbon equals sustainability.’ So I gave up being an environmentalist – at least that kind – and moved out of the city and into the natural

Looking back, we had very little by way of money, or the kind of things it buys, yet I’ve no recollection of ever having felt a sense of lack. I suppose we were all in the same boat, and in the days before the proliferation of aspirational television programmes, it wasn’t so easy to feel the loss of a lifestyle neither you nor your ancestors had ever had.

the same time, having long since designed a dependency on electricity into her home, not having it for a few weeks now would be a lot more difficult than when her family never had it at all. The dependency is not only practical, but psychological and emotional too.

Looking over the balcony at the glare below, I watch a connected world grow evermore disconnected.

There is not an event, big or small, on earth that is not advantageous to something, big or small, and therefore the question of good or bad is always a matter of opinion.

One thing I have learned so far is that: it is futile learning how to fish without learning the river. Such things take time. I remind myself to have patience. It is on evenings like these that I wish I hadn’t spent four years sitting inside lecture halls learning financial economics, when I could have been outside learning real economics.

Despite knowing little or nothing of the bloody, mucky realities of land-based lives, people sometimes tell me to be careful not to romanticise the past. On this, I agree. But I tell them to be even more careful of romanticising the future.

take my breakfast outside to capture the morning sun. For possibly the first time in my life I realise that I feel content, without the desire for anything other than what’s in front of me in that most elusive of moments, the here and now. I’ve been happy, hopeful and full of excitement plenty of times, but I can’t recall a time when I was simply content.

You know that industrial capitalism is nearing the completion of its ultimate vision when people have to pay their neighbours to go for a walk with them.

When I first began to live without all of the distractions of modern life six months ago, I was curious to find out whether or not my overactive mind would get bored or if time would pass slower and, if it did, whether that was something I enjoyed, or something I would struggle with. My experience has been a strange one. While the days feel more relaxed, unhurried, unstressed, the year itself feels like it is cycling through the seasons as quickly as ever. I suppose we all fill our moments with one thing or another, often forgetting to reflect on the most important question confronting us: what best to do with our precious time here?

Sometimes I have to remind myself that I don’t miss the discomfort of having to work jobs I don’t enjoy to pay for gas cookers, dials, buttons and switches. Remembering is the difficult thing.

People in these parts eat dinner at different times of the day – Packie at two o’clock, Tommy at three o’clock, while most of my generation has it any time after six-thirty. We try to eat dinner early in the evening, as it improves sleep, but some days don’t always work out like that.

They managed their diets of vegetables, eggs, milk, meat and fish without a fridge or freezer, or electricity for that matter. They cooked without gas or oil. It wasn’t an easy life, but then none of them ever grew up expecting one. I remember M. Scott Peck writing, at the beginning of A Road Less Travelled, that once you stop expecting life to be easy, life suddenly becomes a lot easier. This was true for the Islanders. Considering the scale of anti-depressant use in contemporary society, it appears that life in the industrial world isn’t easy either.

The philosopher Alain de Botton has said that ‘True love is a lack of desire to check one’s smartphone in another’s presence.’

With my way of life, preparation is critical. Just as November is not the time to be getting your winter’s wood in, I start thinking of darkness in June. With that in mind, I go out to the potato field to cut rush. Its pith, which has all the properties needed for an effective candle wick, will help enlighten my winter, and it doesn’t levy a standing charge for standing in the field in June.

As the way we live and think is shaped by the technologies we use, writing without the aid of computers feels important to me. For as Sydney J. Harris once said, ‘the real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.’

I realised I had been keeping myself busy so that I wouldn’t have to think about all of the things my culture and I were doing to faraway, out-of-sight out-of-mind places, and the people and creatures that inhabited them. I felt my own complicity in it all, and my own impotence to do anything meaningful about it.

Thoreau once wrote that wood warmed him twice: first when he chopped it, and again when he sat by the fire. Well, either Thoreau was being terse or he had it a lot easier than me. I’ve found that wood warms me six times: hauling it 300 metres by shoulder, sawing it, chopping it, stacking it, sitting next to it as it burns and, finally, by eating the food that it cooks for me. We’re prone to forget that, first and foremost, we’re heated from the inside. The Blasket Islanders understood this. Not only did they eat well – very well by today’s standards – their food would have warmed their bones more than once, which, considering what the weather could be like there at times, was no harm at all.

The conservationist in me is confused; there’s more deer around here than there is habitat for them now. That’s not because there are too many deer, but because there isn’t enough habitat.

Out blackberry picking with Jorne (or, as the neighbours call him, Captain John), who lives in the farmhouse. This, he tells me, is now considered poaching in his homeland, the Netherlands (from which he considers himself to be an industrial refugee), and is punishable with a hefty fine.

WHAT?!?! 😱