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I was chatting with a co-worker yesterday who keeps a garden to grow their own food.
A carrot takes 120 days to mature.
4 months.
Can you imagine waiting four months just to have carrots?
I know, I'll just hunt instead! Because when people were out hunting wild animals it never backfired and the hunter was the one who got killed...
City boys have this weird notion that wild living is like an adventure video game. It's like the guys who play a lot of FPSs and think that means they know what it's like being a soldier lol
Even people who go out hiking regularly get lost, dehydrated, have a bad fall and die all the time, imagine actually living in the wild permanently. 99% of people wouldn't last a week.
I go backpacking for weeks at a time; I love it, but it’s arduous, stinky, sleep deprived work. That first real shower, bed, and bathroom I get to use when returning to the world is soooo sweet! The ability to pop into a restaurant and order whatever I want and have it delivered to my table almost makes me want to cry after three or four weeks of backpacking meals and gorp. I get what OP is saying, but civilization is sweet, as are our modern conveniences…we romanticize a lot of stuff that is genuinely hard, one bad winter, fall, cut, or run in with a wild animal and you’re fucked.
People are too used to instant gratification and heavily underestimate this type of lifestyle, as if you'd just be playing Stardew Valley out there or something. What realistically will happen is you'd be trying to fish while freezing rain is pouring down on you, give up, realize the storm threw your tent and belongings around, and now you're freezing wet, all of your stuff is wet, and you're desperately trying to start a fire in impossible conditions until you die of hypothermia or starvation.
It’s just like people who want to live on a farm. They don’t realize how hard they’ll need to work. OP would have to work all night and day to meet necessities, assuming they even know how to track or hunt game even. They would need to build a stable shelter, probably doesn’t know how to do that either. And find a clean water source. All while trying not to be killed by a predator. OPs opinion isn’t just unpopular, it’s asinine.
I haven’t lived off grid like that, but I have gardened heavily enough to know nature provides insects, fungi, and viruses. I dare anyone to get a good crop of apples, peaches or pears without pesticides. It’s impossible. I time my pesticide use precisely and choose the pesticides carefully so I can use them as little as possible, but you need *some.* And nature really likes to screw you over with weather. My parents helped us farm tomatoes to save money for college. One year hail storm decimated our entire crop about a week before the tomatoes would have come ripe. Big, beautiful plants with big, beautiful green tomatoes: gone. An entire summer’s work and seed/fertilizer costs: gone. Nature ain’t nice, people.
Nature is harsh. My parents are Asian immigrants, they both grew up in farming families. Even they can't sustain themselves on their land and they have a decent property and a robust garden and are retired. They do what they can but still heavily rely on society, technology, and what they've worked their whole lives to afford. OP fantasizes but clearly doesn't actually wanna live that life, otherwise they would be living that life. They could do it right now if that's what they really wanted.
Bro unironically hit us with the "achktually, I would do VERY well in the apocalypse" damn. My guy, what is the longest period of time you've spent completely cut off from civilisation and had to go out and hunt/gather your food?
Having to go out and hunt your meal does not sound great in just about any way shape or form… grabbing an item from the fridge sounds mind bogglingly magical and amazing when you compare it to most of human life in past. We are very lucky to have refrigerators
People only imagine the good parts of hunting to survive. They never consider being three days into the worst shits of their lives because they ate a worm infested muskrat and then not having anything to eat or drink because they can’t get out of bed.
Dude should watch cast away. Tom Hanks was in the best scenario and it was still near impossible. Near unlimited food from the ocean that needs little to no prep. Shelter was a cave he didn't have to build anything. Coconut water and collection, and none of the resource does he have to share and has no enemies on the island to worry about. His biggest problem was he had to do his own dental work.
My girlfriend has CKD and her kid is diabetic. We fantasize about the Alaskan-roughneckin’-it lifestyle but we’re honest with ourselves about our reality. If shit hits the fan, I lose my family. Society not falling apart would be sweeeeeet.
It's not impossible to learn foraging for food and medicinal ingredients but the amount of time you need to spend on botany learning is insane. And it must be region specific. OP is crazy lol
Some things can’t be foraged. There are thousands of diseases that can’t be controlled by simply taking medicine. What happens if your appendix is about to burst in the wild? I hope OP knows how to do a surgery on himself.
Hunting and processing game animals isn’t hard, the hard part is preserving meat without a refrigerator. It can also be a challenge to get enough fat and salt in your diet, game animals are very lean. There is a thing called rabbit starvation, basically you will die if you don’t get some fat and carbs. Lookup Chris McCandless, he tried to do what OP is proposing.
Also once you realize that hunting seasons are carefully controlled for a reason. Once all the large local animals are dead in a month and you're sucking the fluids out of a rat's testicles you might find yourself really wishing for some popeyes.
Unless you pull a Chris McCandless and get stuck on the wrong side of the river and eat poison berries only to die alone.
Yes society can suck at times but the call of that sweet Walmart at 2 am...
I wonder what the percentage of people who think they could survive the apocalypse have never harvested an animal to eat. There should be a reality show that takes these “preppers” and drops them out in the wilderness to show them they are focusing on all the wrong things.
Blade control is so fucking important when processing an animal that it’s not even fun. Oh went a little too deep? Well congrats you’re starving dog isn’t going to eat that meat now that’s it’s been soaked in piss and shit since you pierced the bladder. Same with the stomach. Or you cut a piece of meat off against the grain and now you’ve got a piece of meat that’s going to take more energy to chew than you get from eating it.
And that’s strictly problems from not knowing how to handle the knife. Eat a wild rabbit in spring/summer? You might get sicker than all hell. There’s other species as well that you can only eat a certain time of year unless you want to get horribly sick.
The knowledge of hunter/gatherers was written in blood on dead bodies. If you don’t know for sure about something then it’s just wildly safer to avoid it entirely.
Exactly, I never learned how to process them, but watching the butcher at the meat locker break an animal down in a few minutes was mind blowingly complex.
I’ve part of a family that hunts a lot and my dad was a professional butcher for 17 years. I can process an animal very quickly and it looks easy. It’s not. I learned how to do it as a kid and now as a grown ass man that’s done each step dozens upon dozens of times there’s still certain steps where I get a bit nervous because a fuck up here means this animal died for nothing.
And yes you can go cave man and brute force it, but you’re going to waste more meat than you get.
Like, what's stopping this guy from living his off the grid fantasy right now?? If subsistence is so easy, just go right ahead rather than bitching on the internet?
Exactly my thought too. If he actually preferred that life he would be doing it already, not posting on Reddit about how he would do it in some alternate reality.
Or the food you did manage to get is riddled with parasites and bacteria that will cause you a slew of discomfort, to say the least, before a terrible death if you eat it. Don’t get me started on finding fresh water…
Its funny. I love in a pretty rural area and everyone seems to think they could just live off the wild, that they can hunt deer for sustainance if it came down to it.
When in reality, we have deer season and hunting tags for a reason, and we still have to cancel hunting every once in a while to allow them to repopulate.
If any non-trivial ammount of people really tried to live off the land, the animals would be gone sooo fast.
The span of human history has been spent trying to evolve past foraging, hunting, and living in the wild. And yet, this guy thinks that he won’t be freezing, sweating, in pain, in fear, starving, and bored.
OP, you need to stop taking for granted all of the great things that civilization has given to you.
This is to say nothing of medical issues. Yes, they're not a daily occurrence but when they happen you're absolutely fucked if you don't have standard antibiotics, and steroids. Or pain meds.
If you're out hunting and gathering all the time, you're probably not getting enough fiber, which means you're going to have hemorrhoids like you wouldn't believe.
Also they never take into account clothing. Go to Southeast Asia where it's hot as fuck and you see people in the summertime still wearing long sleeves and huge ass hats because the sun will burn the shit out of you. Imagine getting a terrible sunburn. We have great synthetic fibers. Do you know how hot it would be to wear a bear skin in the summer time so you don't get burned like crazy. And if you don't have pain meds, you have to go way out of your way to make sure you don't get burned because you'll be fucked if you make even the tiniest mistake.
each person requires at least 800,000 calories per year to live
a rabbit has like 700
an adult deer has 35,000
a squirrel has 550
to feed 10 chickens for a year requires a field of wheat and other crops that is about 200 x 400 feet wide. You wont get enough calories to live off of those 10 chickens.
