BY JULIAN COOK
IN APRIL of this year, I made the decision to detach myself from the babbling matrix of social media, internet, smartphones, and TV.
I trundled a wheelbarrow full of all my electronic devices down to a riverside and dumped them all in. I felt a burden lift. And, since then, my life has been simpler, cleaner, more organic.
Instead of staring at screens, I stare at trees or the skies. Instead of checking Facebook I sit on a tree stump and watch for signs of the changing of the seasons.
It has changed my life completely. It’s shit.
I have no clue what’s going on in the world. I am frequently howlingly bored. I don’t know what any of my friends are doing, ever, and they’re never in when I spontaneously call round.
Yesterday I tried to make conversation with strangers at a rural pub. They were talking about Stranger Things Season Two. I mentioned a rabbit I’d seen. They discussed the news. I was painfully ignorant of any of it. They left, and I went to the river to stare at my sunken MacBook and curse my own hippy, agrarian idiocy.
It turns out it all my stuff wasn’t an artificial barrier blocking my true self from nature after all. It was all my best stuff, and what in fuck was I thinking?
Our ancestors wrestled with bears so as to lift us from the brutal misery of nature. Stare, stare hard at your phones and their vast gigabytes of our vital human culture.
Trees are boring as shit. Get the new iPhone instead. I wish I could.
This article was written by hand and posted to an editor at the Daily Mash, who typed it up to go online. To mock our Living Without Technology columnist, email and a selection of taunts will be posted to him.
