Maeve noted the following about her story “Irish Time”: “It was written a number of years ago when I moved alone to an old stone cottage on a mountainside in County Leitrim, Ireland, and lived without a phone or car, and, as I focus on here, free from the domination of the Clock. Living in this way, I was changed radically. I've been writing a book about that experience and my transformation, and this is one of the chapters.”

By Maeve Reilly

In this place the earth turns in its own sweet time. It’s so quiet, I sometimes hear, or think I hear, the scrape of the old shale as it turns on its tilted iron axis. The soft rhythm of this place is having an effect on me. When I’m gathering sticks or filling the creel my mind isn’t racing ahead to the next thing or the past thing like it used to. I’m eyeing the shape and color of each stick and sod. I’m applying all my attention to breaking the larger ash branches into basket-size pieces. I smell the earth, and whenever I look up I feel exalted by the mountain and light- and cloud-flung sky.  

What time is it? Who cares? I’m several miles from town, up a steep mountain road, I’ve no car, no mobile phone. The Week-At-A-Glance I brought with me from my old life has seven blank days this week, next week, every week. My only ‘appointment’, on Sunday at eleven, doesn’t need to be entered. Maud rings me Saturday nights and asks if I’ll be going to church and would I like a lift. My answer is always yes, and yes.     

The only public marking of time is the ringing of the Angelus bells rising on the steep air from the convent below. There’s no sense of business time here, though there is the business day, which begins at half past nine, at the earliest. Many places close for lunch between one and two, and nearly every place shutters for the day at half past five. But shops can close at any hour, and sometimes there’ll be a note on the door–Back Soon–sometimes not.  

People don’t rush here. Maybe they do in Dublin, I don’t know, but in this part of the country, people will say, there’s no hurry on me. And this tells me they are ruled from within rather than from without. That if hurry can be put on you, it can be taken off you. When I think of the difference, I realize that in my former life I was a puppet. Someone above (or inside my head) was always pulling my strings–hurry up, get a move on! 

I’m learning that Irish time is different. When Maud says she’ll be down in ten minutes, it translates to she’ll be down in less than an hour. When Ollie Scollan tells me he’ll deliver my shopping in an hour, it could be two hours till I see him, or three. And even though it’s the end of his work day, and he’s on his way home to his tea, he never sets the box of groceries on the counter and rushes back to his van. Instead he’ll say, Now. How are you keeping up here? Then he’ll gaze out the window toward the mountain, though I believe he’s actually gazing into a vast storage vault of The Past, rummaging for a story that will interest me. Like the time he nodded toward the Rayburn and told me his family were the first in town to have a solid-fuel range. The day it was delivered, he said, it was as if a helicopter had landed on the High Street of Drumshanbo. Everyone came to gawk, he said, and it took ten men to carry it into the house.  

Maud and Ollie aren’t late when they arrive, or when they leave. They’re operating on Irish time, which has, I’m beginning to see, very little to do with clocks. Perhaps it's a medium for stories and music rather than a commodity prone to scarcity as we modernistas are conditioned to think of it. 

My American habit of punctuality is beginning to feel maladaptive. And now I’m questioning the validity of the clock itself. It is, after all, a relatively recent invention, a new requirement of the machine-powered market economy, not of the land-based seasonal world before it. A new way devised to enslave and torment the natural world, if you count us humans as part of the natural world, and I do, most of the time.  

Here I find that people think nothing of sitting down with a cup of tea at any hour of the day or night and talking for hours as if there was no such thing in the world as a clock. Where I’m from, we humans live minute to minute under its coercion, and in many cases proudly so. It’s become a kind of status symbol–the amount of appointments crammed into your calendar–and stress become a symptom of virtue.  

What I'm calling Irish time would, of course, be looked on askance by the Puritans and their industrious descendants. Since time is money, you must make the most of it, not squander it by sitting around drinking tea and chatting with your neighbor. 

The clock may have its place, but here it’s an instrument of approximation. And I’m beginning to understand that clock time is merely mechanical, impossibly precise and consistent. We humans know that the hour stalled in rush hour is excruciatingly longer than the hour spent talking with a friend. But clock time insists against the truth of our experience, it wants us to believe that every hour is identical, that every minute has the same value.   

Peter Burke’s sermon last Sunday was like nothing I’d ever heard from a pulpit. He talked about leaving the crowd and finding the quiet. He said to a packed church, we can only properly pray when we are still. He is a beautiful man, this priest, and his words fell on my mind like balm. I think there must be some connection between slow and quiet, fast and noise.  

There’s an Irish saying, ‘when God made time he made plenty of it’, and I see now that’s one reason I’ve come to live in Ireland. Before it was only an idea, a longing for something I didn’t know–to experience days as whole things–as gods, as the great Emerson said. Time here has no velocity, but it has depth, it has mercy.  

¹Sven Birkerts, The Millenial Warp 

If you would like to leave a comment, you can do so on the original post “A Library of Unconformed Lives”.

Leave a comment

First, I must acknowledge the irony of posting this essay on Substack: If you leave one social media platform and don’t post about it on another social media platform, did it even happen? Anyway, jokes aside, I hope you enjoy this week’s Story from Scribbleland. If you get anything from it, please do subscribe and share with a like-minded friend.

Growing Up in The Jungle of The Internet

I entered into a new kind of place, a place unbound by tradition or shared social mores. I walked, in my yellow sundress and high-heeled sandals, into a jungle.

I was 14 years old when I underwent Gen Z’s unofficial coming-of-age ceremony: logging onto social media. Facebook was first. Instagram followed. 

Although my entry into social media echoed the Edwardian debutante’s “coming out,” this modern version couldn’t be less alike. I didn’t enter formally into a ballroom of familiar faces to dance the waltzes I had practiced since girlhood. Instead, I entered into a new kind of place, a place unbound by tradition or shared social mores. I walked, in my yellow sundress and high-heeled sandals, into a jungle.

At first, it wasn’t bad. The platform had not yet been flooded with influencers and ads. My feed contained my friends’ posts, and that was about it. No stories, no reels, no Kardashians. Mostly just pixelated, B&W selfies of insecure middle-schoolers and their dogs. We would chat back and forth in the comments sections, oblivious to any outside observers (especially our parents). 

But the unstable digital environment soon began to change. 

By 2016, everyone was on Instagram (even our parents). It began to impact social customs in real life. After I met someone new, my first instinct was to scroll the grid of their Instagram profile with a practiced eye. After five minutes perusal, I could sort them into one of two piles: cool or uncool.

The criteria shifted constantly.

While members of Edwardian British society felt pressure to stay fashionable, their clothing styles changed slowly on an annual basis, and their social mores remained stable.

In the last decade, American mainstream fashion has gone from skinny jeans and plaid to cargo pants and crop tops. As Günseli Yalcinkaya observes in an essay for Dazed, “The world is splintering.” Even the term “mainstream” has little meaning today, drowned in a flood of insulated and constantly shifting subcultures. 

As for social mores—those are jumbled too. Young women, schooled by feminism, have expectations of young men that often go uncommunicated. Young men, stymied, turn to Reddit and join internet movements like the Red Pill. Both groups attempt to impose draconian social rules artificially on a social scene that has none, and, in the process, end up more confused and divided than before.

The term “shared reality” was coined by two psychologists, Hardins and Higgins, in a 1996 paper to describe how people establish “a sense of both social connection and understanding the world.” 

In an era of my dreams and my truth, we enjoy individualism’s freedom of self-determination. But at what cost? We’re losing collectivism’s stability, our sense of shared reality.

With unstable norms for how to dress, believe, and behave, the pressure mounts to spend inordinate amounts of time and energy on “keeping up.” Today, what that “keeping up” requires, in practical terms, is lots and lots of screentime.  

As I navigated my teens, I grew used to living, at least partially, on social media. Even on days when I didn’t open the app, I judged myself by its metrics. My mind formed into the shape of a square frame, a camera’s viewfinder. Captions scrolled through it. 

I was anxious. I was fashionable. I was playing the status game. For a long time, though, I didn’t see this as a problem.

Setting My Priorities Helped Me Define Tech Boundaries

In the jungle of the internet, I was shoved to and fro amid the vast horde of competing companies, influencers, and apps. In college, I sensed I was losing control, and I wanted out. The fall of my sophomore, I drove a car over my iPhone in a fit of Luddite rage.

But after only a few months with a flip phone, I bought a cheap Moto smartphone and reverted. I needed Google Maps for a summer in Germany, and with it, reintroduced all the distracting apps I had determined to shun.

This pattern continued. My iPhone and I would break up, get back together, break up, get back together. I didn’t know how to balance my desire for modern conveniences with my desire to escape compulsive scrolling and internet surfing. 

One commonly-cited effect of pornography is how it reduces men’s drive to pursue sexual relationships in real life. Once I exited college, social media began to stunt my social life in a similar way. It offered ersatz interactions just appealing enough to keep me complacent. I didn’t have to go through the slog of trying to make friends in a new place if I could post a pic at my own convenience and get a stream of hearts in return. Not only was I missing out on “shared reality” online—being online was making me miss out in real life.

It’s easiest to follow the path of least resistance. But when I became a mom last year, I looked at the squirming, bright-eyed baby on my lap and decided I no longer wanted to. 

It wasn’t my protective instincts that drove my exodus from Instagram. I wasn’t worried my child would become an “iPad kid,” her brain rotted by a constant diet of YouTube. At least at this stage of development, such harms were not yet possible. Infants, with their lack of object permanence, are limited by nature to the present moment—touch, taste, see, smell. 

I left social media because I wanted a closer relationship with my baby. Because, being a baby, she had “opted out” of technology by default, if I wanted to be with her, I would have to join her.

“Unless you become like a child…”—Jesus’ words from Matthew 18 echoed in my mind—“Unless you become like a child, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” 

My baby, at less than 1 year old, was already teaching me by example.

With this newfound clarity, I targeted the specific apps and features of my phone that prevented me from staying present. Instead of throwing out my iPhone, I used its Screentime feature to identify timesucks. If I caught myself aimlessly staring at screens, I changed the display to grayscale. 

Now, I could keep Google Maps without buying into Instagram, Facebook, and X. It just required a strong “why” and some intentionality.

At 24, a decade after creating my social media accounts, I deleted them. 

What Instagram Can’t See

Since leaving social media, my life has been, in most respects, perfectly ordinary. Perhaps I’m more emotionally stable. I certainly waste less time. If Instagram’s influence was subtle, being off Instagram is similarly difficult to quantify. But there’s a new grace that shines in my interactions with people. 

Now that I’ve left social media, I don’t know whether my acquaintances are good at self-marketing, whether they know how to pose in photos or construct an on-trend persona. I don’t get to believe they are my friends because I saw their wedding photos in my feed.

Instead, the people I meet are black boxes, mysterious and unpredictable. The only way to remove that mystery is to gradually unfurl to one another over a long process of walks, tea times, and conversations. 

Together, in real time, I must do the hard work of co-creating a shared reality.

Comfort in someone’s company, long silences—in essence, real relationships—that’s what I’ve desired all my life. That’s what I’m striving for now. And those are exactly the things that Instagram can’t see. 

I was encouraged to share this story by Ruth and Peco Gaskovski at School of the Unconformed. They are asking people to submit stories about how they are fighting back against bad tech habits. If you have a story, consider sending it to them!

If you would like to leave a comment you can do so on the main post for “A Libaray of Unconformed Lives” here:

Leave a comment

or comment on ’s original post here:

Writer's Blog(ck)

Leaving Social Media

First, I must acknowledge the irony of posting this essay on Substack: If you leave one social media platform and don’t post about it on another social media platform, did it even happen? Anyway, jokes aside, I hope you enjoy this week’s Story from Scribbleland…

Read more

2 years ago · 17 likes · 9 comments · Amelia Buzzard

By from

One way we think about our homestead and little community, Metanoia of Vermont, is as an experiment in living with material simplicity and spiritual abundance. We are convinced that the greatest treasures worth pursuing in this life are spiritual and relational, to be found in deep connection and mutual love with God, with other people, and with other creatures and the natural world. To obtain the riches of a deeply connected life, we’ve found that it’s essential to limit our engagement with modern technology, especially but not limited to communications tech.

I often fantasize about going completely ‘off-line’ and entirely removing phone and internet from the property. In our eight years on our homestead, we’ve ‘cut the cord’ twice – once when I dropped a wall on our phone & internet cable during a building demo, and the other time when a relative followed my directions when digging a trench and chewed through our cable. My wife Lisa still jokes that neither one was an accident. Both times, I did feel a sense of ease and relief to be ‘tech free’ for a few weeks, and we did notice a greater ease of conversation and increase in focus among those in residence both times. All the same, our ministry requires a degree of contact and engagement with the outside world, and we’ve decided it’s not practical to drive, bike or walk 4 miles to the town library to send an email. So, we’re left with finding a middle way, with a conscious relationship with communications tech.

We have an office in an outbuilding where we keep a modem, our landline phone, our laptops and printer. When we need to use these tools, we ‘go to work’ over in the office. The physical separation of the tech from our person (we don’t carry smartphones on the property, and we don’t get cell service on most of our 41 acres anyway) gives us a degree of space within which to make a conscious decision about when to use the internet, and why. I’ve found that as long as I have a conscious reason to ‘go to work’ that is aligned with my spiritual commitments and my intention for the day, the internet can be a powerful and effective tool for good. When I use it for entertainment or distraction, it becomes a powerful tool of dissipation. The physical separation helps to increase the likelihood we’re using the internet for the right reasons, in the service of our whole way of life.

I’ve also found that keeping a deliberate relationship with time is a key to a healthy relationship with the internet. In our way of life, this means limiting computer use to the work day, starting at the end of Lauds (morning prayer) at 7:30 AM and finishing by the start of Vespers (evening prayer) at 5:30 PM. While it can be tempting to sneak down to the office to send an email or squeeze in a little work after our kids are asleep, I’m far more likely to indulge in ‘infotainment’ after dark. Better to accept the natural limits of the work day, and to learn to make peace with what is left undone at any given day.

Phones and the internet are one layer where we strive to build a conscious, limited relationship with technology in order to live more whole and deeply spiritual lives. There are many others. We’ve found that we can gain about 90% of the benefits of modern technology, and most of the benefits of low-tech living, by having access to electricity on our property, but not in our home. Within our modest home, we use headlamps and candles for light, and we stay far more in tune with the changing seasons and the natural rhythms of light and darkness. We’ve found that lighting a candle at dusk, or when waking in the middle of a night to tend to a child, creates an environment far more conducive to prayer than flicking on a light switch. Whenever practical, and sometimes when moderately impractical, we opt for manual labor over labor saving technologies. It keeps our bodies connected to the earth and the realities of incarnate life. There’s also a deep satisfaction that comes with learning the intimate, earth-bound skills of our ancestors, whether scything or building stone walls or simply doing dishes (well) by hand. At the same time, we aren’t shy about using some massively effective power tools – freezers and chainsaws, especially – to accomplish the work that is ours to do. This ‘hybrid life’ in relationship with modern tech has helped us to build a bridge between ancient ways of life in relationship with the land and the modern, industrial world in which we were both raised. It’s a dynamic tension, and we’re continuously in discernment about our relationship with these very powerful tools. We continue to ask ‘Is this technology supporting a life of prayer, love and connection, or hindering it?’ and pick up or put down our tools accordingly. The answer to that question changes based on our ages, the time of year, the urgency and scope of the task at hand, the needs of our children, the presence or absence of able-bodied laborers at any given time, and our skills (or lack thereof) with low-tech, more ancestral methods of work. We recognize that there are few fixed answers, but find enduring value in continuing to ask the question.

