I’d say they increased their distress, they were naive too. Living off the land is a major commitment and requires skill and knowledge. People in the past still used trade and tribes to survive that way. Even back then they didn’t try to live in something as flimsy as a tent. Also, going 100% solo was a death sentence. Reminds me of Chris McCandless (“Into the Wild”).
The tent was what got me. A fatal choice. Tragic, but avoidable.
Another article I read stated that the incomplete beginnings of a lean-to or similar shelter were present at the camp, seems like they tried to build something more permanent but ran out of energy to finish it. Which is why you build your shelter first.
Reminds me of the Netflix series Alone. Only one out of ~12 people make it to 100 days, and they’re all experienced survivalists
Sounds like this wasn’t thought through and was perhaps an emotional decision. True off-grid living takes lots of knowledge and prep. Surviving 100 days is basically conservation of resources to last till the e d. Off grid still requires shelter and resources.
For once though, their motives seem more noble/less crazy than most of the headlines. Heck, a bunch of us are here on Lemmy cause we got fed up with a system and want something better. At least they wanted something better.
I thought about going off grid in a house with a well, solar, and storage batteries. The price looked good.
Even with the house it was too marginal. One anomalous weather event would have been RIP.
I knew a guy who went to Montana to try the “cabin off the grid” life. He said we was drinking before noon after a few weeks and was in danger of becoming an alcoholic out of boredom so he moved back.
I could see that. I think the off the grid thing has been glorified by people who haven’t actually done it.
I mean, Id like to run off into the hills sometimes, but I’d probably run right back due to some combination of boredom, weather, starvation, and running out of alcohol.
Can confirm, live in Montana. Cabins are great…during the summer months. Winter rolls around and you better be prepared to be cut off from everything for a few months. Plus it’s cold as fuck. Last year where I live, we consistently saw -20F and stayed below 0F for weeks at a time. Winter here sucks, but it keeps out the riff raff for the most part ;)
Sounds tough. I dont even know how to find and catch wild ramens.
I heard you can get spaghetti from trees in some places
Italy duh
That’s easy. Set up camp and just hike over to Italy.
I understand many people are frightened in this strange world, but this is outright murder-suicide by stupidity. The kid didn’t know what’s happening to him. Don’t run away, change the world. Or -at least- try to.
amprim go brrr
So sad but at the same time LOfuckingL are people dumb!
Oh my, finally a subinstance drama 🍿
They had a 14-year old kid with them. That poor kid didn’t deserve to have been led to his death because of the adults he had no choice but to depend on.
Are you more angry at the people trying to escape the crazy system than you are at the system that drove them out?
The adult who dragged a kid along was trying to create her own system, which undeniably isolated him, subjected him to suffering, and killed him, so yeah I’m angry at that on his behalf.
She was afraid, ignorant, and uneducated. How do you think she got that way?
Well she’s from Colorado springs so I’m going to guess a steady diet of conservative propaganda…
Loss of community, loss of meaningful labor, American healthcare, probably underpaid, socially outcast, etc… Out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Where are you getting all this information about these hardships she faced? It’s certainly not in the article, so are you just making shit up?
She got that way because you personally didn’t teach her a better way of living. You’re personally responsible for these deaths, including that of the child.
Why, why would you do this, @TrismegistusMx? Why? Why?
Nobody drove them out. This was a decision she made on her own accord and by her own free will.
Her free will to run away from a system she perceived as a threat. Are you saying that you’ve been totally comfortable the last 4 years and never once considered the collapse of the system being a threat to your loved ones?
Are you saying that you’ve been totally comfortable the last 4 years and never once considered the collapse of the system being a threat to your loved ones?
Of course I’m not saying that. But I never once thought to myself “Know what would make this situation better? Starving myself and my family in the cold wilderness that none of us are prepared to endure.”
That thought was something she considered and acted upon. It’s not your fault for having such thoughts, but acting on them is always your fault. Nobody told her “You need to take your family into the mountains, or else”. She did that to herself.
Ah, so you’re projecting your insecurity on them by taking satisfaction in the idea that their way of coping with the collapse of the system got them killed, so you’re obviously more in control. If you get cancer from corporate pollution and poor food quality, there’s nothing you could have done. If you get hit by a car, it’s luck of the draw. If a Republican president outlaws your way of life, that’s just the way it is. But since they’re dead, they were obviously at fault.
Where did I say any of that?
Ironic accusing me of projecting, though.
I think there are a lot of threats in the world, I think climate change might also be a threat.
I don’t stake myself out in the antarctic in response.
