i also totally want to wake up in the morning and glance out the window at my garden – but there are no windows in my kitchen, and my vegetable “garden” is a 3-foot by 4-foot plot three blocks away in the community garden, so i rarely make it there before 6pm, after work, to do some quick watering… it’s sad, and sometimes not enough.

so, my question is, do i:

a) accept the promotion that will probably come my way in a few months and thereby commit to longer hours but better pay, and buy a piece of land upstate somewhere on which to plant fruit trees and whatnot that i will only visit regularly only if i, realistically, also buy a car, OR

b) turn down the promotion and soldier on with my much-neglected community garden plot and jars of blueberry preserves bought at the farmer’s market cause i have $8 to spend on blueberry preserves but not enough time/willpower/organization to spend $6 and 3 hours on making blueberry preserves in a non-air-conditioned kitchen with no windows?

in general, i believe people do their best with what they have. i just hope i will.

also, blujay, we should hang out.

Another statistic–quite possibly so.

I work in IT and now see it as a fairly worthless deadend now and want to change my life. I have a back to the land dream too. I’m making small steps in that direction. Me, my wife and two kids are fairly properous. I’m now feeling that I need to adjust my views/expectations of what a back to the land life is like. I’ve read a lot, “Surviving and Thriving on the Land” is a good book to read, it is UK specific though but the principles are universal.

But once I’ve adjusted my own views I need to convince the rest of the family. Which will be real hard and the best situation (maybe) is probably to compromise, keep everyone happy and live as sustainably as possible. I’ve been depressing myself for the last 2 years that my life isn’t as ‘green’ as a could be. Its somewhat better than the average but short of whats I know is needed. But is it sensible to beat yourself up over not living and dream life, its better to feel positive for every green step you do make. And there are many you will and can make without much money without living the ultimate dream.

People like Jay make up the majority of the homeless population. Sounds like you have met another statistic.

The student loan racket is gamed now so you basically become a debt slave.

Affordable education is slowly becoming a thing of the past.

I think growing up in poverty, with the adults in my life removed from the money economy, was a blessing, considering the ease with which I currently live my unjobbed life. It’s amazing what I’ve learned to do because it’s been necessary to do so since I can’t afford it. Also, it’s amazes me what I’ve had the opportunity to learn since I’m available for opportunity.

If I had debt now, I’d surely walk away from it.

But still, the radical homemaking life is not for everyone, and needn’t be for everyone. We all have what we consider beauty in our lives, and that’s how it should be.

Forget about university degrees and credentials. Walk away from the system, including the debts you have.

http://www.ishmael.com/welcome.cfm

Read Quinn’s “Ishmael” series and “get it”.

The Oil Age is over and re-primitivism and neo-tribalism are as likely as the techno-utopian drivel one hears so much, perhaps as part of a neo-feudal, private, state-less, and increasingly non-literate, i.e., verbal, society.

Boomers will be leaving the full-time labor force involuntarily in many cases by the millions with only a fraction of the savings required to maintain their standard of material consumption, not to mention being unable to afford medical services and costly life-extending treatments.

The Oil Age-related composition of household spending will shift from high-multiplier housing, autos, and children to low-multiplier spending for property taxes, insurance, maintenance, and out-of-pocket costs for medical services and medications. Discretionary spending on recreation, entertainment, travel, and women shopping as a hobby is coming to an end.

Over the next 15-30+ years the number of persons per household will rise from 2.6 to 4-5 and higher, and sq. ft. per person will plunge from ~900 today back to the level of the 1940s-50s at 300-350.

The number of autos per person and per household will plunge as “driving while poor” is no longer possible for a growing share of the bottom 80% of US households by wealth and income.

Prepare to adapt to living on first 50% and then just 33% of the level of the material standard of consumption Boomers and the GI generation (your parents and grandparents) enjoyed, requiring you to live communally; share autos; grow your own food; take care of each other’s children (if you decide to take the considerable risk) and elders; and entertain yourselves without i-thingies, cable TV trash, video games, etc.

Learn to play musical instruments, sing, paint, build, repair, plant, weed, harvest, cook, can, suture wounds, set splints, pull teeth, etc.

And, for pity sake, please STOP THE TATTOOS!!!

Forget about “retiring”, as your retirement will be your death, hopefully among lots of people with whom you work, love, and support in countless ways. Your best investment will be to learn useful skills and contribute to a productive tribe (be it ethnic, religious, trade based, cultural, geographical, occupational, or all of the above and then some). The corporation and gov’t will no longer serve as useful “tribes” in the future.

Don’t worry about saving money; rather, save your good health, healthy relationships, reusable materials, cloth, string, rubber, copper, metals, plastics, arable land, clean waterways, vehicle parts, and so forth.

With high unemployment and underemployment rates, your personal labor product to yourself and your extended communal unit is cheap!!! Don’t think of your inability to obtain wage/salary employment as a negative!!! Make use of your cheap labor to produce what you and your “tribe” consume. Don’t give one-third of your labor to the rentier mortgage master or landlord and another third to Caesar. Own your labor product for yourself and your tribe.

