Transcriber: Lisa Rodriguez Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Do you guys know anyone who lives off the grid?
Yeah?
No?
Well, you do now.
My name's Esther, and I live off the grid.
I live intentionally and permanently not connected to the power grid,
with my family, in the foothills of Southwest Idaho.
For me, this is an expression of my freedom,
it's an expression of what human beings are capable of,
and it's also a reaction or a response
to what I perceive to be a culture of hyperstimulated numbness
and learned dependency.
I have kind of a thing about dependency
or, really, whatever is the opposite of dependency.
And there's a particular experience in my life, that we can trace,
that gave me this kind of clarity around this issue.
That's what I'd like to share with you today,
and that's the time that I went for a year without the internet.
So, some of you, when I said I lived off the grid,
thought I might be a little crazy, now you're sure.
But it's true, I went for a year without the internet.
And it might have been a little crazy, just a little crazy.
But it changed things for me;
it changed my perspective on my life.
And if I could just shovel that out of here and give that to you,
well, I guess that's what we're here for.
So, here's how it started.
I was 30 years old,
and I was going through a transition in my life.
I had been very career-oriented and my own financial support,
and I was transitioning into being the stay-at-home mom
of two very small children.
Now, this talk is not about that transition.
That is another talk.
But I shared that with you
so you can understand how it was possible that I could just drop off the internet.
At that time, not only did I not have a job,
it wasn't advantageous for my family for me to try to get a job,
because the daycare would have cost more than I could earn.
I had been a high-achiever in the workplace,
kind of a go-getter type, and I thought, I'm not going to sit around,
I'm going to do something useful with this time.
I'm going to do a social experiment on myself.
But, seriously, when was I going to have another chance?
I think so many of us have these fantasies.
Probably some of you have this fantasy:
If I could just drop out.
If I could shut off the noise.
If I could simplify my life.
But we can't,
because the internet and electronic noise is so integrated into our lives,
we have responsibilities,
we have obligations.
So you always wonder, what would it be like?
Would I be like Walden, like Thoreau on Walden Pond?
Would I be more self-actualized?
Would my IQ increase?
Or would I just be really bored?
Well, in December of 2009, I had my chance to find out, and I took it.
I cut off everything digital,
every form of digital communication in my life.
So, of course, the wi-fi, but also the cell phone,
even the credit cards and debit card
because that counted to me as electronic communication with my bank.
Although that was really hard to explain to the bank teller
when she asked me to run my card and I refused.
I found I had to explain myself to a lot of different people.
Not only to the bank teller,
but also to the parking garage attendant, the travel agent,
to my pastor when she wanted to give me some scripture readings
and I didn't have email so she had to drive them to my house.
Also, of course, all the people on Facebook,
except not really very many of the people on Facebook,
because most of them didn't notice I was gone.
As I was explaining myself to all these people,
an interesting thing happened.
The responses fell pretty neatly into two categories.
There were those who responded with some version of the question "why?"
Why are you doing this?
What does it mean to you?
What is it changing?
What are you getting out of it?
All these people, older than me.
And there were people who responded with some version of the question "how?"
How do you communicate?
How do you tell time?
How do you get places?
All these people, younger than me.
So, I was born in 1979, along a generational line
between people who have experienced the world prior to the net revolution
and those who have never experienced
a world without wi-fi and texting and debit cards.
The reason I share that with you is that when I jumped into my experiment,
I was asking both questions.
I wanted to know why.
I wanted to know how the technology of the internet
was affecting my pursuit of a meaningful life.
But I was also looking forward to the visceral, physical challenge
of getting to someone else's house without Google Maps.
(Laughter)
So December of 2009, in I jumped.
I turned in the cell phone, I turned off the wi-fi. I unplugged.
The first thing I discovered is that I was addicted.
You are not surprised by this.
I wasn't surprised either, except that from the inside,
addiction is always a surprise.
I gained 10 pounds, as if I had just quit smoking.
I was irritable. I couldn't concentrate.
That lasted for about a month or maybe 40 days.
Might fit a clinical profile there.
But I wasn't done.
The second thing I discovered is that now that I wasn't on the internet
and I wasn't binging on banana bread quite as much,
I had a lot of empty space in my life.
Now, and let me clarify: this is not the same thing as free time.
I had two children under the age of three -
and that is not all video games all day, anyway.
But there was empty space.
There was space without entertainment, which is also without distraction.
And I was beginning to wonder if those two were the same thing.
What was I going to do with this space? I decided to try to fill it.
Went through fascinations, like serial relationships.
If this sounds really impressive, that's exactly what I intended.
So, I read a bunch of books.
Over a hundred books, some of them very big books - I made a list.
I reengaged with my spiritual life,
which had been on the back burner for a long time;
all of a sudden, I was an A-plus student of scripture.
I made a financial plan to get my family out of debt,
I changed how I ate, I started doing yoga,
and I learned to cook.
I had not been a confident cook, ever, before that,
and, to be honest, personality-wise, I'm not an easy cook.
But in the third month of my year without internet,
I broke through.
I learned to bake bread, make perfect muffins,
Moussaka, vegetarian lasagna.
And I got really into my marriage.
Because if you're both going to bed at the same time
and you're not holding phones -
I'm gonna let you finish that sentence.
(Laughter)
At this point, my year without internet was an unqualified success.
I wanted to proselytize,
I wanted to stand on the mountain and say, "Everyone set down your iPhones,
there's real life on the other side of this."
I was no-internet-lady-of-the-world awesome.
But around the six-month mark,
I hit a snag.