Your response might be better than theirs, but you could be on the chopping block tomorrow as well. You’re still blaming the oppressed for the conditions set by their oppressors.
You’re gonna need to identify these oppressors if you want anybody to humor this ridiculous argument.
Yes, a senseless death due to Ill preparation
How would they prepare for economic collapse and the rise of fascism? They took a risk, but they might have just accelerated the inevitable.
They didn’t take a risk. Taking a risk means preparing for situations and dealing with them as they come up, and what happens happens. This lady prepared nothing. This is more like resting in the shade of the anvil suspended by twine in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. She walked out into the woods to die and just didn’t know it. It’s an awful story, she obviously didn’t feel she had options, but a little bit of reading or video would show a person very quickly that they needed more preparation than the deceased put in to have any hope it surviving an alpine winter.
Edit: grammar
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Leaving or not leaving your bed is a risk. Preparation has nothing to do with it. They obviously weren’t prepared for living in late-stage capitalism either. You’re falling victim to the just-world fallacy.
Yes, because they died in an incredibly predictable way by going out unprepared and they brought a kid to die with them.
They thought they were going to be killed by capitalism in decline.
They thought wrong, obviously.
They likely would have died in society as well, from poverty, cancer, addiction, or suicide. They were drowning in one world so they sought refuge in another. There was no happy ending in wait.
You seem very eager to justify this tragedy as if it was inevitable, and not the result of very avoidable choices. Are you okay?
They likely would have died in society as well, from poverty, cancer, addiction, or suicide
Lol great rational for killing your kid. They could possibly, maybe, die anyway so better just get it over with right? She was an idiot and her stupidity lead to the death of an innocent child.
Because they were idiots who didn’t realize how they would definitely die in nature without society to protect them.
Many people die in society as a direct result of the way society is. Are they also idiots, or are you the idiot for judging victims of oppression?
Everybody dies in nature.
There is no “system” that drove them out. This was a choice they made. A bad one.
That’s just plain ignorant.
I’d love an explanation if you don’t mind.
There’s no “system.”
Me: Gestures to everything.
…. That drove them out. You left that part out.
Is it a contest? Can’t you be angry at both the system and people endangering their children and that is enough?
Do you get mad at rabbits that run away from dogs and into the line of fire of the hunter?
Humans are not rabbits. What a terrible analogy. I get mad at any human that intentionally endangers their child. I don’t know why you don’t object to child abuse.
If you can’t understand the metaphor for what it is, then you’re below the threshold for understanding how a person living under a constant threat of starvation and death might make poor decisions. I think we’re done here. Don’t bother me again.
You could at least pretend not to be insufferable.
The same system that provides antibiotics? Have you ever grown food? It’s a lot harder than buying it at the store, even when you include the time spent working at a minimum wage job.
Nature is brutal and unforgiving, these idiots did not begin to respect it.
They could never have survived without society to care for them, the proof is that they didn’t.
The system that provides soap, food, internet, cops, homelessness, poverty, fentanyl, prisons, slavery, inequality, racism, sex discrimination, poor education, and horrendous working conditions.
They were ignorant about nature the same way you seem to be ignorant about society. Both of you risk your lives on a daily basis dealing with SYSTEMS you don’t understand.
It’s just the luck of the draw that you can sit there in high judgement and talk mad shit.
Nature provides less, most of us probably wouldn’t make it through childhood.
Not true at all. There are abundant resources in nature, but most people lack the knowledge to make use of them.
Such a victim.
You make foolish assumptions. I’m a homeowner, a veteran, and a registered nurse. I recognize suffering because I devote every day to helping sufferers. One doesn’t need to be a victim to have empathy.
Believe in many stupid trending ideas and you will end up killing yourself and your family. This is not the first time and it will happen again.
Indeed… this is a major life change, not just a “we’ll pop off the grid for a week to chill out and definitely not die of botulism”.
This is very sad, and preventable.
Reading the article it sounds like this woman unfortunately just spent too much time on social media reading all the doom and gloom of the media and people amplifying it in places like reddit, Twitter and Facebook.
wanted to live in a land disconnected from the world, which she viewed as chaotic and dangerous
she and her teenage son could be happy and safe away from the news, the viruses, the politics of modern-day America
had been “discouraged with the state of the world”
Rebecca Vance’s fears intensified during the pandemic
Consuming too much of this crap has really affected peoples mental health, from Trump, to BLM riots, racism, covid, it’s broken some people who spend too much time on social media.
So much so that they think the only way out is to hide away from society.
Reminder, friends, to take frequent and extensive breaks from social media for your own mental health.
