Escaping the digital rat race for a simple life

It was March 2020, still in the early days of the pandemic. My husband and I had packed up our entire existence and departed on one of the last flights from London, soon to be locked down, en route to Cluj, Romania, the nearest big city to where I had grown up and where we intended to make a home.

An elderly lady was in the row ahead of us, wearing a traditional paisley scarf over her hair. She was visibly agitated. She had defiantly pulled the mandatory surgical mask from her mouth. The stewardess tried to reason with her, but the woman was resolute. "It's just the flu. My daughter is a nurse!” she screeched. Even then, the whole plane was split between skeptics and true believers. You could hear faint rumblings of teams forming at the sight of this minimum viable battle.

Technology has become godlike under the cover of the invisible hand and with increasing complexity and illegibility to the layman. It's subordinate only to its own ends, as is repeatedly recorded in the anxious genre of runaway tech dystopias.

There was a general mood of bewilderment and irritation. The pandemic had knocked us all into a state of uncertainty, but our personal plans to change directions, to extract ourselves from London and set down our roots elsewhere, had begun long before the virus had forced our hands. We wanted a family, children, community, and a more connected, spiritually rich life that fit our values. London, despite certain advantages, couldn’t offer us what we wanted.

London is rootless by design; it’s one of its main attractions. You go there to consume: places, experiences, people. Even your self is driven to be a constantly updated creation. Living in a city like London is thrilling, and few places in the world are more suited to exploring what you want to do and who you want to be. But this consumption is not optional; it’s the point. You’re in flux, just like everyone else. Scratch almost any high-flying city dweller, and you find someone who longs to live in a cottage somewhere.

I’ll forever be grateful for my time there because it’s where I met my husband. We’d be a very unlikely pair as a Romanian and a Kiwi if metropolitan life weren’t attractive to us. But for both of us, the city was more a tool than a destination. It was a means to an end, and the end had come.

There were also more practical limitations. We had a lovely apartment in London close to work but were spending enormous amounts of money on rent. In our neighborhood, knife crime became a looming threat, and walking in the dark was close to an extreme sport. After I saw two, now traditional, moped muggings — two men swooping in on the sidewalk on a moped, one wielding a hammer to show they mean business — in one week, my baseline feeling of safety plummeted even further.

Having fifteen Nepalese restaurants in a two-mile radius didn’t compensate for us not knowing our neighbors and them not being that interested in us either. The city seemed built to feed consumption to its prized producers. We were trying to become a bit more than that and make some nutty, inefficient decisions in the process, like having children.

Romania

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My old family home, which I have returned to, is in a small city in Transylvania. It's a small home, but it means our fixed costs are down immensely, and we have a lot more leeway to save or experiment with different opportunities — in my case, it was starting a podcast.

My mom is now my neighbor. This presents certain difficulties, as one might expect. My mother is a flamboyant, loud, creative Eastern European woman; my husband is a profoundly Anglo engineer from New Zealand. One person’s talking sounds like screaming to another; occasionally, lit cigarettes are left in places where they don’t belong.

We cook together once or twice a week and have a few different projects to improve our little intergenerational hub, but we do have enough space and distance to live together without a constant battle of wills. There is a lot of romanticism baked into the idea of multigenerational living. However, it can be a challenge given the immense cultural distance between recent generations and the additional pressures of marrying someone from a different culture.

Family is often tricky, but the benefits far outweigh the problems. "Who is staying home with the kids?" is not a question we must ask. It is just a short walk from the home office to soothe or feed the crying baby in the next room over. Though we do almost all of the child care, my mother is here to help when we need her. And likewise, we’re also here to help my mother with whatever she needs. As a widow, she’s become self-reliant, but giving back a little help is nice, even if she “can do it on her own.”

The garden has become a shared, central project where the nature of these relationships is especially pronounced. Tending one’s garden, as it turns out, is a helpful metaphor for a reason. Romania has scorching summers, abrupt autumns, and not rarely the casual -15° Celsius day in January. The garden sets its demands accordingly. Spring is all about pruning and planting. Summer means watering every day. Autumn is the time to harvest and preserve some of the few edibles we grow. Timing is everything. The work requires everyone to pitch in. The rhythms and harshness of the seasons, the responsibilities they impose on us, and the fruits of this labor have been an essential glue for our relationship.

