Comment by kennywinker
8 hours ago
Absolutely no hate to these people - their projects are very interesting, and if this is how you want to live by all means do it!
But i gotta say, living off grid is fundamentally solipsist. Abandoning society rather than attempting to live well within society will always be a dead end. Imo. It’s easy to say you’ll go it alone, but staying and improving it for not just yourself but for everyone else is more valuable.
Living off grid isn't always about abandoning society. For some it is, maybe a majority I don't know, but I've met quite a few people living off grid for reasons other than hiding from the rest of the human world.
I live somewhere in the middle. We aren't off grid but we are slowly moving more in that direction with solar and rainwater projects on the list. We raise a good portion of our own food, I'd assume a little over half given that most meat, dairy, and eggs are from our land. I also work in tech though, and regularly go into town for various reasons. I'm not building a doomsday bunker, after having lived in close to a dozen cities and two countries I just find that I disagree with certain aspects of modern infrastructure (mostly related to food production, energy use, and waste).
"Abandoning society rather than attempting to live well within society"
What happens when you attempt to live within society and they treat you poorly? The ability of people to freely associate with the society of their choice is supposed to be their right. There are many different societies throughout the world. Living independently when the society you happen to be geolocated with should not be a negative so long as you are not actively harming them.
Not connecting to the power grid is completely unrelated to whether or not you are connected to other people.
Devine and their partner are very community oriented and socially connected.
In a bold outline on the 'about' page:
"Because of the decentralized nature of our work, this has to be spelled out quite clearly: Preparing for impending apocalyptic events should mean collective action and structural reform, not individualism and isolation."
Now, there's a very good historical record of human nature that warns against going all in on a collective mindset, but these guys are already on your wavelength.
Off grid does not mean "no interaction" or "no contribution". The "Hundred Rabbits" people contribute knowledge, view it as their mission to work on resilience and of course they interact with people a lot. What they do has next to nothing in common with the "I want to build my society of one and have nothing to do with the rest of humanity" perspective. In my experience, the latter approach is most often the result of being hurt too much by life experiences (so it benefits from a much kinder perspective than the one you imply) while other forms of off-grid-ish experiments are often very explicitly driven by a desire to contribute.
From their About page[0]:
We shouldn't equate "the (power/water) grid" and all of society. The grid is a small subset.
[0] https://100r.ca/site/about.html
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My grandparents that i grew up with more than anyone else lived less connected to society in a way that is sometimes described in homesteading or offgrid spaces. Not out of some choice but it was natural to them. The place and country has become very modern and densely populated but they are stuck a little bit. It is not without it's upsides either. They did quite well with their extreme ww2 frugality, wood cookstove, etc and saved a lot to help their children and grandchildren out and whilst i grow my own i could almost live on the food they offer me if i didn't refuse. They also must have a tiny ecological footprint compared to most people i know here. They weren't loners either. They were extremely connected to their (now mostly dying) neighbours and large extended family. I liked to joke my grandmother could describe everyone in the municipality by extended family and friend relations before society there too rapidly started changing.
I've thought about living like that and more remotely where land is actually affordable and have found that not only has society been making it less and less possible. It's made less and less posible mostly by people who are all about "improving it for not just yourself but for everyone else"
Everyone else includes endless migration till I feel like a weirdo for having retained cultural elements (which are seen with a bit of a double standard) and incapable of owning a bit of forest and land. Improving it includes pushing insulation standards that make it so you for example can't save glass from the landfill to build a small unheated conservatory due to insulation standards and making it so owning a few farm animals becomes increasingly impractical.
I can go on and on endlessly but I've come to feel like those (usually)well meaning society centric people are the hardest and most frustrated to argue with to work togheter to that aim. I've found many are so convinced of the moral highground, suprisingly unempathic to others contrasting lived experience if there's no ethnic element and such strong adherents of change with no endpoint that it feels useless. Pasolini was on to something.
Thanks for sharing
>society been making it less and less possible. It's made less and less posible mostly by people who are all about "improving it for not just yourself but for everyone else"
You kinda lost me in this paragraph, why does this follow, I don’t really understand the connection you refer to here.
Since we’re sharing anecdotes, plenty of my friends and acquaintances have bought old abandoned farms on the countryside and now live somewhat off grid. It’s definitely possible and I would say at least in my bubble&age group it’s become a trend almost.
Not op, but a small example: my elderly friends had 5 acres they owned and lived on for a few decades and wanted to split a lot off for their kid's family. The modernization costs (no continued septic - must run sewer, must put in additional access, must this, must that. They gave up after spending $40k in permits and paperwork when they realized it was going to cost a few hundred grand before construction of the new house even began. The city wants developers who can invest a lot of money for semi-luxury apartments.
