
Yesterday I read Eric Brende's
Better Off: Flipping the Swith on Technology. It's the account of how Brende and his wife Mary spent 18 months homesteading in a low-tech, Amish-like (Amishish?) farming community. (To protect the group's privacy, he refers to them only by the pseudonym "Minimite.") I have a lot to say about this book, so I'll probably break this up into several posts. (Note: I actually really liked this book and strongly recommend it; if I spend the next three posts tearing it apart, that's just how I learn.)
Brende's ultimate question was about quality of a low-tech life: "How hard and time consuming was this life without 'labor-saving machines'? And was it one Mary and I would consider leading ourseves?" (15)
And his answer is, without the devices--and with more physical work--he and his wife found, paradoxically, that not only were they happier, but they had more time. And the work that they did was more leisurely, even downright inefficient, as Brende found by analyzing a typical day's labor:
While seven hours and fifty minutes were available for the afternooon's work (mainly threshing), only four hours and forty minutes were spent in actual physical work.... All this [other] time was sheer cushioning--the benefits of cameraderie, conversation, fresh air, and natural scenery, without the labor. (161)
That's nice, I guess. But you know why Brende and his wife were able to live this way?
Because neither of them had to have jobs.
How did they pull that off? First, Brende received some "fellowship money" from his university. He is quick to point out that it is not a
large amount, and that by itself would not pay the rent for the entire 18 month experiment (23). But (and second) this rent of which he speaks--$150 a month for a furnished house with a garden--is phenomenal. A kid with a part-time job could pay that. Brende's meagre fellowship would pay for ten months of that! Even better, their landlord was often willing to let them work off the rent instead of paying cash. For the Brendes, life's single largest financial struggle--affording a home--had been mostly removed.
Third, the "Minimite" lifestyle neatly eliminates most bills. No electricity, no phone, no running water, no insurance... their mailbox must have been blessedly empty. And fourth, their neighbors, both "Minimite" and "English," are amazingly generous, surprising them with frequent gifts of vegetables, meat, and even a free dairy cow. Overall, the Brende's living expenses were reduced--largely through others' generosity--to an enviable minimum. This allowed them to devote themselves full-time to the task they had set for themselves. And they certainly needed the time:
Mary and I were discovering now that it wasn't the sheer physical burden of unmechanized labor that was daunting. It was the skill. To make matters harder, skill was not concentrated in a single specialty but scattered in dozens of little knacks and hundreds of bits of knowledge, all foreign to the button-pusher. On top of all this, the foremost skill was balancing and integrating all the little bits into a single livlihood. (50)
The work of a lifetime! What I'm getting from this--and this is my conclusion, not Brende's--is that
real labor is actually a luxury. Only someone who doesn't have to work for someone else can work for himself. Is it satisfying to grow your own vegetables? Sew your own clothes? Homeschool your kids? Sure! Okay, now do it all after spending nine hours behind a cash register at Walmart. Still feel so good? There's a reason most of us don't wash our clothes by hand,* Eric, and it's not because we're seduced by shiny gadgets.
Admittedly, the money question is not what Brende set out to address; he just wanted to find out if the low-tech life was worth living. And, OK, it is. But like any desirable lifestyle, it's more than most of us could afford. Brende may be quick to point out that he was not wealthy, but he was certainly rich in time.
*Interesting fact: the
hand-powered clothes washer Brende recommends actually costs
more than our new high-efficiency electric washer did.