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A decade ago my wife and I quit our jobs packed our kids and stuff and moved 7000kms to our now rural homestead. Our closest neighbor is 2km away. Town and groceries is a half hour drive one way. We have a huge garden and laying hens. We raise our own chickens for meat as well as quail and rabbits. Our kids hunt and fish and play outside.
It’s fucking amazing y’all.
I live about 15 miles outside of a small town (~20k) in a trailer park on the side of a mountain. Been here 6 months and it is AMAZING. Super quiet at night, can see the stars and it has a great view of the adjacent mountains nearby.
It’ll most likely be awhile, but the plan is to save for a small piece of property with a similar rural location. In my teens and twenties, I used to think that I’d live in the big city, but as I got into my late 30s I couldn’t stand being in the city much. I don’t mind being able to visit occasionally, but city life just isn’t for me anymore. Too big, busy and noisy. Give me a nice, peaceful spot where I can read and enjoy nature quietly.
I relate to this a lot. Grew up in a small town, excitedly moved into a big city when I went to college, then bounced around cities for work for a while, and now that I’m married and have kids, I keep dreaming about living further out where we’d have more space and peace.
Do you get around by walking the old school way, or do you use these newfangled automobiles that are killing the planet?
Didn’t the Puritans leave England because they really hated the Catholics and wanted to change the Church of England to not be as Catholic but the government of the day told them to fuck off?
The Puritans weren’t the only or even primary colonists, but yes that was their motivation. That and their barbaric faith practices were quite literally illegal… in medieval England of all places. Children weren’t even considered people yet but how the Puritans treated them was bad enough to be made illegal.
i don’t like most people. i don’t like clutter. i don’t like distractions. i don’t like hassles. i don’t need much. i’m with OP.
I have been working for many years to find the right balance for me.
Currently, by day I am a software engineer, but in my off time I am basically a recreational farmer — as in keeper of animals, not gardening. Though, plants are often involved in service of the animals.
I live in suburbia and am pretty ideally located as far as local resources and infrastructure. So I brought a little bit of the wilderness to me. Currently spending a bunch of time on my koi pond.
This is something I will never understand. You want all of the trappings of civilization without being part of it? You want your cake and to eat it too.
Do people here know who this Fat Electrician guy is? Because I’m vaguely familiar with him and his YouTube channel and my instinct is that the majority of us here on lemmy were rather the opposite of him at 15 (libertarian phase or some other antisocial ignorance) and now around 30+ years old the disposition is much more ‘the modern city is in so many ways a marvel of cooperation and achievement.’
From my encounters he is a ‘society bad, the end’ type and not at all a ‘capitalism bad’ type. I guess that is lumpen proletariat? Anyway I’d love to be proven wrong but I was already too red flagged and turned off to dig further into his content.
The thing that I hate even more about all this, I could afford to do this. But you are not legally allowed to live on your own land in the UK without planning permission. I think it is vaguely comparable to zoning in the US.
Thats what i love about Canada, you can buy land in unorganized townships and can do whatever you want there. The interesting wildlife is just the icing on the cake.
We still have parts where you can disappear into the woods and just sort of fuck off forever. Alaska has the Remote Recreational Cabin Site program as a replacement for the Homestead Act and there’s parts of the state so remote you could essentially do whatever you want and nobody would ever know. Provided “whatever you want” involves freezing in the dark wilderness.
I’m sure some of our other low-density states have similar things going on, and zoning laws vary wildly.
If you weren’t rich you couldn’t benefit much from “most advanced civilization” at the time. most of the them were really poor and desperate and gave everything just for ticket across the Atlantic with the hope for a better life.
40 old me looking at a screen with SSMS and Azure: Instead of an engineer like my father I should have been a tailor like my mom… Or a carpenter…
It’s never too late to enter carpentry. I know quite a few programmers who do carpentry as their main hobby. Something about the math and the amount of careful planning is highly transferrable, I guess.
Whenever I try building something with wood, I get so frustrated that it’s not version controlled. In software, I can fearlessly try dumb stuff because I can just roll it back if it didn’t work.
Creating anything physical requires a lot of practice, and practice really only works if you make mistakes and then learn from them.
Just have to accept that you will waste a lot of wood getting that practice. Heck, a lot of woodworking practice is repetition of the basics before trying to make something with those skills. Otherwise you end up with a bunch of hobbled together ugly stuff that still works like my stuff.
Not catching very slight warping in boards is my weakness.
3D printing and CAD may be the hobby for you then!
Engineer your design in FreeCAD and tweak it before you build.
Assuming you can afford all the stuff to do it.
Which most software engineers can
Nah fuck carpentry. You’ll just end up destroying your body to make shit money.
I mean I was referring to having a shop in your garage so you can build furniture, but you’re not wrong. Construction carpentry is one of the more intense trades I’ve seen.
I mean you can do it as a hobby though.