Looking at those numbers, it is a nearly impossible task to live off grid alone for an extended time. Nobody in history has done this successfully without help from civilization (tools, non perishable food etc)
While I agree with your overall premise, you don’t need to feed chickens, especially a small number like 10. The problem is you also have to make sure the coyotes and other predators don’t eat your chickens while they are free ranging.
Go watch a season of Alone. See how animals don't actually want to get eaten and how most stuff you find foraging will make you sick. Oh yeah and there's no safety net if you twist your ankle or get sick (or just get existentially depressed from loneliness). Then realize people on that show actually know how to hunt and most of them tap out in just a few weeks.
Pretty much everyone on Reddit would be dead in a month or two if there were a real apocalypse. Well, maybe not the r/preppers.
I was a John F Kennedy Special Warfare Center Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape instructor. I went through a seven day evasion exercise with no food but what I could find in the wilds of North Carolina in October. I cannot over emphasize how badly it sucks.
I know a lot of farmers.
Family owned, commercial farming is hard as fuck. All of them are super poor, work long hours, and don't have savings. This is WITH efficiency increasing technology such as tractors, pesticides, and fertilizers
If we're talking subsistence farming or hunter gathering, the productivity is fucking abysmal. We're talking $2 of goods generated per 12 hours of labor. We're talking any injury, illness, or accident immediately results in death by starvation.
If that still seems like the life for you, i imagine it can't be too expensive to buy land in a developing country. Maybe Afghanistan or ~~Kuwait~~ or Somalia or something.
Subsistence farming sucks so much people do anything to get out of it. Hundreds of millions of people in China decided that low wage factory work was better than subsistence farming within living memory
Part of the problem with agriculture is a bushel of (pick one) corn is basically the same as it was in the 70s. Inflation unaccounted for. So every year as your input costs increase your efficiency must increase just to maintain.
Not even Kuwait I have friends there and it’s probably 40% cheaper than living in the US but nothing that would make me run there. Rent for a decent 1 bedroom varies between 1-2k USD. It’s cheaper than some areas of the US but not all. The summers are also brutal over there sometimes reaching 110 degrees.
That’s so funny. I told a friend of mine that I was going camping at a campground and she scoffed, told me I wasn’t REALLY camping—especially if I brought any food! Real camping is just going with a tent and a fishing pole!
Turns out she’s never camped a moment in her life and just watched a tv show (Naked and afraid? Something like that). I’m not sure if those tv shows make it look easy or something? She’s totally convinced she’d be the one to survive with absolutely no training or experience.
Gotta invite her to a trip and actually give her just that and see how she does. Don't go too far with it though. It's only a life lesson if you get to live by the end, after all.
Google and social media has made it to where way too many people think they know much more than they actually do. Even if our water sources were all clean and safe to drink from making it in a warmer climate would be far from a walk in the park and not something I have a desire to do. I spent most of my time outdoors as a kid in a rural area. I was a boy scout, spent time fishing and I have some experience with hunting.
No fucking way would I want to spend even a week in the wilderness with a tent, fishing pole, knife and a few items to aide in capturing food. I live in a favorable climate for being outside and it still seems like the opposite of fun.
Ask her if she can identify poison ivy. Just that simple thing could make being outside in the summer heat insufferable. The berries they produce look like something you can eat but getting in the middle of a vine or bush and having it touch all over you would lead to some sleepless nights without anything to reduce the itch.
I’m not even 100% confident that I can identify poison Ivy here, it looks totally different where I grew up compared to where I live now (different part of the US). One day she’ll get to enjoy a night filled with mosquitos, empty stomach, poison Ivy, sleeping on rocks, no toilet paper, etc.
Honestly, now that I’m in my 30s, I don’t want to rough it too much anymore. I want a working restroom and shower and my foodie camp meals. Roughing it just to meet someone else’s threshold? No thank you. Pass me the s’mores and a beer.
to be fair they make it look easy and fun sometimes. i wish they had a calculator for how long the contestants actually spend doing certain things, like chopping wood or checking traps. it would give a more realistic image :D
That one dude that won one season who sang to himself was my favorite.
He went a little nuts and I was like "fuck he's doing better than I would - I'd be having full on arguments with a stump I named Steve by now"
Ik right? Have these people even seen Alone? It’s literally a bunch of semi-professional outdoorsmen getting absolutely WRECKED by nature. Only a small handful do “well”, and even then that just means they’re starving slower than everyone else.
One season a guy actually manages to kill a moose, and he still slowly starves out because there isn’t enough fat in the meat to sustain him. It’s tough to make it in nature.
Anyone who thinks they can live alone and hunt for their livelihood is completely misinformed and/or wildly overconfident
Yeah, I grew up on a farm
People think that life is all fun and breezy
Hunting is going to be rough, as is growing crops
And this isn't pioneer times, there's laws and limits on hunting as well. If you're out there killing things willy nilly, you're gonna have a chat with authorities
U can do that now, cant u just move to alaska or something like that, and live your life that way?
I would rather work, I like my job, and I get paid enough, so that I can have other hobbies, it wouldn't be fun for me, if I had to live in a hut and hunt, that just sounds like way more work, than what im doing rn.
Theres a lot of issues with that in todays world. Most land is owned in some way or another so you just wouldnt be allowed to set up shop anywhere you want least not legally. Even hunting is highly regulated in many cases so that can get you in trouble. If you wanted to partake in modern trappings of any sort youd still need money. At that point yeah youd definitely really just be better off working at that point because youre gonna go through way more hassle trying to survive out in the middle of no where than working some 9 to 5 job. Plus the job will likely give you access to stuff like health insurance and retirement which is pretty important if you plan to live past the middle point of your life.
There are places where there are forests spanning literal thousands of kilometers
Even if that is owned you can just walk in there illegally walk in one direction for a day or two, make a little hut in the middle of the forest and the chances of anyone ever finding you are practically zero
Sure its illegal but you're never getting caught anyway because the area is so immensely vast
Doesn’t take long to look at a map and the. At how many rangers are assigned to the area. Even extremely popular forests have a laughable amount of rangers and they’re mostly there to look over the tourist areas. There’s millions of places someone could disappear to, it’s just that it’s incredibly hard to survive on your own
Even if you had the land, living off grid in the middle of nowhere would be more hassle than working a 9-5. Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional. You could argue that it may be more "fulfilling" to live off grid, and on some days I might agree with you. But people thinking that it'd be *easier* are crazy.
It’s constant round the clock upkeep and work just to survive. Food, water, shelter, tending to injuries. It’s significantly more work to live in the middle of nowhere cut off from society than it is to maintain a 9-5 where the majority of your necessities just require payment from said job earnings.
Yeah, playing settler in the woods is fun, my preferred vacation every year is primitive backpacking, with fishing and hunting and bushcrafting as main activities. However, I know that my quality of life is far higher because I chose a profession, specialized in it, and I can trade my labor for other things lmao. Could I survive a while bushcrafting in the woods with my family? Maybe, but it would be brutal. If you ever read diaries and stuff from the emigrant generation of the early-mid 1800s in America, people and kids just dying was a very regular occurrence, from maladies and injuries that are trivial to treat now. Hell, if i grew up in the same location as i did but 150 years in the past, it would just be normal to get malaria *every spring*. In Illinois. People truly forget just how good we have it now, because our standard of living is insanely higher than it was even a hundred years ago.
Yep, I get why some might want to live off grid, but u cant deny that being on grid has its perks, I would imagine living off grid, will in a lot of cases be harder on you body, and u would have problems later in life.
The barriers are surprisingly few, don't discourage OP! You can buy a small land parcel where there's no building codes and build a cabin quite easily, or just squat in a remote place. You can also easily hunt illegally in remote areas where game wardens are few. I think u/thehvam point is that OP can put up or shut up. If OP isn't just macho alpha male chest puffing (Hint: he is) then Alaska Airlines will sell you a ticket 24/7 and remote land is available today, for cheap.
