How do I become a self-sufficient old man in a shack?

There is no escaping the system. :)

A relative escape may be possible, but definitely not an absolute and complete escape from 'all' systems.

You go live in a jungle, you have to adapt yourself to the 'system' there.

You may be able to escape the laws of a more civilized country by living with some tribes in Papua New Gunea or the Amazon, but you would have to start living by their laws (formal or informal).

The premium bands seems to want to make it smell acceptable to humans but it just tastes horrible. I suspect it's the smell that makes it taste so bad.

BTW I didn't need to eat the dog food, I just did it. I also ate quite a lot of mud from the back garden. I had a great childhood :)

For health reasons, I have given up all furniture. I sleep on the floor with zero bedding. I had to get healthier in order to be able to do that. Being cold was really about being sick. It was a gradual process of using less bedding, getting healthier, and generally changing our lifestyle to need fewer things to meet our basic needs.

I have a netbook and a small folding shelf it sits on to keep it off the floor. The little shelf has folding legs, so I can change its position. I also have a prepaid cell phone as the cheapest phone access and have cancelled my landline. No furniture means less housework. It also means fewer bugs in the house. When we first moved to this apartment, there were a lot of bugs. I thought it was just that without furniture they were visible. Over time, with getting healthier and getting the apartment cleaner and reducing our possessions further, we have fewer bugs.

At the moment, we own one deep frying pan. We cook a lot from scratch, but they are simple one dish meals. The medical condition I and my oldest son have is high maintenance. So rearranging our lives so we have less to do in terms of cooking, cleaning, etc is essential in order for us to be healthy and still have time and energy to get a life (which we are basically working on now, after having spent about a decade working on getting well).

We live without a car. That substantially cut our expenses and has turned out to not be as challenging as I expected. Since we don't own furniture, we don't need to haul that much crap home. We regularly buy food and clothes (because clothes gets thrown out routinely around here....long story) and we bought a netbook earlier this summer. But I just don't need the kind of hauling capacity I needed when I lived more conventionally.

I have internet access via my netbook and could also have it via cellphone if I wanted it. I guess the internet access my cell phone would offer would be more limited. I'm reasonably content with the situation at the moment, though there are three people sharing one netbook and the plan is to buy one or two more netbooks when there is money for that and eventually add some (probably handheld) gaming systems.

Anyway, that's all that comes to mind at the moment. Just start reducing your needs now. Have a yard sale. Start living with less stuff. Step by step, you can move towards this and as you make changes it will make other changes possible that you wouldn't have imagined.

Good luck.