No Stupid Questions

You're probably underestimating how much hard work it really is to live off the land.

I wanna pose this very kindly and politely because I know a lot of people are against it sadly but

By the way you’re wording things it sounds like you’ve got a lot on your plate right now and you’re losing your grip/stable footing and you should take that very seriously. Stopping a mental breakdown when it finally happens isn’t going to be possible on your own.

There’s a few options for online if you’d prefer but therapy really isn’t that bad of an idea to try. It’s nice having someone you can get along with and be vulnerable with and have help you out with “shit that’s stuck in your teeth” as mine says.

Some stuff is too tough and is way too bitter to chew on our own and this world is infinitely bigger than you and will swallow you whole if you don’t fight for a life you want.

Stay healthy bro. Fight for yourself. We’re all rooting for your best health mentally and physically 💜

Edit: reworded the beginning of paragraph 2, I’m not a psychologist nor do I have the training to be calling out “textbook antisocial behavior” considering how long it takes to go to school to become a psychiatrist/psychologist

Without knowing more about your life, this kinda sounds like burnout to me. It is very common is tech fields especially. I would recommend trying to dial back on work if it's killing your soul like this.

I worked at a high-paying dev job right out of college that consumed my life and put me in a very bad place mentally. I could not sustainably output what I needed to, and evetually I got fired. But walking out of the meeting I could not stop smiling from the tremendous relief I felt (this was when Covid was big so I had a mask on fortunately). It was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I was unemployed for a few months afterwards which is probably the happiest I've ever been. I didn't travel or do anything noteworthy besides starting a small passion project. Finances weren't an issue since I had a lot saved up and low expenses covered by unemployment.

After applying to places in no rush whatsoever and stressing my newfound appreciation for work-life balance in interviews, I ended up getting a job at a nonprofit government-adjacent company with full work-from-home and basically no time tracking. I make less but I can go through things at a pace I can handle and it makes a world of difference.

So if you have felt this way for a while I would recommend taking a break before committing to abandoning civilization. People with tech jobs like us tend to have options so don't feel like it has to be misery or the wilderness. Because I can promise you there are places that will allow you to live as a human being. And it may just reignite your passion too. If you still feel like it after stepping away for a time, you can always escape society more dramatically later instead.

Also, I don't want to diagnose you or anything when I don't even know you but there could be some overlap with depression here when you lose passion for life and just generally become jaded at the world like this. Make sure you are communicating how you feel with people you feel comfortable around. Remember that things can always get better, although it sounds like you have been thinking about how to achieve that plenty already. But if things aren't getting better, you might need to be the instigator for that change so I wouldn't be afraid to go for it after exploring easier stuff first. Maybe just give camping a shot while you figure this out.

I didn't mean for this to get so long, but your post resonated with me a lot I guess!

I think you probably don't have any concept how difficult that is going to be and will likely hate your decision a few weeks into it.

It's one thing to live like a hermit. It's another to be a small farmer with zero experience or help.

Sounds like you need a holiday.

Rent a log cabin with no cell service for 2 weeks and see what you feel like when you get back.

I like all the comments about burnout and addressing that. When I was in a similar mindset, I would dream of hiking the pct. 6 months on a trail where all I had to worry about was walking. Or I could take a 0 day and enjoy camp. Slow paced life. I even bought books and learned the equipment I would need. Spent vacations testing that equipment and adjusting to what I actually needed. I remember coming back from five nights out staying in a camping hammock and being amazed at the "palace" I live in comparatively.

I could go at any time I felt work was absolutely too much. I almost did. For some reason, having all that knowledge and feeling like I could go was enough of a mental break for me to carry on.

At least consider doing one of the long trails. It might address your burnout and give you the feeling of closeness to nature you are looking for. Maybe you will want to do a homestead after that. Maybe that hike will be enough. Worth a consideration anyways.

What you propose is unfortunately just not realistic, it takes way more work and knowledge than you think to be self-sufficient and it's almost certainly not possible without a rather sizable group of people helping each other out.

I would instead suggest finding a place to live where there's a sense of community, where amenities and the workplace is within walking/biking distance and you have access to "quaintness" for lack of a better term. Basically the more it looks/feels like a medieval place the better, such places are viscerally enjoyable to be in. Doesn't have to be rural at all.

