Your life will always be a mix of the simple and the complicated. One choice is which takes precedence. Would you like a complicated life made out of simple things or a simple life facilitated by complicated things? Mark Boyle shares his experience of living without technology. Hint: It’s not simple.

This way of life I have now adopted is often called “the simple life,” but that’s entirely misleading. It’s actually quite complex, made up of a thousand simple things. By contrast, my old life in the city was quite simple, but made up of a thousand complex things, like smartphones and plug sockets and plastic.