BROOKLINE, Mass. Cara Linsdorf used to be, by her own admission, addicted to her BlackBerry handheld device. “We’d be in a restaurant” she says of her husband Carl, “and I’d get up three or four times to go check email. I’d say I had to pluck my eyebrows, or fix my bra strap, or check to make sure I’d put the seat down when I went before.”
“What do they call this stuff we’re breathing again–ether? Phlogiston?”
After an intervention by friends, Cara decided to go “off the grid”, as Carl had been planning to do as soon as he finished graduate school, severing her electronic ties to the world beyond the people she was with at the time. “I canceled my internet connection and got rid of my cell phone and blow dryer,” she says, a big smile across her face. “I’m a much happier person now, although my hair is stringier.”
“We tried doing without glasses, but the red wine left stains on the table.”
Cara and Carl are so-called “New Luddites”–young people who deliberately unplug from the internet, email and mobile communications in order to lead fuller, richer, more intense lives. “It’s hard at first,” says Norm Visbeck of Evanston, Illinois, “but once you cancel cable TV and don’t get that monthly bill, you pick up momentum.”
“The Tunnel of Love is more meaningful when you swim it.”
In Visbeck’s case, he downshifted first to a rotary phone, then none at all, and within a few weeks he was eating breakfast cereal with his hands. “People forget that cutlery is a recent innovation,” he notes, pulling down a volume of a print encyclopedia from his bookshelf rather than using Wikipedia. “Cro-Magnon man developed prehensile skills about the same time General Mills came out with Lucky Charms.”
“Get the Kellogg’s Snack-Pak. It’s got all our favorites in convenient single-serving boxes!”
For some, however, the descent into an earlier, simpler way of life sometimes leads them to depths their peers consider beneath them. “Cara and Carl are nice enough people,” says Jim Tracy, who owns the unit down the hall from the Linsdorfs, “but they stopped paying their monthly condo fees when they went primitive, and every other owner in the building has to pick up the slack.”
“I move we amend the By-Laws to eliminate condo fees!”
As a result, Tracy says, his relations with the neo-primitives have cooled to reserved “hellos” in the hall, and he fears that things will get worse before they get better. “They sit on the stairs chattering and grab food from your bags when you come back from the grocery store,” he says as he ducks to avoid a gob of fecal matter that Carl throws at him. “I wish they’d get mountain bikes or take up golf or something and go outside.”
