You’re just hangin’ out
Wet Willie (1974)
at a local bar
And you’re wonderin’
who the hell you are
Are you a farmer?
Are you a star?
Around bedtime a few nights ago, Deb and I settled in front of YouTube to take in a video or two. None of our regular channels offered fresh content, so we backtracked to the “home” page to see what The Great & Powerful Algorithm suggested. After much perusing, we decided to watch a vid with an intriguing (and arguably clickbait) title:
“WE WERE LIED TO ABOUT OFF GRID LIFE.”
What we saw over the next 41 minutes was maddening and more than a little painful. And when it was over, Deb and I felt damned good about ourselves.
To provide a little background, the thirty-something married couple in the video were experienced homesteaders, having spent the last seven-plus years creating and living on a small farm (which I deduce was somewhere in Pennsylvania). They had six kids, the youngest of which was a toddler.
For whatever reason — actually, the rationale becomes clear in the video, but I’m gonna hold that back for now — they decided to chuck it all and move to a tiny off-grid cabin in Alaska.
That cabin, which they’d chosen sight-unseen, was a cramped A-frame. It was decrepit. A lot of what was there didn’t work. They arrived near the end of the short Alaska summer, and the weather was miserable — cold, wind and rain.
Bugs, too, and bears. And remember, they had six kids in tow. Plus a dog and two cats.
Less than two weeks in, they quit.
What happened? And who “lied” to them about “off-grid life”?
As the woman admitted, “It’s me.” That is, she lied to herself.
Turns out she’s a lifelong fan of author Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. Moving to Alaska would be the fulfillment of her dream to live the simple life portrayed in those children’s stories. Social media further fueled her perception of what off-grid living would be like — what it must be like.
That’s textbook, willful delusion, of course. How this woman could experience on-grid homesteading for so long and not have a full understanding of how hard off-gridding would be is beyond me. In less than two weeks she became a human grenade that blew up her family’s Alaska experiment.
To be clear here, Deb and I don’t live off-grid. The closest we’ve come to that was during our first six weeks on The Mountain, when we powered our life with a balky generator. For over three months we hauled water from a quarter-mile away. And no, Ozarkansas ain’t Alaska.
We don’t have an outhouse. We don’t poop in a Homer bucket.
Still, ours is a rustic way of living. It’s harder than most people are accustomed to. And when it was hardest, especially that first month-and-a-half, we sucked it up and we thrived through it.
We accepted the challenge. We embraced it. We knew what to expect (mostly), and when the unexpected cropped up, we handled it. We didn’t quit because, unlike the woman in the video, we weren’t freakin’ delusional.
After watching “WE WERE LIED TO,” Deb and I talked about this stuff for the next hour. We came to some conclusions, which I present here as advice — take it or leave it.
First of all, y’know the expression, “If you can dream it, you can do it”? Well, that’s bullshit. It has less to do with “dream” and more to do with “you.” If you’re not brutally introspective — about your physical capabilities, your intelligence, your ability to learn, your capacity to adapt to change and misfortune — you’ll end up chasing something you have no prayer of catching.
Check yourself for resilience. If you don’t have it in you, find something else. Pick something easier.
While you’re conducting that self-exam, you may want to determine whether you’re cut out for your dream at all — I’m straight-up serious about that. When Deb and I discussed this the other night, we talked about friends who are (or definitely are not) good candidates for off-gridding, rustic living, or even the RV life. We made our judgments based largely on whether these folks could leave behind the life they know to make room for a new one. You should ask the same question of yourself.
Next — are you wired to win? Do you persevere? Do you refuse to be beaten by what seems to be beating you? Is it in your nature to learn, either from others or from your own experience, or can you just figure shit out? Answering “no” or “not really” to any of those is a dealbreaker.
What do “rewards” look like to you? How much stimulation do you require, and what kind?
Do you take disappointment in stride, or do you dwell on it? Do you manage your expectations, or do your expectations manage you? Do you long for what you don’t have, or for what you can’t have? How often do you wish you were somewhere else?
Can you immerse yourself in the mundane and the routine, the difficult and the distasteful, and still squeeze satisfaction from it? Do you recognize joy when it’s disguised as ordinary chores?
Do you realize that you’re alive?
One crucial dynamic of pursuing a dream or living an adventure is the matter of relationships — and by that I mean how and how well you relate to a spouse, a friend, a business partner or anyone else who joins you on your journey. It’s an immutable Law of Nature that the relationship must be solid, healthy and, most important, functional, or the endeavor is destined to fail.
For example, you don’t take a broken relationship into full-time RVing and expect the experience to fix it. It won’t. It’s suicidal.
Ditto rustic living.
Related to that, if you have to drag your partner along as you pursue a dream, continually having to buck them up, that’s a harbinger of failure. You either share the vision or you don’t. You’re either on the same page or you’re not.
And then there’s family, as in kids. The couple in the video we watched had six children, which would be a handful under the best of circumstances. Taking a brood like that into off-grid life in Alaska could work, provided that the family was functional to begin with.
This one wasn’t. The demands of off-gridding only amplified the dysfunction.
Like I said, Deb and I came away from the video feeling validated. We’re in-sync without being identical. We have the same goals, the same values, the same fundamental approach to this American Life.
We enjoy a healthy, functional relationship.
And we’re hard-wired for what we’re doing. I can’t emphasize strongly enough how important that is.
Again, I can’t tell you what to dream — that’s entirely up to you. Just don’t kid yourself about what’s ahead if you chase it.
Take care of yourselves, Patriots. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Stay free.
#WiseUp #LibertyOrDeath #Ungovernable
#LetsGoBrandon #FJB