I'm not in the US but in Belgium.
But as said the other guy said there's increasing legal hurdles.
Like for the construction he mentions: My grandparents built everything themselves including pouring the reinforced concrete ceilings/floors. My dad did much of the house himself with more premade and delivered components, his own expertise in electrics and with some help from a tradesman family member. Now if I were to build i'd need even more tradesman help, I'd need to get the house very insulated and have it certified. That conservatory example is also a thing for people i know who moved abroad and this seems to be a trend across western europe. Should I want to renovate instead and recoup some of my tax money trough subsidies then the work needs to be done by a tradesman even if i can do it myself. The plumbing must be connected and must be certified. After the electrics are done and connected as is required I need to quickly add a heatpump and solar panel otherwise i'm getting my electricity setup certified 3 damn times. For me building a fireplace becomes impossible. Even if I'd want something much more efficient with external air intake I'll soon to get something by a big manufacturer with certifications (usually optimised for ease of installation) if i want to avoid high cost. (and it'll still give a major penalty to my epc insulation certification so idk if it'll remain possible.) This trough an EU law that first popped up in germany.
Alternative construction methods can be possible but again, there's more and more hurdles and limitations.
Then when it comes to the rest. Having farm animals beyond a certain small amount becomes an administration hell. I can no longer butcher anything myself for own use beyond poultry even tho i'd get a captive bolt pistol. My grandma tried to get rid of my uncles animals when he got paralysed and only got trough it after a government worker took pitty on her and went out of his way. I did software and sensors and whatnot for an abatoir at some point and i started to realise why a load of farmers don't own their own animals anymore and instead are farmers for hire.
The informal exchange my grandparents did with food and the like would not be legal anymore.
Family friends had a business selling heirloom tomato seeds. They needed to get each variety individually lab tested for plant/seed pasports which would cost such a huge sum that they'd have to close shop. The inspector seemed genuenly baffled that this was the domain of anyone but multi million euro operations.
Meanwhile most of those old farms you talk about go for more than a million here. Far out of my range. Our natality has been below replacement since the start of the 50's but we keep growing and cutting up the land.
And so our progressive folk who care for our society push for this stuff along with others. Because they want cleaner air, cleaner energy, no invasive species(of tomatoes i guess),couldn't imagine building their own home since they're largely white colar and have lost that knowledge or live in the city and think they're fending of crooked developers with this, want to embrace migration(endlessly),want to prevent animal suffering but push to factory style animal husbandry, etc, etc
It feels like society begets more society, leaves little room for escape and it's complexity and growth is in some aspects self-reinforcing ...so now I want away from it.
One can argue that they do give back to society by sharing their research, tools, games and findings, and I think it's really valuable. They do claim to be a research collective.
Yeah, but none of what they do works without the rest of industrial society. As such it's an empty pursuit.
Resilience and survival are social pursuits.
By living off grid they are stress testing things so that when things are tougher (perhaps temporarily!) things have a higher chance of chugging along
And obviously, like, they go to places and talk to people and buy equipment etc.
There’s a whole gamut of failure modes for tech from “total civilizational collapse” down to “cell tower is down”, and time periods from “forever” down to “a couple of days”
People doing this sort of lifestyle but sharing findings and ideas and ultimately maybe pointing out how more can be done with less is part of us building up knowledge together isn’t it?
These people aren’t completely offline even! They blog and post online!
> Yeah, but none of what they do works without the rest of industrial society.
But then they have in fact not abandoned society.
> As such it's an empty pursuit.
What do you believe that they are pursuing that you think is empty?
I feel like that’s part of their point. It’s not that they’re separating from society, they’re preparing for a future when society collapses and it’s relevant to live more off the refuse.
Almost no human endeavor is without intrinsic value. Yours is a truly ignorant assertion.
People do this out in rural areas, it would be interesting ot do the same in an urban setting. For example, start in the middle of a city foreign to you with only the clothes on your back and, to spice it up, no shoes. No phone, no contacts, nothing else. How would you survive and thrive?
Funny, I just finished listening to a podcast about Nietzsche, his conception of the ubermensch that desperately needs to stand alone and apart from the ‘herd mentality’ to be able to define new, unexplored cultural paths, and I come across this comment…
It does feel egregious that a person with no skin in the game can point and criticize what people more courageous than them are trying to achieve.
> Abandoning society rather than attempting to live well within society will always be a dead end.