In all things, our goal is for us to possess our possessions, rather than being possessed by them. When our material (and technological) lives are oriented in service to the greater goods of faithfulness to God and loving service to one another, and our land, our hearts are at peace.

There are countless gifts that come from this way of life, far too many to mention here. As a little window into the gifts of a low-tech, connected life, I want to share one here - the restoration of our senses, both physical and spiritual. As we continue to wean, restrain, and focus our engagement with the digital and technological worlds, we replace that engagement with prayer, presence, and interaction with the natural world. We've experienced our nervous systems gradually recovering and 'detoxing' from modern life, and as this occurs, our senses have begun to wake up. On a simple, physical level, this means there is a keener awareness and intensity to the sensations of daily life. Fruit becomes exquisitely sweet, delightful and fully satisfying, while refined sugars taste so overwhelming that they're simply no longer appealing. A conversation or oral storytelling over a fire invokes rich mental imagery, and movies and TV feel like an assault on the senses. Further, we've begun to feel/sense the intentions of plants and animals around us at subtler levels, tuning into the energies of natural life in ways that are reminiscent of indigenous systems of healing and knowing. Life as a whole is much deeper, richer, and filled with a great abundance, just as it is. We need less and less 'thrill' from digital or other artificial stimulation, and there is more and more satisfaction to simply showing up to the symphony of life as it comes, day by day, and moment by moment.

If you would like to leave a comment, you can do so on “A Library of Unconformed Lives” here:

Leave a comment

(Note: You can listen to this post with an article voiceover here).

Digital minimalism is a hot topic in the digital universe these days. You can find dozens of blogs and Substacks online talking about how bad it is for you to be online. Paradox? Yes. But a somewhat necessary one.

“He that has ears, let him hear.” While we try to have more than just digital ears, these media forms are where most people are listening. “Faith comes through hearing. How can they believe if they have not heard?” Saint Paul asks. Therefore we preach in the digital city square — at least sometimes.

One couple who understands this are Peco and Ruth Gaskovski, writing at The School of the Unconformed. There, they explore how to experience the real in life, encourage you to knit your own socks and raise pigs, and discuss bringing up children in a home which moves at truly human pace.

In a recent post they asked for others to share their “stories of unconformity.” So that is what I will do today, in the hopes of inspiring others to take up practices I’ve found to be life-giving — and as an honest look at my own life to see how I could fill it with more of the juicy joy of reality. (Oh, and Peco and Ruth say they’ll give anyone a free subscription for sharing their story of unconformity!)

Thinking about Tech

What technology is, and what our relationship to it is or ought to be is more than a dissertation-length topic. It’s a life-long topic, and one that will be answered — only partially — by the very wise.

That being said, I believe it’s fairly obvious that the past seventy years, and even more so the past twenty years, have seen a rise and advancement of technology quite different in effect from anything present in previous ages.

The fundamental effect of “mastery of nature” techniques ranging from hormonal contraceptives to polyester fabrics has been to alienate us from each other, from ourselves, from our health, and from the living of a life that is full of growth in love and wisdom. The curiously named “smartphone,” invented less than twenty years ago and now tyrannically ubiquitous, represents both the pinnacle and the depths of modern — and specifically digital — technology that has changed our relationship with nearly every aspect of life.

“Every aspect of life?” you ask, perhaps skeptically. Well, name one aspect that the smartphone has not affected for most of its users. Sleep? Its glowing blue screen disrupts our circadian rhythm. Sex? The phone has become a limitless library for pocket pornography. Communication? Distracting us from physically present interlocutors, the phone prioritizes texting over speaking, promotes faceless interactions over face-to-face ones, and allows us to be constantly interrupted and interruptible. Religion? Both as a conduit of bad news and immoral content and as a simple distraction from being present in a real place at a given moment, the phone makes a recollected prayer life doubly difficult. Education? The phone builds up a kind of wall between the generations, making it hard to find access to children anymore. Banking? I can’t do it without a passcode. Shopping? Scan the QR code. Travel? Since they are never asked, and they never had to bother with it, no one knows how to give directions anymore—only Google maps does. Government? How convenient for the CIA that they can listen in on your conversations, and pinpoint your location should it become advantageous to vaporize you (I’m not claiming we’re there quite yet, although we might be; we’re at least well on the way).

Intentional agency is in high evidence in this bow built and used by a student of St. Martin’s Academy. (Photo: Julian Kwasniewski)

Agency and Experience

My purpose here is not just to put down phones (in both senses). My point is that we must acknowledge the effects of a technology — phones first, but also cars, pencils, razors, aspirin, and so on — if we are to retain our dignified place as agents over those effects, the ones who control rather than the ones who are controlled.

All of the above does n ot mean that I think phones are unmitigated evils. Perhaps the disadvantages are so great, and so intimately tied up with the thing itself, that their potential for good can never be fully extricated from their tendency to problematic use. But it does mean that we had better think carefully about when and where we want to use them (or any similar technologies). And that we should try to discover how life can be richer if they were a lot less present.

Essentially we want love and communion with others; we want knowledge that builds us up; we want to care for and create good things, from children to pencil sketches, from chicken runs to governments. Each of these things requires tools and technologies, and will enable us to strive for our ends in various ways. To aim at our ends in a fully human way, what we need is intentional agency over our lives, to the extent that that is possible. In saying this I am not proposing that we be “control freaks.” When God created man, he tasked him with a certain amount of control: “Till the earth and keep it.”

There are many ways to “till” our lives and our environment. Some are better than others. That question of what “better” means is the technology question. Here’s what I’ve found “better” to mean in my life.

Technological Communication

To those who say that it is impossible to live without a smartphone, I have this to say: “I have never owned one. I have traveled internationally without a phone or even laptop computer. Don’t believe the lies you hear.” Incidentally, my father has also never had a smartphone.

Some of the ways I regularly chip at the ever-encroaching means of digital communication:

• Flip-phone use. On my flip-phone, I can call and (clumsily) text. It has a decent voice-recognition feature for texting, which I use for longer texts if such is unavoidable. Group texts don’t work well on a flip-phone: any time I text someone I was recently in a group text with, the message is sent to everyone unless I start a new thread. This has sometimes resulted in lots of friends calling me when I thought I only texted one of them “call me.” A pleasant surprise!

• Preferring cold-calls to friends instead of texting. I can text, but I often call friends without texting them first. I’ve never had someone ask me not to do this. They reserve the right not to answer if they are busy or don’t want to talk. I myself won’t answer if I don’t wish to. No one has a right to reach me when I don’t make myself available, and I don’t have a right to reach anybody else. If there is some question of needing to be “on call” for an emergency or a trip or something like that, then that is easy enough to communicate ahead of time.

• Not checking my email on weekends. I’m pretty consistent about this. I just don’t. If I’m not working, I’m rarely on the computer. And it’s really nice. Why would you need to check your email? I’d be missing out on life! The only way you’d not be missing out is if your life was only on the computer. And how sad would that be?

• No internet at home. My parents made the decision not to have wireless internet at home while my sister and I were growing up, so that we’d spend our time reading, doing art, playing outdoors, and the like. When we needed the internet, we’d walk downtown to the library or to my dad’s office. I have not paid for internet at the various apartments I’ve lived in as an adult. That saves money, and it keeps work at the office. If I want music, I can bring my computer home and play music downloaded off of Spotify. And my flip-phone doesn’t have a hotspot capability.

Work and Finances

This is where I live by more of a double standard than I’d like to. Nearly all my work is on the computer. Whether it is writing this article, or doing graphic design or photography, my work mostly starts and ends on the computer.

I’m hoping to move away from this over time, but for now that’s the way it is. I’d love (in theory, at least) to cut down my own trees to make my own boards to make my own furniture, run a small farm with livestock, or bake bread as some of my friends do. Perhaps at a later date. There are, however, specific things I’ve done to improve my work:

• Advertising through posters. Although I could get paid advertisements via Google ads for my photography work, I’m not sure the results would be worth it. And it would mean giving money to Google. So instead, I’ve created printed posters with my contact info, and spread them around town, in coffee shops, the public library, etc. I’ve gotten several gigs because of them!

• “Take a hike” in the middle of the week. This is not as consistent as it should be, but I often try to make Wednesday a lighter work day with time for nature so that I break the cycle of five-days of straight screen time. Refreshed, I can return to my computer having exercised my body and my power to live away from the screen.

• Sometimes drafting articles via typewriter. Earlier this year I was lent a typewriter in excellent working condition. Since then I’ve drafted about six articles on it. I enjoy this because it allows me to work outside where a screen would be washed out by sunlight. I like it because I can see every part of my page at once—nothing is scrolled into oblivion. The fact that you can’t immediately correct or change what you’ve written leads to more deliberateness. And later, when I enter the piece into the computer in order to prepare it for submission to a magazine, I appreciate the line-by-line opportunity for revisions, the attention I can then give to that first complete draft.

• Renting my car out. Using Turo, I earn nearly passive income by letting others use my car when they, as visitors and tourists, really need it and I can manage without it. It’s easy for me walk around my small town, but they can’t walk around Wyoming. This allows a “surplus,” namely my car, to be used more efficiently, providing a service, and encourages me to be on my feet or my bike.

My finances are a work-related area that I’ve recently become more intentional in moving off-line. Of course I have electronic bank accounts, but…

• Doing finances on paper, without a calculator. I re-organized my finances by taking a sheet and tabulating my living expenses solely on paper, doing all the addition in my head. Not only did the math part of my brain wake up after years of dormancy, I felt like I knew my expenses more directly. If I’m trying to be particularly frugal one month, I’ll keep a sheet in my pocket and write down every expense on it, even if it’s an electronic one.

• Using cash for monthly shopping. This also makes my spending much more apparent to me. I take out the amount of cash I want to spend on groceries and coffee shop visits at the start of tnhe month. Those $20 bills disappearing over the counter make me feel a lot more like I’m spending a resource than tapping a card could ever do. I also like that using cash encourages businesses to resist going completely electronic. If part of their customer base is cash-only, they won’t want to lose those sales.

• Depositing checks in person. I could do the drive-through deposit, and if I had a smartphone, I could deposit checks remotely. Instead, I always go into the bank, and have a brief interaction with the clerk.

Being creative with finances is progressively more freeing, as it allows me to keep more irregular hours and prioritize my priorities, only one of which is making money. The Buy-Me-a-Coffee donation page that many of you have kindly donated through is, to my mind, a great example of using digital technology to further a life away from it. Thank you for saying “thank you” in this way!

Sustenance and Self-sufficiency

I can’t say that I’m exemplary in this realm, mostly because I don’t own and operate my dream homestead—and if I did, I’d probably find it a bit of a bore. When it comes to food, however, here are some things I’ve done:

• Volunteer at the local farm. One of the primary produce farms in Lander has a “workshare” program, where you help them harvest on Friday morning for the Saturday farmers’ market. In exchange for five hours of weeding and harvesting, I get a basket of fresh produce and a farm-cooked lunch. I just started participating this summer, and I’ve enjoyed seeing the process and especially eating the ultra-fresh food the farm-wife cooks for us all.

• No microwave. I grew up in a household that never had one (even as we didn’t have a TV), and I never intend to have one. They are convenient… but so weird. And the extra step of warming something up in a pan, even if it makes the meal a bit slower, offsets the tendency to gobble down food and rush off to the next thing.

• Cooking from scratch. This is not particularly intentional, but most of my meals start as raw meat and raw vegetables. I cook them. And that’s that.

• Barter coffee for reviews. Okay, this is not infinitely sustainable, but I did obtain some free coffee for the sake of writing up a good story (which you can find in this article). If anyone reading this owns a coffee company, you are most welcome to send me some and I’ll write about it!

• Fishing. I like trout fishing, and I usually eat what I catch. You can read more here.

When it comes to clothing, my fiancée has been influential in reminding me to prioritize natural fabrics. It might sound silly, but artificial fabrics and tight underwear are one of the causes of the record low testosterone levels of men today. A serious case can be made for throwing out all your polyester underwear and replacing it with cotton boxers (if you’re a guy) or investing in bamboo bras (if you’re a lady). Microplastics from polyester and rayon enter the bloodstream and act as hormone blockers and endocrine system disruptors.

• Only natural fabrics allowed in the wardrobe. Almost. I rarely buy synthetic materials or even cloths that are partly polyester or rayon; otherwise it’s got to be cotton, wool, or linen. I make occasional exceptions if there is something I just can’t find otherwise, or if it’s a super-lightweight hiking shirt. Even then, I enjoy flouting the customary decalogue of contemporary camping “wisdom” that forbids anything but synthetic materials because of their tendency to dry slowly. You can be smart and safe in the wilderness and still use flannel, cotton, and wool, as great explorers did for many centuries.

• Thrifting. Why would I pay $75 for a new shirt when I could pay $5? The main drawback is how little suitable men’s clothing there usually is. I walk into a Goodwill, pass the eight aisles of women’s clothing and finish browsing the two rows of men’s items fifteen minutes sooner than any woman I’m with. I occasionally buy new clothing online, but even then, you can find unused items for much cheaper on sites like Poshmark.

• Don’t wear T-shirts and branded clothing in general. I’m not your billboard, and if I was, you’d have to pay me to wear your stuff, okay NIKE? Nobody in his right mind should pay money to do free advertising for other people, helping them to get rich on their logos.

• Avoid Amazon. I don’t have an Amazon account. If I need something from that site, I ask others who have accounts to buy it for me and I pay them back. That might just sound like I’m being both annoying and unprincipled, but it’s a compromise: you can find things on Amazon very hard to get elsewhere, but rather than furthering their grasp on everyone, I let those who choose to use it use it, while I don’t give them my info.

Recreation and Relation

I have nothing against watching a good film…now and then. Here are some various ways I’ve tried to intentionally enhance my relaxation.

• Clock-off time. I sometimes intentionally remove any pressure on myself to eat dinner by this or that time, or to do anything in particular when I’m trying to spend time intentionally with those I love. It’s really lovely, and encourages one to just be. Then I’m free to look at the stars if I want, or go to the store for juice or a snack. No efficiency required. No bed-time required.

• Not turning all lights off when watching a movie. In the interests of not being completely sucked into the screen and also offsetting the blue-light, I usually have one or two small lamps on whenever I watch a movie so the room is dimly lit but not pitch dark. I think this helps to keep the screen in its place, and not let it completely monopolize your attention.

• Getting outside. I believe this is a good thing in any form. Canoeing? Great! An e-bike ride? Great! A hike? Great! Laying on the lawn and looking at the clouds? Amen!

• Leaving the phone in the car for hikes. This is not unsafe. Most of the places I hike don’t have cell reception anyway, and the safest thing you can do (which people have always done) is to let people know where you are going, set a time you’ll be back, and especially hike with a companion.

• Air-conditioning. Speaking of the c ar, I try to avoid using the AC in my vehicle when possible, rolling the windows down instead. I want fresh air! If it is really too hot for that to work, only then I use the AC.

• Practice the lute. Relaxation includes embodied art and music-making. I have played the lute for years but it’s hard to find time for it in the midst of busy weeks. The leisurely pursuit of art and music is something I would love to develop more in my life.

• Read physical books and print online articles. It is so relaxing to curl up with a cup of coffee in the morning and read a book that smells of paper. I can hardly focus sufficiently to read articles online, so when I see a good one, I print it. And then I try to get around to reading it!