The key lesson of the garden is that there are no opt-out clauses, shortcuts, or tech-assisted workarounds to these fundamental obligations. So much of the disconnection we experienced in London was based on finally having the option not to need one another. Every new layer of technology we've added to our lives in recent years has been a form of disintermediation, removing friction, costs, and especially humans.

Atomization is a revealed preference because each instance we get atomized is more comfortable and "utility-maximizing" than its non-atomized and human-friction-addled alternative. Every need and every urge has a tech-aided comfort shortcut based on supernormal stimuli. Digital forms of soma are everywhere. Any widget or screen is an all-singing, all-dancing amusement machine. Most food is a hyper-palatable ticket to instant comfort. Pornography is oozing out of every pore of the internet, and any combination of stacked genitalia that you might enjoy is seconds away.

When one transitions from such a chain of experiences to a far less glamorous and less immediately comfortable life, there is a sensation of waking into a cold bedroom. The dream fades. The blankets are peeled back. But the day has begun, and it is yours to make.

Escaping the Matrix

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In "Tools for Conviviality," Ivan Illich diagnoses the escalating problems created by the technological society and its logical successor, the technocratic society, resulting from a misunderstanding of the purpose of technology. Technology is simply a glorified tool. Any tool is subordinated to human purposes. A tool that does not serve human purposes is a bad tool. We've let technology become something else.

Technology has become godlike under the cover of the Invisible Hand and with increasing complexity and illegibility to the layman. It's subordinate only to its own ends, as is repeatedly recorded in the anxious genre of runaway tech dystopias. "The Matrix" and "Black Mirror," among countless others, all tell the same underlying tale: Tech has been turned against us. The tool has become the master, but it doesn't have to be that way. Tech must re-engage with purpose and virtue, with what it means to be human. But first, the humans who make the tech must do the same.

For my family, putting purpose first and thinking about our values explicitly has served us well in this respect. This doesn't mean that we have a perfect relationship with technology, that we're not sometimes frazzled and chained to our screens, even tucked away in the shadows of the mountains of Transylvania. But, on the whole, using technology has given us significantly more freedom than it has taken. It has allowed us to be here in the first place, to ask these questions, and even seek the right answers.

The modern world sets out a default life script sculpted by myriad incentives and promises of status. It is not easy to have the knowledge and the confidence to take a step back and assess which of these pressures to follow and which to ignore. I don’t think I would have been able to make these decisions much earlier in my life without understanding what was on the other side. I was under the same spell as everyone I knew, riding along the same determined path toward a goal I couldn’t have honestly defended or even defined. Career success and a long checklist of novel, cosmopolitan experiences on the way there, maybe. But what about those experiences aside from a few nice-looking Instagram photos?

What happens once I arrive at the destination, assuming there is one? I guess more of the same stuff: “success” and “experiences,” whatever those things meant. Fortunately, I realized pretty early that the horizon line led nowhere I wanted to go and used my time in the default world to set myself up for a life I wanted, or anyway one I understood and could be fashioned on my terms. On our way out, we sacrificed a few things: convenience, culture, and yes, the restaurants. But the city often felt like an expensive amusement park where we paid for our ticket but weren’t going on any of the rides any more. Leaving it behind didn’t feel like much of a sacrifice in the end, and it doesn’t feel that way now, but time will tell.

I know my escape isn't possible for everyone. The opportunity to exit to a place where you have family, where you can live cheaply, and where intergenerational reciprocity is still a core value is a unique blessing. It would have never occurred to me that my mother didn't want to be my neighbor or would rather rent out the second house than have us live there. There wouldn't even be a second house in a different cultural paradigm — it exists to facilitate living closely to the family. There was an obvious path for us, but that’s not true for most.

At the same time, parts of this lifestyle are possible for many: creating new ways of depending on people in real life, using digital means to sell your time or your intellectual output to a bigger market on your own terms, being purposeful about how you use technology and avoiding the trap of becoming its slave. The possibilities have never been greater, but neither have the distractions.

There is no perfect recipe for harvesting technology's upside while leaving behind the negatives. You are wrestling with forces that know you better than yourself, and you will fail often. But remember that what you're dealing with is just a dressed-up tool surrounded by a moat of limbic candy. All you have to do is make it to the other side.

Here is a fine place to stop. It’s late; our dinner is bubbling on the stove, and I can hear the faint cries of a waking baby coming from the other end of the hall.