Leaving Your Smartphone Behind

Here is a fascinating story of one guy who decided to live without modern technology. He grows his own vegetables and does his washing in a tub. A funny thing is that he used to be a militant vegan (aren't they all?) but the reality of living off the land made him an omnivore:

My relationship to food, and thus the world around me, has changed dramatically. When I lived without money, I was an animal rights activist, and strictly vegan for over a decade. These days I live from the landscape around me. Most dinners consist of the pike or trout I catch, the greens or berries I forage, the potatoes and vegetables and salads I grow, and any roadkill – mostly deer, pheasant, or pigeon – that I come across.

What he describes is probably the healthiest diet there is. 
  
That change wasn’t easy. I love wildlife, and so I take life with the reluctance of one who needs to eat. But I harm more life in the soil from one morning’s gardening than I do in a year’s fishing. While I’m as opposed to cruelty as ever, I no longer have a problem with death. Death is life, and nothing exists without it.

It's not exactly a Christian sentiment, I guess, but he has understood something many liberal urban city dwellers forget. This side of paradise, sometimes you need to kill in order to survive. 

I also felt my previous, so-called vegan life wasn’t even vegan. Cars aren’t vegan. Phones aren’t vegan. Plastic isn’t vegan. Tubs of vitamins aren’t vegan. Protein bars, chickpeas, soya and hemp seeds – none of it is vegan, not really. It’s all the harvest of a political ideology that is causing the sixth mass extinction of species, one that is wiping out one habitat after the next and polluting the world around us, making the Earth uninhabitable for much of life – even ourselves. 

There are examples of healthy vegetarians around us,  one guy  even ran a marathon being a 101 years old, but all of them eat some animal products (mostly dairy, especially yogurt which proves that unless you are severely lactose intolerant, dairy is good for you), but a lifestyle which demands "tubs of vitamins" for a person to function properly, is simply artificial. 

I do think he's taking it too far, personally, but to each his own, I guess. We still can learn a lot from his story.

I’ve found that when you peel off the plastic that industrial civilization vacuum-packs around you, what remains couldn’t be simpler. Healthy food. Something to be enthusiastic about. Fresh air. A sense of belonging and aliveness. Good water. Purpose. Intimacy. A vital and deep connection to life. The kind of things I did without for too many years.

I think the most important lesson is that empty consumerism doesn't make anyone happy in the end, outside of woke corporations which use our money to destroy us. Reducing your level of consumption is an efficient manner to fight back. Many of these people hate you, think twice before giving them your hard-earned money...