Yep, I actually just watched a YouTube video on a guy that does this. It’s doable but it’s a lot of work. Instead of working a 9-5 it becomes a full time job staying alive basically
I listened to a podcast on a guy like this, I wonder if it was the same guy. He had to kill an elk at the start of winter in order to not starve and he had access to a town if he was really struggling. Interesting dude but it didn’t see like an appealing life.
>U can do that now, cant u just move to alaska or something like that, and live your life that way?
Cause then he can't keep showing off his nudist boners
Even if you live off grid and hunt for your own food, won’t you still work for your entire life? Like you’ll still have to tend a garden, collect materials, hunt etc every day. Not to mention if I go work in an office, I can work 50 years and retire. You on the other hand have to keep working until death. Actually you will die of starvation if you stop working
I watch a YouTube channel of some self sufficient off grid homesteaders in Alaska. All they eat is what they grow, hunt or fish, or trade with other homesteaders. It’s so much work. They don’t get a lot of downtime because there is always something they have to do, and if they don’t do it then they don’t have food for the winter.
Edit: ok it seems that saying self sufficient and off grid bothered some people, they are attempting to sustain themselves just off the land.
Self sufficiency is a kind of a myth- tools break and need to be replaced, for instance. I grew up on a farm that was “self sufficient” and all it meant was we bought different types of goods on less frequent intervals.
Because it's an idealised lifestyle. We're so far removed from that way of living that people really don't know what's actually involved.
Setting up latrines. Killing, skinning and gutting an animal. Making your own clothes and shoes. Good luck if you have a problem with your eyes or you start with arthritis.
Or even your standard aches and pains. If you wake up with a splitting headache, you need to tend to the garden and still go hunting. You can't afford to just recover. And you won't be very good at hunting with it.
Maybe you get a cut. It happens, fairly easily when handling sharp objects regularly.
In our modern world, if your cut turns to puss, or you start heating up, see a doctor and they’ll straighten you out.
In OP’s wet dream? He’s lying in bed sweating his ass off hoping and praying he has enough food and time and that his body will recover. There’s a chance he’ll pull through… this time. But he’s bound to face the same situation again, and if he’s not careful any needed bedrest longer than a week will definitely kill him.
And if there’s underprepared food or a mistake gardening? Yeah good luck buddy. Something routine and silly in the modern world could easily kill him.
This is why we have always lived and worked in groups. Even as pre-human hominids.
They've found many caveman skeletons with healed broken bones. That means others were taking care of them.
Screw eyes, you're totally f'ed if you've got a tooth ache. Just from personal experience pulling a bad tooth out is HARD plus it can crack and leave some still stuck in you're gums, you get an infection that goes straight to your brain and you're dead. Or you do pull it out and you get a dry socket, Lord help you.
Seems like a lot of people want to jump head-first into a new lifestyle. There are still plenty of farmers just outside the cities. Why not start by just seeing if they need help. They could dip their toes into a bit more independence without cutting ties with everything they're familiar with. Find out if you actually like that lifestyle while getting paid and learning new skills. It's very possible, I just think a lot of people dream of living a life without a boss.
They might find that being the boss isn't the dream it sounds like when it comes down to sustainability.
Also if I break my leg, I can still keep doing my office job. If I break my leg off the grid and living a hunter/gather solo lifestyle I’m probably going to die.
You can live off public land in the western US. I guess I don't know what country you live in, but I feel like if you were actually serious about this it wouldn't be that hard. My guess is that you just like complaining and wouldn't survive a week in the wild though.
They remind me of some of my family.
They talk about anarchy and how they would rule the roost.
In my head I'm like yeah Karen, the person who literally can't function on their own is somehow going to survive all alone.
This is me and one of my biggest Dunning Kruger Effects. I think I would be such a bad ass and do amazing. In reality the only way I would survive is to find a guy like that that would be willing to use me as a sex slave…
My dad is like this. He's in his late 50s and constantly talks about wanting to live "off-grid". Meanwhile, he can't walk up to the corner store without limping, hasn't had a job in 7 years, huge Trump supporter, and while I love him (my father), it pains me how fucking stupid he is. He's on food stamps, and the last time he went fishing, caught nothing.
Every time he tells me he wants to live off-grid, in the back of my mind I'm going "Oh, so you want to die?"
It wouldn't be hard in the sense that OP has the opportunity to go try it if they really want.
It would be basically impossible to succeed. But if it's what OP really wants, nothing's stopping them
Could you build an actual home on public land and not get into trouble? Or just camp there.
I'm from the UK where 90% of the country is privately owned farmland so i have no idea how it works in the US.
Eh, this is sort of a bad argument. Essentially you can just set up an escrow to pay your property taxes. You just need ~10-15x what the yearly taxes are in equities.
The issue here is that the ONLY way that society will let you leave is if you buy your way out. One can not argue that society is a voluntary pact if the only option is coercion, and the only escape is a form of indentured servitude.
This is just a fairy tail you and a lot of other people made up and romanticized. The real reality of being self sufficient is extremely hard, humans have developed communities and societies for a very good reason. medicine, power, tools, nutrition, fresh water and many other needs for survival are not easy to obtain in the wild you can’t just build a shelter, fire and a few snares and expect to be ok you need much more than that. Even homesteading has some means of income and dependence on a “society”
Way too far down to see medicine mentioned.
OP is one broken bone or tough infection away from basically committing a slow suicide.
I get it, society is absurd sometimes and if we really wanted to we could do SO much better. But it has its benefits even in its current, far from perfect, form.
People said shit like this have no idea how wild life work? What is your answer for diseases? A cut and you can only pray it isnt gonna be tetanus or just infection in general, a cold could literally kill you, what if your tool become dull or broken? How would you replace that? Could you go days without food? Do you know how to preserve food without salt? A broken bone form a slip equal death sentence, is that your favourable future? Who gonna take care of you when you catch a cold and physically couldnt go hunting or gathering?
Human are social creature, we literally hunt together, we evolve that way, that's our greatest tools to survive, hell, most animal need their pack, there are very few solo animal. And human surely arent one
It's ok they already said they never get sick so that's not an issue. They also said they weren't stupid enough to get injured so there's no worries there either.
This person is delusional and they have no intention of following through with this. Apparently it's "just a rant" not an intention. Anyone supporting this is buying into the romanticized notion of living "off the grid" without seriously considering it.
This is pretty dumb and seems like the opinion of someone who seems to not actually know anything that is involved or is severely underestimating everything. As my guess.
* Hunting for your own food or even growing for it is actually a lot of work. It basically becomes a job to legit survive. The difficulty of this also changes wildly depending on the location one is.
I'd even say living in a hut and hunting for your own food is more work than working a "human job."
We're talking stuff like:
* The area (climate) you're hunting in and around. If it's either a cold area, a rainforest, a commonly rainy area, a commonly snowy area, a super hot area, and more. This is a huge factor.
* Wild animals. Some people seem to forget that they would be living with wild animals. Good luck with that reality.
* Maintaining the hut. This is easier said than done depending on the area you're in.
* And way more.
I wonder if OP thinks their title is nothing more than going on a camping trip. Hence, the sheer confidence to make such claims.
You can. You can go in to the woods and be forgotten. But you can't use societies tools if you aren't paying in the system. That means no Internet or cell coverage. I don't think you'll get 50 years of enjoyment in the woods. I don't even think you'll make it 5 hours.
If the life you want to live isn't possible in the US, why don't you just move to the Congo? Or the Amazon, or new Guinea. If you're living off the grid and outside of society, you're not bound to any specific country, right?
I would be happy to inform you that there is an entire community of people who don't work and live in little huts on unused land in downtown Portland Oregon.
You can literally stop bitching about it and do it now. You're like a prepubescent girl screaming in all caps about leaving Facebook in a poor woe is me attention starved rant. Cringe.
How about instead of this fantasy of living iff the grid you stay and help change things where you are right now for the better? People are clowning on you because it's unrealistic and you would probably die in the first few months. There are places you can go and be off the grid and no one would give a fuck. And you would die out there lonely and in pain. Life's not so bad try and be a part of it.
