The other day I was in Auckland on business. I had a couple of hours spare in my hotel room and, having dispensed with my work for the day, I took the unusual step of switching on the television. There wasn’t much on offer, so I settled on the Discovery Channel on which was playing a reality television show about a family homesteading in the wilds of Alaska. You can imagine the format – the womenfolk smoking salmon and bottling vegetables, the menfolk out on their snowmobiles with rifles on their backs hunting for something wild and tasty.
It is just the fodder for urban individuals, frustrated by the meaninglessness of modern life and yearning for the willds, the outdoors and the ability to fend for oneself. It’s a way of living that appeals to our primitive selves. Indeed, I’m quite partial to sleeping under the stars and I like nothing better than cooking or boiling a billy of tea over a fire.
I was thinking of all this as I walked to my first meeting of the day. Said meeting occurred in one of those nameless, faceless corporate buildings that one finds in every big city around the world. In this case, I had occasion to use the bathrooms before my meeting and so I headed in the general direction. Coming to the door of the bathroom, I pushed it and felt a strong resistance. Was, I wondered, this door locked from the inside in some kind of risk-reducing security initiative? No, in fact, the door had been fitted with an electronic proximity-sensing automotive door opener.
Now this isn’t a big deal and likely not worth opining about, but I wondered what necessitated an automatic door opener? Was this a highly sterile operating theatre where every germ was a critical risk? Was this a silicon chip fabricating plant where even the tiniest impurity would spell disaster? Was it a facility for the manufacturing of satellites to be launched into space at great expense? No, it was the bathroom in a bog-standard (excuse the pun) office building.
Imagine the setting yourself, there I was, a man of the land, inspired by Alaskan homesteaders, dreaming of tanning hides and building log cabins and yet defeated by a toilet door. Not because it was complex, but because it was too easy. The door was trying so hard to open for me that it wouldn’t let me open it myself.
Which got me thinking: when exactly did we give up doing basic things in favour of machines doing them for us, poorly?
It’s not just doors. We now live in a world where your fridge might text you to say you’re out of oat milk to go with your double decaf cappuccino, your lights can be turned off by voice command, and some people wear rings that vibrate when their posture slouches of they’ve been watching Netflix for too many hours on end. We are surrounded by technological whispers urging us to “relax, we’ve got this,” even when “this” is something that barely needed doing in the first place.
There’s something wonderfully contradictory about the modern longing for the primitive. We want to catch our own fish, build our own shelters, and survive harsh winters using only the contents of a well-curated flannel wardrobe, but we also want a robot vacuum to clean the living room while we’re doing it. Our Instagram feeds are full of wilderness retreats and sourdough tutorials, but only if the WiFi is good enough to post the results.
I’m not saying we should all go live off-grid (though I’m not not saying that). I’m just pointing out the absurdity of a society that fantasises about frontier living while fitting public bathrooms with motion sensors because pushing is apparently too burdensome for the poor dear snowflakes only three venti frappuccinos into their day.
There is, I suspect, a deep and collective yearning underneath all this. Something in us wants to feel more connected to the land, to the elements, to the satisfaction of self-sufficiency. But we also like double glazing, coffee machines, and the soft, yielding clunk of an automatic door. It’s not hypocrisy, it’s hedging our bets. We want the romance of the wilderness and the comfort of central heating.
Maybe that’s okay. Maybe it’s possible to yearn for the wilds while living in a city apartment with an automatic soap dispenser. But I do think we should be mindful of the creeping tendency to outsource our lives. Each convenience, each small automation, removes a tiny sliver of agency. Until one day, you find yourself standing outside a bathroom, unable to enter until a sensor decides you’re worthy.
So yes, bring on the survival shows and the wood-chopping fantasies. Let’s celebrate the allure of the wild and the promise of doing it all ourselves. But maybe let’s also remember how to open a door. Just in case.