You can’t lump in blm riots in there, those were protests stoked to violence by police officers, so what you should be saying it’s, corrupt police forces resulting in blm protests
Man gotta love when those protesters storm the local grocery store to fight social injustice. BLM!
You can’t deny that there is something fascinating about this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUO8secmc0g
Maybe I’m being too generous, but I was reading it as this person consumed too much media, including lies and exaggerations, and it warped their world view. I guess I read it as a topic like and not calling them riots themselves. Kinda like the “race riot” in Tusla, but idk.
The BLM “riots” were 99% protests where the only violence was on the part of the cops harassing protesters.
100%. Some people exploited the riots to break into stores but they were the significant minority, and additionally some were outed as bad actors who actually didn’t support the movement.
Please, I knew people who were exactly the same back in the 90s, there are always people who go down the paranoia rabbit hole and don’t come back out.
Lot of them were praying for the collapse because that’s when God would raise them above the wicked heathens and sodomites because they’re secretly special but everyone else is too evil to admit it.
The article said the poor kid was homeschooled, which is often a hallmark of religious fundamentalism. Not trusting the world and thinking it’s out to get you is also a hallmark of fundamentalism - but also of mental illness.
She’s from Colorado Springs (massive conservative area) and she became concerned about the world and wanted to live off the grid in 2022 (when Trump lost). The writer of this article sure does beat around the bush and struggles not to say whether she was a right wing nut.
And remember that despite some unique large scale issues we have today, there were much, MUCH worse times to be alive. “Majority of Americans live a peaceful life and die at 70-80” is not reportable news but still largely true.
Things are far from perfect, there are major issues, but I’d choose to live today than almost the entirety of human existence previously.
There were definitely way more violent times in the US: there were pandemics, there were revolts, there were wars. We live in an amazing time but it takes a bit of grand perspective to realize that all the bad news is easy to see in a matter of minutes. You can have death and destruction delivered right into your home in a matter of milliseconds. It’s much much harder to see all the wonderful things happening in the world
she and her teenage son could be happy and safe away from the news, the viruses, the politics of modern-day America
Just close the apps. That’s literally all it takes to avoid like 90% of the crap that she’s talking about. But the viruses… did she think those don’t make it to the forest or something?
The teenager — whom Jara described as a smart and caring son who had been a “mama’s boy” and had been home-schooled
The only food found at their shelter was a single package of ramen
Not reading Twitter has a tangible impact on my anxiety. You can feel it rise when I used it, fell away when I stopped.
I haven’t used Facebook in almost 2 years now and it’s so nice
Imagine not giving up when out of food and cold
During winter, in bad weather it might take a while to get back to civilization if you are somewhere out there. I mean sure you should always plan for stuff like that and be prepared (and look for help well before running out), but this really wasn’t a well planned thing from the start.
Imagine not giving up when out of food and cold
Running out of food would bother me more than running out of cold
running out of cold
Lmao
With the way climate change is going, we’ll be running out of cold pretty soon.
If they had read a few more books on survival, this would have been prevented.
Usually those books tell you that you need provisions through winter and if you don’t, you need to get those provisions from someplace.
Nobody typically lives 100% off the grid the first year or more unless they’re a super expert.
You also need someone who isn’t with you to know where you are and arrange check-ins of some sort, or at least give them a time frame of when they can expect to hear from you again if all is well.
Starvation and cold. So sad
I feel like Humans don’t understand how fragile we are
They should all have Fragile branded on their foreheads at birth.
Think they rule the world and then a tiny mosquito wipes them out.
How did they leave a car at a campsite for months and not have any kind of search and rescue triggered?
My buddy got lost on a trail once and had to do an shitty night out in the woods, the next morning there were forest service personnel out looking for him because they spotted his car parked overnight with no camp permit posted.
I thought this was standard practice at every national and state park. An unattended vehicle is seen as a sure sign that someone is in trouble. I guess I’m never going hiking in Colorado, cause if I get in trouble the CO forest personnel are apparently just going to leave me for dead.
From what I’ve read they weren’t in a sanctioned Park, this was more of a back country area tucked away in the woods.
You’re right… National Forest… Not a park
The forest service is still supposed to check for abandoned vehicles overnight, as is the best way to check for lost hikers
Why didn’t they just get back in the car and head back to civilization?
The roads would have gotten buried with snow. One snowy day would do it. By the time they realized it, too late. Those forest service roads are not plowed.
Probably froze overnight while sleeping. Between hypothermia and malnutrition, sometimes people just never wake up.
