The Way Home: Tales From a Life Without Technology

"They’re great friends. They meet and drink beer in the pub every week. Well, he went off grid, holed up in a cabin in Galway. That meant cutting the umbilical connection with technology and virtual realities that most of us have. He had no laptop, no phone, and no electricity. He wrote the book on paper. Remember that stuff? And with a pencil – one of those wooden things with graphite running through the middle. The book is a reflective account of what happened. It was not a stunt, it was not a pose. It was often lonely and uncomfortable. And you can read it if you want, with a sense of schadenfreude , as a catalogue of those discomforts. But it’s a lot more than that: it’s an inquiry into what it means to live as a thriving human being. It’s part of the age-old search for the good life. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Living that way involves asking what sort of creatures we are. Very few people have the nerve to look at themselves, or to look at their species, as Boyle does. The results of his examination are not terribly surprising, but they’re vitally important. All of us have to choose whether or not we’re going to be ourselves. Most of us delegate the construction of our personalities to big corporations, or to industrial society, or to other abstract entities, or to networks of people we’ve never met and are never going to meet. But we don’t have to do that. We can opt for the adventure of being alive. And of being us . Few of us will. It’s scary and hard, as Boyle shows, and everything around us insists that it’s impossible. But Boyle shows us that it can be done, and that if we do it we’ll be immeasurably richer. I don’t think they’re saying different things. Paul Kingsnorth is saying that contentment’s disastrous if you’re going to be a writer . Paul identifies himself as a writer: it’s a crucial part of what he is. But I don’t think Mark Boyle self-identifies as a writer. Or, if he does, ‘writer’ would be much further down his list of self-defining words than ‘writer’ is on Paul’s own list. Paul would love to be content, which is one of the reasons why he sees the writing life as dangerous: writing stops contentment; contentment stops writing. So Paul Kingsnorth the writer has to adopt an approach to contentment that’s different from the approach of Paul Kingsnorth the family man."