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by JoeAltmaier
1654 days ago
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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. |
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> "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.