Immediately after arriving in Lancaster County, we head for the Amish Village.
We are lucky. With almost no wait, we can join a tour of the historic farmhouse and then take a small bus through Amish Country. Our guide is not Amish herself, but she is knowledgeable. We learn a great deal about the customs, rules and faith of this community, whose roots lie in the Anabaptist movement of German-speaking Europe. The Amish emerged as a distinct group in the late seventeenth century, chiefly in Switzerland and Alsace.
We learn how to recognise an Amish farm.
We see schoolhouses.
Washing lines.
Workshops.
Black buggies.
Only a real encounter is missing at first.
In the evening, we are driving along a country road when suddenly one of those legendary black horse-drawn buggies passes us. Not on museum grounds. Not as a folkloric demonstration. Simply as an everyday means of transport.
A man is going home. Or shopping. Or wherever you go by horse-drawn buggy on an early evening in Lancaster County.
Outside the local supermarket, a long rail lets you tie up your horse. Beside it are pick-ups, SUVs and our hire car.
Two worlds, peacefully sharing a car park.
I am not quite sure what instinct this awakens in us.
In any case, we decide that this one buggy cannot possibly have been the whole experience. We drive on.
Very attentively.
Suddenly, we judge roads not by whether they lead to our Airbnb, but by their likely density of buggies.
Wide country road: not promising.
Small road between farms: promising.
Junction with good visibility in every direction: strategically excellent.
We position our hire car so we can observe the traffic without looking too conspicuous. Or so we think. Presumably, we look like two Germans standing at the roadside with a hire car, unsure where they want to go.
For a while, nothing happens.
Then a car comes.
Another car.
A pick-up.
A tractor.
No buggy.
We change position. Perhaps we have chosen the wrong corridor. Perhaps the horse-drawn rush hour is already over. Perhaps there is a route only locals know. Our knowledge of Amish traffic patterns remains close to zero. Our determination grows anyway.
Eventually, we succeed.
A black buggy appears, slowly approaches and passes us.
We are disproportionately pleased.
Not because our research was especially clever or our tactical positioning brilliant. Simply because we have found what we were looking for.
Later, we realise that horse-drawn buggies really are part of everyday life around Lancaster. There is no need to stake out the roads. You just need to drive through the countryside for long enough.
In the evening, we sit in Adirondack chairs by our Airbnb’s fire pit. Our adrenaline levels have returned to normal.
And we begin to think more seriously about the Amish. To this day, what remains is a peculiar mixture of incomprehension and respect. We do not understand why someone would shape their life so consistently around rules that deliberately exclude many possibilities of the modern world. We would not choose this life.
But respect is not the same as agreement.
We respect the consistency with which the Amish disconnect themselves from some of the confusion and constant acceleration of our society.
We respect how visibly community, commitment and hard work shape their daily lives.
And we respect that, at least in their religious understanding, the decision to become a formal member is supposed to be voluntary. The Amish practise adult baptism. Those who leave the community before baptism face no formal church sanction. Those who are baptised, by contrast, commit themselves for life to the church and its rules. That is freedom — but certainly not freedom without the gravitational pull of family and community.
The Amish do not reject technology as inherently evil. The decisive question is more what a technology does to the community: does it create dependence on the outside world? Encourage individualism? Change the rhythm of life together? That is why connection to the public electricity grid may be forbidden while batteries, solar power or other locally controllable energy sources are permitted under certain circumstances.
This becomes particularly tangible where centuries-old traditions meet modern appliances.
A food processor, for example.
Electricity from the public grid is not allowed. So the machine runs on compressed air. The compressed air, in turn, is generated by a tractor. The tractor may be used because its use for agricultural purposes is legitimate. Or at least can be legitimised.
From the outside, this looks like a technically elaborate detour around the spirit of a rule. Almost a religiously approved life hack. But perhaps we are looking at it the wrong way.
Perhaps the point is not to prevent every technical function entirely. It is to keep a boundary visible. The food processor may work — but not by being plugged, as a matter of course and invisibly, into an infrastructure connecting every household to the same modern world.
The detour is then not a flaw in the system. It is the system.
Later in our journey, we encounter Amish families again at the Finger Lakes. The community is expanding. That too is remarkable. A way of life that seems full of restrictions from our perspective appears to remain attractive enough to enough young people not only to survive but to need new space.
That does not mean we should romanticise it. Community can support, but it can also constrain. Tradition can provide direction, but it can also entrench expectations that are hard to escape. From the outside, we see cohesion, craftsmanship and a slower daily rhythm. How life feels from within is not something we can judge after a museum visit, a bus tour and two successfully spotted buggies.
But the technological detours stay with us. And suddenly they no longer seem so far away. Our new fridge at home has a Sabbath mode. I discovered it in the instruction manual.
Because operating a switch and thereby turning on an appliance can count as work under certain Jewish interpretations, the light stays off in Sabbath mode when you open the fridge door. Displays and automatic responses are also controlled so that use does not directly trigger a new action.
A state-of-the-art fridge is designed to be compatible with a religious rule thousands of years old. Suddenly, the compressed-air food processor seems less like a curiosity from an unfamiliar world.
The basic question is the same:
“How do communities preserve old traditions when every technological innovation demands new interpretations?”
Perhaps it is more fundamental still:
“How do you maintain a framework of values while riding a carousel of constant change?”
We modern people like to tell ourselves that we simply make rational decisions. New technology arrives. We assess its usefulness. Then we use it — responsibly, of course.
It is not that simple. We draw boundaries too. Or at least we try.
We discuss screen time, social media, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering and when being reachable becomes an imposition. We turn off notifications, set up parental controls and buy devices meant to help us become less dependent on our devices.
Perhaps we differ from the Amish less in whether we want to limit technology. The difference lies in where we draw the line, who sets it and which values it is meant to protect. Amish rules seem contradictory to us because we do not share their internal logic.
We notice our own contradictions less. We drive a car to observe a community that rejects cars. We use a smartphone to find places where people deliberately live without many digital technologies. And we position a hire car tactically at a junction to see a man who, in his horse-drawn buggy, is probably just on his way home.
Perhaps that was ultimately the most telling image of our visit.
The Amish were going about their daily lives.
We were the unusual ones.