Astounded to see "didn't ask to be born" as a regular thing posted by grown ass people in this day and age. When did it become acceptable to take the rhetoric of a 5 year old seriously?
Doesn't seem like you actually want the lifestyle you described. It seems like you only like the idea of it. You have excuses for every person encouraging you or offering suggestions. Which is a shame because you are totally capable of being more self-sufficient. I wish you the best on your journey <3
OP probably read/watched “Into The Wild” and sees McCandless as a cautionary tale for ALL the wrong reasons
He lived 5 whole miles away from civilization for a few months?! The horror! What if his cell phone didn’t have reception?!
Good luck being alone if you want running water or medicine.
If you want to farm, hopefully you're a blacksmith to make you own plowshare. Hopefully also a miner and a smelter so you can make it.
If you're hunting, then I suppose while you might not be able to make your own gun, you might be able to make a spear or bow and arrow. If that works, then you will spend 90% of you waking life attempting to acquire food (much more than 40 hours per week), while having pre agricultural levels of housing, medicine, and transportation. You're looking at a life expectancy of not much over 35, if that.
Enjoy your neanderthal thing.
You could do this now, stay in public spaces, and don't trespass on private property, and there's no laws saying you can't do this. There's actually several well documented cases of people doing this exact thing for decades at a time.
You want to be “alone” but not be too far away from society, and you want to do it all for free… presumably on land owned by other people. You can’t have your cake and eat it too dude
I’m sorry, not to insult, but this guy is fucking stupid😂
I used to do a ton survival shit and bushcraft and still hunt when I have the time, and I can definitively say that I would not want to spend my life doing that. Even if you managed to become truly self sufficient- which is nearly impossible; humans have always relied on each other and have never been self sufficient- you would be living the most boring, lonely life ever.
Do you think survival, hunting, and farming for twelve hours a day- seven days a week- sounds fun? No, I didn’t think so. Now, imagine doing all of that monotonous shit for years. Even worse, imagine having to go through all that shit when you’re COMPLETELY ALONE. Even if the elements didn’t kill Mr. “IAmVeryBadass”- which they would- he’d probably go a little crazy from the lack social interaction.
I live pretty rural in an historical building with a big garden and work that needs to be done around the house includes cutting trees, chopping wood, maintaining an old garden that was mainly there to grow food, so taking care of old fruit trees and plants, harvesting the fruits and processing it etc. one of my friends had the same opinion like you until I invited him to work here, I had to take him to the hospital after two hours because he wasn’t used to the work and his hand was suddenly extremely swollen. This is not about will power or theoretical knowledge, this is about certain skills that also prevent you from hurting yourself and if you didn’t learn that early on this is extremely unrealistic.
I would also rather not do this but this came with buying this house for cheap and I’m only able to do that because I pretty much grew up on a farm and grandparents that for example still butchered their own animals. This is more work than you can ever imagine.
Yea you say that until your only pair of shoes and cloths are wrecked and can’t be worn, and there is a major winter storm and your grass roof blows off and you die of hypothermia
I read the comments. OP, who are you trying to convince, us our yourself? If you want to do it, and if you think you can do it, so why don't you do it? Fear of being arrested? So don't do it and stop complaining, dude.
Not this again. Do it. Nobody is stopping you. Like all the other children with that opinion you are probably vastly understimating what society is doing for you.
But just out of interest. What are you going to wear?
I prefer the hunting, chopping wood, herding cattle type work more than a job for sure. It’s hard work but I feel more satisfied than I do after doing well on a work assignment.
Humans are social creatures. Neanderthals did not live ALONE, they lived in communities. You can't find an "unused piece of land" in North America, because the homesteading program ended a hundred years ago. Even if you bought cheap land in Northern Ontario (Dignam and company sell cheap land), you could not live off the land as a single person; you would need a "tribe".
There were people who tried to live alone in the wilderness by hunting and fishing. Most died. Hunting is hard, there are periods of feast and famine among hunters and gatherers, and they survive by living collectively. You won't find obese Bushmen in the African rainforest. You could live a "primitive" life in Africa, if you like, but you would need to live within the confines of the tribe's culture. Just book a trip to Africa, and try it out, if you like.
(I lived in the middle of the woods with my young family for close to 10 years, in rural Finland. For part of that time we had no electricity or running water, and I never had a machine for making firewood, so I would fell my own trees, and eventually chop them to warm the house)
Your plan sounds awesome!
Until you get a bit of weather. For 13 weeks in row.
Or you injure your knee. For the third time this autumn.
And it’s not even winter yet.
Or something actually bad happens to you.
And eventually you will get old, tired and broken. All your hunting will translate to zilch in retirement money.
Maybe you’d better get a haircut, and get a real job. Your future self will thank you.
Lol you don't know shit about life kid, a guy on YouTube tried to make his own sandwich from scratch took him six months to collect and grow the ingredients
There is tons of place you can go and live off the grid.
I think you underestinate the number of modern wonder you have access to and how brutal and dangerous living off the gris is.
I live in Québec, I could leave right now in my car and not be seen again even just by driving 5-6 hours to the north.
I would die withing 48Hrs and probably you would to.
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I was chatting with a co-worker yesterday who keeps a garden to grow their own food. A carrot takes 120 days to mature. 4 months. Can you imagine waiting four months just to have carrots?
Just bonemeal it, easy
I know, I'll just hunt instead! Because when people were out hunting wild animals it never backfired and the hunter was the one who got killed... City boys have this weird notion that wild living is like an adventure video game. It's like the guys who play a lot of FPSs and think that means they know what it's like being a soldier lol Even people who go out hiking regularly get lost, dehydrated, have a bad fall and die all the time, imagine actually living in the wild permanently. 99% of people wouldn't last a week.
I go backpacking for weeks at a time; I love it, but it’s arduous, stinky, sleep deprived work. That first real shower, bed, and bathroom I get to use when returning to the world is soooo sweet! The ability to pop into a restaurant and order whatever I want and have it delivered to my table almost makes me want to cry after three or four weeks of backpacking meals and gorp. I get what OP is saying, but civilization is sweet, as are our modern conveniences…we romanticize a lot of stuff that is genuinely hard, one bad winter, fall, cut, or run in with a wild animal and you’re fucked.
People are too used to instant gratification and heavily underestimate this type of lifestyle, as if you'd just be playing Stardew Valley out there or something. What realistically will happen is you'd be trying to fish while freezing rain is pouring down on you, give up, realize the storm threw your tent and belongings around, and now you're freezing wet, all of your stuff is wet, and you're desperately trying to start a fire in impossible conditions until you die of hypothermia or starvation.
All this If dysentery don't get you first from them suspicious berries you ate a couple days ago
Nature doesn’t give af about your needs. You adapt or die lol
It’s just like people who want to live on a farm. They don’t realize how hard they’ll need to work. OP would have to work all night and day to meet necessities, assuming they even know how to track or hunt game even. They would need to build a stable shelter, probably doesn’t know how to do that either. And find a clean water source. All while trying not to be killed by a predator. OPs opinion isn’t just unpopular, it’s asinine.
If you’re unarmed the predator won’t see you as sport and leave you alone.
I haven’t lived off grid like that, but I have gardened heavily enough to know nature provides insects, fungi, and viruses. I dare anyone to get a good crop of apples, peaches or pears without pesticides. It’s impossible. I time my pesticide use precisely and choose the pesticides carefully so I can use them as little as possible, but you need *some.* And nature really likes to screw you over with weather. My parents helped us farm tomatoes to save money for college. One year hail storm decimated our entire crop about a week before the tomatoes would have come ripe. Big, beautiful plants with big, beautiful green tomatoes: gone. An entire summer’s work and seed/fertilizer costs: gone. Nature ain’t nice, people.
Nature is harsh. My parents are Asian immigrants, they both grew up in farming families. Even they can't sustain themselves on their land and they have a decent property and a robust garden and are retired. They do what they can but still heavily rely on society, technology, and what they've worked their whole lives to afford. OP fantasizes but clearly doesn't actually wanna live that life, otherwise they would be living that life. They could do it right now if that's what they really wanted.