Future Joy

I don’t share all of this to virtue-signal or to brag. I know that I’m not perfect, that I don’t do many of the good things there are to do (or even do the above things as consistently as I’d like), and that other people have different needs and priorities when it comes to being unconventional. However, I do want to share that portion of joy I have discovered in this haphazard pursuit of mindful unconformity. I hope you can discover a joyous unconformity as well — your own, unconformed flavor of unconformity!

To leave a comment, you can respond on the main post “A Libaray of Unconformed Lives” here:

Leave a comment

or visit ’s original post here:

Tradition and Sanity

“Be ye not conformed to the world”— Digital and Otherwise

Digital minimalism is a hot topic in the digital universe these days. You can find dozens of blogs and Substacks online talking about how bad it is for you to be online. Paradox? Yes. But a somewhat necessary one…

Read more

2 years ago · 42 likes · 12 comments · Julian Kwasniewski

I have a voracious hunger for information about the women of the past and how their day-to-day lives looked, particularly the work they took up. I believe my need for this knowledge comes from a place of inner turmoil with the current state of things. A state that I have been citizen of begrudgingly, and which I believe has caused me some considerable measure of mental and emotional strife. A state which I choose to try my best to dissent from, and which I hope to build scaffolding against for my children to the degree it is possible. This is why my newsletter is called “Women’s Work”. Both because I am interested in the work of women past and present, and because to me, it is women’s work to design dissent. In my ongoing yearning for bits and pieces of the past, I picked up a copy of Ivy Pinchbeck’s book “Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850”. In the appendix, which I will share photos of below, there is a long list of women’s occupations in England from 1841.

Pick your poison-what's your ideal 1841 women's work combination? Butter dealer/bonnet maker? Confectioner/leech bleeder? Tallow chandler/ seed merchant?

The patterns I notice are of no surprise. Women were dealing in care work, agricultural work, and craft work. Yes, there were a few locksmiths and tape manufacturers, but most women were weavers, dressmakers, domestic servants, charwomen (those employed to clean offices and houses), laundresses, nurses, school mistresses, and farmers.

Seeing that the top professions include such titles is again, not shocking. Care work has always been women's work-but today so much of what these professions entail is shared with technology and also gate kept via expensive and tedious certifications and degrees. I would know, being a nurse with upwards of $30,000 in student loans who learned her skills on mannequins in a fancy “skills lab”. I graduated nursing school never having ever placed an IV or drawn blood on a living, breathing human being. I much rather would have done an apprenticeship and been given the honor of slowly but surely acclimating to the intimate, hands-on work that nursing should be. While some amount of scholarship is of course prudent in these fields, I fear we have lost the unique human touch that is so vital to the core of their value as technology and increasing levels of education become “necessary” to engage in them professionally and therefore make a living wage from what has always been our domain as women.

The craftswomen-the dressmakers, weavers, lace and linen makers, knitters, straw milliners, stay and corset makers, and the basket weavers had jobs that required skills that today in the Western world are seen solely as luxury hobbies. We have come to value the sort of beauty these women imbued their respective crafts with less in favor of utilitarian design. We have come to accept a poor standard for quality over the past few generations who increasingly wore more and more poorly sewn clothes made from plastic derivatives and the like. We have also came to expect the manufacture of textiles and home decor to be outsourced to foreign countries. As all of these phenomena have evolved, these skills have become trivial.

Agricultural work is outsourced altogether. Either to machines, immigrants, or shipped in from faraway places. Many live in urban environments where growing a single tomato vine feels impossible. Children don’t know that peanuts are a plant, or that peaches don’t grow year round. We are divorced from the source of the very nourishment that sustains us, and in doing so, that sustenance has become increasingly manipulated and unhealthy.

“Mother” isn’t on the list, of course, perhaps because it was both an assumption that many women were mothers and also because it was not considered work. We all know mothering is often the most intimate, involved and ongoing women’s work a woman who is a mother engages in, and so in my own work of designing dissent, my status as “mama” is relevant.

Thinking on how much so many of us yearn to master the skills of yore, desire nourishing food produced with some semblance of tenderness, and are naturally inclined to lend our hands and hearts to the work of caring-for our own children and the children of others, for our friends, for the elderly, and for the sick, I cannot help but notice something about the state of things. Our kids are in day cares with strangers. Many of us don't know how to cook or grow a pepper. Most all of us have never mended a worn sock. Our inner knowings, manifested as desire, are ignored in favor of compliance with the demands of the market and the state, and our souls reap the consequences.

This is a problem. It’s a local versus global problem. It’s a generational skills deficit problem. It’s an economic problem. It’s also a tolerance problem. We tolerate too much. I cannot countenance a life removed from hands-on, hands-in living.

Enter knitting. This is but a small task and skill among several others I have been blessed to learn and use in my life thus far, but it is the one I find most worth writing about. It is the traditional skill I most enjoy. It is the skill I feel comfortable teaching others. It is a skill that ties me to other women. It is also the skill which I credit with aiding me in my sobriety from heroin, which I quit using 13 years ago.

I have attempted to unravel the reasoning for my addictions many times over the years and the conclusion I have come to is that I do not feel capable of being well-adjusted in a digitized society. I have felt this my whole life, but only recently put this into words for myself in hopes it may resonate with other people suffering addiction. I fully explain this in my essay Requiem for a Past Life.

Knitting, surprisingly enough, truly helped me work through the earliest days of sobriety. The movement of my hands was distracting enough to buy myself time from cravings. It truly became my “next right thing” in some moments of mental anguish. I had learned to knit as a teenager and I had done it enough that I had muscle memory for the basic stitches, and this was a comfort. I had something to do while I listened to music that felt both productive and meaningful, and this made me feel valuable—something I hadn’t felt in a long while. I wasn’t just sitting around wasting away letting my discomfort with the world rot me away into the ether anymore, I was making something, something beautiful and useful. I was doing something the women who lived before me would recognize and appreciate. I was making a blanket for the baby I was blessed with, and who was the motivation for my sobriety. That baby would have a mother who knit her Halloween costumes and britches to cover her cloth diapered bottom, not a strung out IV drug addict who couldn’t manage reality.

And yet, reality as it stands is still momentously unacceptable to me. The constant drive for progress that has no end point, the all-encompassing social-media-overlording of our lives, the culture that we live in that values sterility over vitality, the overwhelmingly distracting nature of the demands of daily life in this society—I do not consent to it, for myself or my family. And so, I knit. I knit, among other things, and I teach my children to knit, among other things.

In terms of all traditional skills that we deem worthy of ushering into the future, I think we just have to be the generation who has to teach ourselves so that we can teach the next. Before it is too late, before these things go extinct. The extinction of craft is a real threat to our quality of life. Consider how you feel when interacting with environments that are more handmade versus environments that are sterile in nature. The stark contrast in how these things impact your emotions and mental state should tell you all you need to know. We need beauty in a visceral way, and we need hands capable of creating beauty.

I choose to show my children the small, ordinary magic of a garment almost untouched by industrial-anything. The way a warm half-knit sweater feels sitting in your lap as you enjoy the quiet, tedious movement of fingers that know the way on a cold winter afternoon. The extreme sense of satisfaction one experiences from finishing a project, weaving in your ends, blocking it, waiting for it to dry—and then putting it on your body and seeing it fits and feels just right. This is the stuff of life!

I have been a knitter for nearly 20 years at this point. In this time I have learned patience, perseverance, attention to detail and the value of sitting quietly. I have come to know the tangible difference between yarn that is plastic in its origins and fibers that come from living things. Wool or cotton feels and knits up differently than acrylic, and requires much more care and attention. Natural fibers are unruly in some cases, they require hand washing, and God forbid you put them in a dryer. They are slowly made and slowly tended to. A slow sweater in a fast world warms me like no other.

And so, I will push on in my quest for a slower life more aligned with the needs of my physiological self and the similar needs of my children. And so, I will cast on again.

Cast on the stitches of hope that, once brought together, combine to make textile tokens of my love. Sitting at my humble old kitchen table or in front of the wood stove my husband built to warm us, I will carve out the time to just sit and let my hands do what they know how to do, showing my children that this is enough. I will plan projects with fervor, consciously spending the money I can on fibers made from nature, spun and dyed by people of similar mindset. I will choose to make what I covet if I can. I will gift some of these things, soft and intricate parcels of intention. I will choose to sit down daily and participate in this thing my ancestors may not perceive as foreign and strange, in full view of my children, who may one day do the same. This, in place of screen time or driving somewhere to distract myself and sometimes even without indulging in a playlist or a listen to a favorite podcast. Sometimes we must choose the quiet or the conversation, and in fact a skill like knitting is best paired with such.

I will cast on these stitches, and in doing so, I will cast away some measure of digital distraction, distraction from what is of true value.

If you would like to leave a comment, you can do so on the main post “A Library of Unconformed Lives” here:

Leave a comment

or visit ’s original post here:

Women's Work

The Humble Knitter’s Lament

I have a voracious hunger for information about the women of the past and how their day-to-day lives looked, particularly the work they took up. I believe my need for this knowledge comes from a place of inner turmoil with the current state of things. A state that I have been citizen of begrudgingly, and which I believe has caused me some considerable m…

Read more

2 years ago · 40 likes · 23 comments · Emily Hancock

The irony of putting this in a format that can only be read on a screen does not escape me, but here we go anyway...

From January to June, Jonny and I ran this household experiment we coined “screen sober.” The ground rule? No watching screens for entertainment. Which was splicing it thin when it comes to screen use. Could we use our smartphones for any entertainment, like listening to podcasts or music? We settled on yes for both of those. Watching videos to complete a project—like fixing the dishwasher or cooking—was declared “not entertainment.” So what were we actually avoiding?  Podcast streams, real-time strategy video games, Facebook videos of terrible dad jokes. Movie trailers, Instagram reels, sketch comedy shorts on Youtube. I could go on, but you already get it. We were avoiding the pretense of infinite variety offered by our tiny screens—the activities that mostly boil down to staring and tapping.  

Going “screen sober” for those six months prompted the question: what is it, exactly, that we’ve been using these screens for?

And the short answer is… story.

Three days into the “Screen Sober” experiment, Jonny curled up on the brown couch in our living room, eyes closed and hands pressed to his temples, and declared: “I am craving narrative.”

This caught me off guard, because the main thing he was giving up by going screen sober was Age of Empires (or AOE). AOE is a real time strategy video game that riffs off history in some fun ways—each player is a real empire, and each empire has bonuses related to historical facts (e.g., the Huns don’t need houses, and Byzantines build great walls). I hadn’t made the connection between video games and narrative before—mostly because I’ve never really played them (does cheating in Zoo Tycoon to get infinite money and then getting bored enough to let lions loose in a mega zoo count?).

My perspective on video games has shifted a lot in the last nine years. I’ve moved from “what a waste of time” to “I’m not in charge of his screen time.” Without that particular change, something like “Screen Sober” would have been a lot less like a game and a lot more like torture. Also, video games now strike me as somewhat different from the “scroll n’ binge” because players must make time-sensitive decisions, ask questions, and explore.¹ But I didn’t understand the link between video games and story until I saw Jonny on the couch: of course video games are narrative experience for the player. The player is a character.

Narrative—the movement from beginning, to middle to end, the conflict/resolution pattern—is not just something we like, it’s something we need. I need stories for reassurance, especially when I can’t find the narrative threads in my own life—or when I can find them, but I really don’t like how the story is going. And screens immerse all of us in narrative in this engrossing and remarkably easy way.

So what’s the problem? If we need narrative, and it’s easy to find it on a screen…

It’s good to find refuge in narrative—in stories, songs, games, and the like. This is an act of hope. But if something is easy to access, it’s easy to overuse. Jonny and I were difficult subjects in the “screen sober” experiment. We tried this for six months. And it took a whole month for either of us to break into double-digit days of not using screens for entertainment. Just after Lent started, I remember flopping down on the couch with a bowl of chocolate chips and starting to flip through a series of Civil War trailers when it hit me: “This is probably what we were talking about when we said ‘screens for entertainment.’” So I re-set my count to “Day 0.” Jonny had a streak of 81 days in there. But avoiding screens was constantly a disciplined effort.

We’ve shelved that experiment (for now—I’m exploring my e-ink phone options, though), so the relevant question has become: how much is too much?

I’m going to let St. Francis de Sales take that one:

“Sports, balls, festivities, display, the drama, in themselves are not necessarily evil things, but rather indifferent, and capable of being used or abused. Nevertheless, there is always danger in these things, and to care for them is much more dangerous. Therefore I should say that although it is lawful to amuse yourself, to dance, dress, hear good plays, and join in society, yet to be attached to such things is contrary to devotion and extremely hurtful and dangerous. The evil lies not in doing the thing, but in caring for it.” (Introduction to the Devout Life)

Don’t hear me saying Francis de Sales would look at how we’re using smartphones and say, “This is fine.” I think it’s worth noting that everything he mentioned in that paragraph would have been done in a group rather than alone.² That said, “it is lawful to amuse yourself…” but what are the limits? Discerning that means contemplating the difference between “doing the thing” and “caring for it.” And a helpful question to me in that line of thought is: are the stories I’m watching getting in the way of the stories I want to live? In Jonny’s case, real-time-strategy resource management games are enthralling because… well, let me just show you a picture of the garage:

He loves to build things. So video games that present the challenge of using resources in a creative way to win are appealing. And could a person do both? Build and play video games? Well, sure. But he can’t build a beehive WHILE playing AOE.

In April, I was holding my sleeping baby and flicking through photos. Yes, when I’m trying not to watch videos on my phone, I flick through the library of photos instead because I am weak. I suddenly realized that I was holding my baby in one arm and looking at a picture of the same baby on the phone in my other hand—it wasn’t even an older picture. It was taken the day before. I think he was in the same clothes. I sat there for a minute, in “Real Baby/Phone Baby” dissonance, as the reality of my attachment surfaced: I’m asking this thing for something it can’t give me.

I do that with screens all the time.

I ask the group chat for something it can’t give me when I check it instead of interacting with the people nearby.

I ask YouTube for something it can’t give me when I watch sketch after sketch, staving off sadness that must, at some point, be felt.

I ask my email inbox for something it can’t give me when I refresh, and refresh, waiting for evidence that I’m a real writer now.

The danger is not in amusement or information or a grocery pickup order—the danger is in looking for more than that. It’s in the habit of logging on to find the story the screen can’t possibly give me.

2 A roomful of people playing Super Smash Bros, family movie night, or even a scattered group of souls watching Dune 2 in the same auditorium are just plain different than the Lonely Scroll—at least, I think I think that.

---

You can leave a comment on the main post “A Library of Unconformed Lives” here:

Leave a comment

or visit ’ original post here:

Still Today

"Screen Sober"

The irony of putting this in a format that can only be read on a screen does not escape me, but here we go anyway…

Read more

2 years ago · 37 likes · 17 comments · Meredith Hinds

Ruth Gaskovski & Peco who write atSchool of the Unconformedrecently asked readers to share their stories ofordinary daily acts that keep the invasion of digital technology at bay.In 2019, Iwrote one handwritten letter every single day, amounting to well over 400 letters. While I don’t write quite that many letters anymore, I have continued the regular habit of letter writing, and I believe in it just as much as I did six years ago—if not more so.

If you have felt the tug to set your phone aside a little more and connect with those you love in a tangible way, may I offer a few tips as you begin writing more handwritten letters? Because in the words of Margaret Shepherd, ink on paper is still the classiest way to express the thoughts that really matter, on the occasions that really count.

