Moving to a rural area and realizing how fucking hard it is.
The hill I will die on: rugged individualism as strength in a post-disaster world is a lie that is sold to appeal to ego in an individualistic society, and also to prevent the formation of community.
That doesn't apply to many existing rural communities, who of course know better.
What? You mean prepping isn't just another form of participatory consumerism?
That too! Why not also make money from it?
I like enough of the civilized world that I'm still willing to participate in it, despite being relatively removed from a lot of it.
Also, living in the woods in a lot more work than people think it is and I'm lazy.
There are fewer than 10,000 people who, if they just like weren’t around anymore, would inprove everyone’s quality of life like ten fold. I cling to the hope that one day enough of us will realize that and save the world.
Getting rid of those 10,000 people is relatively easy. The hard part is preventing 10,000 replacements from popping up.
not having to shit in a hole in the ground
Shitting in a hole is not the part that concerns me, it's dealing with the hole once it's full.
Cover the hole with dirt and dig a new hole.
Which is a giant pain in the ass, especially if you've built a nice heated structure over the hole so that you don't get hypothermia while pooping in the winter.
In that case, large container that can be tipped into the big hole periodically. You can always dig the new hole in stages rather than all at once too.
Also if manual labour is off putting to you, the whole idea is probably not something you are suited to.
Not sure how I could legally do it here but the idea I like is going half way into the wilderness. Buy some woodland but have towns nearby you could pop into for some supplies occasionally and still keep a part time job. Difficult part is legally living in your own woodland.
Either the soil percolates, so it's fine, or you didn't perform your due diligence when choosing a place to live.
As long as your soil will percolate, a septic system isn't difficult to build. You just dig a trench leading to a hole, fill the hole with plastic buckets or 55-gallon plastic drums cut up and arranged correctly, then run a correctly sloped PVC pipe to the septic tank you just built. From there, you connect to your fixtures to the drain pipe as needed.
The difficult part is getting the tools and equipment to do all that out to your location. The bigger the tools you use, the faster and easier the work will be, the it will also be more challenging to get it in and out. Basically, a shovel is a lot easier to carry than a backhoe, but a lot less pleasant to dig with. Same deal with a reciprocating saw, battery, charger, and solar setup, versus a hacksaw.
except all of that requires a civilized world to produce.
excluding basic hand tools
Ticks. Also, probably, my wife and progeny.
Mostly that I like the civilized world.
Like don't get me wrong: Nature hikes? Camping? All great. National parks are a treasure. But I will freely admit I rather enjoy little comforts of modernity like "clean water just comes out of the tap when I turn it on", "fresh food is a 15-minute walk to the grocery store away", and "the spinny machine makes my clothes clean while I do other stuff."
I complain about the modern world petty often, but damn some of it is nice. The other day, the dishwasher was running, the washing machine and dryer were going, the robot vacuum was doing its thing, the litter box was cleaning itself, and I was just sitting there with a beer and a good book.
Imo, either this is your answer, you’re a hypocrite, or you live in the woods.
Living in the woods alone without food input from civilization is incredibly hard if not impossible.
Realistically you'd need like 10-20 people to help out, livestock, a field to grow cereals, large garden and a vegetable field, just to keep everyone surviving.
Volunteering at the native plant garden in the park. Just enough of a hit to keep me going.
It is impossible to gather food for yourself. We don't live in pre-civilization or even the wild west. Everything is owned by someone, regulated, etc.
How do you expect to feed yourself? Not like you can just gather all day and get lucky hunting.
It is objectively harder to 'live on the land' then it was centuries ago. Borderline impossible, especially if you want to... you know live and interact with people.
I have a wife and cat to look out for, hard to do that when I can't pay rent.
I’ve given it some thought.
There isn’t enough empty land in temperate climates for someone to survive unmolested outside of civilization, and I don’t have the multitude of skills required to make it in less hospitable climates. If I could find a good source of food I might make it past the first couple weeks, but I’m not hopeful. I’ve never harvested an animal, so that’s a big barrier.
If I had a good solar system and a house on several hundred or thousand acres to get me started it might work out. Better yet if I have some seed and starter food.
Have you actually tried doing that? It can be challenging to say the least.
I do it for fun sometimes, but I do it fully provisioned and knowing I can always decide to bail, hike out, and go home to my nice warm bed, clean hot and cold running water (people don't realize how huge this is), a fridge full of food that I don't have to carry with me, devices to make the food within minutes on a whim, no bugs or potentially dangerous wild animals, etc.
Indoor plumbing. Seriously. Go without for a couple of weeks and tell me how you feel about hot showers and flush toilets.
