Why am I drawn to off-grid living, to self-sufficiency?
Growing your own food. Generating your own electricity. Dealing with your own waste. Collecting rainwater. A life built entirely on things you make and manage yourself.
At some point, I got used to none of that. Someone else hauls away what I flush. I buy vegetables at the store without knowing whose hands grew them. Electricity and water just pour out, like magic, endlessly. And all it costs to enjoy these things is money — money I traded my time for. To get that money, I worked shifts at a factory, day and night. I washed dishes at a restaurant. I hauled heavy things back and forth. What did all that time, traded for money, actually mean to me? What did I learn? What did I feel? I just wanted those hours to pass through my life and my memory without a trace, spent for nothing more than food and a roof over my head.
Of the seven days a week, I get two off. I spend them compensating for the emptiness, chasing distractions to shake off these thoughts. For a moment’s pleasure, I buy things that will end up in some landfill within a few months. I eat food I don’t need, just because it tastes good. I spend the whole day charging my phone and scrolling through videos, one after another. This hollowness in me always demanded more consumption than my body ever actually needed, and what piled up from it will exist for far longer than this short life of mine could ever account for.
And at the end of all that — who did I become? I don’t know where or how the food I eat actually grows, or where the things I throw away end up, or how they’re dealt with. What I learned, just from living, was how to kill time and how to obey. Instead of becoming the person I dreamed of as a kid, I became someone who could just endure — someone who closes their eyes and turns their back on the consequences of their own actions.
I want to understand and care for the things that make up my life more deeply than I do now — to plant the vegetables I eat and watch them grow, to understand how what I discard can return to the soil as nutrients. I want to know exactly how much I need, and make only that much. I will become someone who takes full responsibility for the mark I leave behind — while I am alive, and after I am gone.
I don’t want to cut myself off from every piece of infrastructure. I’m lazy, and I’m not someone who lives by conviction strongly enough to give up every convenience modern life offers. But I’d rather keep asking what a slightly better way to live might look like than keep carrying these same dissatisfactions, unexamined, for the rest of my life.