A good shorthand indicator of places where you will most likely start enjoying life again is a lack of cars, it's not necessary but it tends to imply these human-centric features.

I would say you need a change. I suspect you have some level of depression and a change of direction can help. I think you will find living off the land not as peaceful as you think. Deciding to live a minimalist existence can be rewarding but doing so with zero basic amenities is brutal. Have no power and relying on your land for all your needs becomes tedious very fast. An extremely small percentage of people could successfully do that.

Possibly have you considered just moving to a small rural town and taking on more labor type of small work. Handyman stuff of your own comforts. Not sure of your skills but you would need to be a handyman if your thinking of becoming a hermit. Just one suggestion.

Watch the PBS series Frontier House before you try it. Because multiple families- families, not just individuals- tried it for just one summer, spending the whole summer preparing for winter, and it was determined at the end that none of them would have survived the winter.

Grew up in the rural life, my class only had 53 people. Love nature, love the quiet. Hate the Trump loving people with half a brain cell. If you go to the hills, expect the fools. Just because you leave the fools in the city doesn't mean you don't get a whole new set of fools. The people near you are important, including your neighbors and if you can't stand them it isn't worth it.

Maybe try a temporary housing in a rural area to see if it's actually for you.

It's not lonely. You might think it is but it isn't. I did a decade in the cities, bar hopping, out with friends, online dating, all that stuff. It was all surface level and dating was like crawling through a desert wasteland eating bugs for survival.

I met my wife and we started a family after I moved to the country. I met her organically, at a pool. I courted her the old fashioned, organic way, no conspicuous spending to impress, none of that bullshit, just good old fashioned being myself, being respectful but persistent, that kind of stuff. She's an impressive woman in basically any way you can imagine.

To have a rich social life in the country, you need to 1) not move to a tweaker town, 2) move somewhere rich with the kind of people you like to be around (I don't mean ideology, I mean age, sex, etc) and 3) go to places where people are and talk to them. Don't judge. Outside of cities you don't have to pay someone to go outside to do something, you just go outside and do it. Everything doesn't cost money.

So if you are just sick of the materialism, the traffic, the constant expenses, the needless complexity, I'd say a small town is for you, ofc provided you pick one that isn't full of 100 year old people or tweakers, and just go outside all the time and don't be afraid to talk to people. If you like looking at the stars you'll do just fine.

Take a vacation.

Your college/university should have a mental health office/help. It might feel awkward, but make the call. It might help, it might not. You may go in expecting nothing and gain incredible clarity.

Don't drop out, but take a sabbatical for a semester or year. Check with your school to make sure you can just jump back in when/if you want to. If you graduate first and then take time off, it will be hard to stay sharp and relevant for the job market.

If you end up living in Bumfuck, Nowhere, look into setting up a 12v battery system, with a couple solar panels and charge controller. Easy to store enough energy for days of 12v lighting. I do it on my sailboat quite often.

Binge Primitive Technologies on youtube.

I'm a remote, veteran software developer who went slowly more rural throughout my career. I've also seen others do the same. Mixed results. Personally, I love connecting with nature, so right up my alley. But others love the urban scene.

Do some soul searching and make gradual changes towards ideal for YOU

Go as far away from people and traffic noise you can get, but you’re gonna need spark juice if you want to keep posting here. Solar and wind are good options for small off grid power gens, go all out study hard and build your own SMR

see if you can just quit your job and move to a tiny town where rent is dirt cheap (i live in a 30,000 person college town and paying $500/mo is considered normal if not even a little high, im assuming you can find for even less in an even smaller area). you can live off your savings for a bit in a cheap place with a quieter environment to give your mind a break and re-evaluate what you want to do.

Do what you have to. At the end of the day nothing is coming with you to the other side.

That being said, CS is remarkably flexible to accommodating a naturist lifestyle. Try it out in bits and pieces before you settle on the wild life. It’s not one or the other, people can and do get both.

constructing just a little home to live… I don’t exactly care about electricity. I would probably be happier just by burning some stuff to have light

This sounds kinda like bargaining. Ultimately you can't make something difficult work just by being willing to make sacrifices, when those sacrifices don't necessarily influence the real bottlenecks in a significant way. That's going to be money and laws, not food and electricity. Building a rough shack and an outhouse is illegal in various ways. You don't save a lot of money having a garden, can't realistically get all your food that way, and it's a huge amount of work, same with firewood heating.

