Yes, and all of that is even easier, more fun/creativity, within an intentional community at a jointly-shared location....who are on the same page.

a simpler life would also mean no more 12 hour work days away from the house 🙂

Yes, and all of that is even easier, more fun/creativity, within an intentional community at a jointly-shared location....who are on the same page.

You bet!

Well I obviously must be doing it wrong, I traded in a 12 hour off farm job and commute for an 16 hour a day on farm pursuit and I seem to have accumulated a workshop full of stuff to maintain the farm and a big barn full of materials and animals and for the life of me I would be hard pressed to find 30 people around that I truly wanted to live with and I can see a lot of potential for unpleasant conflict presenting itself in intentional communities . Slow food really is slow when you propagate the blueberry bushes and grow them 3 years to get berries or incubate eggs to get turkey then grow them for 5 months, the general concept is simple but actually accomplishing all this seems to present a differing kind of complexity and again, I have to be doing it wrong because it seems I have acquired far more materials in pursuit of these endeavours . . I am absolutely sure there is much room for improvement in my evolution to being a subsistence farmer .

Trade you 12 hours a day working with 120 women 🙂

I kinda have to agree with syn, I work harder and longer hours with no paid days off, heck, no days off on the farm then I ever did at a job.. I love it, I choose it but simple it is not, such a never ending earning curve, and to a point its all about being a jack of all trades

That is what I was getting at syn and farmgal, that it is simple, but not easy. Simple doesn't mean the same thing as easy/hard. Simple means not complicated, and the simpler a life one leads, the harder one has to work. As for material possessions, I wasn't referring to the ones we need for farm life, etc., but the two cars, three television sets, vacations every year. You know, the "keeping up with the Jones'." Keeping up with the material life in our commercialized world makes things stressful and complicated. Is there stress in the self-sufficient lifestyle? You bet. But the rewards of providing for yourself and your family are phenomenal and they don't feel the same as earning lots of money and keeping up with our material world, at least it doesn't to me. It might be harder to grow my own food, but it's a simple process that gets me back to nature. Plus, it feels so good to put it on the table and has more meaning than anything bought from a grocery store.

LP-

For conversations sake, I'm going to call "horse pucky". There was a thread on these boards a few months ago entitled "Less is More". As someone who has had both less and more, it has been my experience that more is better. Now I'm not telling you to give up your wash board for a machine if that is where you find meaning in life. What I am saying is that it is not consistent with my experience. We are all different and have differing priorities. The following is my opinion of the simpler life.

1. You will need eight to fifteen children for the labour required to support this lifestyle choice.
2. Between the child rearing and the physical labour, you can expect a shorter life expectancy. The upside of course is that you can get away with saving less for "retirement" if there is such a thing for people managing their own homestead.
3. Hard physical labour will make your body stronger! It will also give you reminders of that labour as you age.
4. Both Farmgal and Sym have made this choice for themselves and I think it's admirable. I would guess that they don't prescribe their choices for everyone though. It takes a tonne of "sticktoitness" that most of us don't have.
5. I know a lady who spent a few years living out of a tent in the Yukon in her 30's. She and her fella were making a living panning for gold and were living off the land. She came home after her fella nearly died from a tooth infection. She was able to get him into a canoe and paddle to Dawson in time to save him. Some experiences make for better story telling than actual living.

What is the alternative then? Like many things in life, it is not just black and white; I choose to work hard within the current system. Prepare as you see fit, don't waste your life in front of the TV; but you don't have to toss it out altogether. For me, I choose my work based on the payback, not the "job I love". I look for meaning in life not at work, but in the time that I am away from work. Don't forget to save for retirement - old age is the most likely SHTF that we will have to survive. Feel free to call bullshit; these are only my opinions. In the face of overwhelming proof, I am happy to change them.

guess who's wash board broke yesterday.. good thing a) it can be repaired, and b) I have three more stored from farm sales..

