[jeffbee]

Yeah, but unfortunately false nostalgia for subsistence farming is widespread and has traction in the discourse. I guess it's probably because every American who ever suffered from that lifestyle is dead, in other words the same reason that it is now increasingly popular to die from measles.

In reality, the laser-leveled, fully-automated, county-scale factory farm is the only reason anyone on this forum has ever experienced the phenomenon known as "free time".

[bovermyer]

Farming is harder than people who haven't done it think, and surviving on the production of only your family's property is really, really hard. Source: I grew up in very rural areas, and I've seen what it entails. My grandparents lived through the Great Depression in a farming community on a homestead.

However, I don't think that's the ask, here. You don't have to choose MEGASUPERTROPOLIS or remote solo farm. There's a huge gradient between the two.

It's possible to put a little effort into gardening, share with your community, and massively reduce the overall cost of food while still having free time.

[interiorchurch]

> However, I don't think that's the ask, here. You don't have to choose MEGASUPERTROPOLIS or remote solo farm. There's a huge gradient between the two.

The gradient is where you start to consume a lot of carbon unnecessarily.

[api]

It’s an extremely privileged kind of nostalgia. Only the wealthy can romanticize poverty.

The solution to nostalgia for farming is for people to try it.

I used to live in Asheville NC years ago. There were a lot of hippie back to the land types that came there to find themselves. It’s that kind of place. Sometimes they’d decide to become farmers. This usually lasted at best one year. Sometimes it lasted weeks.

[jeffbee]

There's a book about being the child of back-to-the-land hippies called "Against the Country" that I enjoyed and recommend to all who might be tempted.

[api]

Some of the groups around Asheville were "eco villages" that could get rather culty, including the kinds of high control abuses that occur in cults. All groups weren't like this but I recall hearing some crazy stories involving shaming people into giving money to the group (while the higher ups are "more equal" than everyone else) and sexual exploitation.

There was one case where the group leader/organizer ran away with a bunch of cash, and one or two people tried to sue but they'd set up some kind of shell company structure and had conned people into signing things that made it hard to sue or press criminal charges. I think they also left the other members on the hook for a property lease, since the things they'd been conned into signing did that too. It looked a lot like an explicit long con targeting the hippie trust fund kids that would come around. Sex abuse too apparently.

I heard more than one story that mentioned members of the Hells Angels, at least allegedly.

This is another aspect of small insular communities in the good old days that the trads and anarcho-primitivists (left-trads) don't talk about. It still happens in small communities today, but a lot less due to the presence of larger scale nation states with laws and law enforcement. If the sheriff in your tiny rural town rapes you, you could try to bring charges at the state level or at least sue. Worst case you can move, and with a global money system you can sell your home and take the cash with you. Without that larger context, there is no recourse. If your local tribal chief, town sheriff, or cult leader wants to take your stuff, pressure you into polygamy, or rape your kids, there's nothing you can do about it. Back to nature!