Better Off - by Eric Brende (Paperback)

About the Book

On a mission to prove that modern technological advances make lives more inconvenient and less healthy, Brende and his wife lived for 12 months among an energy-free farming community.

From the Back Cover

What is the least we need to achieve the most? With this question in mind, MIT graduate Eric Brende flipped the switch on technology. He and his wife, Mary, ditched their car, electric stove, refrigerator, running water, and everything else motorized or "hooked to the grid," and spent eighteen months living in a remote community so primitive in its technology that even the Amish consider it antiquated.

Better Off is the story of their real-life experiment to see whether our cell phones, wide-screen TVs, and SUVs have made life easier -- or whether life would be preferable without them. This smart, funny, and enlightening book mingles scientific analysis with the human story to demonstrate how a world free of technological excess can shrink stress -- and waistlines -- and expand happiness, health, and leisure.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Review Quotes

"Will do readers more good than a thousand 'self-help' books crowding best-seller lists. It will make you think about your own life more than you've thought about it for years, and for that service we can be deeply grateful to the talented Eric Brende." - Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age

"Brende demonstrats that it is possible to pursue Thoreau's ideals today, and perhaps emerge the richer for it." - Michael Korda, author of Country Matters