➡ Living in the countryside is not easy or cheap, but it gives a sense of purpose and freedom. It requires hard work, dealing with security issues, and maintaining the property. Despite the challenges, it can be rewarding and provide a sense of peace. However, it’s not a lifestyle for everyone, especially those who are not prepared for the hard work and potential difficulties.

➡ Some people choose to live off-grid, preparing for potential disasters, even though it’s often more expensive and challenging than city living. This might be their way of finding purpose or passing time in a world where human resources are becoming less needed. However, it’s important to think carefully before making such a big commitment. If you don’t believe a disaster is imminent, it might be better to stay in the city or have a retreat location for emergencies and recreation.

Hey guys, Canadianprepper here. Should you uproot your life and move out into the country because you are worried about the end of the world as we know it? That is the question in the topic of today’s video and the answer is not so simple as you can appreciate. It really depends on probabilities. If you’re a person like myself who has a high degree of conviction in the hypothesis that there is a 90% chance that we likely will see some sort of widespread societal regression, catastrophic calamity within our lifetimes, 90% and above, that I would venture to say that there’s probably a lot of motivation there to want to get the self-sustaining systems in place so that you could survive long-term and the only reason why you would ever go to the extent of horticulture and homesteading and regenerative systems in an era where you can practically order anything online and you could just stockpile to your heart’s content and for a fraction of the price it would cost to get a homestead, you could load up several shipping containers like that full of all kinds of non-perishable provisions and regenerative power systems and water supplies and tools and weapons and ammo and fuel and you would be set.

So why then would you go to this extent? Again, it depends on probabilities and it depends on how serious you believe the crisis is going to be. If you believe the crisis is only going to be maybe a couple months, then you might as well just plan to shelter in place and stay at the level that I call meso preparedness. There’s micro preppers, which are nomads and bug-out baggers. There’s meso preparedness, which are people who shelter in place and stockpile various forms of energy in the form of food, ammo, water and electricity and fuel.

And then there are macro preppers, which is what I’m aspiring to be, who try to regenerate their own energy, try to grow food, try to make things out of nothing, try to harvest wood from the forest and build things out of it. Doing things very raw, very primitive. Now, you would only do that if you seriously believe, and I have a very, I don’t know, I don’t want to say that it’s 100%, but I believe that my conviction is data-driven in that it could be somewhat self-fulfilling, but I do think that there’s a lot of evidence that I could rattle off to support the fact that I believe that this thing is going to be big and it is going to be civilization upending.

Anyways, that might not be how you think. You might only think there’s a 5% probability. For you, this type of lifestyle might not be justifiable. However, there’s one thing that often gets forgotten about in these videos where people throw shade at homesteaders, okay? The number one criticism of homesteading is that it’s hard, yeah. Big surprise. It is hard. You’re at a war with nature, literally. You take for granted how many layers and man-hours went into taming the concrete jungle, and you’re trying to replicate that out here and you’re trying to achieve a similar standard of living.

You’re going to go nuts if you’re trying to do it organically and just without using a lot of artificial, man-made synthetic inputs, it’s going to be next to impossible. What I would say is that there’s something invaluable and its purpose, all right? In a day and age where people are having their jobs automated away, they’re being vocationally dislocated in a lot of ways, and this is going to become a greater reality moving forward here in the future. There’s a term sociologists call anome. Anome, some people phrase it, and it’s the idea that in ages of technological disruption, people’s sense of normalcy seems to become very ambiguous, and this creates all kind of mental health problems, all right? So for this reason, this is why you’re seeing a lot of people lose their minds right now, whether it’s the various identity crises or what have you, and this is only going to continue to intensify as people lose that sense of purpose that they once associated with their occupation, even if it was just working at the grocery store or the gas station, which is no longer necessary because maybe that is done by a robot, and people will say, okay, well, I’ll take the universal basic income, and I’ll be perfectly content living in an expanded virtual space at the expense of a contracting physical space.

A lot of people will take that not knowing what they’re being deprived of, and I would say that this homestead lifestyle, as hard as it is, and it is very hard because you’re basically everything out here, every specialized skill set that you find in the city that’s one phone call away, you have to become that out here the further away you are from the city, but something that you get out here is purpose, and it’s a way of mitigating anomie, as sociologists call it, and this is very important because there’s something that is inspiring equanimity out here, and just mental balance, despite the fact that it’s very hard, okay, I mean, I could go into a litany of things that are challenging on the homestead, you know, it’s certainly not what it’s romanticized to be on YouTube, okay, it’s a very hard lifestyle, you do require agricultural inputs, like case in point, we put down some gravel last year around the house, because we wanted to keep the bugs down, we wanted to kind of control the weeds a bit, and so we put landscape fabric, we put gravel, always great for the first year, and the second year you realize, oh geez, the weeds are now growing in the gravel, okay, so what do you have to do? Well, you can either pick all the weeds, which is next to impossible, or you can resort to herbicide, and so ultimately, you go the route of herbicide, because it’s relatively cheap, and despite the fact that you know there’s going to be some negative health consequences, right, but you do it anyways, and that’s just one aspect of it, so you know, warring with the weeds, trying to keep things alive, trying to keep things irrigated, and then everything is going great midway through June, you know, the trees are just growing, there’s fruit growing on the trees, and all of a sudden you get a big hail storm, and it completely destroys all the trees, and that’s it, that’s where you were for that season, and you would probably starve that season were it not for the root vegetables that were protected from the hail, at least the vegetables themselves, not the plants that still get tattered, you know, if there’s an electrical problem with the solar panels, you know, I have to, especially in the dead of winter, I have to go out in the middle of the night and figure out why the power just went up, and the power going out for me is problematic, because we have geothermal, and geothermal is something that is romanticized as well, I mean, this is one of the most complicated systems I have ever seen in my life.