There is no such thing as “Social Security”; it’s a scam which robs the working-class masses and their small employers of 7-14% of labor product to feed a militarist-imperialist system of mass violence and plunder. Just don’t do it! Walk away!

Don’t send your children to the mind-numbing, soul-destroying public “school” system. What the “educators” are teaching, you don’t want your children to know. Teach them what they will need to know about the natural world, real life skills, family, community, production, and so on. If you don’t know enough to teach them what they will actually need, then learn so you can, or find someone who will teach you and them. Don’t delay!!!

Resist the incessant infantilism of the mass media, “education” system, and militarist-imperialist corporate-statist propaganda machine. Grow up!!! Seek wisdom and understanding. The gov’t is insolvent. The military is bankrupting the country and is hopelessly overstretched. The private oil-based economy cannot “recover” or grow with the price of oil above $35-$40/bbl; it’s over. Get over it, and move on to changing “your” world to one in which you want to live, or at least one in which you can adapt and contribute to a tribe working for the same thing you need.

The US is a militarist-imperialist rentier oligarchy that can only continue to grow by military occupation and expropriation of resources and labor product of the world’s masses through compound interest, taxation, and credit-money and price inflation.

But the resources of the finite, spherical planet on which we live are limited and slow to be replenished, unlike what conventional economic theory contends. Population overshoot means that these resources will become acutely scarce, risking resource wars and threatening the very existence of an overwhelming majority of human apes in the decades ahead.

“Globalization”, “growth”, and Anglo-American rentier militarist empire are over. Done. History. “Get it”! Move on.

Sincerely and without reservation,

Nemesis

I ended up giving up the world of credit and as you or someone else said, would be considered a failure in that world now. It’s been so long since I made a payment on those loans that they can no longer do anything about them–until I start receiving Social Security payments, at which time they can seize everything I get over $730/mo (which will be about $11, if it’s still there). I don’t own an Earthship or 40 acres or even a trailer. I own nothing but a tiny little business where I make very little money, but I love it. I get to talk to all sorts of interesting people and indulge my creativity in all sorts of ways. I order my own days. Today I canned plum conserves in brandy, worked on my book, and watered my garden in the little city lot of my little city rental. And stayed in my robe until about 10 am.

Sometimes the back-to-the-land thing gets contaminated by the acquire-stuff thing. That’s what I think of Earthships and Mother Earth with their 20K lawnmower ads. Brooklyn can be your place. People are urban farming there right now.

Radical homemaking can be anything–it starts anywhere you have the time and inclination to do so. But yeah, if you’re working full time, or doing anything full time, you’ll probably not have enough time for anything else.

As someone once told me, focus on what you want to happen, because what you’re focused on is what will happen. I mean, yeah, focus on what is important to you! You know your wants and needs better than anyone. But honestly, you sound kind of bitter toward those who are living the radical homemaking life you desire. Certainly a good many of us are NOT trust fund recipients.

I don’t live in Brooklyn because I could never afford to live in Brooklyn. It’s a choice I make. I live in Springfield because I can afford to, with the rest of my life left over to do as I please. I give up things to live here, like culture and all that, but I gain things as well, mostly my sanity and sense of self. And I can create my own culture.

I will be glad when the cash economy crashes, so all of those owing student loans can shake off their shackles and get down to doing what they desire.

Remember that show, Northern Lights? The urban guy was out there practicing in the town clinic, getting rid of his medical school loans.

Best of luck! Don’t give up!

We straddle the two economies: he works full time, I work part-time and scratch cook, garden, bake, crochet, sew, and in general, anything we can do ourselves we do. What is key for us is that we live in a progressive inner-ring suburb in the midwest, where we have a yard, no overly restrictive homeowner covenents, and public transit. Our town has a long-running farmers market, people in town keep chickens, there are community gardens and several CSA plans to choose from. Our goal is for him to ease into part-time work.

In short, don’t give up on your OT dream (I notice that Lloyd has the credentials–and probably had a high enough paying job to be able to set himself up in his dream life).

OT requires credentials–there’s a huge body of real knowledge to be learned, grad school is the most efficient way to do it, and the certificate will enable you to practice your profession.

There are other ways to live green than going back to the land. If everyone went back to the land, there’d be no land! I suggest finding a community in a smallish city where you can work, but also live sustainably.

In coming years your skills will be needed, both professional and sustainable.

I’m going to sound very negative, but this is some serious realism. ShangBang captured quite a bit of it already. First let’s look at your dream life. Lounging in your robe after dawn? If you seriously want to self-sustain, you had better already have put in a couple of hours of work outside. Thinking about what to do today? No way, you get work done while the season is available. We so easily forget that pre-modern life was, and still is for many people around the world: a serious dusk-to-dawn effort. Unless you plan to have slaves, be prepared to _work_.