They must have made some sort of effort to hide the vehicle, or park it somewhere it wouldn’t be questioned for some time. If the goal is to get away from people, you don’t want your vehicle to cause someone to come looking for you.
Yeah, that’s insane. Also, now I know where to go if I ever need to store my vehicle for extended periods of time!
It wasn’t a park, so unless someone filed a missing person report the car itself wouldn’t necessarily trigger anything since people abandon all kinds of crazy shit on national forests.
“How long were they out there, sheriff?”
“I’d say 2… Maybe 3 hours?”
I wish people would realize that humans only got to where we are because we are a COMMUNAL species. We developed complex language and tool usage BECAUSE we work together. Being “off the grid” is usually isolationist and therefore extremely dangerous. We need community in order to develop and manage the resources we need to survive.
Also, we’re living in kind of an unprecedented part of history that enables is to be independent of other people in ways never before possible. So that gives people a very distorted sense of that, a lack of any notion of the importance of community. And of course this “independence” is achieved by a complete dependence on this huge ubiquitous economic machine.
I think sometimes it’s the extreme dependence that makes the attempt at off the grid freedom seem more attractive; it’s weird how the technology seems to both take away so much freedom and yet make people feel independent at the same time
I’m a world of growing instability where the inputs for modern lifehave their supply consistency threatened, learning some basic survival skills is not a bad thing. Many countries will likely have huge energy, food, and water shortfalls in the coming years. Germany is burning what amounts to wet coal to make up for losing Russian oil. Ukraine was one of the world’s biggest wheat producers. Russia produced a lot of the world’s fertilizer. There are reasons to learn how to live without the entire support network most of us take for granted.
Though you should be pretty decent at living off grid before commiting to it.
Don’t assume that you’re cougar-proof or that 40°F and below weather with no real insulation is something you can save yourself from with enough bootstraps.
theres a reason why banishment was historically a death sentence. It took communities to prosper!
Well no, there’s a difference between offgrid and alone and an offgrid commune.
The secret ingredient is commun
alism.Agreed, I’m a fan of village-regional center structure myself.
Oh, to be a seamstress, stitching clothes for the farmer’s infant son in exchange for a sack of wheat and 6 ounces of butter
Yeah let’s all go back to subsistence agriculture! Every time my mind wanders and I find myself romanticizing an age of simpler times and communal living I remind myself of the realities of that sort of lifestyle.
Hate to ask what you’d need to do for a steak… 🤐
The current infant-clothes to steak exchange rate is unfavorable. It would be wiser to hold off till the late autumn, when steak futures usually fall and clothing values skyrocket.
Reasonable. See you in the back-40.
Well, why aren’t we practicing that communal specialty into you know, bettering society from it’s current dumpster fire state? Or is that just too tall of a task?
Humans usually live in peace in groups smaller than 18. Above that, troubles hints. @nieceandtows said 40 &up here … i like (her//his) comment.
There’s also Dunbar’s number to consider for groups larger than that.
Thanks 😀 I found it here :
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number…group sizes between 69–109 and 16–42, respectively. However, enormous 95% confidence intervals (4–520 and 2–336, respectively) …
It’s dangerous to go full off the grid, but in reality it’s never complete isolation. In Leave No Trace/My Abandonment (based on a true story) the father relied on disability checks to buy goods and educated his daughter using encyclopedias… In Walden Thorough is living alone in a remote area, but it’s not like he’s completely cut off from the benefits of society and has visitors somewhat regularly. I think there’s a difference between trying to minimize the brunt of society 24/7 vs going full isolation.
Once I watched a season of alone I dropped all illusions about running into the woods to live the naturalist life.
If anyone is thinking “lol I could do that” just watch alone, it is HARD out there in the wilds.
For real though, they are straight up experts, and after 60 days, 90% of them are on the verge of death lol
Bullet points of what’s the ass kicker?
- Maintaining a balance of calories in vs out is really hard. In particular fats are extremely difficult to acquire.
- Getting almost anything done requires hard manual labor, which means you need even more calories.
- Harsh winters mean food scarcity and burning even more calories just keeping warm.
- You’re completely fucked if you get sick or injured.
- Boredom, loneliness and stress could drive you insane.
Can you expand on why fats are harder to acquire? The most immediate method I can think of is from hunting and trapping. Is this very difficult to do from a practical point of view?
Unless you are a skilled and experienced hunter and trapper, game is quite difficult to acquire. Especially if modern hunting and trapping equipment is not available.
Do you know how to hunt or set traps? Do you know how to butcher an animal without nicking a bowel and tainting the meat? Most folks don’t. I know I don’t. I would die if left out in the woods and having to fend for myself.
