Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology
- ISBN13: 9780060570057
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- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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What is the least we need to achieve the most? With this question in mind, MIT graduate Eric Brende flipped the switch on technology. He and his wife, Mary, ditched their car, electric stove, refrigerator, running water, and everything else motorized or “hooked to the grid,” and spent eighteen months living in a remote community so primitive in its technology that even the Amish consider it antiquated. Better Off is the story of their real-life experiment to see whether our cell phones, wide-screen TVs, and SUVs have made life easier — or whether life would be preferable without them. This smart, funny, and enlightening book mingles scientific analysis with the human story to demonstrate how a world free of technological excess can shrink stress — and waistlines — and expand happiness, health, and leisure.This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more…. More >>
Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology
Tagged with: Better • Flipping • Switch • Technology
Yet another example of someone (who, like a certain French Queen who liked to play “milkmaid” with custom china milk pails) has NO idea what “labor” is. And don’t forget, that back in the “good ol’ days” with lots of labor and few machines, the average person could only afford two suits of clothes a year and never traveled further than 30 miles from home. What a whiny, self-indulgent pin-head. The author should spend 18 months in the Sudan or Mongolia or any of hundreds of countries that have no labor saving devices and let the family he replaces deal with the ‘hardships’ he’s fled. Yet another overfed, overbred idiot spouts nonsense.
For example, he talks about a seamless whole (meaning the family) and gripes about ‘going to the gym’ after work or having to round up the kids for ‘quality time’. He should have read Dickens. The only quality time workers in the 19th century had with their children was if they worked the same shift in the coal mine. Go further back in time? Lots of free time trying to grow a crop in Tang China or raise a herd in Mongolia. (note that the Chinese spent a lot of time developing those nasty labor saving machines, esp. for agriculture. What could they have been thinking? They could have been spending ‘quality time’ with their children. As they all slowl starved to death) Until very recently children (and women) were an expendable resource for rich and poor. Oh yeah, and how about trying to wash clothes w/o a modern washing machine? they used to call washday “Blue Monday” for a reason. Try cleaning a carpet w/o a vacuum cleaner. Women had *lots* of free time for the children w/o technology. Wooops . . .but the kids are out working the fields, or down in the mine about as soon as they can walk. Oh well, she can spend some quality time with them as they die of black lung, gangrene, or a heart attack from overwork.
What a moron! They only reason he could indulge himself in this nonsense is because the world he lives in heavily tech and can support such self indulgent nitwits.
What this idiot seems to overlook (perhaps because using a little logic would spoil his book?) is that technology give him a *CHOICE*!!! He chose to indulge himself playing at being a ‘nobel savage’. Other people can choose to do the same ONLY because the tech he despises FREES up enough labor to make it possible! The automobile gives FREEDOM to tens of thousands of women and the elderly who otherwise would be trapped at home. (It takes a lot of time and muscle to harness a rig or even saddle a horse. And a horse can’t simply be garaged when not in use. Oh, wait. spend quailty time with the kids taking care of the horse(s). When they get back from the fields/mines. Learning to read and write is over rated anyway)
Read it at the library. Interlibrary loan if you must. Do NOT pay for this tripe. You’ll only incourage him.
BOOK, Not worth it at *any* price.
The writing is prosaic, the contemplation is shallow — the narrative is worth no more than a blog, with apologies to the occasional blogger worth reading.
Brende’s tale of entering into a community that shuns unnecessary technology is not perfect. Yet it’s refreshingly honest and to the point in most cases. While this book would certainly be better if he spent more time detailing daily life without electricity or motors, or allowed his wife Mary to have more of a voice in the telling of the experience, he doesn’t try to gloss over his own failings and ineptitudes. He allows the reader to see him as a human, with very human flaws, entering into an experiment based solely on curiosity and a willingness to follow that curiosity where it leads.
His arrogance towards the very community that takes him in and winds up giving him support does come through in places, as does his rather chauvinistic treatment of his wife. Yet, where the book succeeds is that it encourages the reader to look past those flaws and delve into an almost mystical realm of community that works on a level that modern society largely fails at.
I found this refreshing in that it doesn’t paint a perfect rosy picture of a Utopian Luddite society, but rather it pulls the reader into questioning some assumptions about a merger of Technophiles and Luddites to achieve a level of awareness and interaction between humans and devices on a conscious level.
This is an easy, fun read, and is not a diatribe for or against a point of view. It’s a glimpse into another way of viewing the world. It’s a recommended tale of adventure and unlearning.
He gives us another way of thinking about the world without being on the grid. Eric Brende also discusses some of the challenges he and his wife faced while being off the grid. Awesome book and opens your mind up to new ways of living.
When I saw this book, I bought it immediately. The premise is excellent – take an MIT grad student and put him among the Amish/Mennonites to evaluate how much technology we really need to live a full life.
Unfortunately, the author is quite bias. In the first chapter we learn that he is a liberal arts student writing an anti-technology thesis. What a great book this would have been had he been a pro-technology engineering student!!
The author settles into life with his hard-working wife at his side. He’s helped at every turn by the community he’s in. His remarks about how easy life are pretty ironic since he is making his living selling cash crops (pumpkins and molasses) at a road-side stand where “city-folk” are buying his wares. Where would he be if this was a truly rural community cut off from city/suburban interaction?
My other complaint about this book is that the author really didn’t do any sort of assessment of the toil of women and children in this society. Though he acknowledges women work very long hours in comparison to men – I have to question how “easy” this life is for those that are not male. He rather arrogantly dismisses this as he equates the Amish religion to everyone being feminine in nature. Really quite illogical and mystifying.
Finally, if he’d been an engineer then he wouldn’t have left for the reason he stated. Biodiesel in 4×4 ATV — wouldn’t that be almost like a horse?? But then – I wasn’t convinced that was the real reason they decided to leave.
While there are definitely some very valid points in the book, the author’s opinions and prejudices overshadow what could have been an excellent field experiment.