It's rare to find someone who is completely at ease with their internet use. Who can look without flinching at a record of how much time they spend online – 24 hours a week, on average, according to a recent Ofcom report – and think: “Great, I am spending my precious time on Earth wisely”? It is common to speak of feeling “disconnected” in this hyper-connected digital era. We feel that our social interactions are becoming shallow and empty, that we have traded proper conversation for text messages, Facebook likes and Twitter banter. We believe that constantly updating social-media feeds and 24-hour news are killing our attention spans.
In December 2016, Mark Boyle, the author of The Moneyless Man, an account of the three years he spent living without money, set himself a new challenge: he wanted to start living without technology. By learning to survive without running water, electricity or any other mod con, Boyle wanted to “put [his] finger on the pulse of life again”, to experience real “intimacy, friendship and community” and to reconnect with nature. More than that, he wanted to find a way to opt out of the modern economy and everything he sees as wrong with it, from the degradation of the environment and social inequality to reality TV, social media and other non-stop digital distractions.
The Way Home, Boyle's memoir of his first year off-grid, is fascinating. There's something irresistible about an account of someone building their own house from scratch and then surviving mostly on road kill, fishing and vegetables grown with the aid of their own “humanure”. When his writing is at its best it is a poetic meditation on the almost-mystical benefits of falling in sync with nature, of submitting to the light and the seasons rather than to the clock, of noticing the wildlife all around us and respecting our place within it. But Boyle's sanctimony soon becomes wearing and eventually, infuriating.
“I wanted to feel cold and hunger and fear,” Boyle writes of starting his experiment. This fear is sought out. You may feel real fear on a rollercoaster ride, or while free-climbing, or after enlisting in the army just because you want to feel the life-affirming thrill of a close encounter with death. The danger may be real too. But there's something fundamentally different between these experiences and the fear and cold and hunger felt by, say, civilians whose homes are being shelled, or migrants on perilous journeys across deserts and oceans.
I imagine that Boyle relishes the discomfort and insecurity of a life without technology because subconsciously he knows that his ideological purity and pig-headedness are the only things preventing him from checking into a warm hotel or visiting his GP. It's the difference between a miserable, rain-sodden camping trip and living in a refugee camp. Boyle owes a greater debt to the 21st century's rapacious, post-industrial economy than he is willing or able to acknowledge.
This doesn't mean that his experiment isn't worthwhile, but one would hope that after all the meditative wood-whittling and barefoot rambling, Boyle might have grappled with such issues and come to a more nuanced understanding of the meaning of his endeavour. By the time he recounts seeing a young Indonesian child transporting buckets of water up a steep mountainside and reflects that a scene he once thought of as primitive might, in fact, offer him new life lessons, I wanted to throw my Kindle (sue me!) at the wall.
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