Used to be that living off the grid meant living off the power grid … Stickin’ it to the man by avoiding taxes and power bills, living off the land and sucking off of the government’s energy instead of paying for your own. Today, living off the grid essentially means living without the Internet or a smartphone. I’m not saying that would be easy, but it sure does make us all sound like a bunch of pussies. So if the grid is now synonymous with the Internet, then living on the grid is kind of pathetic, codependent and mindless and living off the grid would be a reactionary course correction, unrealistic and probably unsafe. So I’ve resolved to live next to the grid. Maybe you’ll try living there with me, or maybe you’ll just flip me the bird from your pod on the grid and say that I don’t get it.

The grid is really just a wired version of Costco, mostly filled with things you really don’t need and the things you do need are epically blown out of proportion and distorted out of scale. The Costco excess that says you need a pack of twenty-seven pork chops is the same excess that exists on the grid – data and pictures and videos and thumbs up and followers and round smiley faces on the jumbo scale. Always on must be better, Unlimited must be better. Welcome to Costco! Buy a pallet of hot dogs. When you live next to the grid you just dream of a railcar full of bacon; when you’re on the grid you look for online funding so you can buy one.

If you lived next to the grid you could make your way from Point A to Point B the way nature intended – by hitchhiking. Uber, et al., is really just hitchhiking, except that it eliminates all the fun stuff – gas, grass or ass. “Standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona,” was always about free rides and free spirits and feelin’ groovy. That’s all gone now, replaced by an app, a business model and an electric vehicle. Uber can’t be any safer than hitchhiking. Using your upturned thumb or a cardboard sign that says “Bakersfield or bust,” you could maybe get all the way across the United States on a five dollar bill and case of Budweiser. Sure, you’re in a ratty truck with a total stranger, but the Uber guy scratching himself in the front seat is a total stranger too, and you have to ride in a Leaf and somebody has all your credit card info. You basically know not a thing about the driver or his car. When was the last time the car was serviced? What qualifications does the driver have as a professional driver? He’s already shown awful judgment by buying a car named after something that falls from a tree. Here’s the transportation pecking order: 1) your own car, 2) hitchhiking, 3) calling your mom, 4) a taxi, 5) Uber. It’s a last resort.

Uber, and silly things like it, happen because people are addicted to the grid and the grid clouds judgment. Technology is deemed good and valuable simply because it exists, a lot of people have stopped looking at it with a critical eye.

Out of 267 employees, I’m the only one that doesn’t bring their phone into work, who doesn’t drop it down on the conference room table at meetings, who doesn’t spend much of the day texting his mistress and monitoring the Facebook activity of people he went to high school with. That doesn’t make me better than the other 266 people, it just, well … Yes it does. These people, like the ones you work with, are not content to live the life in front of them, rather they are obsessed with the make-believe life they are creating on their phone. I get that the virtual life could be shloads more compelling than the one with actual people, but is it really better or is it just better because people only spend minutes a day nurturing their actually flesh-and-blood existence?

This doesn’t happen next to the grid. Next to the grid you see, up close, just what a mess you’ve made of your life, but the upside is that you might experience the exhilaration of a fistfight or maybe you’ll get laid by an actual human.

Living next to the grid, with your real life and your imagined Internet one on separate, parallel planes means that you could avail yourself to the innovation of a smartphone without it being a remote control for every earthly task … That you could harness the worldwide interweb as a knowledge base instead of it throwing a harness around you and dragging you through dangerous neighborhoods and enticing you to go long periods of time without engaging your own wonderful brain. Living next to the grid means that you and your phone essentially live independent lives and you just check in with each other a couple of times a day.

Don’t be scared. Remember, you’re not off the grid, your next to it. You’ll be able to see it (the grid) at all times, which should be comforting when you start to hyperventilate. Start by doing simple activities without your phone – say, like going into the bathroom (don’t get me started on guys who hold their phones while standing at the urinal). Try leaving your phone in your car for an afternoon and see if you can navigate life without turn-by-turn directions. It could be fun, enlightening. You may find that likes are actually those things in life that you favor based on personal experience, not something strangers bestow on you because you kissed the right ass in a chatroom.

Who knows, maybe being next to the grid is what’s next.