1. Decide on your why: Why do you want to begin writing letters? Write these reasons down in a letter to yourself, and revisit it anytime you feel discouraged and want to give up. Don’t skip this step! The temptation to give up letter writing is strong, especially during a spell when you aren’t receiving many replies in return. Keep your why close at hand and re-read it frequently.

2. Make a list of recipients: Who do you want to write letters to? Make a list of people who you would love to correspond with, and gather their addresses if you don’t already have them. Having a list of names/addresses takes the work out of thinking of who to write to. Once you have listed your closest friends and family, think of all the people in your life who have helped you in some way. The year I wrote a letter a day, I loved writing letters of gratitude to everyone I could think of who had loved me, served me, or had helped me in some way during my life. The list was far longer than I had imagined it would be.

3. Gather supplies: This is the fun part! You can, of course, use paper and envelopes that you already have. But if you need an extra bit of motivation to start writing, and you’d like something beautiful, there are endless options. Botanica Paper Co. has darling stationery sets, Farmette Co. makes stunning letterpress stationery, classic stationer Crane makes ecru half sheets and envelopes that are perfect for a heartfelt letter. Felix Dolittle’s return-address labels make your envelope into a little work of art. Don’t forget a sheet or two of stamps to get you started.

4. Decide on a place and a time: Habits, in order to be successful, need to be concrete and specific. Where will you write your letters? At a desk? At the kitchen table? Gather your supplies in a basket, a tray, or a box with addresses, paper, envelopes, pens, and stamps all together to make your letter writing routine smooth and easy. What time of day will you write? Right after breakfast while your children are at school or busy with their morning chores & schoolwork? After lunch when you feel a bit sluggish but aren’t quite ready to take a nap yet? Make a ritual out of it: light a candle, make a cup of tea (mint & nettle is my favorite), turn on soothing music. Pleasant habits are always easier to acquire.

5. Don’t start alone: Find a friend and commit together to write letters to each other. Even one regular letter-writing kindred spirit is enough to keep you motivated to continue if you aren’t getting a lot of letters back.

If you’re looking for more inspiration for your letter-writing journey, these books are wonderful:

The Art of the Handwritten Note by Margaret Shepherd

My favorite little guide to writing letters, this book is full of inspiration as well as practical tips for writing thank you notes, condolence letters, as well as how to help children learn to write thank you letters (an absolute must).

84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

A charming book chronicling the correspondence between a freelance writer in NYC and a used book seller in London. I highly recommend the audio version of this as each character is read by a different person which adds to the delight of the story. If you love reading books and writing letters, this book is for you!

I Love You, Ronnie: The Letters of Ronald Regan to Nancy Regan

One of the best books on letter-writing to a spouse. Ronald Regan wrote letters and notes constantly to his beloved wife, and she includes a few of them in this book. One of my favorites was this simple note:

My Darling,

This is really just an “in-between day.” It is a day on which I love you three hundred and sixty five days more than I did a year ago and three hundred and sixty five days less than I will a year from now.
But I wonder how I lived at all for the three hundred and sixty fives before I met you.

All my love,
Your Husband

Isn’t that so romantic? I sometimes overthink the letters I write—I think I need to have something special or specific to say— but no. Just a short note that says “I love you” is always perfect and enough. Here’s to writing all the loving thoughts we have down on paper.

More books on letter writing:

—The Art of the Personal Letter by Margaret Shepherd

—Heartspoken: How to Write Notes that Connect, Comfort, Encourage and Inspire by

Elizabeth H. Cottrell

—365 Thank Yous by John Kralik

—To the Letter: A Celebration of the Lost Art of Letter Writing by Simon Garfield

—Kind Regards: The Lost Art of Letter-Writing by Liz Williams

—Illustrated Letters of Jane Austen by Penelope Hughes-Hallett

My beloved grandmother, aged 97, passed away this morning, and I would be remiss in writing an entire essay on letter-writing without mentioning her. She was a prodigious writer of both letters and cards, and sent birthday cards to all of her posterity (which now numbers well over 100) throughout her life. She is one of the reasons I write letters today, and my gratitude for her loving example is deep. I hope I can continue in her well-trod path and keep writing letters for the rest of my life.

Keep seeking the virtuous and the lovely,

Shannon

To leave a comment, visit ’s original post here:

Of Permanent Things

How to begin a letter-writing habit

Ruth Gaskovski & Peco who write at School of the Unconformed recently asked readers to share their stories of ordinary daily acts that keep the invasion of digital technology at bay. In 2019, I wrote one handwritten letter every single day, amounting to well over 400 letters. While I don’t writ…

Read more

2 years ago · 23 likes · 9 comments · Shannon Hood

Ruth Gaskovski put a call out this summer for people to share the ways they live differently in the digital age, so I thought I’d participate. I think it’s so helpful and interesting to know how other people are living, especially when those ways are countercultural. It can be inspiring, and it can help people feel less weird and alone.

I’ve lived a pretty analog life for as long as I can remember. This isn’t to make some sort of statement; it’s really just my preference. Technology stresses me out; I like simple and human.

My husband is the same way. One time I filmed us trying to figure out how to play music in our new-to-us vehicle and shared it to my Instagram stories because I knew it would probably get some laughs. We were very annoyed to find out that this car had no CD player like our old Honda Fit, so we had to try to figure out the bluetooth or whatever.

(We struggled. It did get laughs.)

We are just not very tech-savvy, mostly because we’re not that drawn to the digital life. This has continued as we’ve had children.

With that, here are 10 ways we live a simple-ish, analog life.

1. TVs have a marginal presence in our home.

We have no TV in our main living room; instead, we have furniture around a circular rug. Our living room is for sitting and chatting. We have a TV downstairs in our family room, but we do not have cable, and it is only on when we’re actively watching something. We ride bikes, hang in the yard, play board games, do puzzles, read, talk.

2. We still use DVDs and CDs.

I actually have no idea who else does this and am slightly panicked that this admission will mean we’re weirder than I thought, but here we go. We have a great collection of CDs from our younger days and we play them. (We do use streaming some for music, of course.) I look for movies on DVD at garage sales and thrift stores, and we have a great little collection of family-friendly films I’ve curated over the years that are free to watch and readily available!

3. We don’t have Wi-fi.

We have our Internet hardwired. We do have a modem and router, but we choose to use physical cables to access the Internet instead of a Wi-fi connection. Because of no Wi-fi, we also don’t have Alexa or any other AI woman to help run our home. I’ll admit, I’m often a bit jealous when I see this in action in others’ homes, but it’s just not something we do.

4. We don’t use baby monitors.

We started out using simple audio ones, but quickly found that we just didn’t need them. It was just one more thing. We’ve always lived in smaller homes where we could hear and check in easily if need be. We also don’t really use gadgets for our kids—the amazing ergonomic Baby Bjorn bouncer is pretty much it.

5. Our kids don’t have tablets.

I imagine tablets can be integrated thoughtfully into a life, and I may get one this year for limited use with homeschooling. But to date, our big girls (ages 8 and 6) haven’t had access to a tablet. Do I sometimes let them draw on the Notes app on my phone or watch PBS kids? Yes, I do. But in general, as I mentioned in point 1, we try to engage in non-digital activity. They love audiobooks, which I stream from the public library app on my phone to a speaker (we do have two portable Bluetooth speakers for this purpose and for music).

6. I have cookbooks and printed-out recipes.

I really like my recipes to be tangible. I like to write on them, and I like to have them physically sitting right there as I cook. I realized I was driven crazy by trying to look on my phone at a recipe, so now I never do. We have a printer, and I print out recipes. Then I put them into page protectors that go into a binder.

7. I use a wall/paper calendar.

We have a whiteboard calendar that I keep updated for the family, and I have a week-to-week pad of paper I use to keep track of life in more detail. I’ll admit, I think this needs to shift as my husband and I have realized as our kids get older that we both need to be able to access and add to the calendar more easily (he works outside the home). I told him, you figure it all out and we can do that :) I just really like to write things down on physical paper. When things live in the digital cloud world, it feels harder for me. I need to see it. I do use my Notes app for lists on the go, but the major tracking happens analog.

8. We have print copies of books.

We have massive amount of both adult and kid physical books in our home. I don’t do e-readers or even really audiobooks despite reading a lot, and my kids have only recently started doing audiobooks. We recently had a friend build wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in our downstairs family room. (Best project ever.) I can totally understand the appeal of e-readers and audiobooks, and I’ll probably make the jump at some point (a little tired of hauling four books on every trip, lol), but I absolutely love books I can hold in my hands. They feel sacred to me.

9. My husband has a flip phone.

My husband has had a flip phone for over a year now, and he really likes it. He says he feels much more present in his life and I’d agree that he is. He wasn’t big on phone use before, but he would sit and scroll when stressed or tired as we all do and he didn’t like that, but it wasn’t a big jump. As I said to Katie Marquette recently, it does make me feel guilty (iPhone 14 here). I, too, would like the life of a dumb phone user. But it just doesn’t seem practical for me at this point in time, and that’s ok. Maybe someday.

10. I try to stay human online.

I’ve been writing on the Internet for about a decade, and I try to stay human while still growing my body of work and reaching new readers. On Instagram, I don’t do what the algorithm wants me to do (ahem reels) because I like the vibe of pictures or static posts with words. I don’t think of people as numbers or an infinite resource to exploit and I’m ok with slow growth. I resist the urge to be sharp in comments sections. I love talking with people one-on-one via DM (many conversation of which have turned into friendships and even gone over to Voxer or text). I put people over ideas in my real life and try to do the same online, since everyone on the Internet is, as it turns out, a human being. (Except the bots or whatever.)

I’ve realized as I write this that a lot of these things might seem to someone like “more work,” but it truly doesn’t feel that way to me. Analog life feels good to me. It feels straightforward, simple. And I’m not anti-technology. I like my iPhone, and I wrote just the other day about my love for automatic soap dispensers. I just prefer a life that’s mostly grounded in the physical, tangible world.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t also think of dystopian novels like Brave New World where technology has made everything infinitely more efficient and easier, and… well if you’ve read it you know how that turned out. I do think some resistance is in order, but I do not desire to try to live outside of reality.

I’m looking forward to reading more of the stories and examples that Ruth collects, and be sure to follow her work if you’re interested, too!

What about you? Where are you on the digital/analog spectrum? Where do you love your technology and where are you totally in on the old-fashioned way? I’d love to hear.

If you would like to leave a comment, visit ’s original post here:

One Tired Mother

Notes from an analog life

Ruth Gaskovski put a call out this summer for people to share the ways they live differently in the digital age, so I thought I’d participate. I think it’s so helpful and interesting to know how other people are living, especially when those ways are countercultural. It can be inspiring, and it can help people feel less weird and alo…

Read more

2 years ago · 13 likes · 14 comments · Amber Adrian

by from

It can be hard to resist the siren call of our iPhone and the lure of digital media. My mobile device usually goes with me everywhere I go, sometimes to my consternation, and I admit I still have Gmail on my phone right alongside the Substack icon. I do enjoy using the Calm app which helps me with my almost daily meditation sessions.

Although I feel I've made progress on lessening the amount of time I spend on my phone and obviously there is room for improvement, there are still things that my brain stubbornly refuses to utilize my phone for. In particular, that is scheduling and/or adding things to a digital calendar and writing things on the Notes app of my phone.

It is interesting how intractable I am about these two things. It could be a generational thing, or maybe I'm just a throwback to an era where you literally wrote things down. Growing up, we always had a calendar up on the wall in the kitchen where birthdays and doctor appointments were written down in a scrawled hand. Even after I became an adult and had my own apartment after university, I still had a calendar on my wall and dutifully wrote down any important appointments. Now as a mother with children in school, there I am at my wall calendar writing down when picture day is and the much anticipated first day of school.

Every December, I look forward to picking and choosing a new calendar for the upcoming year in which I will write down all of our various minutiae. But it is our minutiae, and I enjoy putting it all down. I am particular about the calendar I choose, and I will definitely look at the preview pages on the back of the main calendar, just to make sure that it is something I will enjoy looking at for the next twelve months. One year, I had an Addams Family calendar where each month was a different original drawing of the family from cartoonist Charles Addams, which began in 1938. My current calendar is different places in England which for this month, is a photo of Oxford.

So, I definitely do not use a digital calendar and I don't use the Notes app on my phone. I write it down, no matter what it is, literally on paper. Grocery lists are always haphazardly written down on scraps of paper while any ideas that I have in terms of writing, or something I want to look up or read about, I write down in a small notebook that I keep in my purse. Sometimes my scrawl is slightly illegible as I am trying to write down my ideas as fast as possible before doing a school pick-up or dashing into the grocery store for example. This notebook is always with me, and I use it to write down anything, and I mean anything that pops into my head that I want to research or look into later. If you are wondering, my notebook has Sherlock Holmes on the cover, and it is one of my favorite things ever.

I have one other notebook that I keep at home that does not travel and that is used expressly for journaling prompts and book quotes. I am not a big journaler per se, but there are some lovely people here on Substack that I follow who hold monthly Zoom journaling sessions and I do enjoy participating in those and seeing what comes up on the page as I articulate my thoughts. In that same notebook, I will write down quotes from a book that I am currently reading that really resonated with me. This mostly applies to non-fiction, and I find that writing these words down in my notebook helps me to not only retain what I read, but also it is a way to look back and find useful information for an answer to a philosophical question that I am looking for.

I know that there are more ways that I could be less tethered to my phone, and I look forward to exploring ways to reduce my device use even more. But I really do love the fact that pen and paper have always held true for me, even as a little girl scribbling in her diary, to a woman writing down her thoughts and dreams in notebooks full of prose-leaning cursive handwriting. Some things may change but my enjoyment of the handwritten word never will.

If you would like to leave a comment, you can do so on “A Library of Unconformed Lives” here:

Leave a comment

My husband and I were negotiating our way down an alpine steep when we crossed paths with a hiker, clad in high-tech trendy clothing, who stopped and asked, “How much farther to the top?” We pointed upwards beyond the bend behind us; he asked us about the view. We revealed that we didn’t reach the top because we got distracted by the very reason we had come there—huckleberries! “The huckleberries at the top are the best! They’re so ripe and abundant,” we gushed. Our enthusiasm infected him with curiosity. 

We planned this alpine vacation around the huckleberry season (something nobody else on the trail seemed to do). Indeed, most other hikers did not even notice the edible huckleberry-filled scenery. They hastily trekked to the vista while we visibly stuffed our mouths and buckets with these heavenly treats. Wild huckleberries are common, yet they’re impossible to harvest commercially. Their location makes them demanding to attain, and the berries are arduous to pick. Consequently, they cost $20 per pound.

We let the hiker try some berries. When their intense sweetness assaulted his tongue, his face contorted into wordless delight. “Wow!” he exclaimed, asking us where and how to find the plant. I identified an unripe huckleberry plant nearby, explaining that the berries tend to hide underneath the leaves. He thanked us as we joyfully parted ways. 

We could have revealed much more to the hiker—the secrets of the Kingdom—which show themselves in plain sight to seekers. Secrets like the sweetness in wild glacial water that grows roots that will shoot sunwards into daisies. Eventually, this living water spawns salmon in the cool mountain streams before throwing itself into the vast ocean. Secrets like the wild thimbleberries that crunch and pop with flavors of almond, jammy raspberry, and crimson-staining cherries. Or, the potent medicine in pasqueflower, mugwort, and yarrow that permits one to bypass visiting a physician for a costly prescription—the healing is in the mountains. 

