[jodrellblank]

Jon Jandai did a TED talk about this, he was from rual Thailand, he tried to get qualifications and a big city job and then couldn't. He describes his life after returning to his village as spending a few weeks planting and harvesting rice, fishing, spending about a month of making clay bricks and letting them dry in the sun to build a house with no downpayment or mortgage, and having most months of the year free, doing a lot of reading, and teaching people about saving seeds, farming, house building, community building, in exchange for hand-me-down clothes and so on.

He does "work", put effort in for results, but much much less than anything you would consider fulltime western job for survival. Whether it's possible for everyone to do that at scale, possible outside Thailand's growing conditions, whether everyone would want to live that way, it is at least a counterexample to the kind of dismissal "without a corporate job you would work hard 24/7 and still starve in a week, everything except this is worse by every measure" that seems to be behind comments like yours. He feels a lot happier living like this and building a local community than struggling and failing in the city as an isolated independent. http://www.jon-jandai.com/about/index.html

[amw-zero]

> planting and harvesting rice, fishing, spending about a month of making clay bricks and letting them dry in the sun to build a house

These are all things that I can't do. On top of that, even if I could build a house from clay bricks that I made myself, I would be sleeping outside until the bricks and house were complete.

This doesn't sound like a very good counterpoint to me. I never said that working in a big city is the _only_ way to live. My point is only that the modern economy allows us to provide goods and services to other people and businesses, which in turn allows a small subset of workers to provide the necessary food and goods for survival of the entire society.

So, from that angle, working is not useless, it is just a proxy for what you would be doing if you had to provide food and shelter for yourself.

Some people find this idea of living off the land and growing your own food to be romantic. I don't, I enjoy modern society, and I feel like 40 hours a week is a ridiculously small investment to put in for what I get in return.

In the example you gave, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that 90% of current people would actually starve and die if they tried it. This TED talk speaker _grew up in rural Thailand_ and apparently had all of the tools to live this way. Most of us do not have that experience.

Very uninteresting counterpoint.

[JoeAltmaier]

Works for a prime-age healthy male of course. The data point is limited.

It takes a host more work that this theatre of seed-saving and mud-brick-making to live a secure life. That TED pundit could always simply take a plane back to civilization of the crop failed, if he got sick, if he got bored.

If he'd hit his toe with a hoe while doing that bucolic farming, where would he go? Infection, blood poisoning, fever, amputation or death could result. Not so romantic.

[jodrellblank]

{Insert HN comment guideline about avoiding simplistic dismissals here}.

> "Works for a prime-age healthy male of course. The data point is limited."

Not "of course"; it's typically said or implied that even prime-age healthy males would have to work like abused pack horses and still barely survive. A limited data point it is, but there is another - his same scheme includes elderly women building their own homes, and young schoolchildren building their own school. Turning mud into bricks and bricks into a single story one or two room building, working together with no deadlines, doesn't need the labours of Hercules. The datapoint is not just "it's possible to be a subsistence farmer" which we did know, but "we always talk of subsistence farming as gruelling long hard work which leads to things like Russian peasants eating cabbage soup then starving to death in winter; here is a real live example of a community subsistence farming and surviving with at least an order of magnitude less work than commonly assumed, maybe more".

> "That TED pundit could always simply take a plane back to civilization of the crop failed, if he got sick, if he got bored."

He couldn't, he doesn't have the money or any marketable skills, he never did become a wealthy employee who choose to give it up for a rural life; from that page I linked "I worked hard but had no savings, just enough to make me survive day by day. I was disappointed with my life in the city. I couldn’t compete with anyone. I felt I had failed".

> "If he'd hit his toe with a hoe while doing that bucolic farming, where would he go? Infection, blood poisoning, fever, amputation or death could result."

Interesting that you've gone from "he could fly back to the city any time he wanted" as a dismissal to "he'd have nowhere to go if he needed city resources" as a dismissal in such a short time. But yes, no doubt those things could happen, he does say "learned to do many kinds of self-healing" and no doubt that does not include making antibiotics, anaesthesia, surgeons, dental fillings or living to 95 on a cocktail of statins and beta blockers and blood pressure pills and anticoagulants and antidepressents and metformin and all the rest.

The big question is not "how romantic is it" but whether "I do not feel bad about myself anymore", "When I started to do more things by myself, I have more confidence and less fear", "now I enjoy spending my life with my family and friends and plants" are worth the price compared to having readily available opticians and doctors while feeling like an isolated unhappy failure endlessly losing a forever-competition in city jobs while building no community.

[JoeAltmaier]

Yeah if he knew even one person back in America, he could arrange to return. Heck, just because he's American he has in his head the idea that he could go anywhere. He went there after all; he could go back.

Pick at the verbiage all you like; an American playing at being a poor subsistence farmer is theatre. The guy gave a TED talk after all. Did he do that from his 3rd-world farm?

[jodrellblank]

He isn't American. Come on, read something or watch something about him before replying like this.

> "Jon’s world view, from his upbringing in the rural fields of Northeastern Thailand"

> "Jon has over 30 years experience of being an organic farmer"

That's more than "playing".

[JoeAltmaier]

Sorry, I gave a knee-jerk reaction to what seemed a typical TED talk - all enthusiasm.