This isn’t brick laying or plastering. Carpentry is an easy job on the body.
lol what.
No.
I work in tech. But (long story) started with a few years of carpentry/joinery. It is not easy on the body, unless you’re just making small boxes or cabinets. And even then, it’s still not really that easy.
If you think carpentry is easy on the body I can tell you’ve never worked for or as a carpenter before.
In either case carpentry is a massive world. There is a lot more to being a carpenter than making furniture. If that’s all you’re doing as a carpenter than I would argue that you aren’t much of a carpenter and your experience is highly limited.
To me this is like calling yourself a computer engineer because 2 hours a week you write Visual Basic code in an excel spreadsheet.
It can be easy on the body provided one has cash to get and wear safety gear. Too many people depend on a cheap employer for their safety.
Buy good gear. Use jigs. Protect hearing.
It’s a big assumption that you can rely on power/bench tools. At some point you’re going to have to get the chisels, plane etc out.
Good gear doesn’t save your knees, hips, shoulders, and wrists.
What is so bad with plastering? I would have thought that one isn’t too bad.
The pressure to get it done now now now. The overwork. Ignoring safety regulations because they’re fucking annoying.
US defaultism strikes again, is this carpentry as in building houses or carpentry as in building furniture?
Joiner
Furniture or whatever you can make in a single location like garage or maker space, no engineer thinks of joining construction work
A carpenter (at least in the UK) is going to be expected to be able to replace or repair joists, sash or bay windows, lats and other roofing and wall structures. Indoors or out.
There are some days tho dude.
Some days
Don’t be a carpenter. Splinters.
At 35 I’m beginning to realize it’s good I don’t have an office job. Finnaly found a good employer and happy driving through the country.
Honestly I am thankful all the time that people are able to find jobs that suit them best. I am a graphic designer by trade, and working from home has basically been the greatest creative boon I’ve ever had in my life, lol. The routine, access to nature, and just general lack of distractions has been incredible.
After traveling all over for work, having freedom to somewhat set my own schedule as long as I meet deadlines, I know I would lose my mind in a traditional office.
There’s not much I hate more work-wise than sitting around after the work is done so you can get your hours, because someone on the crew thinks that’s more moral than leaving and they’re a snitch.
They forgot the whole genocide thing which is kinda necessary for this to work out
I mean if it would’ve been empty land it could’ve worked likes this. I don’t think genocide is a necessary part of it
Also homesteads weren’t exactly a great place to be. No infrastructure and tornado heaven. People lived there because it was their only choice.
Also the whole industrialization, privatization, and rise of capitalism thing in Europe that led to successive waves of emigrants leaving or being coerced from their homelands. I think in general people don’t leave their communities and families without some kind of direct or indirect violence.
This is why we colonise space, at least the planets without aliens living there.
Almost every colony ever: gets oppressed and exploited, fights for independence, gains sovereignty, becomes either a tense ally or a hostile rival to their former empire
Earthlings: “maybe we should colonize space”
Seriously? Most of the world today are colonies of the rich parts. We just don’t say it that way.
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So you want to send those undesireable people somewhere else? Maybe to conserve your way of living?
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If by undesirable you mean I desire instead to keep living, and by conserve my way of living you mean I just get to continue breathing - then yes. They try to kill me, there’s no moral limit on what I can rightfully do in return if they don’t succeed. Including rocket them off to planet conservative before they get another shot.
Have fun up there i guess
And this is why you have car-centric infrastructure and suburbia.
Pretty sure that’s a post 1900 invention. Trains were the hot stuff in the 1800s
I would love to move to some US state with lots of forested country and go build a cute little homestead. Work part time to buy things I need.
Mmm…my dream. Also BTW I’m in my early 20’s.
Canada has huge tracts of land in the Canadian wilderness.
get a gun though. the neighbors can be a real bear.
I need to move to Central or South America. I would love to live like that but I can’t stand the cold. This past winter just about did me in mentally.
It’s just a dream though. Got family that I love tying me down here.
Someone owns the forest and you owe them rent
Yes and no. Lot of cheap land out there, very little in taxes.
The bigger problem is someone owns the supplies you need to survive, and there’s not a lot of jobs out there to make ends meet.
hope you find the right partner, and a good water source
Unfortunately we’re living in a world that no longer has much unowned/unsettled land. Everything has been bought and hoarded by the ultra wealthy.
that was already true in 1492.
the land wasn’t “unsettled” before the colonizers arrived.
Well yes, but obviously there was some point in history where that wasn’t true. You just need to look back further than modern history.
Where it was “owned” by native peoples. Even though they didn’t think of it the way we think of that term, it was their land.
They’re referring to the America’s before it was colonized by the settlers from Asia.
Ah, right. Well those assholes killed all the giant sloths and American lions so I’m not letting them off the hook.
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If thats what you think happened, then you dont get it. readsettlers.org
