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).

"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.

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.

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.

Devine and their partner are very community oriented and socially connected.

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.

They haven't abandoned society. They are trying to improve it. I don't understand the solipsism criticism. It seems specious. There's a clear philosophical drive:

https://100r.ca/site/about.html

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".

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.

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

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).

there is a corporate employees son, that desires to be a simple farmer.

They can learn a lot from each other, wouldn't you say ? :D

We are all temporary stewards of any land we inhabit, or possessions we own.

The locations are different, the methods are different, but the stewardship is the same.

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.

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.

Sometimes society likes to target and scapegoat people without any shred of justice.

Quote attributed to Jiddu Krishnamurti: "It Is No Measure of Health To Be Well-Adjusted to a Profoundly Sick Society"

> 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.

I strongly disagree; the way I see it is people like this are trying something different and their ideas could in the long run turn out to be better than the ideas that present day society is exploring.

And if God forbid, society experiences some kind of collapse, the skills and knowledge of these people will be invaluable for recovery.

Otherwise, you are just negotiating your terms of confinement.

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'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.

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!"

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)

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 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.