Amish Life

I stayed with an Old Order Amish family in Lancaster, Pennsylvania

Often I don’t know why I’m doing something until after I do it. I decided I shall live with Amish people. I said on a podcast that I will do it, and now I’m doing it. 

On long highway drives, I question what I’m doing.

“Just show up,” I tell myself.

I show up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which I thought would be an Amish village. It’s a small modern city, a little-known gem on the gritty east coast. It’s before the arrival time for my AmishB&B, so I visit a coffee shop in the city. There are liberals selling CBD coffee and stickers that say “Pregnancy begins with a penis.” 

I pick up a sticker. “This seems random,” I say to the cashier. She explains why she made them. Something to do with the Supreme Court. I don’t respond.

I drive out of the city into pure farm country. I pull the Tesla up to a 1790 stone house. I punch in the code and poke around my apartment. There’s no television. The decor is Christian. There are electric lights. Overall, I’m pleasantly surprised.

I go back outside to my car. An Amish man is in the backyard. A large German shepherd comes running at me. “She’s friendly,” he says. That’s what they all say. But this dog is actually friendly—no barking and all cuddles. The early thirties Amish man is Steven, and this is his house.

“Where are you from?” Steven asks.

“New Hampshire. I love it up there, big mountains.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“Is that raw milk I saw in the fridge?”

“Oh no, we don’t give raw milk to visitors. We drink it ourselves though.” 

“I’ve never had a problem with it.”

“You drink raw milk?”

“Yeah, sometimes. My favorite is raw milk yogurt.” 

“Oh we make our own, we’ll get you some of that.”

“Thank you,” I say. “I saw a horse and buggy on the road this morning. That’s the first time I’ve seen that. It was like seeing Santa Claus.”

“But Santa Claus isn’t real, we’re real,” says Steven. 

He has a wife, three young children, chickens, and two dogs — the shepherd mix and Goldendoodle puppy.

For the majority of their lives, Amish people do not engage with the internet. Their nervous systems are different. Steven smiles a lot and never interrupts. It’s easy to have a conversation. There’s a lot of eye contact. 

"We have church in our homes," he says. 

"How big are the church groups?" 

"Once we get to 42 families we split into 21 and 21." 

"42 is the magic number?" 

"Well, depends on the number of kids. 40-45. 42 is the average." 

"Do families have a lot of kids these days?"

“No, not really. Five or six.”

I laugh. "That’s not a lot? In my world, one or two is a lot." 

He laughs. "It used to be 7 or 8. Before that, it was 9 to 12. I come from 11. I’m the youngest of 11."

I look around at the farm.

"Is all this land yours?"

"Yeah."

"Big operation."

"Not really, we only have 600 chickens." 

"How long have you lived here?" 

"Seven years. We rented it for two then bought it. It’s like eating an elephant." 

I try to process this.

"It will take a long time to pay off," he adds.

“Right, right.” I nod my head. 

Steven has a job, an Amish B&B, an apartment rental, the chicken operation, and a neck massage side hustle. He went to school until eighth grade. 

It makes sense.

Inside, there’s a Holy Bible on the bed stand. A sign says, “God sees us how we can be but loves us as we are.” I look out the window. An Amazon truck blows past a young lady in a bonnet driving a horse-drawn carriage. This is real. The Amish women I’ve seen around town have a particularly feminine physique. They are reserved, at least around me. I see them lightly smiling as they work. They look like wife material. 

I go on a run and ride my bike. Then I’m not sure what to do so I play in the yard with the Goldendoodle and shepherd. Steven is outside as well. We get to chatting. 

"I work for Pennsylvania Ag,” He points across the fields. “Right over there." 

"I read and write about the herbicide RoundUp. Do you know anything about RoundUp?" 

"I’m totally against RoundUp. We don’t sell RoundUp," He's animated. "We sell an oil that farmers can add to the RoundUp to keep it on the top one inch of the soil so the sunlight and microbes can break it down. There’s a lot of activity in the top one inch of soil." 

"Do you guys sell GMO seeds?" 

"We sell GMO corn because if the farmer wants it, they’re gonna get it, one way or another. We don’t sell RoundUp though. We advise people on best practices for RoundUp and sell a product to make it less dangerous." 

"That’s cool. It was 1974 that glyphosate RoundUp hit the market, so we’re coming up on fifty years of glyphosate use. Then in the 90s the GMOs came out and they could go crazy with it."

"1974?"

"Yup. What do you think the effects are? I think it’s causing more allergies."

"Well, the glyphosate locks up the minerals. If there’s no minerals, you have nothing." 

"Do you mean no nutrition?" 

"Yeah, you need the minerals for nutrition. Your body won’t feel satisfied if there’s no nutrition, so you just keep eating and growing larger. Our family eats a lot of salt with minerals.”

“I have a salt that I love. I think it’s from Utah.”

“It’s not Redmond’s, is it?”

“It is!”

“We get ours from Baja. We’ll get you some of that.” 

He asks me what I do for work and I tell him I write books. 

“What are your books about?” he asks. 

