Living "Off the Grid"

[Rich Riddle]

I have a friend who believes he lives "off the grid" though he does have electricity. He lacks a phone and water. Today is tax day and he hasn't filed in nearly a decade. Of course, he doesn't earn enough to file. Lives on a small "farm" where he piddles around and doesn't get much accomplished. In a decade he hasn't even put in a well or hooked up to water that is available 100 feet from his "barn" in which he lives. It's his way of beating the system in his mind. He hoards every thing possible, mostly totally useless stuff. He says it's in preparation for catastrophic events that will happen any moment. Any of the rest of you know anyone who doesn't really interact with the world? Is it more "normal" than it appears? Isn't there a name for the folks who think doom and gloom will happen right around the corner?

[Chuck Wintle]

I have a friend who believes he lives "off the grid" though he does have electricity. He lacks a phone and water. Today is tax day and he hasn't filed in nearly a decade. Of course, he doesn't earn enough to file. Lives on a small "farm" where he piddles around and doesn't get much accomplished. In a decade he hasn't even put in a well or hooked up to water that is available 100 feet from his "barn" in which he lives. It's his way of beating the system in his mind. He hoards every thing possible, mostly totally useless stuff. He says it's in preparation for catastrophic events that will happen any moment. Any of the rest of you know anyone who doesn't really interact with the world? Is it more "normal" than it appears? Isn't there a name for the folks who think doom and gloom will happen right around the corner?

I think its a case where one slips into a certain mindset.

[Steve Rozmiarek]

I suspect it's pretty common. It is around here anyhow, and it seems to stand to reason that more populated areas would have more. Most of the time I think it's a financial decision that gets out of hand.

[David Weaver]

Here in the burbs, you don't get folks like that because people complain them out. By that, I mean no mess will be allowed, and the property taxes, etc are too steep to stick around if you don't have income to match. There may be a few people in the city who live like that, though, especially in the worse areas where every other house or every third house doesn't even have a resident. There are hills here where people have, for years, thrown bulk items (tires, washing machines, furniture) over the side of the hill out of laziness. If someone lived messy there, it would make no difference.

I know (or knew) a few older folks who grew up in the depression and essentially lived without amenities, but they were not antisocial and they didn't believe the end of the world was around the corner. They just didn't want to spend money and had gotten accustomed to living without.

On my dad's farm where he grew up, they had a concrete block building halfway back the property that was used to store tools or something at one point, and for his entire childhood, an "old bachelor", as he called him, lived in the building and loaded shotgun shells to make a few bucks to live. There was no electricity in the building that I can recall, but they put a woodstove in and that was enough for him. Same thing, not antisocial, just didn't want to join the rat race late in life.

[Sean Troy]

I have a friend who believes he lives "off the grid" though he does have electricity. He lacks a phone and water. Today is tax day and he hasn't filed in nearly a decade. Of course, he doesn't earn enough to file. Lives on a small "farm" where he piddles around and doesn't get much accomplished. In a decade he hasn't even put in a well or hooked up to water that is available 100 feet from his "barn" in which he lives. It's his way of beating the system in his mind. He hoards every thing possible, mostly totally useless stuff. He says it's in preparation for catastrophic events that will happen any moment. Any of the rest of you know anyone who doesn't really interact with the world? Is it more "normal" than it appears? Isn't there a name for the folks who think doom and gloom will happen right around the corner?

Can anyone truly and fully enjoy life living like that?

[Moses Yoder]

Can anyone truly and fully enjoy life living like that?

There are various types of people. A true extrovert will never understand a true introvert. There is a person who must have a cell phone glued to his hand in order to be happy, so he can check the weather forecast every 10 minutes. He is truly happy so long as his technology is functioning. There is a different type of person who hates being dependent on technology. He is truly happy so long as there is no cell phone nearby.

This of course begs the question what is the purpose of life? I don't see how being happy has anything to do with my purpose. If it did, it seems to me that it would be a very empty life; the purpose of life is to be happy, and my happiness depends on external circumstances?

[Ryan Mooney]

Hmm, not sure how to respond here. I grew up for the first ~8 years of my life what I suppose y'all would consider "off the grid" and went back to live with my grandparents in essentially the same setup every summer until I was around 16 or so. From around when I was 9 or so we had electricity and hot and cold running water but still no TV and the phone was a party line and rarely used.

This meant we didn't have TV or electricity or telephone or running water (no hot and only cold at the main house not mom & dads cabin) or indoor plumbing. Radio was obtained by a long antenna (100+') and a handful of batteries. Food was whatever was fresh or canned or stored in the root cellar (this gave out around when the garden started to produce most years) or dried. Heat and cooking was wood. Night lights were kerosene. We did buy dry goods (some flour, sugar, oil, salt, and similar) a couple of times a year. Until Dad moved out all of the farming/ranching was done with horses (once he and my uncles left the round baler moved in pretty quick). My folks and aunts and uncles were mostly homeschooled (there was some boarding out - I boarded out for grade 1 and partially for grade 2 and then rode the school bus like "normal" folks).

