Last summer 24 strangers gathered on a farm in Devon to escape from the modern world as participants in a social experiment involving bonnets, buggies and a bust-up over booze. They were joined by a family of five from Ohio who were there to show them how, over the course of four months, they could be more Amish.
Lloyd and Edna Miller came from Ohio in the American Midwest with three of their six children, to teach an eclectic group of volunteers, including families with young children, how to grow crops, milk goats and cows and live an almost pre-industrial existence without technology, where the needs of the community are supposed to come before personal desires for a can of lager or a bowl of Frosties.
The group dressed in plain Amish clothes, including bonnets and broad straw hats, drove a horse and buggy and had no access to phones or treats. They lived in cottages lit by candles and heated by wood fires. Work was divided along traditional gender lines with men spending long, back-breaking days in the fields, sowing crops and making hay with scythes, while the women and girls cooked, laundered and looked after the kitchen garden, chickens and the dairy.
At a time when many of us have been reassessing our lives, the idea was to see if we can benefit from a simpler life. The Amish, who grew out of the Reformation-era Anabaptist movement in Europe and came to America in the 18th and 19th centuries, are mostly found in Pennsylvania and Ohio but are now scattered across 30 US states. Many Amish, while doing business with the outside world, are in extremely tight-knit communities, living apart from our hyper-connected society and focused on their land and worship.
Could a group of “English” embrace Amish life and form a cohesive group to run a 40-acre farm and find fulfilment in a life free of modern distractions? Or would the strain of living with strangers and without modern comforts doom the experiment?
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The project was monitored by Barry Schwartz, an American psychologist whose books include The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. “One of the implications of the arguments I made is that maybe simplifying life would lead not only to better decisions, but more satisfaction with life in general,” he tells me.
“People know that the world they live in is toxic in various ways. They feel like they can’t exercise enough control. When they are free to indulge they can’t refuse to indulge. And so tying their hands behind them to try to live a different way might look extremely attractive.”
In 2016 Channel 4 made Eden, in which 23 strangers were left to build their own society on a private estate on the Ardnamurchan peninsula in Scotland. But what they hoped would be a Swallows and Amazons adventure became Lord of the Flies. “We were trying not to be Eden,” says Nick Mirsky, executive producer of The Simpler Life, also for Channel 4.
The Millers, who are new-order Amish and more liberal than some communities, have electricity at their dairy farm in Ohio and in Devon there was electricity to allow refrigeration for the dairy and gas for cooking. The volunteers had comfortable beds to sleep in and did not have the strains — building their own accommodation, hunting, coping with a Scottish winter — that helped to turn Eden into a hell where macho bullies talked of starving out weaker members of the group.
Nevertheless, in The Simpler Life things get rocky pretty fast. A generational divide emerges between Generation Z and the millennials on one side and some of the middle-aged participants.
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One side quickly grasps that it is important that decisions must be made for the good of the community, while the other becomes fixated on what they want individually and starts acting petulantly and selfishly. Put aside any preconceptions about millennials: those throwing their toys out of the pram are from the middle-aged group.
A sticking point is the request, from some of the older volunteers, that they should be allowed to buy beer. The community was given limited cash to buy emergency supplies. The majority decide that booze is not essential and when Hazel, a 52-year-old from Bradford, is urged by a 23-year-old to be patient and not spend money on luxuries until the crops have succeeded, she furiously complains: “Oh my God, we’re getting preached to here by a f***ing kid.”
A lot of time is consumed dealing with Penny, 44, who has arrived with her two daughters. They love roaming the farm, but Penny, a former PA to footballers, is a self-confessed “queen” who can’t live without her designer handbags. In the psychological tests the participants undertook before entering the farm she scored ominously low for “agreeableness” and “needing to be part of the group”.
She storms out of the shop when she is accused of being selfish for wanting to buy breakfast cereal and moans that all the hand-washing makes her feel as though she’s in a “slave camp”. After she lobbies to buy a washing machine, Lloyd Miller, the Amish patriarch, tells her: “It’s what we call chores.” When Penny is accused of sabotaging a vote on how to divide the money, which needs to be unanimous, she is excluded from the meeting in a move that Lloyd later describes to me as an “excommunication”.
The experiment does not make conservative Amish religious devotion a key focus but Lloyd insisted that, because faith is at the heart of their way of life, there must be weekly church services, which were not compulsory. He is jollier and more liberal than some Amish bishops I once interviewed in Pennsylvania, but when he talks of some people who leave Amish communities as “living in sin”, he takes our conversation back to a different century. Amish societies are highly patriarchal and it is noticeable that he dominates when I interview him and Edna together and I have to draw her into the conversation.
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One thing that shocked Edna, she tells me, was when she tried to help Penny move into a different house because she wasn’t getting on with her housemates and wanted a fresh start in another cottage. Despite Edna acting as envoy, Penny and Victoria, the potential new housemate, quickly start rowing in a way the Amish woman has not seen before. “It was different for me to see two people talking together like that. I was thinking back to my sisters in church and I missed them so much, I just cried. It was hard for me to see that.”