Second, your chosen career: occupational therapy. That is only a “large community” career. I.e., it can only be viable within a civilization large enough to sustain a need for it. Living “out there” away from people (or with only a few people around) ain’t gonna provide the employment base. Nothing wrong with that, but you’re not likely to be living among only a few thousand people (not without serious government subsidy, in any case). Again, nothing wrong with that, cities are extremely efficient people-support mechanisms. Also you made it sound like you only have to work afternoons to make ends meet. Is that realistic? If a farmer has to work all day to make ends meet, why is your job so much more important that an afternoon will do? Seriously. You might say “because I’m deciding to live simply, with less”, but that is assuming that today’s economy (or even yesterday’s economy) will hold and that you will simply live differently than everyone else. If the future forces _everyone_ to live more simply, you might find yourself simply one among equals, all working hard to just keep that “simple” life.

Finally, student debt; I completely agree that our model of financing higher education is having serious repercussions, and I believe it will collapse in the near future. Not that that helps anyone currently holding student loans. I had them, my wife had them, we’ve been fortunate enough to be able to pay them off early, and they weren’t too big, but they are going to be a tough burden on many people in today’s economy.

It is a great dream to have and work for. But, as with all things, it is rare that you can have all you want. Life in the country can be very expensive with little opportunity to earn the money to pay for it so life comes down to prioritization. What is your ultimate goal–total self-sufficiency? producing as much of your food as you have time for? having animals and their byproducts? canning? fresh produce from the garden? producing your own energy? All these things require various (normally huge) inputs from you in terms of time and money.

Attempted self-sufficiency requires an immense amount of equipment. I have had to buy the land, put in PV panels and batteries, have a passive-solar house built, buy a tractor, haying, logging, gardening, canning, cheesemaking, etc. equipment. It can be done bit by bit, but be prepared to face the costs. School loans add to that.

Self-sufficiency, to whatever degree, also has learning curves. Those you can work on now along with acquiring simple tools. Someone suggested community gardens. Even without a garden, you can learn canning now using fresh produce from local farmers markets. You can start baking your own bread or grinding your own grain. Find other people in the community with the same interests or who might even have some of the skills you seek and work together.

And start acquiring the practical knowledge you will need. There are many magazines (Countryside, Backwoods Home, Back Home, The Mother Earth News, Grit, etc.) as well as many books on topic.

One book you should read is “Back From the Land” by Eleanor Agnew. She interviews many, many back-to-landers from the 70′s (who read the early years of TMEN) and discusses why many of them ultimately left the land and the lifestyle. One of the major reasons was under-capitalization, an important point when, as you are doing, someone dreaming of going back to the land is adding debt through school loans.

Going back to the land can be done, but rarely meets the idealized dream we all had. But it can still be well worth it.

Best of luck.

On the subject of student loans, they’re the ultimate kind of follishness, for the simple reason that the areas of study for the most part do not have sufficient demand for prospective employers to fund education for future employees. If employers had a big need for educated personnel in those fields, they’d fund the education themselves. They don’t have the need, so students are conned by university faculty who need warm bodies in classrooms to get paid, to run up huge student loans in exchange for a potentially worthless piece of paper. Most students would have been better off going to a vocational school in high school, and learning a skilled trade, than going to a second- or third-tier university and getting any sort of degree at all. If you do a cost-benefit analysis, you’ll quickly see that, outside of engineering and certain professional fields, a college education is *not* worth the investment, over the course of the twenty to thirty years it takes the average student to pay off his or her loans.

I had similar thoughts as well during my college years working at a dreadful internship where I researched getting off the grid instead of doing work. One great site is backwoodshome.com

However the more I looked the more complicated it got. Building a house in the middle of nowhere and still having modern amenities like toilets, running water, electricity involves a lot of stuff.
Toilets lead to a septic system,
Water leads to a well, pumps, and tanks,
Electricity leads to solar cells, batteries that only last 5 years and some fancy ass inverters to control it all.

It got real complicated to live simply, at least to the standards that I wanted.

I asked myself how much I cared about living off the grid, and I came to the conclusion that If I really cared that much about it I could just move to China, South America, Vietnam, etc and easily buy a plot and live off the land like all the locals. Accept they don’t have a choice it’s just their way of live, and it’s not like they need a lot of money to live this way.

I decided I liked having the modern amenities created by humans and that If I was not ready to go all out.
That meant I shouldn’t deprive myself of all the benefits of the infrastructure our system has created for us.

Just think about one piece of wood used to build a house.
That one piece requires a ridiculous amount of industries to produce it.
Just to cut down a tree with an ax means you need an entire steel factory to make the blade. To make the steel factory you need a thousand other factories making the things in the steel factory. That’s just to cut the tree down by hand let alone cut the tree to boards and then deliver it. Each product required to build a house requires a thousand other factories all working together to produce.

This led me to thinking about getting away from the system and it basically meant to me that I couldn’t use
anything that I didn’t make myself with my teeth or bare hands or some rocks.

Stone ages. I didn’t like that and came to the conclusion that I liked the modern world and all the stuff that we have because of it. I decided to fully support it and reap the benefits. I always have the option to live real simple if I want, probably more than half the world does, the funny thing is most of them want to live like us.

Since I’m blogging on my quad core computer using the internet which links us all using millions of feet of copper, fiber optics, all sorts of fancy electronics, etc, I’m not willing to give it up, so I might as well enjoy it all.

My two cents