I can say with a reasonable degree of confidence that

• Most of the people who think they want to live off of the grid are vastly mistaken in their intentions.
• Its not all that bad if you just roll with it, but the lack of reading material around mid winter kind of gets to you. Some members of my family were happier than others.
• Outhouses do indeed suck when its 35 below 0.
• This isn't to say everyone didn't work extraordinarily hard
• I suspect that at least part of the hoarding is from a scarcity mentality and part is that if you don't leave home much all those little seemingly useless parts can come in handy (knowing which is which is a challenge for me to this day).

I work in computers now.. you can take that to mean whatever you want.

[Larry Edgerton]

There are a lot of people out there in a different category. People that live on the grid but are preparing for the grid to be broken. I would not necessarily call them preppers, as that tends to have a negative connotation, but rather people that see the possibility of problems in the future and choose to be prepared. Some people do not have as much faith in the system as others.

My own house has provisions for extended power outages, so that alone must make me some kind of whacko I suppose. I have a large garden, can some of my own foods, heat with wood from my own property, and am getting it set so I do most of my work at home. I like being home, and the tradeoff of working away for things I do not need in the first place seems silly to me. But then I do not watch TV, so I probably do not have the right perspective. I'm missing out on all of those ads that tell me what I need to buy to be one with the in crowd. Oh, the pain...........

I also realize that in the event of a total collapse what I have makes me a target so hold no illusions of living through an apocalypse. If that was to come to pass, I die. So be it.

I have built several installations for people a lot smarter than I that feel there is a possibility of hard times, but I am sure they are just overreacting.

I will never be off the grid, where would I plug in my tools?

Larry

[Ryan Mooney]

I will never be off the grid, where would I plug in my tools?

Larry

And therein lies the bottom line.

Although I did find a property up in Washington state a couple of years back that had a several megawatt (not a typo) private hydro setup (they were big enough they were selling back to the local grid and reasonable rates) on it which I reckon would likely have run anthing I'd be interested in running (also brings in the problems inherent in maintaining a multi-megawatt power generator which frankly would scare the boots off of me).

[Mel Fulks]

Rich,your question is one for a psychologist .

[Ken Fitzgerald]

I know of 2 bachelor brothers in southern Indiana who lived in a log cabin on the 160 acres their parents had owned. They were totally off the grid. My maternal grandparents had the neighboring farm north of them. On Friday morning, one of the brothers would walk to my grandparents house with a grocery list. My grandmother would call one of my aunts in a town 11 miles away with the grocery list. On saturday, my aunt and uncle would bring the groceries out and deliver them. These brothers used horses to plant and harvest corn, raised hogs and cut fence posts, all for sale to have a source of income to pay for their groceries. The last living of the two brothers died in the late 1950's.

I am also sure there are some east of me here in Idaho who are trying to live off the grid.

[Garth Sheane]

The choice to live small may be disguised as an environmental decision, but in most cases it probably isn't the product of a completely rational mind. I'm not saying they are crazy or anything, just that they are driven by a phobia. They don't feel competent in the normal world and this is how they withdraw. I wonder if depression doesn't play a role as well for some people.

[Jim Rimmer]

I think a lot of people think they would like to live "off the grid" until they are faced with the reality of it. No flush toilets, no electricity, no hot running water just to begin the list. Those that actually do it may have experienced something that drove them to it or as some have mentioned, they may have mental issues though not crazy.

[Mike Henderson]

My first wife grew up in rural PA without electricity or running water. After hearing her stories, I'm glad that my family always had electricity and running water, even though we lived on a farm. There's just so much labor involved in hauling water, preserving food, cutting wood for heat and cooking, etc. It didn't leave much time for anything else. When I think of how much labor we had to do on the farm - with electricity and running water - I don't know how people did it.

And then, of course, there was the problem of the outdoor toilets, and what to do when you had to pee in the middle of the night and it was snowing outside. They didn't bathe but maybe once a week, especially in the winter. And bathing was done in a "tub" in the kitchen so that the hot water didn't have to be hauled to some other room.

I'm very thankful for electricity and running water.

Mike

[David Weaver]

And then, of course, there was the problem of the outdoor toilets, and what to do when you had to pee in the middle of the night and it was snowing outside.

Or what to do if you had to pee and there was a rooster in the yard that still had its dewclaws. My grandmother grew up with an outhouse, and they used corncobs to cook and corncobs for toilet paper, though for the latter they left them outside to soften in the rain.

She told that when she was little, they had a rotten rooster for a while, and when the kids wanted to go to the bathroom, they would take turns running the rooster around the yard (there were 9 kids) until the rooster was tired and wouldn't chase them. Then they'd all go.