Also, people really underestimate how difficult it would be to just fuck off into the woods. You'd need a good amount of planning and knowledge to do it. What's edible within what time range. Where the animals are at what time of year. And if you're up north you always gotta be laying in firewood.
Also civilization has taken over most of the good hunter gatherer/ subsistence farming spots. River valleys, estuaries, anywhere with good fertile soil. Most of the places with good desolate wilderness to fuck off into was left desolate because it's fucking desolate.
It's hard. Really, really, hard.
Yeah, modern life could be improved. There's a lot of ways society could be better. But you think it's tough now? Wait until literally every comfort you have is gone and you get nothing that you didn't grow, hunt, build, or craft yourself. And that's assuming you even have the skills to do it.
One wrong step and a twisted ankle is a death sentence. In the wild when you stop running, you die.
Without antibiotics any cut is potentially life threatening.
Civilized world has it's perks. Water closets, supermarkets, social media.
social media
I'd argue that's a reason to leave civilization 🤣
I have a chronic illness, while it's not that serious, I need my meds.
I had enough with where this society is going and I no longer want to be part of it. But I like:
And probably a bunch more stuff because of which, while I truly enjoy being in nature, I keep choosing living in a city and going to work instead. The common thing with all these items that you need money for each. The only ethical way I know of for making money is working hard and building a career relentlessly for decades. if you’re lucky. There are no guarantees.
I’m not sure if it’s worth it, but I do know for sure I couldn’t give all of the above up, as long as I have a choice.
The fact that living like that is miserable, expensive, and exhausting and I don't want to die from a basic injury.
Infrastructure = stability
I highly recommend watching the Fall of Civilizations series: https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/
...and then think about each civilization as a group of people trying to stay alive in the wilderness.
Most of them collapsed because something went wrong with the water and/or food supply, and they weren't able to recover because they were dependent on a single source. Some event overextends the resources and there aren't enough backups.
This happened to many other smaller groups over the millennia, which never made it long enough to be labelled as civilizations. Most of them we don't have records on.
As human technology has improved and civilization has grown more complex, we've built more redundancies into our system. Drought in an area no longer means the people living there have to leave or die. Famine can be overcome with modern farming technology and logistics. We can even mitigate the impact of diseases that are so contagious they spread around the entire planet in less than a year.
Benefiting from the redundancies of the system requires being attached to the system. Disconnecting might seem freeing on the face of it, but the reality is that it makes you a slave to your basic needs. Infrastructure provides the escape from that slavery, but you can't build or maintain infrastructure by yourself.
If you want to see what it’s like to live without modern conveniences, go to a really poor country and observe the lower-class civilians. Having been to Honduras where poor people live in the mountains (with amazing vistas) with dirt floor huts and no clean drinking water, I can tell you that it is a terrible existence. Half their children die before they make it to 10, because of parasites from the dirt which get in their feet, and contaminated water that they have to hike down and up the mountain for every day. I feel like everyone should see this at some point to reset their perspective.
Relative comfort and occasionally ditching the civilized world to live in the woods for a bit to remind me how nice that relative comfort really is. Disconnecting from screens ia also a nice benefit (though I do still play video games and read ebooks when I fuck off into the wilderness).
Living in the woods needs a LOT of money
Cuck porn, unfortunately
Its illegal to do here without permission from the local government and they wouldn't realistically give me permission.
The wilds; they call... Pretty sure I could be a happy well-adjusted hermit, but my wife and family keep me from running off to amass my racoon army. I focus my energy on creating a backyard jungle that lets me pretend that I'm not trapped in suburbia.
My wife is also a big reason. She likes “going out” and “meeting people” and “eating at restaurants.”
Once we can get out of the suburbs we have agreed we won’t be more than an hour from a train station where she can get to a city.
Lack of survival skills
Needing regular doses of my asthma medication.
Mostly getting shit delivered. My current ideal spot is far enough outside town that I'm still able to get pizza delivered and have good internet... but not deal with JW's.
Chronic medical conditions that require medication.
the civilized word keeps encroaching and chopping down the forest
I'm sorta there.
I live about 15 miles from the nearest town and I can only see my one neighbor in the fall and winter.
Like others have said, it is really difficult. I strongly recommend reading a good book about how hard a life it really is, e.g., Crusoe of Lonesome Lake.
Also, man, warm showers are amazing.
Kids. They would hate it. I'm not going to ruin their normal life by being super weird and ditching modern society. As bad as I think things are, this is the best chance I think my family has.
I'm pretty sure I could convince the spouse to do it. She's just as burned out as I am.
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