I find interesting that from the perspective of sustainability, the opposite actually holds true - trying to have a sustainable life in modern society is a dead end; even a very modest life ends up being globally unsustainable.
(I'm not implying that either way is right or wrong).
Having said that, they haven't entirely abandoned society; they do socialize somewhat, for example:
> In comparison to the past few months spent mostly on our own, we've had a very social August. It seems our friends made it up north all at the same time, it has been nice to run into familiar faces, meet some new ones, and fill our days wandering in the woods catching up on the time we spent apart.
There’s a person living off-grid in Alaska that comes up on my YouTube page occasionally.
They have a “flag-stop” Alaska Railway line somewhere close-ish to them that they use to ride into the nearest town to buy crates and crates of supplies. Basically a personal freight station.
How much of this is sustainable living vs massively subsidised (and unsustainable) LARPING?
People living “off-grid” often seem still dependent on society in ways that are uniquely unsustainable and/or subsidised.
Living in Alaska like this is feels to me way more sustainable than living in a city with millions of people - might be wrong though, I guess it’s a question of scale.
When you say subsidised you mean the state is paying for essentials here?
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Society is not "modern society". Humans have always lived in tribes and there are significant advantage to working together. Even off-grid it's much more comfortable, and more can be achieved by living in a community rather than isolated.
Since I know of them and what they're up to I'd be hard pressed to say that they have abandoned society. Since I can download, use and modify the software and art they create, and enjoy doing that, I'd be hard pressed to say that they're only improving their own lives.
There are a lot of degrees of "off grid". Society also includes less dense (non-urban) regions. Being miles away from your neighbors permanently isn't a crazy idea if you live in Kansas, yet they still have a coherent civilization.
It isn't very hard to reinterpret this critique as a kind of crab bucket mentality. God forbid someone goes off on a crazy boat trip for a few months without first consulting with "society".
Growing up brown in red America cultivated isolationist tendicies out of survival-instinct for me.
Sometimes society likes to target and scapegoat people without any shred of justice.
I don't really get that impression, if you look through their blog posts plenty of them talk about their interactions with and getting to know locals, moored neighbours, harbour workers etc.
Sort of. Living off-grid doesn’t necessarily mean fully abandoning society, but rejecting the part that values convenience over self-reliance. You can do this while still participating and improving society as a whole.
Granted, living full time in a sailboat is a little more extreme than a homestead with a few solar panels and crops, but even then I think it’s hard to argue that 100r have fully withdrawn from society
I disagree. There are obviously many good reasons to turn your back towards society. The real issue is that it probably won't work - number 1 are the economic realities of maintaining self-sufficiency - number 2 is society will come to haunt you eventually ... they'll build something next to your hideout, they'll find a reason why you broke some building code or law, they'll come to rob you at night or when you're out, they expect a smartphone registered mailbox 2.0 with an AI account paid with a bitcoin credit card and you have to register for that in person at some office etc ... number 3 is you probably overestimated your motivation to actually live or die with the consequences of checking out from society.
> Abandoning society rather than attempting to live well within society will always be a dead end.
Devils Advocate: Various religious societies such as monestaries and nuneries have been doing this for centuries, and appear to do rather well (if religion is your thing).
I have understood that they were more so extractive from surrounding communities than anyway independent or disconnected. They had to get input of people and usually collected taxes or rents of their sizeable land holdings protected from other state like actors.
Do they operate independently though? I've always seen them as organizations that rely on donations and of course a supply chain for food while they do some kind of activity themselves to generate revenue, like making beer or wine, or copying books back when. Western / Christian monestaries, anyway.
That said there is an appeal to retreating to one of those and live a simpler life dedicated to one thing. Religion isn't for me but I'm sure there's something like secular monestaries out there (that aren't suicide cults).
I mean they also sometimes die catastrophically of ergot or alcohol poisoning or toxic moulds. And it’s a misconception if you think monasteries and nunneries exist without the support structure of at least the church to which they are attached, and usually the communities they serve: the monastic life is generally one of connected outposts, not islands.
That is the whole different society that respect nature, help each other, well-planned...
Because their resources are limited, they use them very careful. Because the open sea and the weather are unforgiven, they help the others unconditionally and proactively, it's the duty, not emotion.
They contact to earch other everyday by many means, e.g. on long range radio to help alert about weather, emergency...
That is the difference lifestyle, not isolation.
