How & Why I Live In The 1970s

With just a few exceptions, my daily life could fit seamlessly into in the 1970s. In fact, I fight to keep it this way: not for nostalgia, but for health, happiness and efficiency. It comes down to the fact that I like thinking my own thoughts; that I’ve found them far more satisfying and useful than thoughts implanted in me by others. Said another way, I pursue simplicity, for the sake of my innate creativity and the satisfactions that come from it.

One thing I’ve learned along the way is that the best and most satisfying of our choices and actions come from within us; they are self- generated. The things we’ll be happy about in our old age will not be acts of compliance; they’ll be things we self-generated. I live in the 1970s because it was a better environment for self-generation.

I happen to be the right age to remember the 1970s. I remember the 1960s pretty well too, but over the course of the 1970s I came to see the world as an adult rather than as a child. And so the era of roughly 1968-1978 was foundational to me. The 1970s also make a good reference because we had all the necessities of life, minus the technology that was twisted into today’s “grab every ounce of human attention” economy.

I don’t live entirely in the 1970s, of course; I use computers, the Internet and when necessary cell phones (though not smart phones), but I avoid the rest. And I really, really like it this way; it keeps me uncluttered and effective internally.

How I Do This

Before I specify how I keep my life simple, I’d like to expand just a bit on simplicity: By keeping my life simple, I also make the world comprehensible.

The great advantage of life before World War I was that it was comprehensible, and there is a critical difference between the person who sees the world as comprehensible and the person who does not:

• Understanding the world, we tend to make plans to accomplish our goals, and then pursue them, confident that we can (or at least are likely to) reach those goals.

• Feeling overcome by a world we cannot understand or rely upon, we hunker down, pull back our horizons, hold on to whatever we do have and refuse to let go.

By getting rid of the daily noise we really can comprehend the world. We won’t see every detail of course (that was never possible), but we’ll evade the pollution and still see the things which matter, and that’s quite enough.

Here’s what I do:

• I receive no alerts at all. (And haven’t yet been run-over by a tornado.)

• I’m not on social media at all. (We all know why.)

• I don’t watch TV, and certainly not TV news. I do watch DVDs.

• I keep news of the world locked out and check it once per week, and not for more than an hour or two. (I make the occasional exception for work-related or very significant events.)

• I don’t use AI. If I was a programmer I’d use it to eliminate grunt work, but I wouldn’t use it to supplant my innate creativity. My creativity is something I want to cultivate, not to bypass.

• I evade apps. I’m not interested in the app way of life. On rare occasion I’ll use one that’s unavoidable (for which I keep a separate device that remains on a shelf), but I avoid them like I avoid communicable diseases.

• I evade voice mail and notifications. I rely on email, because it doesn’t interrupt me. Interruptions are my enemy.

• I turn down all the deals that will cost me a few minutes every month to manage. I guard my brain cycles.

• I turn away from advertising, and hard. Most of those ads are the fingers of others grasping at my mind. I want to think my own thoughts and to be uninterrupted while doing so.

• I strongly avoid products whose ads intrude upon me. Those companies are not my partners in thriving, they are rather abusers. In the old days there were things that “a gentleman would not do,” and I see a lot of modern advertising that way.

• I am careful not to compare my stuff with anyone else’s. I learned, back in the 1970s (a great story for some other time) that possessions are for utility, not for contentment… and certainly not for bragging rights.

This is how I structure my life to support my inner operations, sacrificing the expectations of the loud, demanding and grasping world. The trade is eminently worth it.