Now, I know there are more rudimentary analog style geothermal systems, but the one I have looks like something out of Star Trek, all right, I mean, there’s so many different levels to it, so many different things that could go wrong, I couldn’t imagine having to repair this system in a grid down situation, and that is just the truth of it. So, you know, thankfully, we have a fireplace, we have alternative means to heat our home with respect to various fuel sources, all of which, unfortunately, run out. What about the well? What about water? Well, you know, there’s problems with the water too, I mean, the water isn’t always the best kind of water, you need to soften it with salt, so where are you going to get that in SHTF? You know, the water system itself, the purification, the reverse osmosis, the UV light, I mean, it’s a very complicated system into itself, it’s not just going and fetching a barrel of water, and I’m sure you could, you can get a manual pump installed, and you can do the whole thing yourself and, you know, get some Berkey systems, which of course we have, or some Pro1 equivalent, or some gravity fed, you know, charcoal filtration system, you could do that, and that’ll work likely, but again, to do that in such a way where you get enough water to shower, and to wash dishes, and to do all the things that you would expect to do, there’s just so many levels of complexity to all of this, you know, and then maybe if the hail doesn’t get your plants, it’s going to be the bugs, and then your animals are going to get sick, and then you got mice, so you got to get cats to get the mice, and then the cats are going to crap all over the place, and so you have to deal with that, and you got to feed the cats, you got to get some dogs, because of course you got all kinds of wild animals around here, we actually had a couple bears around here, and we are still in the transition zone, we’re in a place where it’s right on the kind of fringe of like the last place the bears are going to get to, they try to stay in the forest, but you know, you need dogs in order to, you know, just watch the property at night, and then you got security issues on top of that, you know, you got, you know, just frozen pipes, I mean, just the list goes on shingles, things blowing down because the plow winds, there’s so many complications out here in this lifestyle, but at the end of the day, it does give you a sense of purpose, and that is something that you can’t really put a price tag on, okay? Now, again, you don’t get into this lifestyle because it’s the frugal way of doing things, it most certainly is not, it’s going to take me years, okay, in order to see a return on everything I’ve invested here.

Now, one thing I could say is that I am getting the experience with the stuff, which is also worthwhile and arguably valuable in a way that does not, you know, cannot immediately be measured quantitatively, so there is that, but to think that this is going to be a lifestyle in which you are going to prosper above and beyond what you might in the city, for the majority of people, man, get a shipping container, load it with shit, get some sort of camper van, and get a small piece of property, and just do that.

Like, if you got five to six figures to burn on this prepping stuff, you know, okay, country living is one thing, and at the end of the day, maybe for 15 minutes out of every day, you kind of get to kick back, put your feet up, and be like, man, this is the best life ever. For every other 23.75 hours of the day, you are working your ass off to make sure it looks pretty, and everything is square, and that is just how it is. Now, people, again, who have been in the country for a while, they might not share this sentiment because they have got a few more years, and they have started to see that flywheel effect with things, where it is starting to regenerate, and maybe they even have a commercial aspect of things, where they are actually earning a bit of an income off their homesteading pursuits, and, you know, that very well could be something that happens.

I am just trying to shed some realistic light on people as to whether or not this kind of life is, you know, something that you should aspire to be. Now, I will say, though, if we are talking about a long-term SHTF, unless you are planning on scavenging, unless you are planning on stealing from people like myself, then you are probably SOL. And I would say, even if you were of that predisposition, you are going to have to contend with a lot of things. You know, people in rural environments, you know, they are not pushovers, and you are going to be dealing with the fences, you are going to be dealing with the perimeter alert systems, the barbed wire, the razor wire come SHTF, which is illegal to use in Canada.

When times are good, you can still buy it for some reason, which is why I have something just in case you are going to have to deal with, you know, satellite cameras. You are going to have to deal with being sniped. I mean, let’s just be realistic. You are going to have to deal with thermal optics, drones, dogs, all manner of booby traps and bottlenecks that you are being corralled into and trickery that the owners of that property are going to be using to try to shape the environment to their advantage.

And it is not going to be an effective strategy long-term, which is what I am trying to say. So, I guess if you genuinely think that we are entering into a period of time where there is going to be years of possible disruption of services and a collapse of the government, then you ultimately have to go this route because having stored energy will be insufficient ultimately. It is very difficult to store a lot of food. For example, in my warehouse, it was like a 20,000 square foot warehouse. I must have enough food in there for 10 years.