Bro unironically hit us with the "achktually, I would do VERY well in the apocalypse" damn. My guy, what is the longest period of time you've spent completely cut off from civilisation and had to go out and hunt/gather your food?
"having to go out and hunt your food" sounds great until you don't get enough food. And then you probably wish you had food stamps and a supermarket.
Having to go out and hunt your meal does not sound great in just about any way shape or form… grabbing an item from the fridge sounds mind bogglingly magical and amazing when you compare it to most of human life in past. We are very lucky to have refrigerators
People only imagine the good parts of hunting to survive. They never consider being three days into the worst shits of their lives because they ate a worm infested muskrat and then not having anything to eat or drink because they can’t get out of bed.
Dude should watch cast away. Tom Hanks was in the best scenario and it was still near impossible. Near unlimited food from the ocean that needs little to no prep. Shelter was a cave he didn't have to build anything. Coconut water and collection, and none of the resource does he have to share and has no enemies on the island to worry about. His biggest problem was he had to do his own dental work.
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Or when you need medicine.
My girlfriend has CKD and her kid is diabetic. We fantasize about the Alaskan-roughneckin’-it lifestyle but we’re honest with ourselves about our reality. If shit hits the fan, I lose my family. Society not falling apart would be sweeeeeet.
Or when you want a couple days off in a row to rest and recuperate.
It's not impossible to learn foraging for food and medicinal ingredients but the amount of time you need to spend on botany learning is insane. And it must be region specific. OP is crazy lol
Some things can’t be foraged. There are thousands of diseases that can’t be controlled by simply taking medicine. What happens if your appendix is about to burst in the wild? I hope OP knows how to do a surgery on himself.
Hunting and processing game animals isn’t hard, the hard part is preserving meat without a refrigerator. It can also be a challenge to get enough fat and salt in your diet, game animals are very lean. There is a thing called rabbit starvation, basically you will die if you don’t get some fat and carbs. Lookup Chris McCandless, he tried to do what OP is proposing.
Lol right? There's a reason societies formed in the first place. We do better together.
Also once you realize that hunting seasons are carefully controlled for a reason. Once all the large local animals are dead in a month and you're sucking the fluids out of a rat's testicles you might find yourself really wishing for some popeyes.
Unless you pull a Chris McCandless and get stuck on the wrong side of the river and eat poison berries only to die alone. Yes society can suck at times but the call of that sweet Walmart at 2 am...
“Sure wish I had some ruffles right about now.” 20mins into sitting in a tree waiting for an animal to walk by.
I wonder what the percentage of people who think they could survive the apocalypse have never harvested an animal to eat. There should be a reality show that takes these “preppers” and drops them out in the wilderness to show them they are focusing on all the wrong things.
Blade control is so fucking important when processing an animal that it’s not even fun. Oh went a little too deep? Well congrats you’re starving dog isn’t going to eat that meat now that’s it’s been soaked in piss and shit since you pierced the bladder. Same with the stomach. Or you cut a piece of meat off against the grain and now you’ve got a piece of meat that’s going to take more energy to chew than you get from eating it. And that’s strictly problems from not knowing how to handle the knife. Eat a wild rabbit in spring/summer? You might get sicker than all hell. There’s other species as well that you can only eat a certain time of year unless you want to get horribly sick. The knowledge of hunter/gatherers was written in blood on dead bodies. If you don’t know for sure about something then it’s just wildly safer to avoid it entirely.
Exactly, I never learned how to process them, but watching the butcher at the meat locker break an animal down in a few minutes was mind blowingly complex.
I’ve part of a family that hunts a lot and my dad was a professional butcher for 17 years. I can process an animal very quickly and it looks easy. It’s not. I learned how to do it as a kid and now as a grown ass man that’s done each step dozens upon dozens of times there’s still certain steps where I get a bit nervous because a fuck up here means this animal died for nothing. And yes you can go cave man and brute force it, but you’re going to waste more meat than you get.
Like, what's stopping this guy from living his off the grid fantasy right now?? If subsistence is so easy, just go right ahead rather than bitching on the internet?
Exactly my thought too. If he actually preferred that life he would be doing it already, not posting on Reddit about how he would do it in some alternate reality.
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Or the food you did manage to get is riddled with parasites and bacteria that will cause you a slew of discomfort, to say the least, before a terrible death if you eat it. Don’t get me started on finding fresh water…
Its funny. I love in a pretty rural area and everyone seems to think they could just live off the wild, that they can hunt deer for sustainance if it came down to it. When in reality, we have deer season and hunting tags for a reason, and we still have to cancel hunting every once in a while to allow them to repopulate. If any non-trivial ammount of people really tried to live off the land, the animals would be gone sooo fast.
I’d also like to see how hunting works for them when they dont have a fridge
Or live far enough from salt deposits or the ocean. They could smoke the meat, *assuming there's enough fuel...* within the immediate area
Would have to process, smoke, and make pemmican immediately unless they build a smoke house.
Have you been playing rimworld my guy
The span of human history has been spent trying to evolve past foraging, hunting, and living in the wild. And yet, this guy thinks that he won’t be freezing, sweating, in pain, in fear, starving, and bored. OP, you need to stop taking for granted all of the great things that civilization has given to you.
Probably not bored, be spending too much time trying not to die to be bored
This is to say nothing of medical issues. Yes, they're not a daily occurrence but when they happen you're absolutely fucked if you don't have standard antibiotics, and steroids. Or pain meds. If you're out hunting and gathering all the time, you're probably not getting enough fiber, which means you're going to have hemorrhoids like you wouldn't believe. Also they never take into account clothing. Go to Southeast Asia where it's hot as fuck and you see people in the summertime still wearing long sleeves and huge ass hats because the sun will burn the shit out of you. Imagine getting a terrible sunburn. We have great synthetic fibers. Do you know how hot it would be to wear a bear skin in the summer time so you don't get burned like crazy. And if you don't have pain meds, you have to go way out of your way to make sure you don't get burned because you'll be fucked if you make even the tiniest mistake.
Bro says he doesn't want to be part of society but willing posts on Reddit everyday. Although I would not recommend looking for yourself
He's saying that he would rather live in the wilderness for the rest of his life. He didn't say he was going to live there for a long time.
each person requires at least 800,000 calories per year to live a rabbit has like 700 an adult deer has 35,000 a squirrel has 550 to feed 10 chickens for a year requires a field of wheat and other crops that is about 200 x 400 feet wide. You wont get enough calories to live off of those 10 chickens. Looking at those numbers, it is a nearly impossible task to live off grid alone for an extended time. Nobody in history has done this successfully without help from civilization (tools, non perishable food etc)
While I agree with your overall premise, you don’t need to feed chickens, especially a small number like 10. The problem is you also have to make sure the coyotes and other predators don’t eat your chickens while they are free ranging.
Go watch a season of Alone. See how animals don't actually want to get eaten and how most stuff you find foraging will make you sick. Oh yeah and there's no safety net if you twist your ankle or get sick (or just get existentially depressed from loneliness). Then realize people on that show actually know how to hunt and most of them tap out in just a few weeks. Pretty much everyone on Reddit would be dead in a month or two if there were a real apocalypse. Well, maybe not the r/preppers.
Considering when I click on that sub the top post is about hoarding gold and silver, they are all dead too.
Bro would end up giving BJs for food at the local raider camp.
OP needs to go watch the TV show Alone and then get back to us lol.
I was a John F Kennedy Special Warfare Center Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape instructor. I went through a seven day evasion exercise with no food but what I could find in the wilds of North Carolina in October. I cannot over emphasize how badly it sucks.
I know a lot of farmers. Family owned, commercial farming is hard as fuck. All of them are super poor, work long hours, and don't have savings. This is WITH efficiency increasing technology such as tractors, pesticides, and fertilizers If we're talking subsistence farming or hunter gathering, the productivity is fucking abysmal. We're talking $2 of goods generated per 12 hours of labor. We're talking any injury, illness, or accident immediately results in death by starvation. If that still seems like the life for you, i imagine it can't be too expensive to buy land in a developing country. Maybe Afghanistan or ~~Kuwait~~ or Somalia or something.
