161–170 of 188 posts
I do enjoy it when we get some good plums in, though, and for me that's enough.
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I'm not disagreeing, but having worked for 20+ years now as a web dev, and also on and off on farms (parents, relations, neighbours, friends, and 30 acres behind my house), I'd move to a farming job that offered the same income in a heartbeat, no questions asked. There is something much more comforting about having worked yourself to physical tiredness and a feeling of having accomplished "something useful" instead o…
where are you going to get a farming job that pays the same as tech without also feeding the corporate beast?
But it's extremely hard work, and depending on what one grows, one can expect to have maybe 2 weeks off a year. Nature is a boss that doesn't accept excuses.
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I think you might be missing a lot of the amenities of modern towns/cities. Let’s ignore energy and internet/cell service. * You’ll want to live close to a grocery store. * You’ll want to live close to doctors —- not only hospitals and ambulances but also any specialist you or someone in your family mind need. * You’ll want access to tradesmen/craftsmen. Plumbers, auto mechanics, carpenters, electricians. Things brea…
I can't speak to grocery stores or doctors, but the idea that you should be abele to fix everything in your home isn't that far fetched. Perhaps the modern world has made things appear otherwise but even the most average adult has the capability to do basic vehicle maintenance, plumbing, simple electrical work, basic carpentry and so on. In fact even if you do live in an urban area you might be in for a a bit of regr…
> basic vehicle maintenance, plumbing, simple electrical work, basic carpentry and so on
There’s a big gap between simple electrical work, basic plumbing, basic carpentry etc and the full range of issues that can go wrong with a house. At the first sign of a natural gas leak, or any electrical tasks involving high voltages I’m calling a professional.
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I think you might be missing a lot of the amenities of modern towns/cities. Let’s ignore energy and internet/cell service. * You’ll want to live close to a grocery store. * You’ll want to live close to doctors —- not only hospitals and ambulances but also any specialist you or someone in your family mind need. * You’ll want access to tradesmen/craftsmen. Plumbers, auto mechanics, carpenters, electricians. Things brea…
Make a trip once a week or every other week into town (1hr drive) to pick up groceries. Doctors, etc. - why do you need to be close? 1-2 hr drive for something so infrequent does not seem to be an issue. You learn to fix your own stuff. At least during the pandemic, housing outside of city centers have been in high demand as people seek more land/space.
My parents did this when I was a kid, except they moved deep into the country and not a homestead.
Their motivation was that I had the potential to become a bit of a punk in middle school, and the middle school i would go to in NYC was… not so good. It seemed more affordable and a better life than a private school or moving intra-NYC.
One of my best friends did something similar. I remember his dad saying when we were graduating high school “I built this house looking for a sanctuary, and it turned into a prison.”
I didn’t hate country life, but I never felt like i belonged either. My friends were into hunting, 4-wheelers, etc, and I was not. Most of the people who lived in my town had been there for many generations and had deep ties to the place — the farmer I worked for was like a 7th generation farmer whose deed was signed by a Dutch West India company agent of some sort.
I didn’t have that, and all things considered, I didn’t really belong to that community. I now live in a small city not too far away, but my family is part of that community, which is something my wife and I wanted.
I’d encourage you to look within and figure out what you want. It may or may not be living in the woods, and your feelings right now may not really be about the house.
Be suspicious of any hobby where there are hoards fat margin advertisers.
And I don't think it will help you survive in a collapse. Here's a piece from 2004 that I mirrored on my own website, Urban vs Rural Sustainability by Toby Hemenway: http://ranprieur.com/readings/urbanrural.html
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perhaps if agriculture and food generation was priced more in line with its value to humanity, rather than along the lines of cheapest product wins, there would be more feasible careers in homesteading, simpler lives and farming. but in a world where NFT based companies are claiming to be worth billions what hope is there of that? :)
The same could probably be said for software. You can't make any money homesteading software either. Get a half rack 22 u servers, install the os (set up a pxe boot server and golden images plus a bootstrap script). Build out your storage, app server database server, load balancer, write your app, get customers, do support, fix bugs, release features. You could probably break even with a well targeted market and not…
Why does working to make software pay so much? Yet working to make food pays so little?
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Homestead may not work if you depend on your own farm for all of your food needs. However, I feel off grid life with solar, storage, EV etc. combined with a remote job and hopefully cheaper Satellite Internet in the future may work for a lot of people. If I lived in a scenic country I would've at least tried this lifestyle, but may be that is because I am inherently introverted.
I think you might be missing a lot of the amenities of modern towns/cities. Let’s ignore energy and internet/cell service. * You’ll want to live close to a grocery store. * You’ll want to live close to doctors —- not only hospitals and ambulances but also any specialist you or someone in your family mind need. * You’ll want access to tradesmen/craftsmen. Plumbers, auto mechanics, carpenters, electricians. Things brea…
That's just us. You may be different.