• Pons_Aelius
      link
      fedilink
      19
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      Yes, it is.

      But most are not willing to completely leave the society that supports them.

      They want all the benefits of living in a modern nation while ignoring all the laws that make a modern nation actually function.

      • @Jiggle_Physics@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        1311 months ago

        There is always the need to pay tax on land you own or risk some government agency kicking you off the land you are on when they find your place. However, you definitely can separate yourself from society as you stated. It’s a hard fucking life you are looking at though.

        • @Zink@programming.dev
          link
          fedilink
          410 months ago

          And by definition, the people who succeeded at leaving civilization aren’t updating the bros on Facebook or getting pulled over on city streets.

          That would make the ones we get to see anything about… the failures!

          • @Jiggle_Physics@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            410 months ago

            From what I have seen, as my family has some personal connections to people like this, they seem to be either very well educated, highly skilled, people who have deep trauma from war (military friends), felt they could no longer live in normal society, and knew they had the skills to do this. So they went out there.

            Others were people who sort of always just felt “the call of the wild” so-to-speak. They grew up learning what they would need to know, working on those skills, and pushing their envelope until they felt they had established the capacity to make the move both in regards to the skills to do it, and the financial position to start it off. These people are often very intelligent, driven, and interesting people. They usually have spouses and sometimes kids.

            Then there are the people like this. Originally most of these people were very mentally ill. Various paranoia disorders, or illnesses that also include paranoia. However, over the past ~30 years, there has been a gradual increase in people who are just naive, disaffected, people with poor critical thought skills. These people generally fell down some rabbit hole and found a community that accepts them. Unfortunately this community is… well, this stuff. They say that in the last decade it has exploded though. They worry that their remote homesteads will be surrounded by neighbors, shit neighbors, and the success rate for these people is like 1%, if that. It was always low, and even people who succeeded often would move back into society when they started to get old, but now it’s almost guaranteed to fail. However they seem to be sustaining, as a group, and it bothers them.

            The smallest group are people with lots of money, who get on the fad waves of this stuff when it spikes in popularity. This often happens when a successful TV show comes out, or there is a spike in these movements online. These people show up in $70k trucks with trailers carrying $100k in tools. Over the next few months there is an explosion of activity as contractors come in and out setting up a luxury life far out in the woods. These people will do a few hours of something here and there, declare all they accomplished, by themselves, with grit alone. Then get bored way out in the middle of nowhere and move back to a metropolitan area.

            • @Zink@programming.dev
              link
              fedilink
              110 months ago

              Yeah, that division makes sense to me. The people that really want to, do, and the people who just need something to talk about, talk.

        • Pons_Aelius
          link
          fedilink
          410 months ago

          The open ocean.

          There are thousands of uninhabited island around the world.

          Sealand.

          None of these are easy options but for people who want to be out from under the yoke of government it will be a small price to pay for total freedom.

          • @merc@sh.itjust.works
            link
            fedilink
            410 months ago

            Name an island that isn’t owned by a country.

            Sealand is a joke. The guy who “owns” it doesn’t even live there. When there was a fire there they had to rely on a Royal Air Force helicopter to rescue someone and take them to a British hospital. The fires were put out by local (British) fire tugs. If the British had cared at any point they would have retaken their lost territory.