Pura Vida: The Joys of Going Off the Grid

We recently took a holiday in Costa Rica, which by the way is a marvellously stunning country with the friendliest people. The Costa Ricans have a wonderful saying, actually more of a mentality and approach to life called Pura Vida. The words literally translate to “pure life” but the term gets liberally applied to a variety of situations: monkey bite your toe, lost your passport, have a strange rash, Kenny G on the radio…you guessed it…Pura Vida.

Admittedly there were times when Pura Vida was spoken through clenched teeth. The sporadic lack of Internet access was one such occasion. Little known fact: a disadvantage of staying in the cloud forest is that you can’t actually access the cloud. No internet. No WiFi. Nada.

You can imagine how the kids reacted. A protest movement quickly formed, with demands to make the Internet great again. Eventually the noise subsided, and lo-and-behold everyone survived if not actually flourished. The constant din of emails, posts, newsfeeds, and tweets disappeared for extended periods of time, replaced by old fashioned things from the 20th century, like talking.

It was wonderful, and apparently I’m not alone in enjoying such digital dieting, which I’m told by Google means limiting your use of technology. According to a recent Mindshare survey of over 3,000 people in the UK, nearly half (49%) of the respondents agreed on the need to regulate technology use, particularly for kids. 46% of parents limit their children’s time, while perplexingly only 27% of those adults limit their own time. And apparently people with heavy tech usage, primarily 18-34 year olds, are the most likely to reduce their time.  Some of this digital dieting is down to newsfeed fatigue and the simple desire to re-engage in the real world; a stunning 40% of participants in another recent study admitted to postponing sex because of smartphone use.

There are other factors in play, particularly concerns over online privacy, cyber-bullying, diminishing social skills, and other potential ill-effects from too much time on the Internet. So while three in four people believe tech has a positive impact on their lives, virtually everyone in our survey had concerns about these issues.  

Of course a few brave souls have decided to leave the ranch altogether by going completely off the grid and wiping out any digital footprints left behind over the years. If you go to Google’s history page you can actually see (and delete) a long trail of all your search activities and behaviour over the years. It’s an embarrassing embarrassment of riches. Sweden’s Deseat.me goes one step further by enabling you to completely wipe your existence off the Internet with a few quick clicks. Tempting. Pura Vida. 

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