If you’ve never heard of Keiichi Iwasaki — and I hadn’t until last week — then you haven’t seen the future. Or rather, the past. Or rather, the way that strong-willed individuals are gradually forcing us to reconsider our wasteful modern ways, so that the 21st century may well be closer in spirit to the pre-industrial 18th than the ultra-mechanised 20th.

Iwasaki was in Switzerland last week. So, as it happened, was I. But whereas I got there by a conventional but unutterably tedious route that involved hours of soul-sapping faffing around at Heathrow followed by 80 minutes of ecologically disastrous jet travel, Iwasaki’s mode of transport was altogether more enthralling. He cycled to Switzerland on his battered Raleigh bike. From Japan.

Not directly, you understand. That would be too much of a doddle. No, his bike ride has so far taken in 37 countries, from Nepal and India through the Middle East to the UK and back to mainland Europe again. Along the way — just to keep fit, I presume — he climbed Everest (he cheekily pedalled up to base camp and asked an expedition if he could join them) and swam the Ganges.

He was in Switzerland to knock off an Alp or two. Then he plans to cycle through Africa and across America. Not bad for a thirtysomething who originally intended only to bike round Japan. Then he saw a ferry to Korea and rather fancied the trip, and then ... well, you know how one thing leads to another.

But Iwasaki’s marathon pedal (28,000 miles and eight years so far) is not the point of this story, astonishing though his achievement is — especially to a fellow cyclist. He must have knees like the pistons on the Queen Mary and a crotch like a rhinoceros hide. No, what really fascinates me is that he left Japan with 160 yen (or about £1) in his pocket. Since then he has supported himself by busking. So although penniless he has managed to see the world entirely under his own steam (the odd boat trip excepted), and without harming the planet ecologically in any way — just as explorers, nomads and merchants did in the 50,000 years that humans existed before learning how to power themselves along with fossil fuel.

And that’s what makes his story so powerfully symbolic. I think he’s pointing the way to the next great revolution in human affairs: the Age of New Simplicity.

Consider what’s going on at present. Around the world all intelligent people are alarmed by the extent to which our species has pillaged and suffocated poor old Mother Earth over the past 200 years. Pressure is mounting on governments, business and individuals to curtail the reckless disregard of the environment that has been a trademark of “progress” since the Industrial Revolution.

At the same time, individuals seem increasingly dissatisfied with the tame passivity of 21st-century urban life. The technology with which we cocoon ourselves has brought us everything and nothing. We shop till we drop — but can’t get no satisfaction. Cars and cheap jet travel, which were once thought to confer tremendous freedoms on ordinary people, are now freighted with overwhelming frustrations and delays.

Our lives seem far more complicated and convoluted, processed and packaged, than ever before. Yet basic desires for love, happiness, security and friendship remain just as unfulfilled. No wonder that the recession (and what seemed, a year ago, like the imminent collapse of capitalism) triggered ambivalent responses in many thoughtful people. It seemed a warning from the gods that the West’s mad dash to fill daily life with more and more frocks and gadgets that we don’t need (and can’t afford) would end in catastrophe, both for ourselves and those unfortunate enough to share the planet with us.

On top of that is the feeling that our over-sophisticated lives lack authenticity. We exist in sanitised, synthetic bubbles. Mobiles, e-mails, Twitter, Facebook — they all appear to make communication easier. In reality we talk face to face less and less. Similarly, the more we stay at home watching TV or downloading music and movies, the further removed we are from the thrill of live performance.

People go on holiday all over the globe, yet the hotels, beaches and packages offered to tourists are pretty well identical in every destination. Supermarkets sell 89 types of cheese, yet almost nobody in urban Britain has milked a cow. “Have you felt the wool of the beaver? Or swan’s down ever?” asked Ben Jonson in the early 1600s. Good questions then; good questions now. We rely more and more on specialists to make things — bread, beer, clothes, music, furniture, whatever — that would have been made in every home a century ago. So many people never experience the satisfaction that comes from self-sufficiency — from creating something with your own hands.

All this will start to change in the Age of New Simplicity. Already there are signs of the revolt to come. People cycle to work, rather than submitting themselves to the mind-numbing, nerve-frazzling grind of train or car commuting. There’s been a boom in deliciously old-fashioned books passing on basic outdoor skills to children — camping, fishing, cooking on an open fire, knowing which wild berries and mushrooms are edible.

A century after Baden-Powell founded the Scouts to keep working-class boys out of mischief and soak up excess energy, we are starting to realise that he wasn’t an authoritarian oddball but a visionary pioneer whose ideas urgently need revival. There’s been a surge, too, in adults taking classes that point them towards the forgotten joys of life: how to fillet a mackeral; embroider a cushion; carve a chair; make music in the home; identify birds by their song and trees by their leaf.

The hardy Iwasaki is the patron saint of this New Simplicity. And the reason he gave for undertaking his odyssey — “I wanted to see everything with my own eyes and feel everything with my own skin” — will be the motto of the new age. Not all of us can summon the masochistic fortitude to traverse the world on an 4cm-wide saddle. But more and more of us are fed up with getting someone else’s version of reality. “World is crazier and more of it than we think, incorrigibly plural,” Louis MacNeice wrote in his great poem Snow. The paradox of technology is that it has narrowed our world, tamed its craziness, made it seem grey and uniform rather than incorrigibly plural. It’s for striking a blow against all this that Iwasaki deserves acclaim. As Philip Larkin wrote, in slightly different circumstances: “I take off my cycle-clips in awkward reverence”.

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