Escaping the Rat Race to a Cabin in the Woods
From a pipe dream to a collective reality?
I recently watched a video of a guy commenting on how impractical it is that everyone these days just wants to “escape the rat race and live in a cabin in the woods with WiFi” — because we don’t realize how much hard work (not to mention time, money, and resources) goes into achieving a lifestyle like that.
He goes on to say that while it sounds idyllic to “opt out” of the rat race and choose not to move up the career ladder, what you’re actually doing is forcing millions of other people into backbreaking hard work so that you can enjoy your cabin in the woods with WiFi.
I get the point he’s trying to make… and I don’t agree.
At this point, I will apologize for not being able to link the original video, because as these things go, I saw it on social media, and then wasn’t able to find it again even though I tried so it’s disappeared forever.
Sorry.
So let’s just go off of what I remember from the video (which definitely does have its merits).
Now, let me preface this by saying I’m one of those people who wants to move to a cabin in the woods with WiFi. I opted out of the corporate hellscape early on and never saw the appeal of working 80-hour weeks to get to the top of some imaginary career ladder that would supposedly bring me stability, security, and success.
It wasn’t my idea of a good life back when I graduated from university, and I remain even more convinced that that — that neverending chase for a promotion, a raise, a bigger house, a faster car — has nothing to do with what I envision as a good life for myself. Honestly speaking, I don’t think those aspirations make for a good life for anyone, we just haven’t come around to realizing it yet — but that’s a conversation for another article, perhaps.
I wrote about it in a previous article, talking about how much I love being able to make food from scratch and to grow vegetables showered not in pesticides but in love and care and simply spend my days doing things that sustain me and people in my community (in different forms). I also recognized how much of a privilege and luxury it is to be able to pursue this type of life.
My question then (which remains now) is — why should it be a privilege and a luxury afforded only to a very small group of people?
And perhaps, my unasked question is — what can we do so that this lifestyle that more and more of us are seeking becomes a reality instead of remaining a pipe dream?
Going back to the commentary of the guy who basically shot down people like me wanting to live a simpler life by saying we have no clue what it really takes to make a life like that a reality…
He says things like (paraphrased):
What you’re dreaming of is called subsistence farming, and in those times, entire families were wiped out because of bad weather or a plague of insects
Some guy on the internet tried to make a chicken sandwich from scratch (growing his own wheat for bread, raising a chicken, planting and growing all the veggies in the sandwich etc.) and it cost him $1500 and took 6 months, so it’s simply not possible.
In order to achieve this “dream scenario” of a cabin in the woods with WiFi, we’d still need to have someone do the cabling and the internet and the construction of the cabin and etc. and if you’re not going to do it all by yourself, you’re expecting someone else (millions of other people, he says) to dedicate themselves to creating that reality for you.
There were other things he said as well, but let’s deal with these.
Subsistence farming sucks. (Not quite what he said, but summarizing for brevity *wink*)
Yes. I don’t disagree. Subsistence farming is perhaps extremely inefficient. I volunteer a couple of times a week at a community garden that’s in its second year of existence now. We’ve harvested a few batches of spinach and chard and tomatoes, and a bunch of basil and other herbs, and even a couple of cobs of corn and a few kilos of beans. But considering that there are about 10 people who show up regularly (and have been doing so for the last 18-24 months) in order to plant and tend and water and fertilize the garden to produce such a minimal yield… it has definitely not been sustainable. If we were a family living off this plot of land, we’d all have died of starvation by now. But that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t become sustainable.
Wanting to go back to growing our own food instead of relying on commercially produced monoculture crops that strip the earth of nutrients and destroy local flora and fauna (instead of finding ways to coexist with them), is not such a terrible dream… nor is subsistence farming the only solution.What if we went back to small, locally organized communities that allowed each of us to participate in the production of the food that we all needed as a community?
What if we decided that throwing away food that is ugly or cannot be sold for a profit is unacceptable and found ways to get that food into the hands of people who need it instead?