Wild food—one of the many wonders in the homemade life. 

I didn’t always lead a homemade life. Regrettably, I’ve spent most of my days living the purchased life. 

The shift began with the multitude of changes brought by the covid lockdowns. My work dried up, leaving me hours of free time. I canceled my April hiking vacation to Utah and decided to vacation at home. I packed a lunch, tied on my hiking shoes, and ventured on daily 8-mile walks around my neighborhood. With new eyes, I saw the life that was there all along. On the trees, tiny carmine buds emerged, eventually ballooning into wide, lush maple leaves. Golden sunbursts of dandelions pierced through the soccer field. When the flowers turned to puffs of seeds and their limp bodies fell back into earth, white clover emerged along with the whirr of buzzing bees. For the first time, I noticed the verdancy of the foliage awakening in the throbbing pulse of that Spring of 2020. My childlike perception returned as I walked in awestruck wonder, hearing the songbirds and seeing the novelty of Creation as if for the very first time. Yet, in my newfound wonder, I felt a deep heaviness. A profound sadness. 

I had not realized the great emptiness I had been living in for so long. 

I had wasted my life focusing on human-made things rather than Creator-created Creation. And the human-made world did not evoke the satisfying wonder I was just now beginning to grasp. 

I was trained up to live the purchased life. I lived this life at universities and in front of computer screens while binge-watching shows, eating fried food at cheap happy hours, commuting on the freeway, and flying to exotic destinations while stuffing down packaged purchased food. My MacBook laptop,  Kindle, and smartphone were ever available for me to listen to podcasts or just scroll the IG. As a weekend warrior I frequented concerts, shows, movies, and restaurants. There was no time to consider the lilies, so I didn’t!

Covid lockdown granted me an abundance of time, I smelled the roses on my long walks. And ate them too! I simmered their rose hips into jam and steeped their petals into calming tea. While learning other plants, I began to cautiously nibble my way through the neighborhood. I roasted dandelions into a soothing digestif. I trimmed elderberry bunches to cook into elderberry syrup. I plucked spruce tips for making jelly. I collected cottonwood buds to make Balm of Gilead—an analgesic anointing oil. In doing this, I learned that gathering from God’s garden is a way to materially receive His spiritual gifts without much toil on my end. It says in Philippians (4:19), God will sustain me: “My God shall supply all your need.” God’s love was no longer abstract or theoretical but physical—tangible—in the freely given dandelions, elderberries, and healing cottonwood buds.

The ponderous days in 2020 halted my “busyness.” And I realized I liked it. I did not miss flying, traveling, or commuting. Nor did I miss restaurants, packaged food, concerts, or theaters. I didn’t care about the “binge worthy” TV shows. None of those things could replace my newfound sense of wonder. 

As all the noise faded, I started to feel this strange peace…dare I say shalom? Absorbed in awe, I noticed nothing else around me but the clouds, waters, plants, animals, and people. When glancing into grocery store windows during my walk, I was perplexed that everyone was distanced and wearing masks. And then I would snap out of my reverie and remember, “Oh yeah…the pandemic. Forgot about that!” 

While the human world had been shut off to everything except what they deemed “essential,” Mother Nature kept right on going with her birthing, rebirthing, blooming, buzzing, growing, flowing, flowering, and serenading. She beckoned me to join her. Unknowingly, I did. And found my humanity. 

Instead of focusing on all we couldn’t do, we got creative regarding what we could do. To replace the shut restaurants, I hosted dinner parties. I cooked complicated things like Scotch eggs, Vietnamese fish sauce fried wings, and Duck a l’Orange. My friends contributed their delectable dishes: gruyere red pepper soup, olive oil lemon blueberry cake, Chinese five-spice pork belly, and hearty homemade seeded German bread. We feasted with lively chat.

Despite the despairing world around us, we laughed! We created inside jokes and gave one another knowing looks at just the right moment to signal an explosion of laughter. My friend Lisa facilitated an evening of homemade comedy; we played improv games that left us in stitches. My musician friend Jeb taught us the basics of rhythm, and we soon became a chorus of musicians! I plinked the piano, someone else beat a drum, another friend strummed a guitar, and an impromptu poet sang silly. We ended that evening dancing and laughing. Sure, comedy shows and concerts were canceled, but we didn’t mind; we made our own laughter and (terrible) music! 

The reprieves were uplifting. Nevertheless, those uncertain days brought much distress. My demanding job depleted my energy and filled me up with anxiety. But I did not despair since I knew that God’s Creation was for me; in the foraged rose hips and spruce tips, I had literally tasted and seen that, yes, the Lord is indeed good (Psalm 34:8). During moments of angst, I would plunge myself into the salt water of the Salish Sea. As the cold squeezed and hugged me, my angst dissipated into the sea’s mist. Peace returned. This became an almost daily habit, and eventually, several friends joined me on my anti-anxiety plunge. 

The day came when a nearby county entered a different phase of covid restrictions, opening bars, movies, and restaurants. We hadn’t been anywhere in months. We drove an hour for a date out on the town, attending a comedy show and dining at a local pub. 

Returning home, I realized that I had not enjoyed myself. We had purchased (mostly crude, cheap) humor from strangers who did not know what delights us. I could have called a friend who would have made us laugh much more effectively and for free. Additionally, we had purchased a mediocre meal made with low-quality ingredients. The food wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t exactly good, not nearly as good as fresh jicama dipped in our homemade red pepper sauce, or homemade sockeye salmon in a sugar/salt brine dusted with fresh dill. I told my husband, “Ya know what? I didn’t need that. I prefer the homemade life.” I didn’t miss what passes for civilization. I wanted to make my life, not buy my life. That’s when we became more intentional about living a homemade life.

We now weigh decisions by asking: “Does this bring us closer to our humanity?” We cook our meals, make wine and jams, and create our own art (or at least try). I’ve learned crochet and coil basketry. We even make our own medicine from wild herbs. A homemade life is a human-made life; it brings us closer to our humanity, to the humus (soil), and to the earth. Each decision that brings us closer to our humanity invariably brings us away from a machine-made life, from distracting technology. 

Recently, I weighed travel options for a friend’s wedding in San Francisco. The city is a 15-hour drive but only a 1.5-hour flight from where I live. Could a person be any more disconnected from earth—traveling in a plastic pressurized tube 40,000 feet above ground, speeding at 600 miles per hour? It’s actually dehumanizing. To remain connected to my humanity, I stayed near the humus, enduring a 24-hour Amtrak journey instead.  

As the train weaved through the changing landscape, I experienced more humanity than I would have on an airplane—where everyone sits silently ignoring each other. A child I met in the Seattle station took a shine to me, and delighted me by waving excitedly whenever he saw me throughout the long journey. Three people conversed with me over dinner in the dining car. A Native American man spoke to me for a while, offering me pork rinds and an energy drink. I chatted with my young seatmate. On my return journey, I inadvertently sat in the car reserved for the disabled, and I communed and shared food with people who physically could not travel by plane. I offered my elderly seatmate a pillow as day dimmed into night and the train grinded closely along the rhythms of the land.

Moving closer to humanity, I now live more connected to the rhythms of earth.For Summer Solstice, we drink homemade heather mead (an energizing herbal wine) and stay up with a sun that refuses to sleep early. To celebrate the Winter Solstice, we forgo electric lighting and enjoy the winking stars and glistening moon amid the early darkness. In the glow of beeswax candles, we eat rich homemade cassoulet accompanied by mulled, home-fermented plum wine. 

In Autumn, we take our annual foraging trip to the mountains in search of chokecherries, elderberries, and whatever unexpected gifts we might receive. We visit fruit stands to buy inexpensive B-grade apples and pears, which we turn into butters, ciders, sauces, and jams. We comb the forests for wild mushrooms and dig up medicinal roots. In Winter, we drive to a nearby town to gather cottonwood buds, read books, and enjoy a forested sauna. In Spring, when life revives, we eat reviving nettles and chickweed. In Summer, when all things ripen, we go to the mountains as freelance huckleberry evangelists. (This year, we got a convert!) 

The purchased life steals our humanity; the homemade life births wonder, peace, satisfaction, and even thrill. Thrill at encountering chanterelles while out on a Winter walk. Satisfaction that with my own hands (and the help of a generous sheep), I crocheted a sweater. Wonder that comes from sitting at the foot of a cloud-piercing mountain. And the peace that comes from knowing I am held in the palm of the Creator, an irreplaceable part of His glittering glory on this resplendent earth, ever tasting and seeing that the Lord is good. 

To leave a comment, visit ’s original post here:

Divine Nature

The Homemade Life

My husband and I were negotiating our way down an alpine steep when we crossed paths with a hiker, clad in high-tech trendy clothing, who stopped and asked, “How much farther to the top?” We pointed upwards beyond the bend behind us; he asked us about the view. We revealed that we didn’t reach the top because we got distracted by the very reason we had …

Read more

2 years ago · 16 likes · 11 comments · Alissa Bonnell

Hello! I am 24 years old and I live in New Zealand with my husband. I began wrestling with my technology about 2 years ago. I have divided my brief story into three sections:

• Digital tech

• Other tech

• Moving forward

Digital technology:

I use the word wrestle because it is a constant tension for me, the pull towards engaging with ideas online and the desire to be offline.

I work full time online as a tutor, so I am spending a lot of my time on the laptop which frustrates me, but I also really enjoy my work and connecting with my students who otherwise wouldn’t be able to get this help due to living so remotely.

One major thing that I have done has been to move to a dumbphone. It has come with all the inconveniences and adjustments that have been documented before. My main difficulty has been learning to navigate without maps. Our nearest city is about 45 minutes away and I do not know how to navigate it without googlemaps. So I am hoping to find a paper map (hard to find in my neck of the woods) and learn to navigate it without the maps.

Some things that I have included into my life as I have phased out the constant stimulation of a smartphone has been learning to play the viola and piano. It’s a humbling experience to learn to play a string instrument as an adult. My poor husband has to listen to it, but it has been a really awesome thing to learn to play. I have developed a love of music, it has become something that I play for leisure and I hope to continue to learn and appreciate good music.

Another thing that I have tried to implement is using my public library. When I have a query about something or want to learn about a subject, I have been going to my library and getting books out about it. This has been a fun practice and it has been awesome to use my library more. My husband and I have also begun reading a novel together (currently reading “the 100 year old man who climbed out a window and disappeared”). We take turns reading it and it has been a wonderful way to spend an evening.

Other technology:

In December 2023 my husband and I moved down to one car. Living rurally it means that my husband takes it for his work and I stay at home ( as I work from home). This has been a very interesting experience. I found that I had to organise my life a lot more and that everything takes a lot longer when you’re on foot. Also becoming very aware about how the area we live in has been designed so that you need to own a car if you want to get anywhere.

We have in the last week moved into a township where most essentials ( like supermarket, library etc..) are within walking distance. I am very exciting to continue this one car experiment and try experience our little town on foot. I want to take the time to learn who my neighbours are and learn the names of the streets and take the time to really know the place in which I am living. I am finding that is easier to do at a walking pace.

We also moved into a very old house with limited electrical sockets and limited insulation. It’s been interesting to observe these things, as I am accustomed to the modern house that we were renting with electricals sockets all over the place. You could plug everything in and within an hour of using the heat pump it became warm enough to wear a t-shirt in winter. In our current house it takes more time to keep warm and more navigating when I want to use an electrical appliance. These aren’t bad things, but an adjustment and an exposure to a different way of living. It also means that I am feeling the cold of winter! Wool is used for a reason! It feels more real somehow. I am learning that there are natural limitations to things. There is a time and a season for everything and I think living in this house, having to walk everywhere by foot, I am going to have a crash course in these truths.

Moving forward:

I still have this constant tension with technology. I get frustrated at myself and my inability to walk throughout the world without it. At the same time I feel immensely blessed that I have access to so many thoughts and ideas (such as this substack) online.

Going forward I want to explore how I am consuming information. Although I have removed my smartphone, my laptop has taken it’s place. I constantly am listening to podcasts from spotify and then not being able to remember what I’ve listened too, or can only remember fragments. So I am giving myself a month to not listen to any podcasts. Just to see if there’s a way that I can move throughout the world and learn things in a way that not just being overstimulated with information all of the time.

I also want to bring these thoughts outside of myself. My musings about technology have been very much just for me, how I spend my time etc. But I want to begin seeing if I can try do some activities with people, in-person. Things like : rosary nights, in person book clubs, games nights, or learning a piano or string duet with my husband etc..

I am just bumbling along the beginning of this journey. I am not totally satisfied with where I am at with my relationship with technology but it is something that I want to continue working on. I think the hardest thing is that I have grown up with this technology. I haven’t got many of the skills that were developed before digital technology, I learnt to drive with Googlemaps, I don’t know my way around without it. So I am finding that I have to use technology to learn the skills that will help me step away from technology. I am looking forward to hearing about other people’s experiences. Your substack has been invaluable to me. It’s wonderful to hear about other people who are thinking about these ideas.

If you would like to leave a comment, you can do so on “A Library of Unconformed Lives” here:

Leave a comment

In their article, Guideposts for an Age of Technological Upheaval, Peco and Ruth discuss what we can do to spare us from the negative impact of technology, keep us rooted in reality, and deepen what it means to be human. They asked their readers to share their stories.

My husband has worked in the IT industry ever since completing his electrical engineering degree at the age of 21. Two of my sons and both my sons-in-law also work in the IT space, a couple of them in cyber security. They are all aware of the hazards involved in its use and misuse and for the main part, they tend not to be keen on social media. But involvement with technology has paid our bills and put food on the table for over three decades. And we can all see at least some of the benefits of technology or we wouldn’t be here on Substack.

I’d be a Luddite if I hadn’t married an engineer. My contribution to our married life was a spinning wheel, a loom, some musical instruments, a copy of Jane Eyre & Pilgrim’s Progress and a two-seater car. We didn’t have a T.V. so my dad asked if we’d like one as a wedding present. I suggested a sewing machine instead, which is still fully functional. Not having a T.V. in the home, especially when our children came along, was our first noticeable act of going against the tide of our culture. It was a little thing for us. We didn’t think of it as a deprivation, but just about everyone else around us did.

I’ve done quite a bit of reading about exercise in recent years and a phrase has stuck in my mind, ‘death by comfort.’

Exercise is uncomfortable. I always feel disinclined to get up to the park on a cold morning and get in some cardio and weights with some other women three times a week. We all complain but once we’ve finished our 45 minutes, we are a much happier group.  

This idea of death by comfort has been a motivator for me. It helps me to tackle a difficult book, look up words I don’t know or am not sure of, memorise scripture, get up and move around, practice my guitar, or write a long letter instead of sending a quick email. These are small things but they are diffusive acts that seep into other areas of our lives.

Integrity

The word Integrity comes from the Latin word integer (integritas) or whole number; meaning that a person of integrity is a whole person, unimpaired and of a sound, understanding mind.

Integrity takes in the whole moral character and we are continually making or marring this character. The early 20^th Century educator, Charlotte Mason, said:

...let us do each bit of work as perfectly as we know how, remembering that each thing we turn out is a bit of ourselves, and we must leave it whole and complete; for this is Integrity.