I was on the phone with my sister - on the phone because I didn't have email -
and I was explaining to her how I would write these articles,
and I would put the articles on a jump drive,
and I would put the jump drive in an envelope,
and I would send the envelope through the U.S. Postal Service to California,
where my friend would put the articles on my blog.
Yeah, that is what it sounds like.
So I was off the internet,
but I was writing articles for the internet
about how I was off the internet.
My sister was not impressed.
She's not net generation, she's a few years older than I am,
and she said, "Esther, why don't you just quit?"
I said, "What, quit my little letters to the internet?"
She said, "Yes, get off the internet, like you've been telling people you are."
Well, my heart just froze.
Because I realized at that moment, that I couldn't do it.
I couldn't cut that last thread that connected me to my online self
as it was visible to other people,
because I was afraid if somebody didn't know what I was doing,
I wasn't sure it was still happening.
Whoa.
Everyone born after 1980 is totally tripping with me.
(Laughter)
For the rest, let me explain.
So, in internet life, there's a cycle of an action
and then some kind of validation for that action.
What had happened to me
is that I had integrated that validation response
into my interpretation of reality.
In other words, if no one is looking at me,
I am not sure that I am real.
Well, I took my sister's advice.
I unplugged completely this time.
And I was still baking bread.
I was still having quality time with my family.
I was still doing yoga.
I was still getting us out of debt,
but my life was really quiet and really small.
Now, some of you may know
there's another TEDx talk out there about a year without the internet,
it's called "A Year Offline: What I Have Learned."
I saw this TED talk, I think, it must have been 2013.
I went off the internet in 2009.
So three years after I finished my experiment,
I was watching this, and he's got a TED talk,
and he's got a documentary, and he's got viral articles,
and he's the top-ranked thing on Reddit, for days.
And I realized that going off the internet and telling people about it
and going off the internet and not telling people about it
is not a difference of degrees.
It's like going two different directions on the same road.
So, imagine with me,
this city, this Mecca of validation, which is the internet,
which in our culture is the very center of notoriety and fame and being known.
Are you really walking away from that?
Or are you walking toward it
by doing something that you hope will trigger
that viral information distribution?
I realized that the difference between my experiment and Paul Miller's
was just how many people cared what I was doing,
which was about 10.
About 10 people cared what I was doing,
my pastor, my husband, my sister,
add a couple close friends, and that's about it.
And when I came back on the internet at the end of my year, no one noticed.
That isn't true.
Real people noticed.
My community noticed.
But the internet did not notice.
That viral information distribution wasn't triggered.
So what did I get out of this?
Well, kind of a lot.
I mean, besides the Moussaka and the vegetarian lasagna.
The thing that I gained from my year without internet
was not a gain at all.
It was something I let go.
I let go an addiction and dependency that I didn't even know was there.
I was addicted to a validation, and, in my case,
that was keeping me from being true to who I really was on the inside.
And, also, not to feed the conspiracy theories,
but it was keeping me from having my eyes open
to what's really going on in the world.
Six years later,
you can find me all over the internet.
I have a blog, I have a YouTube channel,
you can find me on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram.
But you won't find me producing constantly on any of those channels,
because now I live off the grid.
Now I have only as much electricity
as I can gather and store with equipment that I understand.
I have only water that I am gathering from a natural spring.
I don't even live in what many of you would think is a real house.
We live in a yurt, which is one of these round things.
You have to take my word for it, it's pretty cool.
Turns out that this process of discovering and changing your dependencies
is repeatable.
So, I went through this process of paradigm shift.
Over here is my life in context of the internet.
And over here is my life without the internet.
They're different.
I started looking for other things
that are technology masquerading as reality.
We have all these things we count on:
light switches and forced-air heating and sewage lines.
We think that's reality, but actually, it's technology.
And if we don't know that,
I'm afraid we can't be using it responsibly.
Now, not only is this process repeatable, it turns out it's also contagious.
My husband caught the bug
although he may have been predisposed to it already.
As a couple, we started living simply, in sometimes very dramatic ways.
But always following this process of cutting along the line of a technology
and reattaching it without the element of dependency.
My husband and I are not the only ones.
Off-grid living is becoming more popular all the time.
I know off-grid families in Canada and Australia
and all over the United States.
You want to know how I know them?
From the internet.
(Laughter)
It's true. You are going to think I'm crazy again, but it's true.
Off-grid people are hanging out on the internet.
You'll find a concentration of us on YouTube.
And if it seems like that's a physical impossibility,
remember that we are a bunch of fairly resourceful people.
We're not just hanging out, we're doing community.
When your obsession or passion is reversing necessity,
reversing learned dependency,
there's a lot of skill building to be done.
And we're doing that in community together.
We're using the internet in a way that emphasizes
community rather than competition and humanity rather than scarcity.
Which is how it's possible for me to say that I produce content for the internet,
on my good days, at least, and I think have a lot of good days,
that's very grounded in my real life,
which is still pretty quiet and pretty small.
Someone asked me the other day why we put ourselves through this;
he meant living off the grid.
He meant working so hard, having so little,
settling for so much less than everything that a person can reach for in this world.
Didn't have time to tell him the whole story.
Didn't have time to show him that I have searched and found and I know for sure
that this Mecca of validation was making more insecure and more anxious,
was keeping me from my full personality development,
and also keeping me from being accountable
to the big difficult issues of a difficult time.
All I could say was, "I choose this.
I choose quiet, and I choose small because it's real, and I choose real."
Thank you.
(Applause)