I can do most of that. Still would probably die due to falling from a cliff or shit.
Also tbh I’m highly pharmacodependant.
Fair enough. Even if you do end up killing something, you might not have the skills to safely prepare it for consumption.
It’s weird to me people who think they could or want to attempt to survive doing those things every. single. day. by themselves. I’ve done everything you’ve mentioned, as well as foraged for whatever couldn’t kill me or eat me first, bugs included. It’s not fun, it’s fucking brutal work and you spend most of your day hungry unless you find a good, consistent source of calories and clean water. You’re still fucked though if you live anywhere that gets a real winter, break a bone, get an infection, run into an animal that’s just as hungry as you are. Humans aren’t equipped to survive alone for very long.
All the bullet points, there’s a reason we’ve moved society in the direction we have. Everything from shoes to showers makes life tolerable.
People like to idealise primitive lifestyles. But when actual primitives are given a choice, they always choose civilization, despite the drawbacks.
If you can’t at the very least identify what mushrooms you can or can not eat in the forest, you should not go out there to live. I 100% can not, so my dumb ass will never try to go live off grid out in the woods. I can’t find food and I acknowledge that. More folks need to realize their limitations.
For most of us, going to live in “the wild” is as preposterous as us returning to the oceans we crawled out of eons ago. We’ve evolved past that, and are no longer suited for that environment, at least not naturally anyway.
I built a submarine, would you like to go
dieexplore the depths of the ocean with me?Sure, I’ll bring the chips to go with the human salsa we’ll turn into.
I don’t know, man. There are Amazon tribes who do perfectly well without iPhones. I think what you mean is, we, that is, you and me didn’t get to learn how to survive in those environments naturally and organically, simply because our societies don’t need those skills. But of course we are suited for that environment. We have opposable thumbs!
In the show Alone the take away is that fat beats skills. All of the super fit “survival experts” with 5% body fat are being carried out on stretchers in a couple of weeks. The 300lb dude with minimal skills out lasts all of the experts.
The environment just doesn’t have enough fat calories available. Skill won’t change this.
For the first few seasons sure but that Jordan guy that won season 6 was all skill and attitude.
Is he the guy that killed an elk?
I hate how people talk about off grid living as something you can pull off alone, that’s difficult even if you allow for buying food and installing all kinds of fancy infrastructure in your home.
The truth is that properly sustainable and reliable off-grid living requires a small community, because you need a lot of labour.
I am reminded of that guy who did that in Alaska solo, for like 30 years Dick Perniky or some such I believe his name was. He took video of wildlife and got it edited. I think he was 50 or there abouts when he left the lower 48.
And everyone that wanted to live off the grid wanted to get away from people.
That should be the key takeaway. Prepping or off-grid that isn’t at the community level is at best one step away from disaster.
We should learn from Lemmy, federated community is the way.
In the past it took entire villages who still engaged in trade. Even back then you were on the grid even if it was a stone age one.
You nailed it. And these folks were simply living off canned food and ramen… For how long?
Communal living is great if you get the right mix of people with a shared vision… In the right location… With the right resources… To be successful it seems you need to have a pretty organic evolution of the process and attract people with shared vision. The dark side of this devolves into cultism; the brighter side is a sustainable living and sense of belonging.
Now there are people who live off the grid in places like Alaska (just watch Life Below Zero) and do it successfully… But these people grew up doing that or studied and prepared A LOT. And man, doing that solo is not easy. None of them seemed to be super healthy or cheerful.
Right? Living off grid used to be called being banished by your tribe and it was basically a death sentence.
Casuals ruin everything
Other people are annoying as fuck, but I recognize I need them to live.
Somebody read Little House on the Prairie once and said, “I can do that!” I’m joking, but only slightly.
I read a book a while back about the real life of the author of little house on the prairie (it’s called “prairie fires”) - her books really sugarcoat how hard life was - even people who knew how to live off the land had a really hard time
Now there are people who live off the grid in places like Alaska (just watch Life Below Zero) and do it successfully… But these people grew up doing that or studied and prepared A LOT. And man, doing that solo is not easy. None of them seemed to be super healthy or cheerful.
But even in the story they went into town for food and blankets, and they didn’t try to winter in a tent.
You quoted a post other than the one to which you replied
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Kazinsky didn’t live off the grid. He worked as a teacher from time to time, and received financial support from his father.
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I don’t know this guy, but even Superman needs a backup plan in case he gets sick, and infected wound or ruins his ankle by tripping over something. Living off grid alone is just one misstep away from catastrophe.
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