MIT Graduate and Wife Spent 18 Months in a Deliberately Low-Tech Community

For Eric Brende, the decision was not about rejecting modern inventions outright. As a graduate student at MIT studying the relationship between technology and society, he wanted to test in everyday life the assumption that technology makes life easier. The experiment he and his wife Mary undertook in the 1990s eventually became the foundation of his 2004 book, Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology.

In the 1990s, Eric Brende, an MIT graduate student researching the relationship between technology and society, and his wife Mary spent 18 months living in a low-tech community, giving up telephones, running water, modern refrigeration and motorised machines.

The couple lived among a group Brende referred to as the 'Minimites,' whose way of life resembled that of the Amish but depended even less on technology. They kept their location secret in order to remain insulated from the outside world. The pair did retain a Ford Escort, which Brende acknowledged they used more often than was strictly necessary.

Life without familiar conveniences

Without running water, tasks that would ordinarily involve a tap had to be handled differently. Food had no refrigerator for storage. The community nevertheless developed its own practical solutions: a hydraulic ram was used to push water uphill, and a wood-burning stove provided both heat and a means of cooking food simultaneously. During winter months, ice gathered from ponds and stored under sawdust served as refrigeration. A water wheel powered the rotary saw in the community's lumber operation.

That distinction was significant to Brende. The experiment was never intended as a return to a world without tools, but rather an inquiry into when convenience stops being genuinely useful and begins generating its own new demands.

When removing labour-saving tools brought unexpected gains

One of the more unexpected findings was that eliminating labour-saving technology did not make everything worse. While some tasks grew considerably more difficult, Brende found that other aspects of daily life improved. Activities such as growing food, preparing meals and managing household chores required more manual effort, but the additional work also created more opportunities for neighbours to assist one another, turning certain chores into communal tasks.

Brende acknowledged that his conclusion — that this principle applied to his own experience — could not be proven to hold for everyone. Ultimately, his central question was how much technology people actually need.

Rethinking leisure and the meaning of progress

The 18 months also changed how Brende thought about free time. He had initially been drawn to the idea that technology saves time and thereby creates more leisure. What he found instead was that technology brings its own set of demands, including maintenance, costs and the need to earn more to afford it. In a 2004 interview with WBUR, he said the couple's experience showed that people who started work early on farms could sometimes enjoy more genuine leisure than those living faster-paced, technology-heavy lives.

Brende did not return from the experiment calling on others to abandon electricity or modern machinery. His conclusion was more restrained: convenience should not automatically be treated as equivalent to a better life. Doing things the harder way could, at times, bring physical exercise, greater contact with neighbours and a clearer awareness of the effort involved in everyday tasks. Having moved from one of the world's most prominent centres of technological innovation, he found after 18 months that while some things were indeed harder with less technology, the work itself became more tangible and, in his view, more enjoyable.