Finishing what I start whether that’s a patchwork quilt with hundreds of handsewn hexagons or some other unfinished object

Keeping my word even when it hurts

Keeping things real – not projecting a different person or image to who I am in real life

Living a faithful life when no one is watching

Not worrying about promoting myself: ‘Let another praise you, and not your own mouth,’ —Proverbs 27

Continuity

This is another idea that pushes against the stream. It is a way of stability and unbrokenness; a sense of ‘staying.’

My husband & I have been married for 36 years. We’ve stayed together in the face of difficulties and change, joy and loss. I was so afraid of getting married, but I knew the man I was pledging myself to was a stayer. I wondered about my staying ability after the brokenness of my own background, but we made our vows, ‘Calling on the Grace of God,’ and here we are. Going against the stream, day in, day out; nothing heroic, just little acts of faithfulness and commitment.

So I don’t have any stellar stories to tell, just some small ideas:

Don’t always default to the comfortable option (make soup from scratch, bake a loaf of bread instead of buying it now & again, move your body regularly, use your brain, walk instead of driving if you can, have a cold shower occasionally…)

Be a person of integrity (don’t be fake, acknowledge someone else’s ability or skill, finish that jumper you’re knitting, return the book you borrowed)

Pass on an inheritance…family traditions, the knitted baby clothes your grandma made; invest in your friendships long term; honour your vows & commitments

Read old books, make do with what you have, have relationships with older people and those who are younger.

At the end of her book, Middlemarch, George Eliot wrote this:

…the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life…

Amen

You can leave a comment on “A Library of Unconformed Lives” here:

Leave a comment

or visit ’s original post here:

Carol Hudson’s Substack

Against the tide: some thoughts on navigating the modern world

In their article, Guideposts for an Age of Technological Upheaval, Peco and Ruth discuss what we can do to spare us from the negative impact of technology, keep us rooted in reality, and deepen what it means to be human. They asked their readers to share their stories…

Read more

2 years ago · 9 likes · 4 comments · Carol Hudson

This post is a response to the call for stories from School of the Unconformed, a newsletter offering practical guidance on navigating daily life in the Machine Age. There is a link to the call at the end of this post.

We are staying at my brother’s home in a 1920s skyscraper in a south side Chicago neighborhood near University of Chicago.  It’s hot and muggy and there is no AC.

There is also no paper.  I’m sure he has paper, but he and his wife are at work and in all the places that I feel comfortable snooping I can’t find a piece of paper to write a grocery list on.

I often make grocery lists on the backs of sealed envelopes filled with junk mail, appreciating the padding within for the smooth strokes it allows of my pen.  My brother’s recycle bin yields no such thing.  

My mom stops by, and I ask her if she knows where he might keep a tablet or some scrap paper.  She asks why I don’t just make my grocery list on my phone.  She mentions there’s an app.  I dodge adding new apps to my phone whenever possible, so I pull up my Notes app. This is clunky and keeps generating autocorrect errors.  I make it work gathering grocery requests from my brother, my husband and our parents.  I want to make them good food while I’m here, something I love to do, especially now, from my joy in receiving their generous hospitality. 

I walk through the store repeatedly punching in my phone’s passcode to “wake it up” and check the list.  There’s a palpable distraction in this lack of nuanced handwriting, the tiny text and the myriad of typos while I try to navigate an unfamiliar grocery store.

Later that week we’re visiting my parents’ home: a tiny studio apartment that is practical and uncluttered; comfortable furniture is curated to provide order and beauty and the limited space is judiciously allocated. It illustrates the adage “a place for everything and everything in its place”.  And so they have intuitive-to-locate paper. Easy enough to find that my toddler spots it and starts scribbling. It is the kind I’ve been able to find in my parents’ home all my life.  A white legal pad; blue lines and a pink double stripe down the left margin.  

He picks up a ballpoint pen, explores the clicking mechanism, then starts making marks that he is sure are words.  He looks at me and clearly says “list”.  He is only two but has seen me make many dozens of grocery lists while perching close to his level on a child size chair at the kid’s table in our kitchen. List making, whether it be grocery or to-do, is a chore that I reverently do a couple times a week in neat black ink. I write on unlined paper in all capital letters with pens selected for their smooth flowing ink and fine point. I imagine instead having made those hundreds of lists on my iphone while my little ones watch me.  They are always watching.  

To them I would appear no different than if I was responding to a loved one’s text; a colleague’s urgent work email, scrolling media or reviewing photos.  But my toddler knows that things we eat can be represented with marks on paper and that paper is taken to the grocery store and laid in the cart next to him as we load it full of groceries.  

And now he imitates me. He “writes a list” on paper.  And thank God.  Thank God there is something to imitate that is not me staring at a screen.  

I have always been slow to adopt new technologies like grocery-list-making apps.  And sure, there are more noticeable, maybe “chunkier” ways we’ve unmachined our lives. Our family of four travels around our suburban streets via foot or cargo bike synchronistically meeting friends who travel the same way. My husband and I share one car and one laptop; we have never owned a TV or a baby monitor and when we say, “hey record player, play Okee Dokee Brothers” nothing happens until one of us goes over there and slides that deep orange vinyl out of its artfully decorated sleeve covered in engrossing maps of Brambletown, and sets it gently on the turntable. (And because I would not have gotten that reference until this past week staying at my brother’s let me clarify that in their house you can say “Hey google play some music!” and music starts playing.) So the timing of that first (and maybe last) digital grocery list and my two-year-old’s rendition of his first handwritten list highlighted the importance, to me, of these tiny, more granular ways we “unmachine”.  

Halfway through our vacation we move from my brother’s guest bedroom to a downtown AirBnb in my parent’s building to spend more time close to them.  There is AC and it’s disturbingly cold.  The unmitigated heat in my brother’s home was a thin connection to the “real”.  Even though there was an elevator ride between us and outside, with open windows I knew when a storm blew in one night; I knew when it didn’t cool off at all one stifling night and at times I heard the revitalizing wind howl mightily off the lake. Now, in a very new building, 33 floors above the rumbling “L” trains and treeless concrete I can barely tell when it begins to rain early one morning.  We keep turning the AC less cold, but it never really feels like it warms up.  Or maybe it just never really feels “real” so we keep trying to adjust it. 

 We’ll leave the city in a couple of days via jet plane.  We’ll return to our tiny house in California with wide open windows surrounded by our garden and the northern mockingbirds and scrub jays in place of the robins and cardinals we’ve been seeing here.  We’ll be getting ready to return to work and start a new year of homeschooling our first grader.  We’ll organize our calendar, run back to school errands and restock our kitchen after three weeks away, all with handwritten lists in tow.

You can leave a comment on “A Library of Unconformed Lives” here:

Leave a comment

or visit ’s original post here:

Kitkitdizze

Paper or Pixels?

This post is a response to the call for stories from School of the Unconformed, a newsletter offering practical guidance on navigating daily life in the Machine Age. There is a link to the call at the end of this post…

Read more

2 years ago · Erin

“Battery Empty.” The red camera blinks at me before shutting off.

“Oh.” I say slowly to myself. “Guess I won’t be taking pictures.”

Five weeks of not using my cell phone and I’ve not missed it-- except in moments like this. I’ve been meaning for days to step outside with the camera and take a few updated shots of our chickens in the chicken tractors and now when I finally do, I find that the camera needs to be charged. The chickens will keep doing their thing whether I photograph them or not but there’s something picturesque about the way the chicken tractors sit opposite each other on each side of the driveway.

If you don’t know what a chicken tractor is, imagine a tiny screened-in house, with a short, hinged door on one end, and a 5-gallon bucket hanging on the back end, attached to a small hose for a watering system. For rain and sun shelter, a tarp covers the sides. A narrow feeding trough hangs low in the middle of each tractor, holding the day’s food. Each tractor comfortably holds 25 birds. My husband attaches two wheels on the back end once or twice a day, lifts the front with a rope, and rolls it to its new patch of grass. There they’ll enjoy new families of bugs and worms, and fresh grass to poop on.

This morning, golden corn tassels wave lightly in the field nearby and the sun catches the ends of white chicken feathers, making these unattractive birds look somewhat charming. From where I stand, anyway. (If you’ve raised meat birds, then you know.)

In leu of being camera-ready, I’m forced to take it in slowly and thoughtfully. It’s quieter than usual, as six of my kids are eating oatmeal at picnic table out back, and the baby is sleeping.

The phone is off, the camera battery dead, but in this moment, I feel very much alive.

Every day there’s an enforced “quiet time” at the Pfenning house. Have you read the sweet children’s book “The Napping House” by Audrey Wood? On the cover is a picture of a snoring granny, a dog, a cat, a child, a mouse, and a “wakeful flea” …am I forgetting any?

The story begins with, “There is a house, a napping house, where everyone is sleeping.”

Soon after lunchtime, I send all children outside who are not sleeping. When someone inevitably tries to come back in after 10 minutes I say, “Nope, this is a napping house. Are you coming in to take a nap?” Naps are always allowed here.

There’s no screentime for the kids and in fact they don’t really “do screens” at all unless you count the occasional family movie night or geography quiz with Grandma. My kids are aged 10, 8, 7, 5, 3, 2, and 3 months. In their downtime you might find them coloring outside, dragging “treasures” out of Daddy’s scrap metal trailer (they’re really not supposed to do this) playing house, climbing trees, swimming in our pool, biking, or reading a book. Nine times out of ten for my oldest kids, it’s reading a book.

On an ideal day, I have an undisturbed chunk of quiet time all to myself during The Napping House hours. Littles one sleep, while big kids entertain themselves outside. In reality though, that kind of planned alone time doesn’t happen much. This isn’t to complain-- it’s just life right now with this many young children.

What I do have in this season of life, are pockets of time. A pocket here for a few dishes before my toddler comes to me with blue marker on her legs. Another pocket where children are playing nicely together, and I get a chance to sit down with my coffee. A pocket of time later on for a phone chat with my sister.

Before my phone’s summer siesta began, those pockets were largely spent on my phone, or trying hard not to be on my phone. There never seemed to be enough time for creative pursuits. My idea of rest was falling asleep in my chair, Bluetooth headphones on while an audiobook played, or phone dropped mid-YouTube video.

I don’t let my kids spend their quiet time on screens because I’m convinced it’s not restful at all. And there I was— phone following me outside, in the car, in the bathroom, and to my bed at night.

I was seeing my kids live a very interesting and creative life, and watching YouTube influencers also live these very interesting lives. And where was I? Feeling stuck in my recliner for the 100^th nursing session that day.

Yesterday, during a pocket of time, I sketched a bouquet of flowers. Nobody needed me, and kids were playing outside. I didn’t have any pressing housework at that moment, and I was too tired to start any meal prep. Six weeks ago, I would have pulled out the easiest nearest thing: my phone.

I would have scrolled. YouTube, Substack Notes, text messages, my photo app. Anything. Anything to fill the pocket of time and numb out for a bit.

With that not being an option this time, I grabbed a blank sheet of paper, and reached for the nearest pen. Flowers. Ah, I love flowers. My husband surprised me with a bouquet of farm fresh flowers last week and though many were wilted now, I was remembering how beautiful they looked that first day. I started to sketch a vase, then flowers for the vase, and a table for them to be set on. I looked at the sketch before me and was stunned, but not by my artistic abilities.

When was the last time I’ve drawn anything like this, just for fun?

My daughter came inside shortly after I drew the flowers, and she went “Wow! Did you draw this?” When I had finished with that and was on to the next thing, she started adding to my drawing. Soon it became “our drawing,” as there were now windows and a calendar drawn in behind the flowers and table. She even drew a running deer on her calendar page, just like the calendar shows on our kitchen wall.

This evening, I put the youngest four to bed. Normally, everyone sort of goes to bed at the same time and it’s chaotic and loud. Today, as usual, it was chaotic and loud, but I felt this nudge to do something a little different. Tonight, I ended up doing some drawing practice with my oldest two while we listened to an audiobook (Anne of Green Gables) on my new CD player. Within the span of an hour, we had each filled at least one page with adorable doodles and were quite proud of our work.

I can’t say that putting my phone away has resulted in anything major these last few weeks. I still haven’t started exercising like I keep promising myself, I can’t seem to get to bed at a decent hour, and kids have still left their shoes at home when we’ve driven to town for the library. Some things continue to be a struggle, smart phones or not.

What I can say is that without my phone I have enjoyed a few more moments to stare at ugly chickens, a few more moments to laugh at silly things my toddler is saying, and a few more restful pockets of time.

And that seems to be enough: enough reason to keep the phone in its place, and out of my pockets.  

What would you do with if you had more restful moments without your phone?

Do you find yourself feeling like there’s never enough time?

And please tell me, am I the only parent whose kids leave the house without shoes in the summer?

You can leave a comment on “A Library of Unconformed Lives” here:

Leave a comment

or visit ’s original post here:

The Large Family Letters

Pockets of Time

“Battery Empty.” The red camera blinks at me before shutting off…

Read more

2 years ago · 5 likes · 2 comments · Catherine Pfenning

Five summers ago, I was still a relatively new convert to catholicism and was ardently seeking my vocation in prayer and kept returning to the impulse or inspiration that I would be a wandering preacher in Europe. At the time, I thought I should start experimenting with barefoot walking as a preparation for this task. Of course barefoot would be a more excellent way to fulfill this task. So one evening rather than throw on my summer sandals to walk to my local grocery in Hyde Park, I decided to try the 2km walk barefoot. It didn´t go well. By then end of the walk, the muscles in my feet were aching, the bottoms of my feet were very tender and not happy to have been exposed to the ground, and my heels, worst of all, were badly bruised. “How do people do this?” I wondered. But I kept going and havent stopped really. Each subsequent year I find I am able to do a little more, and am able to puch my limits a little further. And I´ve been pleasantly surprised by what barefoot walking has taught me. If barefoot walking doesn´t have any obvious connection to our digital world, as the digital revolution really hasn´t altered this aspect of our life materially, I do think barefoot living might provide the most ready-to-hand lessons for the appropriate use of technology in general.

An ulterior motive for barefoot training was that I´ve always enjoyed running and wished to develop a toe-strike for long distance running. I knew barefoot running would more or less insist upon this. After my bruised heels recovered, I started walking exclusively barefoot, a shock to the locals in Hyde Park and a few friends of mine. I moved my barefoot running training from the beach to the park, and from the park to the street. And on the street I realized the same joy I found running on my toes as I ran sprints in high school. I was gliding again and it felt great. I was taking small quick steps like a bird, and this time I was flying not just for 400m but for miles and miles as my calves slowly developed to do a long distance toe strike. I loved the form that was given. I loved nature´s form.

But the flip side of this is that, if nature gives the form, its still a hard teacher. I needed the balls of my feet to strike the pavement carrying along with them the vast portion of my body weight, with my heels then gently coming to rest and then bouncing off the same surface and then finally my the balls of my feet and toes again springing forward without wiggle, with perfect symmetry. Anything less than this and the skin under my feet couldn´t survive. Too much friction would cause blisters. The quickest way to learn to run well is to run barefoot. In my case, to be honest, nature also needed the help of a fair number of instructional youtube videos before I could approximate the correct form.