You can find ways to live cheaply but there's going to be a minimum cost. Don't start by committing to huge challenges you aren't ready for.

You should read Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Consider working in another country. You could be proud of your CS skills again if employed in a more meaningful way, or maybe just because they are the key to more exciting life experiences. What I'm thinking of is when my family was traveling five or six years ago, we spent a little time on the island of Niue, which is somehow associated with New Zealand. People there told us it would be easy to get a visa and stay as long as we liked because we had tech skills. We arrived with very little--a kind of hippy adventure--and kids with health needs, so we were not ideal immigrants, but the skills were so valued that they went out of their way to offer this though we were just there for a visit. Anyway, just anecdotal, and we didn't take them up so I don't know how it would have worked out, but there are opportunities like this worth looking into.

Just reframe this as a temporary trip/challenge to live off the land and regroup!

If you can genuinely view it that way, tell people about it and they’ll think it’s a really cool experience.

Then do it. Make it a project you can complete and then actually finish and come back to tell people what you accomplished and what you learned.

Give it a go, why not? You only know yourself by trying new things.

Yeah, do it. 100%.

I spent a lot of years moving around as a contractor/consultant devops/sysadmin/IT architect and finally broke when I got stuck in Switzerland on what was supposed to be a 3 week client engagement, and was extended by covid lockdowns for almost a year.

I decided right then that I was done moving/travelling and started looking for where I wanted to settle in.

We chose a small piece of super cheap forest land in the middle of nowhere and started clearing just enough space for a small driveway and a tiny house. We started fully off-grid with just a few kWh of solar to power laptops and a starlink setup, and carrying water from the creek in buckets.

We now have 1000 litres of water storage that I fill with a gas pump instead of buckets, 12v water pump and propane heater that deliver hot and cold water in two taps (bathtub and kitchen sink), and got tied to the grid, so I could run desktops instead of laptops.

I spend my mornings pre-standup hand-feeding chipmunks and squirrels, and watching flocks of Blue Jays eat from the various seed piles we leave lying around. It almost makes the idiocy of every standup bearable.

This all a digression - But the TL;DR is this - Yes, leave the city. Life will be physically more difficult for a while. But once you have the creature comforts out in the country, you will never consider going back to a city.

This is exactly what we’re planning.

I am done done done with the pressure, the incessant need for connection, only to reach out and find that people on the whole are just fucked up.

Where are the relatively normal people?

The measured people, the people who do not have a insane opinion about guns or politics or how people should live their lives?

Where are the people who know right from wrong? Good from evil?

It’s tiresome. I want to be friends with a donkey, stare at some landscape and see my days out in peace.

Fun fact: I'm actually aiming to do just that someday. My work is mostly remote, so if I can manage to live just close enough to the city and with enough space to get my own plantation, I could feasibly live off the grid with only a subscription to the Internet

I have similar thinking I moved out in a rural area about 30 minutes to the suburb grocery store. I guess I didn’t move out far enough cause they’re building neighborhoods nearby and rolling out fiber. I’m about an hour from city center or 66 miles.

It’s quiet which I like but I miss being able to go out cause it’s not practical to drive 30min for every little errand. We’re making friends nearby which helps. Mostly due to my kids so it’s not too lonely I have my wife and kids and brother and in laws are less than a mile from me.

No comment on farming as I don’t have personal experience just what I’ve read. we buy our veggies and eggs from a nearby farm . Good enough for me. I would imagine farming myself would take most of the day and it’s hard work. Sounds like a dream but I think it will be a lot harder. Try gardening onions and garlic those are the easier ones to start along with peppers if it’s for you.

Yes.

Did I write this? Could’ve fooled me. I know what you’re feeling and I’m looking for the answers too.

there’s also the intersections of CS and rural – there’s all sorts of little projects and things to fiddle with in the self-hosting communities across the Fediverse – rather than focusing on one big project, a lot of times it tends to be a more organic process of growing several small projects – a website run off solar power, cover your back 40 with wifi mesh, discover the smolnet