What if we found away to harness technology to solve our food (production and supply chain) problems instead of using it to make fake images and write shitty articles on the internet for clicks?
I firmly believe that solutions exist, we just need to get creative about finding them.
Making things from scratch is expensive and time-consuming.
Yes. And?
What else would you rather be spending your time doing? So many of us spend days, weeks, months, years of our lives doing utterly pointless things in our bullshit jobs that we might as well dedicate ourselves for 6 months to doing all the things necessary to make a chicken sandwich.
And I bet it’ll be the best chicken sandwich you’d ever have tasted too.
It’s funny, how we decide certain activities are worth dedicating our time and energy to, but others are not. It’s fine that we dedicate large swathes of our time sending pointless emails and sitting in aimless meetings going over insignificant data points that mean nothing, really, in the grand scheme of things once we’re living on an uninhabitable planet and wearing gas masks because the atmosphere has become too toxic to breathe in, but not that we spend 2 hours baking bread or making a pasta sauce from scratch to eat slightly better?
I feel like we’ve lost the plot a bit as a species.
Of course, this cannot be everyone’s reality — not everyone will be able to (or even want to!) make their own chicken sandwich from scratch, and that’s okay. That’s the beauty of these communities of care — we get to choose what we want to dedicate ourselves to, and trust me, despite what we’ve been indoctrinated to believe that what we do only has value when someone else will pay us for it, that’s not true and each of us is blessed with beautiful gifts that all of us need in some way, shape, or form.
We’d have to exploit other people to make our dream scenario a reality.
Um, reality check — in the current world we live in, we’re those other people being exploited to make the dream scenario of billionaires a reality.
Okay, this one is a little more complex to break down but bear with me. In our current social context, if you have a job, work for an employer who pays you X but takes home (X+Y)*number of employees (for example), you’re already being exploited. And don’t come at me with this idea that CEOs or Founders of companies deserve to be paid 18,000 more than their lowest paid worker because they work 18,000 times as hard. That’s just bullshit — they’re exploiting their workers and we know it.
So, in this current situation, you are helping make the dreams of billionaires a reality. Their dreams of flying 13 minutes to avoid a 45km drive (it would have taken 30 minutes?) and owning parts of Hawai’i and having lavish weddings.
Is it so wrong for plebeians like us to want something not even a tenth as fancy? I mean, all we want is a small cabin in the woods with WiFi, FFS. Surely it is not impossible to collectively create this future for us all, if we all put our heads and hands together?
And there my friends, is where I think dude-on-the-internet-who-made-a-lot-of-good-points went wrong.
You see, in his analysis that it is impossible to achieve a future where we all have little cabins in the woods with WiFi and don’t work shitty jobs we hate, he seems to assume that we would each be doing all of the things to achieve our little dreams individually.
But what if we went at tackling this problem… collectively?
It’s true that doing a lot of this — growing our own food, building our own homes, taking car of ourselves in the different ways we need to thrive — is extremely difficult, if not impossible on an individual level. But what if we joined forces and pooled our individual talents and resources to create communities of care, not merely bonded by the fact that we live in the vicinity of each other but that we really, truly care about each other, where your wellbeing affects mine and vice-versa?
Could we not create a world where we each contributed some of our time and energy to the collective good, to the well-being of us all, whether that was in building homes or cultivating crops or tending to the sick or putting up cable lines so we could all have WiFi, and as a result all mutually benefited from the gifts of each of us?
If we took away jobs like accounting and calculating credit scores and telemarketing to sell shit nobody needs, couldn’t we simply redistribute all the essential tasks that need getting done among all of us so we could all work less and live a more leisurely life?
Maybe I’m an idealist and maybe I’m a dreamer, but I’d like to think that this is a possibility for us, in our lifetimes.
We just have to find a way to make it happen.
And I think, between all of us, we might just have what it takes to make it happen. Don’t you?
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