COMMENT: Getting off the grid

Joni Mitchell told us, in her song Big Yellow Taxi, that “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone”. I can’t argue with her logic. I realised recently there might be a caveat to the sentiments she expressed.

Last week we embarked on a short holiday with some friends on an uninhabited island off the west coast of Ireland. On an overcast day we amassed the supplies we would need for three days away from the world on a small pier and waited for the local fisherman who would ferry us in his boat.

That evening the wind settled to an extent but only after it had rid us of the cloud cover that had hidden the sun.

By dusk we sat around a fire on which to cook, with tents to return to should the weather turn against us. In the end, the sun shone until it dipped below the horizon and we gradually swapped its light for that of a full and glowing moon.

The next morning we awoke to the sound of driving rain and wind so strong that it threatened to tear our tents from their place on the earth and fling them into the sea which lapped only metres from the camp.
We huddled in the largest tent as a group and regaled each other with stories, guitars and conversation.

Phones died with no way to replenish their charge and we waited for the “storm” to pass. After five wet and windy hours it did just that and sun like I’ve never experienced before in Ireland emerged and stayed with us until we embarked upon our return journey. We were lighter in the supply department but our hearts were a little heavier for having to leave what had come to feel like a retreat or, in many ways, a paradise.

Most people reading this will rightly see the above description as nothing more than romantic nonsense and I can’t argue with their logic.

To return to Joni Mitchell however, you have to lose or dispose of something completely to know what you had before and, in our contemporary lives, this is becoming increasingly difficult. Most people would not choose to dispense with communications equipment and access to the latest news and so will never know what they have lost.

There exists a significant movement throughout the world of people who are attempting to live “off the grid”.

There is no little irony in the fact that most of these people communicate, as far as my research and personal experience can attest, through the internet. In its idealised form, this method of living describes a self-sufficient existence taking nourishment from the land and generating the power required from renewable sources. It suffers from a terrible breakdown in internal logic and lapses, essentially, into paradox in that it engages with the world only in order to take what it needs. Its proponents then turn their back on other people who do not share their ethos. It resembles certain religions in many ways, giving the impression that those not on board are less likely to be saved when the apocalypse comes.

While I acknowledge these downsides of the cult, there was something exhilarating about being disconnected from the world for a few days and realising there is an alternative way of living.

As a self-avowed communications addict, I was startled by my feeling of freedom at being disconnected. It was a pleasure not to know what was happening on the streets of Egypt or even on the mainland. For a few days, at least, my most important concern was whether we had harvested enough driftwood from the beach to keep the fire going.

If you put a frog into boiling water it will immediately realise its peril and try to escape. If you put it in warm water and slowly boil it, the frog will not detect the danger and die. I think this is a useful metaphor for the new reality of communications.

I resisted getting a mobile phone for many years. In the end, I broke and since then I, along with many others, have become enmeshed in the seemingly inescapable networks that keep us always on, always available and rarely alone. I have read many accounts of recovering heroin addicts. They describe a similar path. They see and revile the junkies before they themselves become addicted.

If they are lucky enough to break their habit and remain clean, their achievement lasts only as long as they never ever pick up the needle again. However when they take even one hit they may as well have never stopped.

So it was when we reached the mainland. I plugged in my phone and began immediately to fret about work and other commitments which I could only address by opening a computer and plugging back in. It was similar to methadone in that it didn’t deliver a high, it just kept the worst effects of cold turkey from consuming me. I did not want it, I just somehow felt I needed it despite what I had felt in the days when I hadn’t had it.

In the face of all the advantages of modern life lurks a longing for an Arcadian past represented by unspoiled nature which we are slowly destroying to feed the march of modernity.

We devote our time, our lives and the planet we live on to a bewildering stream of the things we have collectively dreamed into existence, telling ourselves that life is getting better and trying to ignore the feeling that we are losing something along the way.