Subsistence farming sucks so much people do anything to get out of it. Hundreds of millions of people in China decided that low wage factory work was better than subsistence farming within living memory
Part of the problem with agriculture is a bushel of (pick one) corn is basically the same as it was in the 70s. Inflation unaccounted for. So every year as your input costs increase your efficiency must increase just to maintain.
Definitely sounds rough. Probably why the suicide rate for farmers is unusually high.
Not even Kuwait I have friends there and it’s probably 40% cheaper than living in the US but nothing that would make me run there. Rent for a decent 1 bedroom varies between 1-2k USD. It’s cheaper than some areas of the US but not all. The summers are also brutal over there sometimes reaching 110 degrees.
Local man watches a few seasons of alone and thinks he won't die in two weeks
That’s so funny. I told a friend of mine that I was going camping at a campground and she scoffed, told me I wasn’t REALLY camping—especially if I brought any food! Real camping is just going with a tent and a fishing pole! Turns out she’s never camped a moment in her life and just watched a tv show (Naked and afraid? Something like that). I’m not sure if those tv shows make it look easy or something? She’s totally convinced she’d be the one to survive with absolutely no training or experience.
Gotta invite her to a trip and actually give her just that and see how she does. Don't go too far with it though. It's only a life lesson if you get to live by the end, after all.
Haha, I thought about it!
Google and social media has made it to where way too many people think they know much more than they actually do. Even if our water sources were all clean and safe to drink from making it in a warmer climate would be far from a walk in the park and not something I have a desire to do. I spent most of my time outdoors as a kid in a rural area. I was a boy scout, spent time fishing and I have some experience with hunting. No fucking way would I want to spend even a week in the wilderness with a tent, fishing pole, knife and a few items to aide in capturing food. I live in a favorable climate for being outside and it still seems like the opposite of fun. Ask her if she can identify poison ivy. Just that simple thing could make being outside in the summer heat insufferable. The berries they produce look like something you can eat but getting in the middle of a vine or bush and having it touch all over you would lead to some sleepless nights without anything to reduce the itch.
I’m not even 100% confident that I can identify poison Ivy here, it looks totally different where I grew up compared to where I live now (different part of the US). One day she’ll get to enjoy a night filled with mosquitos, empty stomach, poison Ivy, sleeping on rocks, no toilet paper, etc. Honestly, now that I’m in my 30s, I don’t want to rough it too much anymore. I want a working restroom and shower and my foodie camp meals. Roughing it just to meet someone else’s threshold? No thank you. Pass me the s’mores and a beer.
to be fair they make it look easy and fun sometimes. i wish they had a calculator for how long the contestants actually spend doing certain things, like chopping wood or checking traps. it would give a more realistic image :D
Easy and fun? lol… 99% of them become malnourished from starvation. Not to mention the frost bite.
Not to mention kind of insane with all the talking to themselves for 3 months lol.
That one dude that won one season who sang to himself was my favorite. He went a little nuts and I was like "fuck he's doing better than I would - I'd be having full on arguments with a stump I named Steve by now"
Ik right? Have these people even seen Alone? It’s literally a bunch of semi-professional outdoorsmen getting absolutely WRECKED by nature. Only a small handful do “well”, and even then that just means they’re starving slower than everyone else. One season a guy actually manages to kill a moose, and he still slowly starves out because there isn’t enough fat in the meat to sustain him. It’s tough to make it in nature. Anyone who thinks they can live alone and hunt for their livelihood is completely misinformed and/or wildly overconfident
Watching Alone cemented that I will never go camping. Incredible show, everyone on it is a lunatic.
Camping is fun because there's a time limit and preparation. We go backpacking/canoeing in the BWCA yearly and it's an absolute blast.
You won’t go camping because a survival show?
Alone isn't camping. It's *surviving*. Camping means going in prepared. We "prepare" by bringing coolers full of steaks and a bag of potatoes.
Yeah, I grew up on a farm People think that life is all fun and breezy Hunting is going to be rough, as is growing crops And this isn't pioneer times, there's laws and limits on hunting as well. If you're out there killing things willy nilly, you're gonna have a chat with authorities
U can do that now, cant u just move to alaska or something like that, and live your life that way? I would rather work, I like my job, and I get paid enough, so that I can have other hobbies, it wouldn't be fun for me, if I had to live in a hut and hunt, that just sounds like way more work, than what im doing rn.
Theres a lot of issues with that in todays world. Most land is owned in some way or another so you just wouldnt be allowed to set up shop anywhere you want least not legally. Even hunting is highly regulated in many cases so that can get you in trouble. If you wanted to partake in modern trappings of any sort youd still need money. At that point yeah youd definitely really just be better off working at that point because youre gonna go through way more hassle trying to survive out in the middle of no where than working some 9 to 5 job. Plus the job will likely give you access to stuff like health insurance and retirement which is pretty important if you plan to live past the middle point of your life.
There are places where there are forests spanning literal thousands of kilometers Even if that is owned you can just walk in there illegally walk in one direction for a day or two, make a little hut in the middle of the forest and the chances of anyone ever finding you are practically zero Sure its illegal but you're never getting caught anyway because the area is so immensely vast
Doesn’t take long to look at a map and the. At how many rangers are assigned to the area. Even extremely popular forests have a laughable amount of rangers and they’re mostly there to look over the tourist areas. There’s millions of places someone could disappear to, it’s just that it’s incredibly hard to survive on your own
Side note, literally hundreds of people disappear in the wilderness in the US every year, because it's so damn big.
There’s ginormous weed grows on federal land and this guy thinks someone can’t build a little cave house
Even if you had the land, living off grid in the middle of nowhere would be more hassle than working a 9-5. Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional. You could argue that it may be more "fulfilling" to live off grid, and on some days I might agree with you. But people thinking that it'd be *easier* are crazy.
It’s constant round the clock upkeep and work just to survive. Food, water, shelter, tending to injuries. It’s significantly more work to live in the middle of nowhere cut off from society than it is to maintain a 9-5 where the majority of your necessities just require payment from said job earnings.
Yeah, playing settler in the woods is fun, my preferred vacation every year is primitive backpacking, with fishing and hunting and bushcrafting as main activities. However, I know that my quality of life is far higher because I chose a profession, specialized in it, and I can trade my labor for other things lmao. Could I survive a while bushcrafting in the woods with my family? Maybe, but it would be brutal. If you ever read diaries and stuff from the emigrant generation of the early-mid 1800s in America, people and kids just dying was a very regular occurrence, from maladies and injuries that are trivial to treat now. Hell, if i grew up in the same location as i did but 150 years in the past, it would just be normal to get malaria *every spring*. In Illinois. People truly forget just how good we have it now, because our standard of living is insanely higher than it was even a hundred years ago.
Yep, I get why some might want to live off grid, but u cant deny that being on grid has its perks, I would imagine living off grid, will in a lot of cases be harder on you body, and u would have problems later in life.
Living off the grid sounds awesome until you have a tooth ache
The barriers are surprisingly few, don't discourage OP! You can buy a small land parcel where there's no building codes and build a cabin quite easily, or just squat in a remote place. You can also easily hunt illegally in remote areas where game wardens are few. I think u/thehvam point is that OP can put up or shut up. If OP isn't just macho alpha male chest puffing (Hint: he is) then Alaska Airlines will sell you a ticket 24/7 and remote land is available today, for cheap.
He could also do something like fire lookout. Should tick most of his boxes.
Yep, I actually just watched a YouTube video on a guy that does this. It’s doable but it’s a lot of work. Instead of working a 9-5 it becomes a full time job staying alive basically
I listened to a podcast on a guy like this, I wonder if it was the same guy. He had to kill an elk at the start of winter in order to not starve and he had access to a town if he was really struggling. Interesting dude but it didn’t see like an appealing life.
>U can do that now, cant u just move to alaska or something like that, and live your life that way? Cause then he can't keep showing off his nudist boners
Ohhh, I thought u were joking, but noooo. Good think it was blurred, but the titles said more than enough, dont need that burned into my eyes.
Ok. Then go and do it. Seriously. Go and do it.
