I have done without any form of technology for six months and my life is utterly shit

BY JULIAN COOK

IN APRIL of this year, I made the decision to detach myself from the babbling matrix of social media, internet, smartphones, and TV. 

I trundled a wheelbarrow full of all my electronic devices down to a riverside and dumped them all in. I felt a burden lift. And, since then, my life has been simpler, cleaner, more organic.

Instead of staring at screens, I stare at trees or the skies. Instead of checking Facebook I sit on a tree stump and watch for signs of the changing of the seasons.

It has changed my life completely. It’s shit.

I have no clue what’s going on in the world. I am frequently howlingly bored. I don’t know what any of my friends are doing, ever, and they’re never in when I spontaneously call round.

Yesterday I tried to make conversation with strangers at a rural pub. They were talking about Stranger Things Season Two. I mentioned a rabbit I’d seen. They discussed the news. I was painfully ignorant of any of it. They left, and I went to the river to stare at my sunken MacBook and curse my own hippy, agrarian idiocy.

It turns out it all my stuff wasn’t an artificial barrier blocking my true self from nature after all. It was all my best stuff, and what in fuck was I thinking?

Our ancestors wrestled with bears so as to lift us from the brutal misery of nature. Stare, stare hard at your phones and their vast gigabytes of our vital human culture.

Trees are boring as shit. Get the new iPhone instead. I wish I could.

This article was written by hand and posted to an editor at the Daily Mash, who typed it up to go online. To mock our Living Without Technology columnist, email and a selection of taunts will be posted to him. 

Sign up now to get
The Daily Mash
free Headlines email – every weekday
privacy

Year Nine announce gains in war against enthusiastic new teacher

LEADERS of the Year Nine rebel insurgency have announced significant gains in its war against a keen new teacher.

Intelligence reports confirmes that trainee teacher Miss Fisher, who has been attempting to empathise with and inspire pupils at St Thomas Secondary in Swansea against their will, spent an hour eating chocolate biscuits and crying in a darkened classroom yesterday.

Rebel leader Nikki Hollis said: “Good, good. We can win this war.

“She came in here all full of energy and excitement, so giddy it was as if she was high off the whiteboard markers, which we obviously accused her of being.

“Determined to make us learn, her innovative new techniques were no match for our arsenal of guerrilla warfare tactics including pretending we couldn’t hear her, playing dog noises on our phones and blaming everything on an imaginary boy called Connor.”

Hollis added: “Let me be clear, this is simply war. We take no pleasure in it.

“Well, except for when Aaron called her Miss Fishyflaps. That was fucking funny.”

Neutral observers are divided over whether Fisher will leave teaching before Christmas or toughen her up so much that she will be deputy head within five years.