Maria Arozamena

George Grube ’27 is full of stories. Asking a simple question might yield a response that starts with “back when I was a competitive glassblower” or “during my hitchhiking trip across New Zealand.” As for life goals, George hopes to be a professional Greek Orthodox Monk. Now call me jaded, but I have become less generous with my astonishment since starting at Yale; almost everyone I meet here has crazy stories to tell. So, even though the glass and the trips and the monk stuff all caught my attention, what really shocked me about George is the fact that he doesn’t own a phone. 

I met George the day before we embarked on our First-Year Outdoor Orientation Trip together. George is actually not a first-year, but a transfer junior fresh off a gap year. He walked up to the tarp in a wide-brimmed straw hat and neon orange hokas. When our FOOT leaders tried to make a group chat, he explained his circumstances. 

I, for one, was shocked. My high school and my social life revolved around technology and social media. Despite my own long-held misgivings about the superficial life technology promotes, I had always put that issue in the category of things far out of my control, and I’ve spent a good portion of my life mourning the agency I could have if I wasn’t compelled to distract myself with my phone. So, to meet someone who refused to engage with the modern times was revolutionary and a little disquieting. 

The FOOT environment wasn’t anything new for George. Last year, he hiked 30 miles a day in the Alps. I, on the other hand, spent the humid days of summer in my air-conditioned living room rewatching “Gilmore Girls,” scrolling through the Yale class of ’28 Instagram page and putting off my summer reading — so for me, FOOT was transformative. 

After the first four days of college, which were jam-packed with recitations of the same surface-level facts — “I’m from Houston,” “planning on majoring in English and Philosophy, you?” “I’m in Silliman, aka the best residential college” — the harsh authenticity of hiking the New Hampshire mountains was terrifying. I had been pulling out my phone in any and every awkward moment of silence; all of the sudden my safety blanket had been snatched away, replaced by hours of tough hiking and, in my case, even tougher falling. Waking up after my first night outdoors, I legitimately did not believe I would be able to keep going. 

But, when we got home, I cried. I felt that on FOOT I had zeroed in on the purest form of living, and that any return to my prior phone-centric haze marked a willing abdication of my humanity. It didn’t help that I now felt my tech dependency was a product of my own spinelessness. After all, if George could find a way to give up his phone and take back his life, why couldn’t I?

* * *

For George, the decision to distance himself from technology and reject modernity is connected to his spirituality. From a young age, he has felt called to lead a deeply religious life.

“I think on a certain level, I was always willing to make certain sacrifices in order to live what I considered the right kind of life,” George told me over dinner. 

But it wasn’t until the summer before ninth grade that George connected technology to this mission, when he discovered Neil Postman’s book “Amusing Ourselves to Death” in a stack of disregarded tomes in his grandparents’ library. It was the cover that first caught his eye: an illustration of two people with televisions where their heads were meant to be. Postman’s historical narrative, which George described as an “immediately exhilarating read,” argues generally that freedom has fallen by the wayside in a culture that instead promotes mindless entertainment. Postman’s main point was that the medium of television had cheapened America’s interactions with politics and the news. 

“It’s a very damning rebuke of hedonism,” George said of the book, and reading it sent him down an anthropological and self-interrogative rabbit hole. He started to explore the idea that frequent and voluntary exposure to television had the capacity to send his life in a direction completely opposite of his theological principles. 

I’ve never been very religious, but when I asked George what these principles included, he listed one that struck a chord with me: empathy. He told me he believes that television, and the forms of digital media that have emerged in its wake, all present a sincere obstacle to mutual human understanding. 

“There is something particularly serious about the extent to which television commodified the news and turned it into something watchable,” George said. “Even if it wasn’t fun to look at, it still elicited viewership.”

This overarching search for the entertaining within the human as opposed to the human within the entertaining is something that George is very wary of, and something for which he blames modern technology and capitalism, almost exclusively. He pointed out the innate contradiction of a culture that is based on freedom, putting people in a position where they feel that they have to engage in a digital existence. To George, this is a very scary thing.

More than just ideologically, though, George thinks that a phoneless existence has materially bettered his day-to-day life. He gives credit to the inaccessibilty of texting and other instant methods of communication for his willingness to just knock on a random door or strike up a conversation with a stranger.

“Waiting in line in the dining hall, I don’t have the option of hopping on my screen and isolating. I’ve given myself no choice but to start talking to someone. I’d like to think that I can talk to anyone.”

* * *

On our trip, George mentioned how he had founded the Ivy League’s first Neo-Amish Society. He’s already launched a new chapter at Yale, the inaugural meeting of which took place the first Friday in September. In a show of fellow FOOTie loyalty — and a genuine interest in reprising my phonelessness — I spread the word about the meeting and arrived promptly at 8:00. 

George’s invitations to the Neo-Amish Fête, as he marketed it, were regrettably via email. He tried to gain access to the undergrad printing press to make paper invitations, but his request didn’t go through in time. In the email, he specified that cellular devices would be confiscated upon entry, but I just left my phone in the dorm. 

When I arrived, George ushered me into the JE Junior Common Room, which he had supplied with a smorgasbord of grapes, bananas and bottles of milk ready to be churned into butter. Intrigue doesn’t begin to describe my immediate reaction.

One thing about George: he commands quite the turnout. Over the course of the two-hour event, almost 50 neo-mennonites filtered in and out. I asked most of them the same question — “What brings you to the Neo-Amish Society?” — and almost all of them in one way or another attributed their attendance to George. I wasn’t very surprised by that answer. After all, as I have learned over the past month, it’s impossible to have a conversation with George that doesn’t leave you with 10 more questions you want to ask him. 

But I wondered if, more than George himself, the attendees of the fête weren’t drawn to a part of themselves they saw reflected in him. That part that was not content with complacency, with the artificial varnish that technology applied to their lives. I knew that at least I was hoping to find in myself that which had been so easy to identify in George: the courage to go against the grain.