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.