"My first book is stories inspired by true events. My second is about Elon Musk and his philosophy. And the third is about health and mental health, which is a challenge for people in my world, especially young people.”

“One of my passions is mental health. We have facilities here. They’re packed."

"With English?"

"No, with Amish."

"What do they have? Like anxiety and depression?" 

“Yeah, that’s most of it. We see it in kids too which is strange. I want to know why.” 

“That’s the big question. I think there are many reasons.”

“It’s gotta be environmental. Some people say depression is a spiritual thing, but from what I’ve seen, it’s not. It’s in the kids. How could it be spiritual if it’s in the kids?”

“Around half of teenagers in the U.S. say they have depression or anxiety,” I tell him.

“What? Get out of here.”

“Around 20% of Americans are on psychiatric medication.”

“No, really?”

“30% of young women report having a diagnosed mental health condition.”

“What’s going to happen to this country in 40 years? I didn’t know the numbers were like that.”

"For the Amish community, what do you think the numbers are,?"

"Less than 10%. 

An Amish guy was telling me that he was on depression meds for 17 years, and he listed them. He said the doctors say it balances the brain chemistry, but he said it did exactly the opposite."

I blurt out laughter. 

Later, Steven is working in a garage section of the large barn. His youngest son is with him, climbing on scaffolding, picking up scraps of jagged metal, and adding them to the loader for disposal. The little boy works quietly.

“Do you need a hand?” I ask Steven.

“Sure!”

The three of us compile scraps of wood, metal and plastic from the work site.

Steven decides he wants to show me his friend's cow milking operation. It is the time that they do the milking. He brings out one of his horses and brushes her off. He pulls out the buggy and rigs them up. We take the buggy, clickety-clack down the narrow road to John’s dairy farm. 

John’s beard is edgy by Amish standards. We watch him and his wife connect the cow's udders with milk suckers. The operation runs on compressed air. The Amish are more technical than I thought they’d be.

John’s wife gets me half a gallon of raw milk for $2.

"This is all non-GMO,” Steven tells me. “Well, maybe the beans…no he grows his own beans.” Steven takes into consideration the food that feeds the cows that produce their milk.

"This might seem like a strange question, but how often do you eat alone?" I ask Steven.

He’s confused. 

"Like without my family?"

"Yeah, family or friends."

"Sometimes at work I eat lunch by myself, but almost never. Almost never."

"Do any English people ever convert to being Amish?" 

“One guy, David. He was a German. He converted and married an Amish woman. So one every 50–100 years.” He laughs.

“Sounds like my odds aren’t good then,” I say. If it wasn’t for the mandatory bowl cut I’d be down to convert.

***

Steven’s voice is a blend of optimism and localism. Natural authenticity. He knows nothing less. There’s no porno vice in his pocket nagging him. There’s no video game tugging on his brain. There are no television shows warping his worldview.

The Amish are a decentralized people. Each church group makes their own rules. However, there are common denominators among the Old Order Amish churches. No cars, no grid-tied electricity, and no mustaches. 

Why limit transportation to horses and push-bikes, and limit electricity to tool batteries or solar? Localism and decentralization. 

18 miles is the furthest Steven’s horse has pulled them. A pedal bike could take you triple that, far away from the community. So their bikes are push-bikes. They use electricity, but they don’t connect their homes to the electrical grid. Their lights run on batteries, oil candles, or a solar setup.

On the surface, some of the rules seem petty, but the downstream effects hold their groups together. The men wear suspenders, the women wear dresses. Frankly, the men look like dorks, but I understand the dress code creates an in-group out-group scenario and signals allegiance to the tribe. It’s also a simple life, and simplicity is a winning strategy.

“Was it an easy decision to join the Amish church?” I ask Steven, while we’re standing in the kitchen.

“Not really. It’s gotten easier since covid. I mean, I heard stories about what English people experienced. I was like, how could you live like that? 

Grandparents couldn’t see their grandchildren because they didn’t get the shot.”

“How did the Amish community respond to covid? Were they reactive, like wearing masks and stuff?”

“That’s one good thing about the Amish, we were all on the same page about that. No masks.”

“Were you able to have gatherings?”

“We skipped church for four weeks.”

“Four weeks?”

“Yup,” he says, “We're all on the same page. You can't find unity like that in the world, hardly anywhere else, where everyone's on the same page. I know that was tearing families apart, the different opinions. If you don't do this, then they're not going to hang out with you.”

“Yeah. For me, it was a big thing. Intra family it was causing divisions.”

“Right. We didn't have that. Not at all in the families and basically none in the community.. So that in itself is worth a lot, to me,” he says. “Yeah, there are times when it would be convenient, but we don't need convenience. That’s my opinion, not on Earth, we don't need convenience.” 

“So you got married around ten years ago?”

“I was 23.” 

“And that’s when you’re full committed?”

“Right. Well, I joined the Amish church at 19, a couple years before I got married.”

“So at 19 you made the commitment.”

“Right. Pretty much.”

“You said you had some hesitancy?”

“Not really because the youth group I joined when I turned 16 was a Christian youth group. We didn’t have vehicles. There was some alcohol, but nothing like parties every Saturday night like some of the youth do. There are sixty or seventy youth groups in Lancaster County. You can pick and choose what you want, and that varies greatly. 