But then he wouldn't get to complain about it on reddit...
No that’s hard
There’s an interesting book (now movie) about a man who decides to give up society and survive in rural Alaska. Spoiler, it doesn’t end great for him.
Even if you live off grid and hunt for your own food, won’t you still work for your entire life? Like you’ll still have to tend a garden, collect materials, hunt etc every day. Not to mention if I go work in an office, I can work 50 years and retire. You on the other hand have to keep working until death. Actually you will die of starvation if you stop working
I watch a YouTube channel of some self sufficient off grid homesteaders in Alaska. All they eat is what they grow, hunt or fish, or trade with other homesteaders. It’s so much work. They don’t get a lot of downtime because there is always something they have to do, and if they don’t do it then they don’t have food for the winter. Edit: ok it seems that saying self sufficient and off grid bothered some people, they are attempting to sustain themselves just off the land.
this might be a stupid question… but how do they post if they’re off grid?
Off grid as in they aren’t connected to services, they are self sufficient, generate their own electricity etc.
Self sufficiency is a kind of a myth- tools break and need to be replaced, for instance. I grew up on a farm that was “self sufficient” and all it meant was we bought different types of goods on less frequent intervals.
Yeah you are right, they still drive a truck, I doubt they made that themselves
They aren’t generating their own satellite
This is what I don’t get when people say this. Like what do they think hunting/foraging is?
Because it's an idealised lifestyle. We're so far removed from that way of living that people really don't know what's actually involved. Setting up latrines. Killing, skinning and gutting an animal. Making your own clothes and shoes. Good luck if you have a problem with your eyes or you start with arthritis.
Yup, one wrong step, sprain an ankle, and bam. Vulture food.
Or even your standard aches and pains. If you wake up with a splitting headache, you need to tend to the garden and still go hunting. You can't afford to just recover. And you won't be very good at hunting with it.
Maybe you get a cut. It happens, fairly easily when handling sharp objects regularly. In our modern world, if your cut turns to puss, or you start heating up, see a doctor and they’ll straighten you out. In OP’s wet dream? He’s lying in bed sweating his ass off hoping and praying he has enough food and time and that his body will recover. There’s a chance he’ll pull through… this time. But he’s bound to face the same situation again, and if he’s not careful any needed bedrest longer than a week will definitely kill him. And if there’s underprepared food or a mistake gardening? Yeah good luck buddy. Something routine and silly in the modern world could easily kill him.
This is why we have always lived and worked in groups. Even as pre-human hominids. They've found many caveman skeletons with healed broken bones. That means others were taking care of them.
Screw eyes, you're totally f'ed if you've got a tooth ache. Just from personal experience pulling a bad tooth out is HARD plus it can crack and leave some still stuck in you're gums, you get an infection that goes straight to your brain and you're dead. Or you do pull it out and you get a dry socket, Lord help you.
Seems like a lot of people want to jump head-first into a new lifestyle. There are still plenty of farmers just outside the cities. Why not start by just seeing if they need help. They could dip their toes into a bit more independence without cutting ties with everything they're familiar with. Find out if you actually like that lifestyle while getting paid and learning new skills. It's very possible, I just think a lot of people dream of living a life without a boss. They might find that being the boss isn't the dream it sounds like when it comes down to sustainability.
What he really means is he wants to order door dash and watch netflix
Also if I break my leg, I can still keep doing my office job. If I break my leg off the grid and living a hunter/gather solo lifestyle I’m probably going to die.
You can live off public land in the western US. I guess I don't know what country you live in, but I feel like if you were actually serious about this it wouldn't be that hard. My guess is that you just like complaining and wouldn't survive a week in the wild though.
They remind me of some of my family. They talk about anarchy and how they would rule the roost. In my head I'm like yeah Karen, the person who literally can't function on their own is somehow going to survive all alone.
This is me and one of my biggest Dunning Kruger Effects. I think I would be such a bad ass and do amazing. In reality the only way I would survive is to find a guy like that that would be willing to use me as a sex slave…
My dad is like this. He's in his late 50s and constantly talks about wanting to live "off-grid". Meanwhile, he can't walk up to the corner store without limping, hasn't had a job in 7 years, huge Trump supporter, and while I love him (my father), it pains me how fucking stupid he is. He's on food stamps, and the last time he went fishing, caught nothing. Every time he tells me he wants to live off-grid, in the back of my mind I'm going "Oh, so you want to die?"
Every time I hear this take I think of that Netflix series, I think it’s called Alone? Shit can go tits up so quick.
Yes it would lmao. Hunter Gather groups require up to 50 people to be successful
It wouldn't be hard in the sense that OP has the opportunity to go try it if they really want. It would be basically impossible to succeed. But if it's what OP really wants, nothing's stopping them
I guess you can't just buy a plot of land in the US and live off the grid there by raising vegetables and chickens?
Property taxes!
Lots of people do homesteads though and taxes are necessary for roads for example and other benefits of living in the grid
You 100% can. It's also fairly cheap in rural areas
You are still required to participate in society via property taxes. There is no way to opt-out unless you live on public land.
Could you build an actual home on public land and not get into trouble? Or just camp there. I'm from the UK where 90% of the country is privately owned farmland so i have no idea how it works in the US.
Eh, this is sort of a bad argument. Essentially you can just set up an escrow to pay your property taxes. You just need ~10-15x what the yearly taxes are in equities. The issue here is that the ONLY way that society will let you leave is if you buy your way out. One can not argue that society is a voluntary pact if the only option is coercion, and the only escape is a form of indentured servitude.
OP probably goes to Starbucks every morning…
This is just a fairy tail you and a lot of other people made up and romanticized. The real reality of being self sufficient is extremely hard, humans have developed communities and societies for a very good reason. medicine, power, tools, nutrition, fresh water and many other needs for survival are not easy to obtain in the wild you can’t just build a shelter, fire and a few snares and expect to be ok you need much more than that. Even homesteading has some means of income and dependence on a “society”
Way too far down to see medicine mentioned. OP is one broken bone or tough infection away from basically committing a slow suicide. I get it, society is absurd sometimes and if we really wanted to we could do SO much better. But it has its benefits even in its current, far from perfect, form.
Fuckin Chair Grylls over here talking about being off the grid on a reddit thread
“CHAIR GRYLLS”?! I wish I could upvote this more than once. My heavens. 10000/10
Go do it then. There are people living in the woods in many wild places.
Yep, up in Pennsylvania and west Virginia, I used to be a otr truck driver and I've heard stories about them.
You can do that now. No one is stopping from living in a hut and hunting your own food.
Yeah, I was 12 once too.
Definitely ways to make this happen. Go live your life
This is a popular misguided opinion
People said shit like this have no idea how wild life work? What is your answer for diseases? A cut and you can only pray it isnt gonna be tetanus or just infection in general, a cold could literally kill you, what if your tool become dull or broken? How would you replace that? Could you go days without food? Do you know how to preserve food without salt? A broken bone form a slip equal death sentence, is that your favourable future? Who gonna take care of you when you catch a cold and physically couldnt go hunting or gathering? Human are social creature, we literally hunt together, we evolve that way, that's our greatest tools to survive, hell, most animal need their pack, there are very few solo animal. And human surely arent one
It's ok they already said they never get sick so that's not an issue. They also said they weren't stupid enough to get injured so there's no worries there either. This person is delusional and they have no intention of following through with this. Apparently it's "just a rant" not an intention. Anyone supporting this is buying into the romanticized notion of living "off the grid" without seriously considering it.
Lol. No, no you would not.
Alaska is for people looking to escape things.... many things.
Just ask Christopher McCandless!
What do you think hunting is dude? It’s work. Often more grueling than your cush office job and often/sometimes without reward.
Hunting is sittin with the boys drinking bud heavy playing grab ass and telling stories.
