The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology

by Mark Boyle

Alcoholics are more likely to be described as ‘giving up the booze’ than ‘gaining good health and relationships’.

The sun was slowly cooling,

the roof took shape; sawn spruce boards with waney edges were overlapped above young, thinned-out spruce rafters, on top of which went the topsoil that we had dug out from the foundations a month earlier. Into this we broadcasted a wildflower-and-grass seed mix which, when they grew and blossomed, would blend the cabin gently into the landscape.

It wouldn’t be until a year later, when I would read Aldo Leopold’s essay ‘Thinking Like a Mountain’ and attempt to live from these lands myself, that my thoughts on life and death would change dramatically.

Up in Dublin I’m told there are big protests about the water charges, which the International Monetary Fund (IMF) insisted on in return for credit in the aftermath of the banking crisis in 2008.

Reading Jay Griffiths’ deep exploration of time, Pip Pip, reinforced in my mind how recent the concept of clock-time is in human culture, and how essentially ideological and political it is. Clock-time is central to industry, mass production, specialised division of labour, economies of scale and standardisation;

the unmistakeable whirr of a bottle filling up tells me when the demijohns are full.

Henry David Thoreau, who went to live in the woods – because, as Lars Mytting noted, ‘modern American society had become too hectic for him (that’s right, in 1845)’

a 1970s German bumper sticker that said ‘Everyone wants to go back to Eden, but no one wants to go on foot.’

We both know how much more fun weeding and transplanting seedlings are when you do it with friends.

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.

transhumanists – who, simply put, argue that our bodies are a ‘suboptimal substrate’ for our minds, which would be better off cased in machines (through mind uploading and other means) – cite the £250 million worth of time which British people annually ‘waste’ looking for keys

our lives are ‘increasingly under the influence of unseen algorithms, whose creators effectively control what version of the news we read, what we buy, what information we consume, even the romantic relationships we end up having. Schmidt’s chip will simply mean we don’t have to bother typing it into the search engine he runs any more. That way Google can know every single thing you think. Those who write the algorithms will rule the world. Perhaps they already do.

I would go as far as to argue that most wild animals are entirely domestic in that they belong to a place; that is, their home. Domestication, in its truest sense, does not imply a lack of wildness.

The extent to which you are controlled by others is the extent of your domestication. It is the extent of your civilisation.

sweep the floor with a wooden stick whose end is tied with a dried plant called broom (hence the alternative name for a brush).

Fairtransport ships cargo – including its own rum, coffee and chocolate, which has been fairly traded with small producers – from the Caribbean to Europe, by sail only.

To ship a bottle of rum with one of the behemoths costs roughly one pence. On one of Jorne’s sailing boats it’s more like one pound. And instead of taking days, it takes months.

My four criteria for any infrastructural work – natural, local, inexpensive or free, beautiful

The section of the path I’m working on is 15 metres long, and it will take me five days of heavy work. From my experience of using concrete, a day would have been more than enough to get the job done. But I’d rather work ten weeks at it than use bloody concrete.

Every now and then I’d overhear small talk of different people trying to be famous for fifteen minutes and not, as Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder recommended, for fifteen miles.

I’d overhear small talk of different people trying to be famous for fifteen minutes and not, as Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder recommended, for fifteen miles.

we’ve never been exposed to so much news, never had so many attentive followers of it, and yet politicians and big business are getting away with as much murder as ever.

‘Anything worth doing is worth doing faster.’ Good point, BlackBerry. Why spend an hour or two slowly making love when you can fuck somebody for five minutes, after all?

Mick, who like all of the remaining natives here is part of that generation which was taught to throw nothing out, grew up in a different Ireland, one in which people had next to nothing to hold onto.

I was an environmentalist once too, back in the days when it was still more about defending wild places and the natural world against untrammelled human ambition, and less about carbon and something obscure called ‘sustainability’. 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.’

while the bread section was decimated, she says the flour shelves in the baking section were full.

the widespread indigenous belief that in taking something’s life – a plant or an animal – you take on a responsibility for the wellbeing of its ‘tribe’, and that you commit yourself to the defence of its species and its ecosystem, to the death if necessary.

One thing I have learned so far is that: it is futile learning how to fish without learning the river.

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.

When I lived in Bristol, activists – including me – would be forever falling out over theories of society, ecology, politics and culture. Out here we need each other too much to fall out over such things.

studied marketing for four years, as part of an undergraduate degree in business. At the time I remember reading how each of us is exposed, on average, to around three thousand adverts every day – in shops, magazines and newspapers, on billboards, vans, radio and television. That was between 1996 and 2002, before the internet copy-and-pasted itself into every nook and cranny of our lives. I can only imagine what the figure might be in the digital age.

Seeing that advert felt strange, like a jolt. I can hardly complain, considering that my current exposure to advertising is tiny in comparison. Yet, as it drove past, its abruptness and overconfidence contrasted starkly with the woods behind it. If it didn’t need permission to expose my mind to irresponsible, sexed-up marketing for an unhealthy, addictive product, does that mean I don’t need permission to put an axe through the advert the next time it drives by? My mind is private property too – perhaps the most private of property.

The only work I receive any money for is writing, and everyone is telling me that quitting social media, phones and email isn’t exactly going to boost my prospects with that. Everything else I do gratis, and always for something or someone I care about.

the statement is mostly a small collection of bank charges which everyone in Ireland with less than €2,500 in their account has to pay – above that and banking is free. It’s effectively a tax on the poor.

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.

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil.

I’m restless. I remind myself that I am an animal, not a disembodied thinker, and so I follow the urge to go sauntering.

His is no ordinary wheelbarrow. It was handmade when he was a young man, and is still working perfectly fine today.

I visit the village well, the gathering house (An Dáil), the unconsecrated graveyard, the tiny school and post office, along with Tigh na Rí, the house of the last Blasket King, which appears to be the smallest house of all.

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.

It used to be that people who suffered from hayfever in their youth grew out of it later in life, but with increasing levels of carbon in the atmosphere promoting pollen production in trees, we are now seeing the trend in reverse: people who never had it in their youth are developing it in their thirties and forties.

I sometimes wonder, however, if our constant exposure to the world’s best has degraded our relationship to our ordinary, local musicians in the same way that exposure to porn stars with fake 34DD breasts and 10 inch penises has degraded and damaged our sexual relationships with those ordinary men and women we call our lovers, our husbands and wives, our girlfriends and boyfriends.

Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s The Islandman

Muiris Ó Súilleabháin’s Twenty Years A-Growing

Even after five months away from football, I know it’s May, and that means crunch time. Excitement. Tension. Passion. Roaring. Shouting. Swearing. Cycling home from the lake one day, I notice a game on a big screen television glaring out of a pub window. I stop, stare in for a moment, and am surprised to feel absolutely nothing.

JP is in his late sixties, but you wouldn’t know it. He has that kind of bubbly, youthful enthusiasm that’s becoming rare even among young people. His physique, like that of my seventy-three-year-old father, belies the idea that to age is to become unfit,

Expect the end of the world. Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.