Penny quits the farm, although her teenage daughter doesn’t want to leave. Asked by her mother how excited she is about being reunited with her phone, the girl replies: “I don’t miss it.”
The battles “certainly came to be generational”, says Schwartz. “One possibility is that when you’re more set in your ways, you need creature comforts or your routines. When you’re in your twenties, you can be much more adaptable. I would have expected the older people, who are immersed in this network of relations to other people, to be much more sympathetic to a collectivist orientation than the younger ones, who are all about freedom and being your own person.” In many cases, the reverse is true. And Schwartz highlights another theme: “What modern affluence has done is convince everybody that every want is a need.”
Despite the tensions, the group raise a barn, a feat that stunned Joseph, 34. “I have a PR company. I don’t even do Ikea flat-packs.” He went to the farm with his partner, Victoria, 28, an influencer who does online make-up tutorials. “We really wanted to live this simpler life and take ourselves away from technology which runs our lives,” Victoria says. “I missed social media so much. That’s where my friends are.”
However, the couple became unlikely close friends with the Millers. “They left their dairy farm behind. They were 100 per cent committed, just like us,” Victoria says. “Me and Edna will be best friends for life. We couldn’t have survived without them. They taught us to put people before yourself in a community. On social media my page is all about me.” Edna later tells me that she was struck that Victoria “wasn’t used to friends that would sit down and talk face to face and share what’s in her heart”.
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“We survived without our phones, without TV, without Frosties,” says Joseph, who took on the role of treasurer. He learnt to engage better with people, “rather than talking while thinking about sending an email to a client”. Victoria is no longer glued to her phone, they are considering moving out of central London, she has ambitions to keep chickens and she misses making cheese.
Poppy, 16, signed up for the project with her brother, Jacob, 21. The division of labour between the sexes irked her. “The boys built the barn and the girls weren’t allowed. It was not that I’d really want to build a barn, it was just the fact that I couldn’t do it. It did annoy me.”
She bonded with Judy, the Millers’ 20-year-old daughter, but was taken aback that she and Edna said doing tasks for men made them happy. “I was like, ‘Are you having a laugh?’ That is crazy.”
Schwartz was surprised there wasn’t more pushback from the women volunteers, who mostly accepted the gender roles. “It was almost like they were playing house,” he says.
Jacob, who had just finished university, relished the agricultural labour, and working outdoors helped his mental health. After the death of his closest friend from cancer, he had been suffering with depression and anxiety. “I needed to heal and going on the farm really helped me realign everything. I got into meditating. It made me value my own mental health a lot more. It was life-changing.” He also had a romance that continued after he left the farm.
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More volunteers left during the course of the experiment than the producers, Schwartz or Lloyd had expected. “I was a little bit surprised that people walked away that easy,” says Lloyd, when we talk on a video call (one of his sons has a job that requires a laptop). “All they would have had to do was sacrifice a little bit of that self.
“There were moments that we were like: what are we doing here?” he adds. But ultimately it was a great experience, he says, even if “we were very soft on them. Our family got up every morning at 5.30. There was no way I could get [the others] out before 6.30 or seven o’clock and then we met to start the work at eight o’clock, which was stinking early for them all.” He knew from near the beginning who would survive until the end of the project.
“The most obvious reason for dropping out was this tension between ‘me’ and ‘we’ and how much people were expected to submerge their individual interests in the service of the collective,” Schwartz says.
Tests showed the volunteers getting physically stronger and their blood pressures dropping. Some blossomed. When I speak to the Millers, Kevin, a 23-year-old from Wigan, is about to arrive in Ohio for the wedding of their son, Jerald, with whom he bonded. Kevin had been ill with colitis and unemployed before the farm. He lived with his mother and liked listening to Radio 4 and drinking tea, but was horrified by social media dating.
Viewers will see his incredible enthusiasm for the project and how he gains weight and strength. “Somehow [our] society didn’t really notice Kevin,” Mirsky says. “He found a self-belief and became, in moments, a leader.” He has a theory as to why the millennials thrived. “They know the world cannot go on like this, they’re going to inherit the mess we’re creating. They are open to living in a different way.”
Schwartz detected one key reason a group made it to the end of four months at the farm. “The Amish family had this incredible, steadying influence. They were very gentle. They weren’t really expecting people to embrace their way of life, but they were there with mild words of encouragement and helped the people over rough spots without being excessively preachy.” The experiment was “a provisional success. It’s really quite extraordinary to see the effect on the people who stayed. The great question is, will it last?”
At one level, he saw people who are used to sitting in front of laptops all day taking enormous satisfaction from planting crops and seeing them grow. The experiment also made people think about how they wanted to live when they went back to a world of endless choice. “It does suggest that it’s valuable for people to scrutinise the life they’re living and come to judgments about what’s essential to preserve and what isn’t. There’s enormous benefit in doing that.”
The Simpler Life starts on Channel 4 on March 22 at 9.15pm