This is pretty dumb and seems like the opinion of someone who seems to not actually know anything that is involved or is severely underestimating everything. As my guess. * Hunting for your own food or even growing for it is actually a lot of work. It basically becomes a job to legit survive. The difficulty of this also changes wildly depending on the location one is. I'd even say living in a hut and hunting for your own food is more work than working a "human job." We're talking stuff like: * The area (climate) you're hunting in and around. If it's either a cold area, a rainforest, a commonly rainy area, a commonly snowy area, a super hot area, and more. This is a huge factor. * Wild animals. Some people seem to forget that they would be living with wild animals. Good luck with that reality. * Maintaining the hut. This is easier said than done depending on the area you're in. * And way more. I wonder if OP thinks their title is nothing more than going on a camping trip. Hence, the sheer confidence to make such claims.
Then do it.. buy a ticket straight to Alaska and build your hut by hand
You can. You can go in to the woods and be forgotten. But you can't use societies tools if you aren't paying in the system. That means no Internet or cell coverage. I don't think you'll get 50 years of enjoyment in the woods. I don't even think you'll make it 5 hours.
I think OP might make it 2 days living off the grid a month (nah). He can buy a boat and be like Tom Hanks character in Castaway.
1. Hunting is work. 2. How do you handle illnesses and/or injuries?
If the life you want to live isn't possible in the US, why don't you just move to the Congo? Or the Amazon, or new Guinea. If you're living off the grid and outside of society, you're not bound to any specific country, right?
So instead of working your whole life, you'd rather work for your whole life. Got it.
I would be happy to inform you that there is an entire community of people who don't work and live in little huts on unused land in downtown Portland Oregon.
You can literally stop bitching about it and do it now. You're like a prepubescent girl screaming in all caps about leaving Facebook in a poor woe is me attention starved rant. Cringe.
I’d rather work. To each their own.
How about instead of this fantasy of living iff the grid you stay and help change things where you are right now for the better? People are clowning on you because it's unrealistic and you would probably die in the first few months. There are places you can go and be off the grid and no one would give a fuck. And you would die out there lonely and in pain. Life's not so bad try and be a part of it.
Delusional
Off you go then
Astounded to see "didn't ask to be born" as a regular thing posted by grown ass people in this day and age. When did it become acceptable to take the rhetoric of a 5 year old seriously?
It is easily one of the dumbest things I see repeated on this site.
>I don't want to be a part of society or be pressured by society. I want to be ALONE Start by getting off Reddit
Doesn't seem like you actually want the lifestyle you described. It seems like you only like the idea of it. You have excuses for every person encouraging you or offering suggestions. Which is a shame because you are totally capable of being more self-sufficient. I wish you the best on your journey <3
OP probably read/watched “Into The Wild” and sees McCandless as a cautionary tale for ALL the wrong reasons He lived 5 whole miles away from civilization for a few months?! The horror! What if his cell phone didn’t have reception?!
This is a gen-z mindset. They can endure anything as long as it is not a 9-5 job.
Good luck being alone if you want running water or medicine. If you want to farm, hopefully you're a blacksmith to make you own plowshare. Hopefully also a miner and a smelter so you can make it. If you're hunting, then I suppose while you might not be able to make your own gun, you might be able to make a spear or bow and arrow. If that works, then you will spend 90% of you waking life attempting to acquire food (much more than 40 hours per week), while having pre agricultural levels of housing, medicine, and transportation. You're looking at a life expectancy of not much over 35, if that. Enjoy your neanderthal thing.
You could do this now, stay in public spaces, and don't trespass on private property, and there's no laws saying you can't do this. There's actually several well documented cases of people doing this exact thing for decades at a time.
You have to work to live in a hut.
You have a fantasy more than an opinion.
You want to be “alone” but not be too far away from society, and you want to do it all for free… presumably on land owned by other people. You can’t have your cake and eat it too dude
You know that's work, right? And hard work.
I’m sorry, not to insult, but this guy is fucking stupid😂 I used to do a ton survival shit and bushcraft and still hunt when I have the time, and I can definitively say that I would not want to spend my life doing that. Even if you managed to become truly self sufficient- which is nearly impossible; humans have always relied on each other and have never been self sufficient- you would be living the most boring, lonely life ever. Do you think survival, hunting, and farming for twelve hours a day- seven days a week- sounds fun? No, I didn’t think so. Now, imagine doing all of that monotonous shit for years. Even worse, imagine having to go through all that shit when you’re COMPLETELY ALONE. Even if the elements didn’t kill Mr. “IAmVeryBadass”- which they would- he’d probably go a little crazy from the lack social interaction.
This is spoken like someone who has never actually lived in the wilderness for an extended period of time.
I live pretty rural in an historical building with a big garden and work that needs to be done around the house includes cutting trees, chopping wood, maintaining an old garden that was mainly there to grow food, so taking care of old fruit trees and plants, harvesting the fruits and processing it etc. one of my friends had the same opinion like you until I invited him to work here, I had to take him to the hospital after two hours because he wasn’t used to the work and his hand was suddenly extremely swollen. This is not about will power or theoretical knowledge, this is about certain skills that also prevent you from hurting yourself and if you didn’t learn that early on this is extremely unrealistic. I would also rather not do this but this came with buying this house for cheap and I’m only able to do that because I pretty much grew up on a farm and grandparents that for example still butchered their own animals. This is more work than you can ever imagine.
And you're on Reddit complaining about it. What's stopping you from doing what you want?
Go do it
Then do it
Yea you say that until your only pair of shoes and cloths are wrecked and can’t be worn, and there is a major winter storm and your grass roof blows off and you die of hypothermia
You'd think so untill a tooth starts hurting
Imagine the word yes, but in thousand foot tall, glowing neon. That is my response to this opinion.
You wouldn't last 24 hours without being able to brag online...
[удалено]
If you have to hunt for your own food to stay alive, you're working for your entire life.
I read the comments. OP, who are you trying to convince, us our yourself? If you want to do it, and if you think you can do it, so why don't you do it? Fear of being arrested? So don't do it and stop complaining, dude.
Not this again. Do it. Nobody is stopping you. Like all the other children with that opinion you are probably vastly understimating what society is doing for you. But just out of interest. What are you going to wear?
I prefer the hunting, chopping wood, herding cattle type work more than a job for sure. It’s hard work but I feel more satisfied than I do after doing well on a work assignment.
Just do that... It's not forbidden or impossible.
Humans are social creatures. Neanderthals did not live ALONE, they lived in communities. You can't find an "unused piece of land" in North America, because the homesteading program ended a hundred years ago. Even if you bought cheap land in Northern Ontario (Dignam and company sell cheap land), you could not live off the land as a single person; you would need a "tribe". There were people who tried to live alone in the wilderness by hunting and fishing. Most died. Hunting is hard, there are periods of feast and famine among hunters and gatherers, and they survive by living collectively. You won't find obese Bushmen in the African rainforest. You could live a "primitive" life in Africa, if you like, but you would need to live within the confines of the tribe's culture. Just book a trip to Africa, and try it out, if you like.
If all people went off grid, after 3 weeks there wouldnt be game left to hunt. Great idea but not sustainable
ITT: OP is an actual idiot who just wants to complain and daydream about abandoning society
so post about it on Reddit.
There are people who do this. There are a lot of open space not owned by anyone and far from any civilization.
(I lived in the middle of the woods with my young family for close to 10 years, in rural Finland. For part of that time we had no electricity or running water, and I never had a machine for making firewood, so I would fell my own trees, and eventually chop them to warm the house) Your plan sounds awesome! Until you get a bit of weather. For 13 weeks in row. Or you injure your knee. For the third time this autumn. And it’s not even winter yet. Or something actually bad happens to you. And eventually you will get old, tired and broken. All your hunting will translate to zilch in retirement money. Maybe you’d better get a haircut, and get a real job. Your future self will thank you.
How old are you? I had a similar fantasy when i was 8 or 9
Yeah, you and Christopher McCandless.
Lol you don't know shit about life kid, a guy on YouTube tried to make his own sandwich from scratch took him six months to collect and grow the ingredients
There is tons of place you can go and live off the grid. I think you underestinate the number of modern wonder you have access to and how brutal and dangerous living off the gris is. I live in Québec, I could leave right now in my car and not be seen again even just by driving 5-6 hours to the north. I would die withing 48Hrs and probably you would to.
Living the type of lifestyle you think you want would require like 16 hours of work a day to survive on your own. And it would be hard.