[sfn42]

Not really. It's just that people don't realize how much they rely on modern society. You could go all Primitive Technology and go live in a mud hut somewhere or whatever, nobody's forcing you to buy toothpaste and electricity and all that stuff.

The problem is that sucks, so people don't actually want to live off grid. They just want to not work but also get the benefits of modern society.

[gaussiandistro]

A human can't survive without somehow exploiting the resources in their environment, at minimum you need a certain amount of baseline calories from either harvesting or hunting food. Do you think there is a square inch of arable land, areas suitable for livestock, or regions with plentiful wild fruits and animals, which is not currently claimed by some existing power structure who already claims exclusive rights over the exploitation of those resources and with whom you would need to negotiate with in order to access?

The issue isn't merely that you give up the benefits of modernity, the issue is that industrialized states and corporations have spent the last 200 or so years claiming every resource in the world as their property- that's why you see living off the grid as being in a "mud hut" or something, the resources left unclaimed are the ones that weren't valuable enough for someone to snag them already!

[sfn42]

I don't disagree with you on that, but the reason I said mud hut is because I was taking the off grid thing very literally - you don't have an axe to build a log cabin.

I imagine a motivated individual could find some remote place where they could live undisturbed for a long time but without owning the land there's no guarantee you won't be chased off eventually.

But my main point is that's all kind of irrelevant because no one really wants to live that way. They want a somewhat modern home and access to utilities and vehicles and fuel and medicine and so on. They just don't want to pay taxes. They want to have the cake and eat it too.