Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology – A Smart, Riveting Experiment in Simple Living That Reveals the Surprising Science of Happiness (P.S.)

Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology – A Smart, Riveting Experiment in Simple Living That Reveals the Surprising Science of Happiness (P.S.)

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. “Will do readers more good than a thousand ‘self-help’ books crowding best-seller lists. It will make you think about your own life more than you’ve thought about it for years, and for that service we can be deeply grateful to the talented Eric Brende.” - Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age “Brende demonstrats that it is possible to pursue Thoreau’s ideals today, and perhaps emerge the richer for it.” - Michael Korda, author of Country Matters 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. Eric Brende has degrees from Yale, Washburn University, and MIT, and has received a Citation of Excellence from the National Science Foundation and a graduate fellowship from the Mellon Foundation in the Humanities. At the insistence of his editor, he now has an e-mail account at the local library but continues to minimize modern technology for himself and his family. Eric and Mary Brende have recently relocated to an old-town section in St. Louis, where Eric makes his living as a rickshaw driver and a soap maker. Better Off Flipping the Switch on Technology By Eric Brende Perennial Copyright © 2005 Eric Brende All right reserved. ISBN: 0060570059 Chapter One Seeds of Discontent I used to be as optimistic as anyone about technology. Once asked ingrade school to draw a picture of what my home would look likewhen I grew up, I sketched, in crayon, a transparent hemisphere restingon a single pole and a little flying saucer containing me, my wife,and our many kids about to dock at it. There were exactly eight littleheads (besides mine and my wife's) peeking over the rim of the craft,all identical and propagated with the help of a fertility drug. When I reached my early teens, I never failed to watch an episodeof Star Trek , and I read almost every piece of science fiction IsaacAsimov wrote. On our family's first cross-country trip, I became ecstaticwhen we got caught in a traffic jam on the Oakland Bay Bridge. Toa midwestern boy, traffic jams were exotic events in which only specialpeople living in modernistic cities took part. There was always an undertow to my technological infatuation,however, which at first I was loath to acknowledge. On that trip outwest, I spent most of the time carsick. A few years later, after returningto the lazy metropolis of Topeka, Kansas, I began to notice anomaliesin the mechanical utopia of our modernized household. After wegot an automatic dishwasher, the size of the pile of dirty plates on thecountertop didn't decrease at all. If anything, it increased. My dadbought one of the first word processors ever made in the hopes of easingthe time and effort of writing. He spent so much time with thatmachine, I almost never saw him again. In my grade-school years, the neighborhood seemed alive withchildren out in the street playing stickball and hide-and-seek. But theolder I grew, the more deserted the street became -- except for the cars,of course, which had multiplied over time and made playing out-of-doorsmore perilous. After supper even the cars went into hibernation;the only signs of life