Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology

This is a real life example of what wonderful things we can experience when we shut off technology and truly live our lives. The author perfectly articulates his unplugging experiment, and all of the incredible benefits anyone could enjoy if they would just slow down and look and listen.

What makes this such an interesting book is a variety of things. First off the author is MIT educated, Catholic and willing along with his new wife to try an experiment. Live with as little technology as possible for over a year, maybe two. True, they do not go cold turkey, because they do own a car which they keep and use for over a year. But considering the way they grew up and lived, going sans indoor plumbing, regular washer and dryer, cook stove, refrigerator, computer, telephone is a huge cultural shock for someone. Especially if its a way of life and not simply a break from the regular world. Loved reading how they struggled to shed the small issues like sleeping in, or taking naps when the work became so hard and the heat outside to hot. Interesting reading how they dealt with work, cooking, canning food, using an old wringer washer that required hauling water, heating it etc. Same with taking a hot bath. Hot summers and something as simple as moving the bed layout and opening windows for a cross breeze. Or the work of planting enough pumpkins and sorghum to sell to at least meet expenses. Learning how to use a horse drawn plow and harvester. Rasing chickens and swine for food and all that is involved with culling them and preserving what one grows so one can survive and eat during the non productive winter months. Then having a baby at home and incorporating washing diapers, late night feedings, with keeping the homestead going on less sleep. Dealing with squabbles that were about her sewing away and he's hungry from working all day, yet nothing has been cooked for dinner. Was pleased to read his defense if you will of the women who co-own and run a family homestead which is what the Amish and many Mennonites do. How they are indeed equal partners at home. Had never heard the term Minnimites before and it suggested to me that there are far more Minnimite minded folks here in the states that I realized. Including here in the Sierras. Albeit they aren't 'organized' religiously, but their lifestyle certainly denotes a simpler more content way of life. One looks around them and see all the 'labor saving devises' we have and yet so many people complain of not having enough time to do things. Maybe all these modern technological items waste more of our time than they save? How many hours, as the book shows, are wasted watching mindless shows on TV, or reading or talking idle nonsense on the Internet? How much money is spent joining a fitness center, when planting a vegetable garden and tending it a half hour a day would be just as or more healthy? How much better would we be if more of us rode bikes, rather than jump in the gas fueled car to drive to the store to buy stuff we probably don't need and junk food we really don't need? The book simply is a thought provoking book that even the hardest person will be made gentler by. I cannot help but think, anyone who reads it will be changed in some small way.

Eric Brende's personal look at the impact of technology on the modern world is a book well worth reading (and just as important, readable). As a computer programmer and fan of all things science fiction, I found this book a necessary critique of the "Star Trek"-type attitude that technology is only an agent for good in the world. But this is no dry, boring academic treatise. By writing about his actual life experiences living for 18 months in an Amish-like community, Brende allows us to enter the actual thought process of these people and their decision to forego technologies most of us believe are "essential". He takes us past our stereotypes to understand why they have made the decisions that, frankly, make them seem crazy to the outside world. I initially went into this book assuming that Brende would believe that all technology was evil and destructive. But that is the surprise here: Brende does not think all technology should be rejected outright; instead, all technology should be thoughtfully judged for possible negative side-effects before embracing it whole-heartedly. He calls us to remember the unintended consequences of much of our technology. A case in point he mentions is the use of the telephone. In the community he lived in, there was debate on the use of the telephone after a woman was saved in childbirth after a midwife called a doctor. Everyone agreed that telephones could serve useful purposes (such as the midwife's use), but many worried that overuse of it led to idle chatter and a destruction of interpersonal social communications. Their decision was to continue to have phones available to the community, but not allow them for anything except emergency uses. Considering the fact that you can't sit in any public location today without being bombarded with constant (and banal) cell-phone chattering all around you, it seems to me that the community might be on to something. As we progress to a "Brave New World" of experimentation on human beings for medical reasons, remotely-controlled military weapons systems, and communications overload, I think Brende's book is a welcome wake-up call to analyze what really makes us human and how modern technology was to be the servant of humanity, not our master.

Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology is the story of how a young man and his wife embark upon a journey that at heart is straight out of Thoreau's Walden. Ostensibly, Mr. and Mrs. Brende are seeking a refuge, however temporary, from modernity. What they in fact are doing is more serious: they report back, they are sending us their findings--which is what Thoreau understood Emerson to be saying in his essay on "Self-Reliance": Leave the hurly-burly behind. Clear your head. Come back and tell us what the air is like. Life among the "Minimites" is Brende's addendum to what is by now something of a long-standing tradition (Letters From an American Farmer; Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; On the Road) in American Literature. The idea that anyone today might have reservations about our over-reliance on technology is not itself new; others have been down this road before. But rarely has it been done with such grace and sensitivity. The story begins at MIT, where our narrator (Brende), while working toward his Ph.D., is trying to come to grips with a burgeoning realization that the indiscriminate use of technology exacts a price, and that for some people, that price--a dilution of what might be called the 'joy' we humans can feel when we work with our hands--is indeed a steep price to pay. In Better Off, Brende demonstrates, by putting the gloves on and doing the work himself (under the watchful and often wry eyes of his 'Minimite' friends and neighbors), that we have more control over the technological choices we make in life than most of us ever come to understand, and that there are things we can do to regain some of those old feelings we have lost at the hands of machines. Better Off is exceedingly well-written. Brende has a flair for understatement, and an utterly keen eye for the telling detail and the delightful anecdote. My copy of the book is littered with yellow post-its. I came away from the book with the unalterable sense that I knew these people, these 'Minimites' (especially the Millers). Important to note, too, is that Better Off is not an anti-technological screed. Most of the people Brende lived among depended upon some use of technology: what they tended to do was to use the minimum necessary to accomplish a given task. Tasks! Ends and means! Who talks about these things anymore? By and large, all the characters in the book are trying to lead a balanced existence, and they accomplish this by respecting the power of machinery, and by not letting go of what it is in our physical nature that cries out for some good hard work. And no one works alone. The Minimites, like their 19th-century utopian counterparts, work together: "many hands make work light." Community! There's another of those forgotten words. As Brende says, and it's a good notion to get hold of: "there is no end to the possible uses of technology...but in all cases it (technology) must serve our needs, not the reverse." Philosophically speaking, that's

Other reviewers have summarized this book so I'll just make a few comments. This book really draws you in and lets you share the life they live without technology. He minimizes discussions of theology, for which I was thankful. I am hoping to change my life in ways that will give me more time and mastery over my life rather than my modern life which in some ways has mastery over me. I love books which present an alternative way of living- I can learn from their mistakes and also pick out the best parts to put together to make a new life. I also wanted to mention that I did not get the anti-woman impression that the other feminist reviewer did. I don't know that I call myself a feminist but I certainly am a woman who identifies with many of their beliefs. As far as I could tell he treated his wife with respect and I think that showed in the telling of the story. He made if clear that this adventure was something that he wanted more than she did, and that after the 18 months were over it would be her choice what to do next. When he mentioned Mary gabbing with the neighbors, he mentioned that he did too. In the previous paragraph for example, he had mentioned that he spent a half-hour every time he made a photocopy because he had to catch up on the news in town. In the section on childbirth, he just tries to balance the dangers of home birth (they had three midwives plus a doctor stopped by) with the dangers of hospital births (hospital infections, 1 out of 3 births in boston hospitals is by cesarean). In summary, it's a wonderful book if you like books which let you explore someone else's life. If you are overwhelmed by how much you pay (in time and money) for technologies like car upkeep and power tools, you might even learn a thing or two.

This is a wonderful book, warm, and very well written. Never pedantic, Brende in a wise and gentle way brings the reader to a deep reflection about our choices regarding technology. Our tools may in fact not be our friend, and the myth of progress which we all have been seduced into believing, may be just that, a myth. Why would a student soon to be awarded a graduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say anything subversive about the Great God of Technology? It was not sabotage or subversion. If that had been the case "Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology" would be boring instead of the page-turner that it is. Brende does not push the reader to go "cold turkey", but asks instead, "how much technology do we need?' Even during his undergraduate years at Yale it dawned on Brende that labor saving devices are creating more labor than they save. Between semesters at MIT, Brende decided it was time to take the slow way to the Midwest. Somewhere in Pennsylvania a man in very clean well-pressed black clothes, wearing a tall hat and a long black beard got on the bus. At a rest stop he learned that the man was from an obscure part of the country--a location Brende has agreed not to reveal in his book. The bearded man was not Amish, but, adopting a simple lifestyle, he lived in a community Brende refers to as Minimites. Brende went on a quest to this community, searching for the balancing point and learned that an economy of means is sought in everything--using only as much technology as is necessary. And exercise, social interactions, a test of one's wits, whether it be a barn raising or a threshing--everything is combined with community.