Fast forward to a year after my start with barefoot running, I was still running the barefoot living experiment, and had started a few new experiments. I had quit my job in chicago, moved to germany, and was living in the forest. A pilgrim walking to Santiago from northern germany showed up at the evening Mass in the Freiburger Münster on the vigil of the Assumption. He needed a place to stay. I offered him a place sleeping next to me in my tent in the black forest and he was pleased to take me up on this offer. Then next day he invited me to walk with him to Santiago and I, pleased at the thought of accompanying him and at least the reality of it for the first 4 km or so, took him up on the offer. But even that first day where we couldn´t have gone much more than 20km in total was an absolute nightmare. My feet were killing me. The muscles in my feet were too weak and found themselves throbbing at the end of the day. After two days of walking I took a train back to Freiburg with my tail between my legs. But two months later I set out again and this time did eventually arrive months later in Santiago and then Fatima Portugal. I started and ended without shoes or sandals but I did (full disclosure) do a majority of this pilgrimage shod. Injury, cold, cowardice, psychic survival, all played a role in my preference for shoes at times and still do. I say this not to give a false impression. I am not (yet) a purist. I am a pragmatist who sees immense benefits in barefoot walking.

But basically, the stuff of barefoot walking is basically more sensory imput overall, more pleasure, and much, much more pain. When I first started barefoot walking I thought I would eventually develop callouses under my feet that would eventually return the walking experience to the same level of comfort as shod running and walking. This never happened. I did develop thicker callouses on the soles of my feet, but these only serve to allay, not entirely alleviate the pain. If you run a marathon barefoot, even if you manage to find a marathon totally without gravel, you will have a few very painful strikes where the balls of your feet land directly on a sizeable rock. If you walk barefoot on the camino de santaigo, there will be some very uncomfortable gravel stretches. Pain becomes an accepted part of barefoot life. And patience is basically our muscle for tolerating discomfort, pain, failure, in pursuit of a distant goal. And barefoot running and walking insists upon exercising your patience muscle, it insists upon accepting and dealing with pain, rather than seeking to avoid it. One also learns how subjective pain is. I can happily romp down a gravel path with a good conversation partner, but alone I would timidly tip-toe and be on the verge of tears. Pain tolerance is all about focus and focus is about community.

If nature provides the form and the form is often hard and painful, patience lets nature also adapt quickly and well to the proper form. The feet themselves grow to become like bricks of muscle, built to feast upon the earth, upon earthen paths, pavement, parking lots, rocks, whatever. My feet became conquerers. In retrospect its sometimes humorous to see ripped men in gyms who look like they could lift cars yet whose feet are so weak they couldn´t endure a 5km walk in the park without injury. Few parables could sum up our contemporary world so succinctly, we have become incomparably strong in many aspects of life, but with consideration of the most essential point of contact with the ground, or at the metaphorical level with reality itself, we have become altogether limpid and almost ill-equiped to endure the slightest discomfort or confrontation without technological mediation or assistance. Having strong feet, having human paws, feels great and I´ve grown to love exercising them.

I tend disdain the entirety of the new-agey lexicon, words like the word energy, chakra, spiritual pathways, connectedness, authenticity, living in the present, etc. But after years of walking barefoot, I have to admit the people who talk about “grounding“ are onto something. There is a sort of intangible spiritual benefit to having the skin of your feet make contact with the ground as the theory of grounding goes. The theory seems intuitive: both our hands and feet are chalk full of nerve endings and it seems, at the very least like letting these nerve endings get their daily exercise or activity without incumberance must have some cognitive benefit, moreover going barefoot does facilitate a deeper awareness of and connection to ones physical environment.

Another way to frame this connection is that barefoot walking is just way more mentally intense. When I am walking on the camino and I put sandals on, I notice that I am then allowed to check out mentally and be way less attentive of my surroundings. Sometimes this feels like a relief. With shoes I can let my thoughts wander more freely but its a slothful sort of state overall. Truly, I´ve found that prayer, philosophical speculation, insight into my life, these things are more ready to hand when I am walking barefoot. The whole impetus behind barefoot walking in the middle ages was penance. Here offering the pain itself became part of the intention. Im ashamed to say how little of this I´ve done when I am walking. But the few times I have said, “Lord, I offer up this path for x good thing, the repose of the soul of X, or X persons discernment right now,“ I am always granted graces to pray better for this person during that period of time.

Thus, after one develops the skill and learns to harness this added level of experience and intensity, shod pilgrims can seem like neanderthals in contrast, as they can trod along without considering their step, like thoughtness brutes insensible to pain, crunching rocks beneath their boots, where I am more or less doing pirouettes around the same rocks to prance along with a minimum of pain. I dance on a stage that others cannot see, as every rock, mud puddle, possible thorn, has a different meaning for me. I keep walking barefoot because I find this dance to be more beautiful and rewarding all-together. Except when its not, when its too much pain, when I am miserable, when I am injured, when I have to focus so hard I cannot converse, when I can´t keep up with people I really want to keep walking with. Then I put on sandals! I am not a purist but a pragmatist.

If pressed on the matter, I think my experiment with barefoot living has taught me the following things that could be applied more broadly concerning technology and our dependence on digital technology:

1. We should try as best as we can to let nature alone teach us the proper form for things and make experiments in this regard.

2. Doing so won´t make life easier, but more intense and rich, likely much more difficult and painful at times.

3. It will require a great deal of patience, failure, and adaptation.

4. This adaptation will ultimately strenthen us at crucial points of contact with ourselves, others and with the world.

5. Nature´s intention is a greater unity with creation, a greater intensity of life, and overall more beauty. It will teach us to dance in the most surprising ways and in the most precarious moments.

At the end of my first camino, as I arrived in Finisterra I hopped in the sea and then I wondered how to celebrate. I was all alone. But above all I thought a dance with my guardian angel was in order, and commenced a jig with him. I had been granted so many graces to keep on going over the previous months. There were even times when I resolved to stop with my thumb out to hitchnike home. I was always somehow stopped from succeeding in these attempts. But really each day walking barefoot, you are so vulnerable. In this way too, barefoot walking proves to be an accurate metaphor for life itself. No matter how strong your feet become, one shard of glass can end a pilgrimage, one mistep could lead to a bad injury. So too one mortal sin. Seeing and accepting this vulerability too is a grace. Grace perfects nature and this vulnerability should turn us to God for protection and guidance, or in the case of walking barefoot, I think it should lead to a special devotion to one´s guardian angel who helps us see the dangers lying before us on our path. And helps us avoid those we never see.

You can leave a comment on “A Library of Unconformed Lives” here:

Leave a comment

or visit ’s original post here:

da solo a piedi

Descalzo Lessons for a Digital World

Five summers ago, I was still a relatively new convert to catholicism and was ardently seeking my vocation in prayer and kept returning to the impulse or inspiration that I would be a wandering preacher in Europe. At the time, I thought I should start experimenting with barefoot walking as a preparation for this tas…

Read more

2 years ago · 3 likes · Stephen Weller

I first realized that my phone was starting to become a problem in my motherhood when my 2-year-old son said “Mommy, phone off!” These were devastating words to hear, especially since I tried so hard to balance his screentime, only to find out it was my screentime that was the bigger problem.

I'm an elder millennial, meaning we are the ones who created this problem. I was a freshman in college when “The Facebook” popped up, for college students only. Never had I been so proud to have a college email. We all desperately switched our AIM away messages and MySpace pages over to this new gem.

The first iPhones and Blackberries started popping up over the next few years, and then it was off to the races. We all barely knew what was happening and quickly left our 90s childhoods in the dust.

20 years later, I am a wannabe mompreneur on Instagram with 3 different accounts, 2 blogs, a YouTube channel, two kids under two, and postpartum anxiety to boot. What. A. Mess.

I took my first social media break in 2020 (can’t imagine why…). With the world shut down and everyone spending even more time online, which at the time seemed impossible, yet we all managed, emotions were at an extreme high battling the pandemic overload and a contentious election cycle. I found the snooze button on Facebook and used it liberally. My husband and I took off on a long road trip to visit my parents, and I took my first break. I spent two whole weeks off of social media. It was bliss! I didn’t know what I was or wasn’t missing - the true definition of ignorance is bliss.

2021 found me pregnant with my first son, and back on the East Coast with my parents as my husband took a short-term job in South Carolina. Once again, I found peace in being present with my parents and not spending time scrolling on social media. We played Yahtzee, went on walks (important for later), and watched the entire Marvel series from Iron Man to Endgame, one movie a night. It was the best time I’ve spent with my parents in a long time.

This trend of social media breaks here and there continued on ever since, especially into motherhood. I’d find myself scouring the internet for solutions to my motherhood woes at 3 am when I had insomnia after a night feed, my babe has long gone back to sleep. The late-night scrolling made the insomnia even worse, and my anxiety followed. I sometimes was served up problems I didn’t even know I had just so some other mompreneur on Instagram could sell me her solution. Every once in a while, after a bad scroll sesh, I’d take a week or so off of social media.

The biggest revelation and break came after my second son was born in the fall of 2023. I’m deep in postpartum anxiety while also dealing with a load of health problems that two back-to-back pregnancies surely escalated. And so back to my parent’s house, we went (bless them). We stayed for 2 months this time, and I took my longest social media break ever.

Leading up to this break, I had been desperately grasping onto my old life - work-from-home entrepreneur, yogi, and creative. I got lost in the world of online businesses, influencers, and social media craze. I couldn’t find direction or purpose - I shifted my blog name and niche 3 times, I kept working on my blogs while my baby was nursing and my parents entertained my two-year-old. At this time, I was also experiencing what turned out to be the worst Crohn’s disease flare-up of my life.

I was anxious, lost, desperate, confused, ill, weak. There are so many words for this time. Scared is probably the most descriptive.

And in the past when scared, I have started walking.

My life has always been very loosely surrounded by movement. We were an Army family who moved to a new home every 1-2 years for my entire childhood. We were also a family who went on outings - day trips, road trips, drives, walks, hikes - we were always doing things together. I recall being so annoyed by this as a 13-year-old, but I’m grateful for this foundation now in adulthood for it led to many years of hiking and now, in motherhood, daily walks.

During this long postpartum visit to my parents' house, whenever I felt well enough, we went for a walk. We’d walk around the horse stables on the air force base, or walk around the large hangers at the Air Museum. We strolled around the Georgia National Fairgrounds in Perry and walked along the boardwalk over the marsh at the Rotary Centennial Park. I wasn’t able to do this every day, depending on how strong I was feeling, but each walk began to bookmark core memories in this season of my life.

Eventually, we returned home to Nevada. I had a new doctor I was working with to restore my gut to health, and a new plan to power into motherhood back home without my parents' help. A big part of being able to do this has been remaining off of social media and continuing to walk daily.

I write a lot about quitting social media, what that looks like for me in motherhood, and how others may do it to, but here’s how I would summarize my reasoning - I felt like I was constantly chasing some dreamlife that the internet sold to me and told me that I wanted, and I bought into it without my permission. The mind virus got me. It wasn’t authentically me, it’s not truly what I wanted. Whenever I took a detox break, I immediately felt more free, at peace, more productive, and more vivacious.

With so much time in my day not spent scrolling, I found an old familiar way to fill the hours. I started taking the boys on long daily walks, which was also part of my new healing protocol. We started with 30 minutes a day, then worked up to 45 minutes a day, weaving in and out of the streets and cul-de-sacs in our old-town Las Vegas neighborhood. Sometimes I would listen to an audiobook or podcast, other times I’d just breathe and take in the lovely Vegas spring weather. Some walks were easy and the boys would nap, others would be cut short by a fussy baby or a dirty diaper. No matter what happened, I went out the door and got that walk in.

Walking changes in the summer here, for obvious reasons, so we moved in indoors. We walked around museums, malls, and Ikea. Eventually, I was able to sneak away in the early morning hours, after the morning feeding and before breakfast, to walk alone before the heat overcame us. These solo walks are where the magic began to happen. I started to find myself again. I prayed, and I listened for responses. I pondered the existence of my children. My mind wrapped itself around my entire postpartum experience and where it had brought me.

On a recent walk, I was reminiscing about my hiking days. In my late 20s, I took up hiking in red Rock Canyon just outside of Las Vegas. The desert views are indescribable, the air crisp and clean, the feeling of being in nature unmatched. I explored the entire southwest, adding notches to my belt from Sedona, Arches National Park, Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon, and more. On one solo hiking trip to Moab, Utah, I had a profound spiritual awakening on a hike. It wasn’t an extraordinary hike, but it was a bit challenging. I recognized that there was a certain excited fear going into the hike, not knowing what leaps and bounds (literally) I would come across. And then I paid close attention to my feelings on the way back out, which were completely different. Accomplished. Proud. Confident. I had already walked this path so I no longer had any fear.

This realization has always stuck with me, even though my walks are much simpler now. I can still see what I’m walking toward, and what I’ve come from. I’ve come from postpartum depression, mom guilt, and severe illness. I’ve overcome identity crisis, matresence, and hormonal shifts. We’ve battled breastfeeding, healing, and big life changes. We’ve had ups and downs in our marriage, but we keep coming out stronger.

As I continue to walk with my boys, I easily hit 12,000-13,000 steps a day. I’m sure I’ll be closer to 20,000 when the nicer weather comes. But more importantly than the number of steps and the health benefits we are all receiving, I am freeing myself from, well, myself. Every step is a forward direction toward the me I’m becoming. I don’t leave the old me behind per se, she is a part of every step that has brought me to where I am today.

And so I continue to stay off of social media and trudge forward, one step at a time.

If you would like to leave a comment, you can do so on “A Library of Unconformed Lives”.

For some time now, I have been following Ruth Gaskovski and Peco’s work on living an unconformed life in the digital age. Recently, they invited readers to submit stories of their lived acts of nonconformity and rebellion against the tyranny of modern technology. This is my contribution to the conversation.

Human beings are embodied souls. That means that we are every bit as much our bodies as we are our souls. This intertwining of rational soul and animal body is precisely what makes us human: were we soul only, we would be angels; body only, irrational beasts. That being said, we do have a word to describe the separation of human soul and body: death.

And so, it matters very much what we do with our bodies. I, like many, find myself deeply concerned by the role technology, particularly screen-based technology, plays in modern society. I believe that it endangers us and our humanity to perform in a disembodied way so many actions that are meant to be embodied: interaction (social media), exploration (browsing the web), investigation (google and other online research), play (video games), and countless other perversions of work and leisure.

I haven’t always been an aspiring luddite. Indeed, for many years I was a dogged defender of digital technology, touting its benefits and blaming its users for any ill effects that they themselves experienced. I immersed myself in video games and online entertainment to distract from health conditions that made life difficult to bear, and I barely blinked when my children asked to begin playing video games of their own. But as the years have flown by, I’ve come to see more clearly many of the destructive effects of digital technology, and I have felt a growing impetous to rout such technologies from our lives. I do not want to live my life chained to a screen, nor do I want that for my loved ones.

Despite our efforts, digital technology still has a place in my family’s life—often a much more prominent place than my husband and I like. It is difficult to put the bird back in the cage. However, we have made a conscious decision to resist tech’s totalitarian reign. Following are some of the choices we have made in our effort to live more human, embodied lives.

Home Education and Religious Formation

Education is not the act of shovelling information into children’s minds; education is a lifelong process of formation. This formation occurs with or without our voluntary participation, through exposure to a variety of forces, including what we read, what we listen to, our home atmosphere, how we worship, and our everyday actions and interactions.

We have made the choice to educate our children at home rather than expose them to the latest experimental methods in our local schools. We use minimal technology in our homeschooling efforts, eschewing screens in favour of books and paper. Whenever there is a choice between digital and physical products—for example, the choice between digital and physical letter tiles for our reading and spelling courses—we choose the physical option. If a curriculum option requires the use of digital technology, we find a different solution for that area of our schooling. Eventually, we will probably need to teach our children certain technological skills, but as elementary-school-aged and newborn, they have plenty of time before computer skills are mandatory or beneficial.

