Transcription
Want to tell you about a week, not even a crisis week, just a week. Your alarm goes off. You're already tired. Which is strange because you just woke up. But you're used to that by now. So you don't mention it, not even to yourself.
Coffee, traffic, or the train, or the home office that's somehow worse than both. Inbox, meetings about meetings, lunch at your desk, or skipped entirely. More inbox. That specific 3:00 p.m. feeling where your brain is just gone. But there are still 3 hours left. Dinner, that's fine. Screen time you didn't plan on. Sleep you don't quite get enough of. And then the alarm again.
And the thing is, you're handling it. You're showing up. You're meeting your obligations. By every measurable standard, you're doing the thing. But there's something else happening underneath that. Something that's harder to name precisely. Cuz it's not dramatic. It's quiet. It just keeps going.
The city that we lived in was never really my home. I liked my job. I did, but I'd grown up being able to just go, run around, explore, roam. Nobody was tracking me. And my kids had sidewalks and cars, and every trip to the park was me gripping their hands at every curb, carrying them through traffic. This low-level terror that just became background noise after a while. And I kept thinking, they can't just go anywhere. They can't just run. But oh well, isn't that just normal? Isn't that just what city life is? Isn't that just what you do?
But oh well in that story is doing a lot of work. It was the thing I said to myself every time something felt wrong. But I couldn't justify making it a problem. And the thing about that is, it works right up until it doesn't. That loop isn't neutral. It's not just how life is. It has a destination. And if you've been living it long enough, some part of you already knows where it's going. You just haven't been able to say it out loud because saying it out loud feels like giving up, or being ungrateful, or I don't know, like like you're one of those people that just can't hack it.
But that's not what's happening. It's that this life that you've built is slowly costing more than it's paying out. And not in a dramatic way. There's no explosions. It's just every year there's a little less of you left at the end of it. And you keep telling yourself that's just what being a responsible adult feels like. And maybe you started to do the math. Not the budget math, the other math. The what does the next 20 years of this actually look like math. And the answer isn't great. And that's not pessimism. That's your brain doing its job and telling you something is true.
The thing nobody said to me, and what I genuinely wish someone had, is this meeting your responsibilities thing doesn't mean that you have to do it in a way that slowly erodes who you are. Yes, the obligations to the people you love are real. The specific game you're playing to meet them is not mandatory.
Now, if you know me, you know I don't have a problem with failure. Failure is where all the growth is, and I believe that. There's a different kind of failing. And that's the kind I was doing. The kind you can't learn anything from because it just keeps coming at you in waves. Failing to get ahead, failing to make enough money, failing to dig out of the hole. Wave after wave. And what made it worse was the shame because those failures weren't just mine. They were landing on my family, and I was watching that happen, and I couldn't stop it.
This stuff right here is miner's lettuce. Mhm. Roughage. Actually, at this point when they open up like that they're delicious.
So there was this neighbor. He had a door. That thing made the most god-awful noise when it opened and closed. And one day I just I went at him. Yelling, the whole thing. Over a door. And I think I knew even while it was happening that the door wasn't the point. The door was a pressure relief valve, and it had finally blown. And when it did, something became clear. I was looking at this man over this completely stupid and trivial thing. And I thought, if I don't change something radically, actually change it, this is all I'm ever going to have. Not a version of this, this exactly, on repeat until I'm done. And that was the moment that I crossed the threshold, as it were. Just that thought standing in a hallway after screaming at a man about a door.
Here's the thing you need to know about that door. I had already gone over there and tried to fix it quietly. Went over there, hit it with WD-40 on the hinges. I knew I couldn't do anything about that that gunshot sound that it would make when it closed, but maybe I could quiet the hinges just a little bit. We had a 5-month-old, and nobody in the house was sleeping. Their solution was to party till 3:00 a.m. So I went over and tried to fix it. And then the cops showed up. I just thought, it doesn't even matter who's right in this situation. We needed to get out of there.
Carrie, like she always does, went on the internet, looked for homes, or whatever solution she could possibly find. And she came across this site selling land. Not a house. And and it was something that we could afford. She just sat there staring at it until she decided to turn to me and ask if this was something that I thought we could pull off. Could we move out to the middle of the woods and build our own home? And I said emphatically, yes. Absolutely. I have all of those skills. >> [laughter] >> And she went to work. She found everything that she could on the city, the county, where the stores were, how far they were, hospitals, gas stations. She pulled up all of the local traffic cameras to check the weather and get a feel for the terrain. And then she zoomed in to Google satellite as far as she possibly could and just stared at blurry trees trying to understand what it was that she was looking at. And I just knew it was perfect. So we were going to make it happen out in the middle of the woods. Build a home, build a life, do something genuinely different. I was in. It wasn't She didn't have to convince me.