The youth group I joined, I wanted. I wasn’t as exposed to all kinds of negative stuff, so it wasn’t as difficult to join the church. Once in a while, we had some alcohol. I’ve had alcohol maybe three times in my life. Tastes horrible. Why bother? So it wasn’t like I was addicted to that or anything.”

“Are you grateful you don’t necessarily have to engage or worry about new technology?”

“There is some of it. With the community support, it’s easier to not have those things. If your peers — if everyone around you has it, there’s much more pressure, and you want to have it.”

“Exactly. It’s hard for us to get off our phones because if you get off your phone and look up, everybody around you is still looking at their phones. But when we go out into the wilderness, all of a sudden no one has their phones and it’s good, it’s like a normal human experience. It’s much more tolerable to abstain from the internet when you have 100 friends also doing that.”

“Right, exactly. You can communicate face to face.”

“So you guys have phones?”

“I do have a cell phone. I have a flip phone. And I don’t carry it with me. It’s basically a house phone. If someone needs me they can leave a voicemail. I’ll get back to them when I get back to them. That’s the way it is. That frees you up a lot. If you have a phone you’re looking at it every five minutes. You’re waiting on the notification bell…I was on Facebook for a couple months. That did NOT work.”

“Why didn’t that work?”

“You have so much more distraction. That was in 2012. Oh man, all the political opinions on that. I was like, I don’t need this stuff.”

“Do you have a computer to go on Facebook?”

“That was a smartphone. That was before I had my flip phone.”

“There’s a lot more flexibility than I thought, I suppose.”

“That was before I was married,” he says. “Typically, even when you join the church but aren’t married, there’s more flexibility. Then once you get married it’s expected that you get rid of some of those things.”

“Do you worry about worldly news?”

“Not really. Some. If something needs to be found out we’ll find it out. We need to be aware of what is going on to a certain extent.”

“All this stuff about wars in other countries, it’s too much for me to keep track of,” I say. “I just try to focus on my country.”

“Right. Focus on the things you can have control over. Folks have too many things they’re worrying about that they have no control over. Wars or whatever. You can’t do anything about that. But if people can focus on what they can control instead of what they can’t control then it would be a better country.”

“Yeah.”

“You can control yourself.”

“Thanks for answering some of my questions,” I say.

“No problem,” he smiles. “It's too bad someone else is coming tomorrow, you could've hung out all day.” 

“I’d like to go to your friend’s food store that you told me about.”

“Here's the address.” He writes it down and hands it to me. “Go down the driveway and into the garage on the left. It’s self-service. Maybe I should go with you. I’ll get some cream. But this time, we’ll take your ride.” He looks at the Tesla.

“Alright, let’s do it.” 

We rendezvous in the driveway after dinner. I have the passenger seat pre-heated to the max. I show him how to open the Tesla doors. I show him the acceleration. He laughs like a child.

“That’s nuts,” he says.

“I kill a lot of bugs with this car,” I tell him. “It gets crazier.”

“No kidding?”

I turn on autopilot. 

“It has cameras on it that allow you to have it do the driving. So now it’s doing the driving. It will see the stop sign up here.”

“Nahhh…What?”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“What about highways? It wouldn’t shift lanes or does it shift lanes for you?”

“Yeah, it’ll shift lanes,” I say, with some guilt in my voice.

“It will?”

“Yeah.”

“Sheesh.”

“That’s pretty much it. The screen does lots of cool little things, games and stuff.”

“Play games while you’re on cruise self-drive mode,” he laughs.

“The thing everybody loves is you can do karaoke while you drive.” He lets out a deep chuckle. “They call it Caraoke.”

“Caraoke—okay.”

“Is your butt getting warm yet?”

“I figured that out pretty quick.”

“The seats lay flat, and I have a sleeping bag back there.”

“So you can sleep while it drives on the highway?”

“Probably in a couple of years.”

“I gotta get a horse and buggy that does that.”

We pull up to his friend's house and enter the garage to shop for food. Fresh cream is $2 a quart. There are chicken hearts and cow livers for sale.

Read the full story in my book.

Thanks for reading, and have a great rest of your day.

Things I like:

Writing coaching. I’ve been enjoying working 1 on 1 with great writers, providing input, guidance and accountability. Here is my offering.

My first book, All Outcomes Are Acceptable, is on Amazon. It’s about true wealth, AI drones, Amish people, and wilderness survival. Readers are loving it.

The Pathless Path is my favorite online community.

Open gym for writers on Wednesdays.

I replaced health insurance with CrowdHealth. It’s a large group of the healthiest people auto-crowdfunding pregnancy, injury, and illness healthcare bills. They also match members with the best clinicians. I’ve been a member for three years and save $4-5k per year. See if you qualify to join.

My publication is free to read. I hope you become a paid subscriber. With your support, I will become one of the greatest writers in the world.

Tip jar: Click here to support my work with a one-time tip that I will use to buy duck eggs from a local family with ducks.

Bonus Photos