There is a thriving parish near us that offers a variety of opportunities for service, fellowship, and faith formation. They offer Mass in a range of styles, including a contemplative Mass incorporating chant and Latin, which is precisely to my taste. They baptise new converts every Easter, struggle to accommodate the number of visitors on important feast days, and faithfully transmit the teachings of the Magisterium. They are, by any definition, widely successful in their mission. But there is one problem: they choose to use screens at every Mass. Therefore, we attend a (slightly) less convenient parish, equally faithful to the Magisterium), with fewer perks, but where screens hold no place in regular worship.

In addition to attending, at minimum, weekly Sunday Mass, I also make a personal effort to take a weekly Sunday screen sabbath—an intentional day of abstention or near-abstention from using my laptop, cellphone, and other digital technologies (with some few exceptions, such as watching an online Mass if we cannot attend in person, or checking weather forecasts if a winter storm may make driving dangerous). I have found that this sabbath liberates me to experience Sunday rest and worship in a deeper and more fulfilling way, and helps me to make time for some of the more humanising activities I might otherwise neglect. This simple practice has proven to be transformative and rewarding.

The Right Technology for the Task

If something can be done on a screen or on paper, we generally try to choose paper. Thinking and planning are often best done with pen or pencil in hand, and a family wall calendar helps us to keep track of our commitments. An extensive library that includes a variety of reference books—encyclopedias, dictionaries, cookbooks, catechisms and other theology resources, hobby-related texts, and more—significantly decreases our dependence upon internet search engines and online entertainment. Personally, I would be lost without my many notebooks, and my paper zettelkasten is an indispensable asset to my intellectual life.

When we do use technology, we try to use it intentionally and specifically. We recently purchased a cd player to allow us to play music without the need of a screen-based digital device, and while I do sometimes use my cellphone camera, I much prefer my digital and film cameras. We use a baby monitor infrequently, and when we do need to use it, a basic audio-only model is more than adequate. Clocks and wristwatches save us from getting distracted by checking the time on our phones. And although I love paper books best, I recently replaced my broken digital tablet with an e-reader, since the e-reader is easy to hold while nursing a sleeping baby and allows access to library and public domain e-books, without the tempting internet browser of a colour tablet or laptop.

I do still use a computer, but I try to keep it task-specific. I am fortunate to have a laptop that performs quickly and efficiently, so I don’t spend extra time behind a screen waiting for it to execute commands. I also rely on Omnivore, a Read It Later app, to save articles of interest for reading at a more convenient time—usually on my e-reader, which is kinder on my eyes, and gets me out of the always-distracting web browser.

We don’t have a TV in our home, but we do have a Nintendo Switch, and our children are currently allotted limited playing time. To decrease the isolation created by handheld play, we have connected it to a computer monitor. This allows us to oversee play and encourages multiplayer gaming, both of which help to mitigate some of the more damaging consequences of video game use. The monitor can also be used in lieu of a television in the rare event that we want to watch a family movie. Finally, we are in the process of implementing a mandatory weekly screen sabbath for our children, to encourage them to pursue other worthwhile activities.

Inviting Alternatives

When trying to avoid something—whether it be a bad habit, an unhealthy diet, or excessive reliance on digital technology—the easiest path to success is usually not abstention, but replacement. It is easier to act than to avoid. Therefore, we consciously cultivate a home environment where family members are invited to engage in appealing non-digital activities.

Our house is set back from the road and has a large yard, so in nice weather, you will often find some or all of us out-of-doors. We are well-stocked with balls, rackets, sleds, and other outdoor toys. Raspberry, blueberry, and blackberry plants are their own invitation to tiny tastebuds on sunny summer days, and experiments in gardening provide amusement, if not always nourishment.

We live in Canada, however, so not every day is an outside day. For times when we’re stuck inside, we have shelves full of books, craft and art supplies, a variety of musical instruments, and plenty of low-tech toys and games. Story writing is also a popular pasttime (with parents performing transcription services when necessary). I’ll be honest—the children often still prefer screens, and ask for them, but it’s easier to say no when there are plenty of alternatives that we can say yes to instead.

Looking to the Future

I sometimes wish I could roll back the clock and do things differently. I like to think I would have kept digital technology out of my children’s lives for much longer, and that I would have endeavoured sooner to break free from my own digital chains. But we can only ever learn and move forward, striving to become a little more human every day.

We intend to continue to promote ever-increasing engagement with all that is good, real, and embodied, and disengagement from all things digital, both for our children and ourselves. And I hope to raise this new baby differently, in the wisdom I have gained from previous error.

The real world is beautiful, and we are meant to live in it. Let us have the courage to begin.

To leave a comment, visit ’s original post here:

Nota Bene

Forming Human Persons in a Digital Age

For some time now, I have been following Ruth Gaskovski and Peco’s work on living an unconformed life in the digital age. Recently, they invited readers to submit stories of their lived acts of nonconformity and rebellion against the tyranny of modern technology. This is my contribution to the conversation…

Read more

2 years ago · 1 like · 1 comment · Shannon Donald

Ruth Gaskovski and her husband Peco, over at the brilliant School of the Unconformed asked people to share their stories of how they live differently in this digital age. Much of what they write resonates with my thoughts on The Unmachined, so I decided to share a little of my story to add to their project. I hope that you find it interesting…

How I live life differently in the digital age?

As I sat reading my book, in the fresh summer air, drinking tea out of an aluminium camping mug I felt the lightness. The feeling that I was in the world and a part of the world. Fully living in reality.

Inside the tent, tucked away somewhere under clothing or family detritus was the only link to the digital world. And as links go, this was more of a "two tin cans and a bit of string" digital link. A dumphone. Calls, texts and, well that was about it. And to add to it's uselessness only two people had the actual number for the phone, my mum and my wife.

'Lightness' - it's a wonderful feeling to have. And one that is fleeting in the modern world. But it's a feeling that I remembered from years ago. Back in the day before we all became more and more machined.

And getting back to that feeling of lightness, and as a parent passing it on to my son, is the main driver for how I have started to live differently in the digital age.

Subscribe

Before we continue though, I have to admit this is a work in progress. I have not arrived, I've not finished or won the race. Life changes, technology changes, my needs change. I make mistakes, I change my mind. It's a journey not a destination. The things I have done have made things incrementally better, but I can often improve and aim to do so.

Is this good for me?

We're often told that if you can be clear on the 'why' for anything, then the 'how' will be easier. I've completely taken this on board in my use of digital tools. One simple question helps me to decide whether to adopt a technology, keep it or drop it. And I ask this question regularly,

"Is this good for me?"

To get back to my opening paragraphs, I had noticed than if I had a smartphone on camping holidays I couldn't fully immerse myself in nature. This made it hard for me to be fully relaxed. I noticed other people’s and apps’ agendas directing my thoughts. I couldn't wind down. I didn't have the mental bandwidth to slow down and daydream. So when considering turning it off and having a holiday dumbphone instead, the clear answer to the question “Is ditching my smartphone for a simple emergency only dumb device good for me?” was a resounding YES.

So what do I do differently?

The dumbphone experiment was a tiny first step, a toe dip into the water. But it set a number of things in motion. I kept asking the question about any technology that I used, anything in the modern digital world that sometimes stole my focus, attention or peace of mind. Below, I'd like to outline some of changes I've made

I deleted Facebook and Twitter

These two networks made me angry, vain or egotistical. I wasted time arguing online with strangers. I wasted time judging myself against other people’s curated unreality. So I deleted my accounts and never looked back.

I removed any social apps from my smartphone

Whilst I continue to use LinkedIn and Instagram (although the latter is so near to going now) I made the decision to not have them installed as apps on my smartphone. Containing them on my laptop added the right amount of friction.

I continued to have a dumbphone to use on holidays and when wanting disconnection

I made a point of sometimes going out without any phone, smart or dumb, to remind myself that I used to do this for decades without the slightest worry. I find it refreshing.

My wife and I bought an old Hi-Fi system and started listening to CD's instead of streaming

This helped us to choose which album to listen to, to enjoy the whole package, and to avoid algorithms adding to my listening decision.

I bought a DVD player and now buy used DVD's to watch movies distraction free and at a low cost

This takes me back to the days of the video rental store. My film watching is more intentional, I don’t have to worry about movies dropping off streaming services for paid rivals, I can keep the movie if I love it or resell or donate it to charity. And all for less than the cost of renting from paid digital rental services.

I make an effort to schedule time to do activities with my son that cannot be done plugged in

We go running three times a week, we cycle, we walk, we recently took up paddle boarding. None of these lends themselves to looking at a screen.

I seek out quietness by turning off background TV

I’ve become aware of my need for quiet. If I’m inside I turn off the TV if I’m not actually watching something.

I’ve started taking a film camera with me to document memories without distraction

I began by taking a digital camera, which removed the smartphone distractions. But then I moved back to shooting on film. No screens to preview, the need to slow down and concentrate on composition. And the bonus joy of anticipation whilst waiting for prints or scans to arrive.

My wife and I choose areas to holiday or camp, that have poor or no mobile reception

We actively seek out areas where the digital realm finds it hard to invade. Wild places with poor signal, holiday lets without Wifi. The effects on our family are tangible.

As a family we now make time to sit and read paper books together

As a parent I’ve learned that instead of telling, demonstrate alternatives to digital. After battling to get our son to sit and read books, we decided that we would all do this together. It worked.

On my website, I created a hello page to be clear to others how I prefer to keep in touch

To make it easier to opt out of technologies I don’t agree with, I began to be positive about those I do. Email for example. Other people have since joined me in this which is lovely. (And if you want to join us, you’ll be very welcome)

I buy used paper books rather than order e-books on Amazon

Buying used from sites like World Of Books gives me paper reading, at a fraction of the cost of new. No digital rights, no e-ink screens, better for the environment. And something that can be sold, given or donated afterwards.

I use a Linux computer to remain in control of my digital tools

Instead of getting angry at how even Microsoft wants to distract or advertise, or how Apple wants to control, I spent time learning how to manage, customise and own my laptop and it’s OS.

When I am using my smartphone nearly all notifications are off and it's on silent

For now, I do still have an iPhone. But in addition to switching it off and leaving it at home on occasions, I also go through settings to make it as distraction free as possible.

When out and about I don't wear headphones

If I’m out walking, running or just pottering I never wear headphones. I take in the sounds of nature, the environment, or even listen to odd conversations around me which gives me material for my writing. I fully immerse.

When out and about I observe people around me

I notice how many are plugged in, looking at screens, listening to something not of their environment. It makes me sad, but determined to push back at the way we’re being changed. I also make eye contact and talk to people. This helps to redress the negativity.

I carry a paper notebook and pen

Small, often battered, my small notebook allows me to record thoughts without becoming distracted by a screen. When really bored, it even allows me to sketch, badly, for fun.

All of these changes have helped me to push back against the more negative effects of the machined culture. But, as I said before, this is all a work in progress. So if you’ve your own ideas or practices you’ve adopted, do share.

Ruth and Peco are collating other people’s experiences and as a thank you to contributors are offering a complimentary 6 month paid subscription to School of the Unconformed. You can find full details here.

That’s it for now.

Be kind and live well!

To leave a comment, visit ’s original post here:

The Newsletter of Alastair Johnston

Living differently in the digital age

Ruth Gaskovski and her husband Peco, over at the brilliant School of the Unconformed asked people to share their stories of how they live differently in this digital age. Much of what they write resonates with my thoughts on The Unmachined, so I decided to share a little of my story to add to their project. I hope that you find it interesting…

Read more

2 years ago · 2 comments · Alastair Johnston

By Amy Nolan

When I look back, I can trace my journey to live a more real and analog life during the insanity of Covid. I was horrified at my fellow citizens and their complacency to stay in their homes and have cocktail hours over zoom.  I felt like the savage in “Brave New World” and kept pissing people off by my questions and my seeming inability to wear a mask properly or stand the requisite 6 feet away.

I quit social media at that time and have never looked back.  I then came across “1,000 Hours Outside” which is a phenomenal movement aimed at getting people to have more green time than screen time. It’s quite the revelation to start tracking how much time you truly spend outside and spoiler alert—it’s not as much as you think!  Increasing my time outside led me to ditch the earbuds on walks and to actually be outside with my thoughts and nothing else. Wow, no wonder our childhoods were so awesome!  Reading more on getting back outside led to my discovery of Wendell Berry (how had I missed his writings all these years?!) which in turn introduced me to Front Porch Republic and then Paul Kingsnorth and then happily to the School of the Unconformed and Pilgrims in the Machine.  Thankfully, these happy discoveries continue to happen almost daily.

Since starting this journey, I’ve made small, incremental changes that are surprisingly impactful.  No social media means I’m not enraged at my friends.  I don’t actually need to know their every, single thought on politics and they don’t need to know mine. 

I don’t walk with a phone. I don’t use my computer or watch TV on Sundays and it is by far the best day of my week.  I’m more in tune with silence than ever before and now make it a habit to drive in silence as often as I can.

I keep a book of short stories in my car at all times so I’m not tempted to start scrolling on my phone and loose precious moments of my day. I still do Wordle but I don’t do Spelling Bee because that is somehow like crack to me.  I bought a book of NY Times Crossword puzzles to keep me off the app and also invested in several beautiful jigsaw puzzles. 

I’ve begun writing a list of what I need to do online and then follow that to try and curb endless surfing. The most impactful change, by far, was turning off my notification sound on my cell phone.  My ringer is on (surprising how few phone calls one actually gets) but I don’t know when a text message comes in and the siren song of checking my phone every five seconds is gone. 

I’m always trying to figure out new ways of changing my daily existence that will help me feel more grounded and more connected.  I’m not looking to go off the grid or start a homestead, I simply want to not be owned by the machines in my life.  I want to be in charge and I want to be present.  I’m so happy to have found so many others who feel the same.

If you would like to leave a comment, you can do so on “A Library of Unconformed Lives”.

The little red house traveled up and down the California coast with them, as they stopped here and there to stay awhile and take in the beauty of the scene. They went to Mass in different towns, stopped in at libraries and tiny grocery stores, and found some quiet, hidden beaches. They were domestic vagabonds of a sort that first year, putting together a home and family memories in their own way, in a very tiny space. Neither one asked for much more than to be with the other as the adventure unfolded day by day. It was strangely freeing to me to watch two people so unfettered from "stuff" and the conventional expectations of the world at large.

It certainly gave me a new perspective on making a home. I am a born Hobbit. I love my Hobbit hole and all my things, and I am okay with that. I make memories and establish traditions with them. I have cup collections, and heirlooms are dear to me for all their stories. My books have taken on a life of their own, but I can’t part with any of them. We have been through too much together. But Thomas and Bibi’s life always intrigued me, for they were doing the same thing as me in a different way.

Since that October day in 2019, they have had two little boys now ages three and two. They had to give up the little red house on wheels, but life in that house gave them a few lessons on living in a minimal way which they grew to love and they sought now to incorporate those lessons into apartment living. I wanted to know what they had gleaned from such an experience. I asked them if they would like to share their thoughts in an interview. They were happy to do so.Read the whole Interview here:

The Inscapist

A Journey Into Minimalism

The little red house traveled up and down the California coast with them, as they stopped here and there to stay awhile and take in the beauty of the scene. They went to Mass in different towns, stopped in at libraries and tiny grocery stores, and found some quiet, hidden beaches. They were domestic vagabonds of a sort that first year, putting together …

Read more

2 years ago · 8 likes · 2 comments · Denise Trull