What I wasn't honest about, maybe even with myself, was how ready I actually was for this adventure. I couldn't reliably start a campfire when we first got out here, and that's not an exaggeration. That's actually true. I was so out of my element, it wasn't even funny. The skills I thought I had, or thought I could figure out fast enough, I was totally wrong about most of them. And the failures kept coming. But here's what was different about all of that. Is that I was learning. The next day I'd fail a little less. Learn a little more. Fail a little less. Learn a little more. It wasn't fast. It actually took a couple of years before I really felt like I had what we needed to get by. But the thing that changed, the thing that actually mattered, was the game. I was finally playing a game with different rules. Rules that weren't stacked against me on purpose. A game I could theoretically win. And I was getting better at it every single day.
Here's what I actually found on the other side. And I want to be careful here because I don't want to sell you a dream. That's not what this is. What I found was a different set of rules. And that's it. Not paradise, not a life without hard work. Honestly, more physical work than I ever had done before. But the math is different. When your cost of living drops significantly, and when you own land instead of servicing debt on something that you will never actually own, producing a meaningful portion of what you consume, the equation changes.
Look what this opened up. That's a wild currant bush. And it looks like looks like it's trying real hard to make berries. Yep. Look at all them.
An old mentor of mine, Will, a 90-year-old rancher who used to be a manager of an IBM plant back when IBM made typewriters, he said to me something that I couldn't unhear. When you trade hours for dollars, your skills and effort have a value. That's how you get paid. What I didn't know until Will told me is that the company bills out some multiple of that to their clients. Maybe 1.5 or three or five times. So the company actually captures most of the value your effort generates and keeps it. And in exchange gives you the security of a job that in an at-will employment state is only secure until it isn't. It's not a broken system. It's a working one. It's extracting value from you exactly as it's designed. I would rather do something where, no matter how much effort I put in, I get 100% of it back. That's what homesteading gave me. Not ease, not security in the conventional sense, but the full return on my own effort, that math I can live with.
There are other games with genuinely different odds. Lower cost of living, land ownership, producing your own food, these aren't escape fantasies. They're alternative financial architectures. The numbers work, I've run them. They work differently than what you were taught, but they work.
But here's the part I don't really love telling, but it's the most important part. We did at some point think the grass was greener back on the other side and we moved back to the city. I got offered a real job making good money, a hundred grand a year, and I took it. And I want to be honest with you about why. Because it wasn't just the money. I genuinely believed that I had finally become the person who could do it. That I'd worked hard enough, gotten skilled enough, gotten good enough at what I was doing that I could beat the odds. That the system that hadn't worked for me before would work now because I was different. And that was a choice. And I made it.
A hundred grand a year in a city and we were always just scraping by. The alarm, the coffee, the traffic, the work, it became a blur. And I wasn't living much of a life inside that blur. But I kept moving because that's what you do, right? You keep moving. Until one day I just went numb. Not sad, not angry, just numb. Like the signal had finally cut out.
I was in a meeting with my boss one day and he tells me he didn't want to keep paying me for what I was doing. And I want to be clear, he's a good guy. At the time I was going back and fixing solar and battery systems that I had designed and sold, systems I'd assumed our installers would get right, and they just couldn't. So my boss was paying for the same system three times over and it was gnawing at him to say the least. But the thing is, I didn't want to be doing what I was doing either. So we were sort on the same page in that way. And sitting in that meeting, I had one of those moments where things just like came into focus. Everything got clear very fast. And what came out of my mouth was, "It's okay." Because I want to go home. And that was it.
So here's the thing I actually want to say to you without dressing it up. The life you're living right now was a choice. I know it might not have felt like one. I know it probably felt like the only reasonable option or like things just unfolded and you were following the path that made sense, but it was a choice. A series of choices made under real pressure with real constraints. I'm not diminishing that, but choices nonetheless. Which means a different life is also a choice available to you.
I'm not telling you to blow up your life tomorrow. I'm not telling you that homesteading is the answer or that moving to land is what you specifically need. I don't know what you need, but I know this. You are allowed to question the game that you're playing. You are allowed to look at the odds and decide they don't work for you. You are allowed to find a different game. Pig pen.
And I think the thing that would have helped me most earlier is just someone saying that clearly. Not, "Here's how you do it." But just, "You're allowed to." Like explicitly. Because there's this voice that keeps telling you that wanting out is selfish or irresponsible or naive. And sometimes you just need someone to say, "No, actually wanting a life that doesn't slowly consume you is not a character flaw." The real risk isn't leaving. The real risk is staying inside something that guarantees the outcome you're already afraid of and calling that safety.
That's what this channel's about. Not a perfect life. Not an easy life. A different game with different rules that we're figuring out in real time. And if that's useful to you, stick around.