Embrace the Analog Life

Reject digital ubiquity and experience true freedom

Something very important has been taken from us — the taking carried out with such stealth and nonchalance, we didn’t even notice. Back in the 1980s (at least here in the US) builders began to construct homes without functional fireplaces. For tens of thousands of years, the fireplace was the center of the home. It acted as the sun around which family life revolved. It provided warmth and light. Before modern stoves and ovens, people cooked their meals in its flames.

The Spanish word, el hogar, means hearth. At least that’s the original meaning. It has the same etymology as fuego, or fire, and of the English and Latin word focus. The word home developed out of that. Home, fire, focus. Makes perfect sense.

[I’m grateful that our home came with a fireplace. Here you see two children acting silly right in front of it. The artwork is cloaked because we took this picture during Lent.]

Looking back, it seems to me the worst of the evil and chaos we’re presently experiencing began to assert itself 30 to 40 years ago. Sure, evil and chaos have always been a reality for us — at least ever since the Fall — but we began to allow it quarter in our lives and hearts some decades ago. This happens to be the same timeframe when we stopped building houses with fireplaces in them. Not saying the two are directly related, but…

Someone made a mistake

Builders gave lazy excuses about how fireplaces are messy, hazardous, and expensive. Many things in our homes are messy, hazardous, and expensive: ovens, stoves, bathtubs, furnaces, etc. These excuses fail to explain things.

Someone made a mistake. Some number cruncher decided fireplaces weren’t a necessity based on trivial numbers and maybe poorly designed surveys. This someone and his ‘betters’ made the decision based solely on profit margins, failing to realize the importance of this symbolic thing they were eliminating from future home plans — from people’s lives.

Artificial gods for an artificial society

Today, artificial fires in the form of smartphones, tablets, and other electronic distractions have replaced hearths and bonfires. One of my favorite people ever, Jonathan Pageau, often talks about how attention is like obedience and obedience requires energy expenditure.

“Energy is attention, attention is energy. If you want more energy, stop wasting attention. Only attend to good and true things. People get lost in so much petty stuff and so much lowly bullsh*t. The standards are so low — everything is becoming dumber and less than. I think if we consume any media at all, we should choose only what is noble and that which promotes nobility and virtue and speaks to our own higher selves.” ~Jonathan Pageau on preserving fractal structure

Can we do this without a fireplace? Absolutely.

Family time. Six of the seven featured in this picture. You must look carefully to find number six…she’s lagging behind. Beach times — no phone, no electronics, just togetherness.

The absence of fireplace as focus of the home represents only one reason we’ve been plunged into literal and metaphorical darkness as a culture. But in order to fetch back what has been stolen from us, we must attend to the good, the true, and the beautiful. We must stop obeying and attending to lesser goods. Pageau teaches that our attention has been deliberately reoriented by, to, and for The Machine (see another of my favorites, Paul Kingsnorth).

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How modernity killed leisure

Part of the problem, I think, is that we have forgotten (or never learned) the importance of true leisure. In medieval times, festival held a high place in the lives of the people. Entertainments such as music, dance, art, poetry, and fair food were associates of festival, but they were not the festival itself. Festivals were a leisure activity.

Entire villages, towns, and cities broke from work to celebrate festival days and engage in this invigorating, wholesome leisure activity. In fact, leisure acted as the basis of medieval culture (at least that’s what I learned when homeschooling my kids and and later after reading Josef Pieper’s book, Leisure the Basis of Culture). The accompaniments of festival — food, music, dance, etc. — promote that culture. Of course, the most noble festival was (and remains today) the Day of the Lord in which people abandoned work to attend Mass or Divine Liturgy.

Today, we instead forsake this noblest of days to work, to golf, to shop, to watch other men play sports, to lay about, or numerous other far less savory activities. Our culture essentially views leisure as free time. That is, time with which we either rest (as in, binge on Netflix or indulge in copious amounts of sleep) or engage is pure entertainment activities. Rest and play may count as aspects of leisure, but not in the way we understand these in our post-modern culture.

In my personal observations, I see people — especially men — break from work to rest from its relentless demands, only to return to the same monotony without feeling truly re-energized and edified.

Why?

Because modernity mandates that there exists nothing higher than ourselves to celebrate. Essentially, we’re encouraged to put career and self at the very center of our lives for the sole purpose of getting that raise and serving the god of consumerism. This relegates the workers to nothing more than functionaries, similar to the serfs in feudal times.

Escaping ‘The Machine’ by anchoring in the analog

The Powers That Be (TPTB) are profoundly atheistic at their very core. In my opinion, they are steeped in fear. They may not realize it consciously, but I believe they are profoundly fearful of many things, especially physical death. This is why they’re obsessed with the idea of uploading their consciousnesses into some sort of digital cloud universe. They believe that this will, somehow, make them live on in perpetuity.

They also fear and vehemently despise regular people. We seek to control what we fear; hence, the frantic push to monitor every move we make, every word, every thought, every aspect of our lives. They can only do this with digital technology and, possibly, the poisonous drugs they trick desperate people into accepting into their bodies. The gene modifying injections might just be a way to begin their planned massive population culling dreams, who really knows for sure.

Escape is crucial and the time to start is now.

The best and simplest way to begin the escape from The Machine is by anchoring yourself in the analog. Meet up with people physically, even if you have to travel a ways to do it. Go to conferences in person and truly experience the energy of those attending. Write real letters to people with pen and paper and make plans to meet up. Don’t waste your attention on Netflix binges. In fact, cancel all of those streaming services, if possible. Limit your phone and computer usage to the minimal amount possible. Read real books. Have a bonfire and tell stories around it. There are so many ways to begin your escape.

Finally, offer up everything good in your life to the glory of God, for that is its true origin — the Holy Trinity. Take comfort in the knowledge that there is Something which transcends us and to Whom we have ready access.

Let’s begin today, let’s begin right now.

+Ad majorem Dei gloriam+