But even that, I mean, most people wouldn’t have that, right? And so, I mean, you have to be a multi-multi-millionaire, possibly a deca-millionaire to be willing to commit to like a 10-year provision plan. Now, you could buy a year’s worth of freeze-dried food. Probably, I am not sure what the exact amount would be. There is going to be companies that tell you it is a year supply of food, but when you actually do the calorie counts and then when you factor in every member of your family, it is not even close. It looks like these bees are thirsty.

I am going to have to get them some water. They are drinking what appears to be mud at this point. Hang on a sec here. Let me give this guy a drink. There you go, bro. All right. Got to keep these bees happy. They are doing a lot of work for us. Every bee counts. What was I talking about? Anyways, guys, I lost my train of thought totally because I decided to give a bee a drink of water. Is it worth it? I don’t know. All I can say is this life is not what it is cracked up to be, but there are rewards that you can’t measure.

And one of those rewards is just providing that sense of purpose, preventing you from going crazy, which is what I think is driving a lot of people crazy nowadays in their frivolous eccentricities that they are perhaps oblivious to. They don’t realize that something is missing because they have only ever known the concrete matrix and all those right angles and the orthogonality of it. They don’t appreciate or they are not aware of this more rounded nature, which could bring them a lot of tranquility and peace of mind if they were to subverse themselves in it, even though it is very difficult.

It’s not easy. And I think ultimately, I hope that it will pay off when I need it to. I know that if we can go long enough, we will be able to regenerate things in such a way it’ll get easier and easier to fix things, to repair things, to find workarounds, to things that you might currently need artificial inputs. There is always a solution before the Industrial Revolution. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here. It’s finding your way back to that. Right now, we’re heavily reliant on diesel. If a tractor breaks down in SHDF and you don’t have the parts, you’re basically SOL.

If you forgot to stock up on oil, you’re SOL. All of those farm implements require maintenance and fuel. How much fuel can you possibly store? These are all things to keep in mind. With respect to fuel itself though, what I will say is that anybody who thinks that they’re going to be able to do it naturally with a scythe and just out there with tools swathing the land, maybe at some point that will become normal. But that’s backbreaking work. That’s going to get stolen your body as well. For every liter of diesel, every liter, just one little tiny liter of diesel, I swear it’s doing at least a hundred if not a thousand man hours of work.

What that tractor, little tractor I have can do in five minutes, it would take me days to do. Even if it’s just, you know, cutting, brush cutting a large stretch of land or tilling something, just the amount that you get out of it, it’s just incredible. These tools, these amenities that you are going to want to incorporate into your homesteading are great, but they also potentially can break down and you can become dependent on them. Just some things to keep in mind that yes, homesteading is highly beneficial if you can initiate it.

If you’re willing to make that upfront financial commitment that is most certainly not going to pay off, possibly not even in your lifetime. I mean, if you’re spending a million dollars to get all set up on a homestead, it’s going to be a long, it’s a lot of eggs and a lot of tomatoes and a lot of potatoes to pay for that. But again, it’s not just about that. And this is the thing is what I’m talking about with anatomy is going to be more and more relevant moving forward. There’s a peace of mind knowing that you’re further away from the government’s spheres of influence.

There’s a peace of mind knowing that you are more free to do what you want to do, even if it does come with a greater responsibility. And there’s also a peace of mind in knowing that you do have a purpose every day, whether it’s something as simple as waking up and feeding the animals at a certain time. I’ve never understood how some people can just waste time like playing solitary or solitaire or, you know, playing games on their phone. Like, I’ve never understood that. Because it’s like, you’re wasting your life, your precious life is being wasted.

But one could perhaps make the argument that that is how they find purpose. Because in a day and age where human resources are increasingly obsolete, you need to have something to do to pass the time. And maybe this is just what preppers ultimately end up doing to pass the time is doing things where there’s an equivalent that you can get into the city for much cheaper. And, you know, for it’s abundant, it’s convenient. Yet, here we are, you know, challenging ourselves in this way that is arguably unnecessary. So I don’t know, I hope some people got something out of this this rant today, because I shouldn’t call it a rant, it’s not a rant.

I think I’ve provided you guys some good insights anyways, at least from my perspective. I would encourage people to think about this stuff before making a big commitment to really pull yourself and go off grid. Unless you think that the shit is going to hit the fan and you should never take my opinion of this 100%. I believe it is going to. But you might not, then it might not be worthwhile for you. You might want to either stay in the city and shelter in place, or just get a bug out location, a cottage in the woods, a cabin in the woods, as it’s called in some place, a dacha in the woods.

You know, whatever you call it in your culture, get some place to retreat to, and you can even use it for recreational purposes as well. Let me know what you guys think about the topic of homesteading versus remaining in the city and just hoping for the best. Thanks for watching guys, take care, Canadian prep around. [tr:trw].

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