I've said before, I'll say again: If you were to take all technologists and instill in them a values of simplicity and re-use and longevity, and an obsession with repurposing old tech, I think you’d find they roughly sort into two camps:
One would take on an intellectual journey of discovery, sailing off into the pacific to learn to live off grid, writing colorful narrative-driven articles, full of artwork, mission statements, and subtle suggestions of donations. They would emphasize the human nature of discovery and seek to engage you as they went. Come to the enlightened tech path! Some neat new technology would be built along the way around these principles, mostly for their own use.
https://100r.co/site/projects.html
But the other group would write a self-hosting Forth targeting the top 10 most used CPU platforms of all time and post a text-only HTML site with download links. It would work everywhere. You’d know nothing about them and they’d probably run linux on a 17 year old mac.
https://duskos.org/
Personally, I’m squarely in the second camp, but I wish dearly I had the creativity and spine to be in the first camp.
Is life not a "dead end" itself?
> It’s easy to say you’ll go it alone, but staying and improving it for not just yourself but for everyone else is more valuable.
There's almost no way to easily improve society now. Almost all practical pathways for people are just furthering technology past the point of diminishing returns...
I agree there's still some value in helping people but now it's mostly just helping people adapt to this dystopia of furthering our destructive influence, and it's still depressing.
I wrote them an email a few years ago, they got back to me and we exchange some views.
Living off grid has nothing to do with abandoning society, it’s all about abandoning the grid. Pretty much everyone I know that lives off grid is extremely orientated towards social good and community, they’re just orientated towards doing both without wasting energy.
What does it really mean to live off grid, anyway? Eschewing electrical and/or road connections takes you out of physical grids, but you still live in the wider and more important grid of depending on other people. It might feel rustic to live in a log cabin or a boat, but if you bought it with capital and heat it with imported fuel, and power it with mass-produced solar panels, and stock it with purchased food, you’re still on the grid of industrial civilization.
This is taking the term away from its meaning IMO. Very few of those who live offgrid mean completely detaching themselves from society, but as a way to reject parts of modern society. As others have said, you are more likely to find those living off the electrical/water/etc grid are generally motivated to form communities of their own, to have more of a dependence of other people, and generally to be closer to those people they are depending on day-to-day.
No perfect solutions, I've found it is usually just people trying to do what they think is right/better way to live in whatever ways they can.
From their own statement:
> Because of the decentralized nature of our work, this has to be spelled out quite clearly: Preparing for impending apocalyptic events should mean collective action and structural reform, not individualism and isolation.
Easy to talk like that when you don't have to live in the system.
> lliving off grid is fundamentally solipsist. Abandoning society rather than attempting to live well within society
No one should be forced or guilted to "contribute"
Those people are nobler than perpetuating the cancer upon this planet that we call "society"
Coincidentally, YouTube just randomly recommended a video about people who are on the extreme opposite end of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1Mt3YJYb2A — Bali Is Everything Wrong With Society
There are different type of off-grid people. Some are the yurt-dwelling solar-toilet types that seek to live small. Others are the survivalists that want to live big "off the land" via snowmobiles and machine guns.
Then there are the sane people who want a house in the woods but with a driveway, fast internet and heated floors in their bathrooms. And then there are people who look at the cost of installing a mile of electrical poles and say "well, I can buy a kick-ass solar setup for a tenth that cost!"
There is not a singular ideal for all to pursue
They literally haven't abandoned society because they're PRECISELY still communicating with it, reporting about their experiences, discoveries, etc
What isn't a dead end? What path is it that you think you can take that doesn't end with you dead and forgotten? That's right, sucker. There isn't one. The joke is on you, and the joke is cosmic.
But i gotta say, living off grid is fundamentally solipsist. Abandoning society rather than attempting to live well within society will always be a dead end.
You should watch the old British sitcom "The Good Life" to discover how wrong you are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Life_(1975_TV_series)
Someone should do it.
The first thought I had was: this is not too terribly far from the technical mentality that a group trying to settle Mars would need. (For real, not the fantasy LARP that looks like an Apple Store on Mars.)
That’s true only in a society that hasn’t been hi jacked, co-opted and enslaved for the benefit of the few like through tactics like propaganda, psyops, control and injection of the food and water supply with substances to keep most of society perpetually anxious and weak and aggressive and so forth.
That society is a straw man and rotten to the core, it’s a a dead cause for you to try to stay to improve while you ignore those forces at the top that keep corrupting it. And this is the society you claim we should stay and improve.
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You can only truly consent to participate in a society if you also have a viable option of exit.
Otherwise, you are just negotiating your terms of confinement.
This perspective only makes sense if you deny that our native environment is society.
Our native environment is a band of 20-30 people.
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