While I get your points on the work, having helpers etc, want to focus on the couple in Yukon for a second, having lived in both nwt and nu, having a hubby who lived in camps for months, and having a ton of geologist friends (as that is hubbies formal school training), why would they not have had a good supply of antibodics with them, when you head out to the bush, you can talk to you doctor about putting together a reasonable bush kit based on length of time out, ease of contact etc

Glad she saved him in the end but there are parts of that story that make me ask a number of questions, as it raised my own horse pucky senses..

Farmgal,

I don't disagree with your assessment. All I know for sure is that it was thirty years ago, plus or minus, and that at that age I personally felt pretty invincible. It's not really that surprising though. I just got back from a fishing trip in the gulf of Mexico. Six hours off shore from Biloxi and most of the fishermen were not wearing the appropriate PPE to protect them from stingray injury while fishing in the surf. It was my sixth trip out there and I wasn't even aware of the seriousness of the risk.

I feel like we live with one foot in either camp. We don't live so far out in the bush that we don't have the amenities of every day life but we are still working harder than we have ever worked before. We have an off farm income or we would never make it. I know my family would have a very difficult time surviving in a total off-grid subsistence farming scenario. Heck - I love technology 🙂 When it's gone - it's gone but for now I enjoy it every day because it makes my life much easier. We have also found that we have collected a LOT of equipment and tools and stuff in order to live here but we did give up TV so that evens it out (ha ha)

We have also found that life has slowed down a bit since moving out of the city - we have made time for campfires and walks after dinner with the whole family. We talk more and leave home less. My son reminds me often that when we lived in town he would complain about talking care of 6 chickens in typical teenage fashion. Now we have a farm full of animals and we work together daily for several hours at a minimum. We're hot and tired but for the most part - no complaining 🙂 It does feel good to do things for ourselves in ways that we were not able to before.

I live on a small suburban acreage and started growing our own food and making my living off the property as a means to single parent two toddlers who are now bigger than me . I have many a modern convenience but I do toil at food and animal production and learning old ways that are really new and somewhat foreign to me like canning as in my family I am a whole generation now deceased from anyone who had the skill. I do so because I feel that industrial agriculture is delivering the product that most people want and pay for , convenient and relatively cheap food and it is not environmentally healthy nor sustainable and we are seeing consequences , nor is it my choice for nutrition so my choice is to start doing my own thing. I use a washing machine to do my laundry and a clothes line inside and outside for drying which epitomizes how I am trying to straddle doing the right thing building some resiliency for my family living in a situation that I see as becoming more precarious and still living with the abundance our plundering of resources in present day offers. From my perspective , it is bloody hard work, some success and lots of fails and I see some people doing it but not many and I think for security we all need to be doing a little more of it , slow food is really slow when you use an incubator to hatch the chickens that will eventually be the next layers or propagate the plants from saving seed to growing trees and it all has a learning curve for me it seems like a long one . Walking into the local hospital and having a conversation with someone who has an MRSA infection and has no clue how serious it is nor how they have created their own dilemma eating convenient conventional meat products laced with antibiotics , and that is just one life example of the bigger picture where our progressive choices towards seeming abundance have masked the underling nonsustainable underbelly . It just strikes me I better keep working at it from this perspective of tring to do something better, no matter how long the hours and how calloused my hands . I do not see it as a simpler life, it can be labeled that but when you get down to it you wear a lot of hats from learning to grow herbs and their uses when conventional 'medicine' falters in promoting health to working at producing more biomass in some blind faith attempt to sequester carbon , to developing barter relationships to learning to fix everything you can possibly break or have go sideways, it just all evolves towards what you work towards creating but it does not come land in your lap easily and it seems to be slower and more local but complex . I get up just as early as I ever did commuting into a city job and go to bed more tired . But I also prioritize the things important to me as much as possible . ha ha I have a washboard I have never used . I don't have tv either but this internet is just as engrossing and distracting and my kids have more gadgets like Iphone or Ipad (? ) than I can even comprehend . I too feel I have one foot in each world but I know which one is running us into the ground being unsustainable and I know the one is giving me arthritis .

I too feel I have one foot in each world but I know which one is running us into the ground being unsustainable and I know the one is giving me arthritis .

I love the way you put that 😆