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Notes -
You're mostly right. My statement wasn't meant to say "TK should go live with the Amish because they're exactly like what he proposes" - I don't think they are either. What I think is more like, the Amish are 70%-ish of the way from mainstream society to what TK says he wants, but they actually exist now, are accessible, and decent odds you could find an Amish church that would let you live with them for a while. Living with them would let him learn a lot about what it's actually like to live in such a society, how to live decently well with minimal contact with the industrial world, and get an idea about what it would be like to go further.
You are spot on and thinking about it I realise that I've seen TK's the lack of incrementalism before.
I was listening to radio broadcast about the Utopia Experiment. Dylan Evans sees total collapse coming and sets up his simple living experiment to try to get ahead of it. But quite early on, his attempts to make soap come unstuck because he has already given up the internet, so he cannot watch the "How to make soap" videos on You Tube. That is when I twigged that the story was going to turn into a mental health crisis. Going all in, rather than plotting a path and taking reasonable sized steps is usually a sign of mental illness. And so it was in Dylan Evans' case.
Reminiscent of Christopher McCandless too.
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