Meet the Author

Brende’s research into the unplugged life continued long after the completion of his master’s thesis. Returning to Cambridge after living on the farm, he drove a cab for several years and often conversed with his passengers about his experience. “It seemed that the more high tech the job the person had, the more wistfully they talked about the way of life I was describing,” he says. “I think a lot of people have the yearning to wean themselves from all these technological barnacles.”

Brende wasn’t always so skeptical and technology-averse. He was once a science fiction aficionado who gave up wrestling in the eighth grade because Star Trek coincided with practice. He became wary of technology, he says, “when my father got a word processor and spent so much time with that device that I almost never saw him again.” Brende had arrived at one of the fundamental criticisms of modernity: that time- and labor-saving devices prove neither time- nor labor-saving. 

Brende has been successful at creating a pastoral, low-tech life for himself, even in an urban environment. He and his family now live  in downtown St. Louis, with electricity and with running water, but without a television, computer, or electric washing machine. He makes soap and drives a bicycle rickshaw on weekends for a living; his kids are home-schooled and have attention spans undiminished by television and video games; and he says his wife actually looks forward to doing the laundry with the hand-powered machine. It’s an aerobic workout that comes with a bonus: clean clothes.