Life off the Grid; Living sine Technology

The day technology failed me was the day I lost touch with people. Society has become so dependent on the need for science that we're barely able to function without the comforts of it. And when technology stops working, ceases in its functionality for us, we become hopelessly lost and disconnected. That which we have designed and created for our ease and purpose, disconnects us from actually being able to communicate and be present with one another. We are dependent upon it -- for many (of which I am a part) the computer age generation is entirely dependent upon this technology to be able to function and participate with the greater society and world at large. My present situation serves as the perfect case study of how impacted an individual life is when technology ceases to function.

Martin Heidegger and others hypothesized and speculated on the impact and problem of technology. We cease to live when it works or doesn't work unexpectedly. How much of our lives depend on the function of super computers? How much information is filed on hard drives? Where else is this information stored? What happens when it stops working and breaks down? On the societal level, a large-scale loss of technology would be cataclysmic. The world would stop. No lights. No energy. No phones. No form of communication. No satellites. What of our world exists outside of these constructs to keep us going? Anyone in a hospital on life support would be dead. Forget about your dialysis appointment... Forget about picking up a phone or the internet or the TV to check-in with someone. What would we do? What would be left? The cataclysmic part is worse. How much of military technology is safeguarded? Who is to say that bombs would not be erratically deployed at the first moment of breakdown -- that everything would not be destroyed? Yes, the apocolypitc-doom-of-us-all perspective may be out there. But is it impossible? How many of us as individuals have been dumbstruck and lost when a virus has taken down our virtual world? What do we do when our virtual technological unities break and we're left bereft, writing on paper, by hand, in the dark because we cannot check our emails, social forums, or even get our computers to turn on? If we were isolated, solitary, who would we even be able to reach out to for help?

Even as neighbors, how many of us are strangers, connected more to some image of a person in a mechanical box that we've never met in the flesh than to other fleshy, breathing beings around us? How dependent on cars and cell phones and Facebook and Blogger and YouTube and Gmail Chat are we that our individual lives and connections would be nearly impossible to maintain if a virus, theft, or act of God took those dependencies? Where would we be without them? Would we still be able to live, work, interact, socially connect? To what degree would depression destroy an individual in the moment of complete disconnect from connections made based on the utility of scientific technology? At what point would an individual succumb to utter loneliness and despair with the forced removal of an ability to connect with people?

I am the case study of that individual. I am the example of how failed technology can be ruinous. I am the impacted person, lost from the mainstream connections of the world. I am living off the grid. And it is isolating. The forced cut-off from the majority of my social network is painful. Living - and making a living - is nearly impossible. This is what it feels like to be on the fringe. And desperate. How am I to overcome the circumstance technology has delivered me to and live without the commonalities of virtual/technological social interaction?

How did I come to this? My fated day of life off the grid began a month ago: July 26, 2010. Years of living with severe depression and an inability to break out of denial to deal with my problems directly attacked at once. I awoke that Monday morning to a repossesed Ford Focus, a shut-off cell phone (thank you, AT&T), and a job from which I was "removed from the schedule." However, I still had a landline, supportive roommates, and a functioning laptop. I was still able to communicate via technology (except for when I left my house) and be reached via an archaic house phone. [Imagine if that did not exist!]

Despite the support and list of haves verses have-nots, depression over my car removed me from any desire to leave my house. And so I hid. From humanity. From other fleshy beings. For days. After a few days of locking myself in my room, flipping through TV channels, pulling covers over my head, avoiding the landline and people, I decided to emerge from my cocoon of self-induced despair. I walked through my neighborhood (on the outskirts of where there are Section 8 Houses) to the busstop adjacent from my street. Armed with a grad school ID from a university I am on leave from, I waited for the bus. A stranger stood beside me. Cars passed on the street. Cyclists dodged the sidewalk and the edge of the road. Pedestrians wired to iPods, screaming into Blue Tooth devices, thumbing texts, passed by unaware of their surroundings.

The woman beside me spoke, "You have a beautiful tattoo."
I stared into the open air beyond vehicles and a man sitting on a stoop across from me. I thought for a half-second. My backpiece -- a phoenix bursting into flames with a crumpled piece of paper and a passage from the Tao Te Ching -- was covered by a t-shirt.
"On your foot," the stranger added.
I looked down at the crow on my right foot. I smiled. "Thank you."
We chatted until our buses arrived. She filled the empty air, wishing me well. Before boarding her bus, she shook my hand. "It was really nice meeting you today."

How many times have opportunities to open up to a stranger, to meet and impact someone new, presented themselves? How often has a preoccupation with a text or a shuffle of a song snuck-up and usurped the possiblity for impacting the life of a stranger? To what extent have we lost the ability to interact with flesh and sinew standing among us because of the amount of time we spend preoccupied with avoiding breathing specimens of human life beside us for something distant?

I've spent the past month riding the bus and interacting with strangers, connecting with people who would have been obstacles on the street if my cell phone were permanently affixed to my hand. I would have missed opportunities to speak with a person -- sacrificed for a piece of technology I was convinced at one point that I could not live without. I used to be in need of my phone at all times; I have even been criticized by men buying me drinks at the bar for texting nonstop. Circumstance has forced me to take a step back and make a connection. Now, I listen.

Where does this incessant need to connect stem from? What does it even signify or mean? Who cares about when/if technology falls apart?

Two days ago my laptop broke. A virus? The hard drive? I'm still trying to diagnose the problem. I borrowed an old dinosaur of a Dell, mourning the potential life-threatening disease of my less-than-two-year-old HP Pavilion. I was devastated. I am a writer. I work online. I NEED TECHNOLOGY. Sacrifice my car, my phone. But take away Gmail, Elance, Sittercity, Craigslist, Facebook and I'm a total waste. The old dinosaur Dell shutdown mid-email around 9:15 this morning. I am shut out. Technology -- and the tricks at defragging, rebooting, reformatting -- fail. And I am fading away in a society driven by technology, in a time where jobs have to be found and applied for online. We are dependent and at the mercy of computer-age technology.

And so, the catch-22 of technology, the problems and limitations of science, are real. By harnessing technology, the only options left for us are to create more advancements, to fix the problems we continue to make. The cycle will only continue to perpetuate. Not everyone can live a simple type-writer lifestyle like the likes of essayist Wendell Berry. Even the choice to remove the self from technology is not entirely possible; he still is a part of it -- his writing is printed on presses operated by computers. Google Wendell Berry; find his work on Amazon.com. Technology is inescapable. If we cannot live without technology, what are our options for living in a world in which all we do is determined and regulated by it? Furthermore, does the internet afford us genuine connections? Or is the only way to interact authentically to live off the grid?

I do confess, I've never been so happy to be able to connect with the world by borrowing a friend's desktop so I can attempt to reach out, to connect, to find out if anyone in the world is listening.

Hello? Can you hear me?

[PS This is 4 double-sided (8?) pages of hand-written fine point black ink when you're forced to compose thoughts outside the realm of a computer screen and a keyboard. Just for those who were wondering...]