This Christmas I was rather remiss with messaging people and wishing them a Happy Christmas and New Year. Mostly because I focused on doing the things that needed doing for my family to have a relaxed time over the holidays.
On Christmas day we basically didn’t even get out of out PJs and just watched the kids go nuts with their presents, which thanks to my wife was a literal mountain of odds and ends. She also got me some nice tops and colognes.
She wanted to go crazy with Christmas dinner but I finally managed to break through the usual female delusion that whatever they imagine is reality —the five small crazy people running around the house helped of course— they tend to break through most self-inflicted delusions of blissful parenting, and she finally realised no one cared for a specific Christmas dinner as she envisioned it, and everyone was happier just chilling out and eating random stuff and pigging out on panettone and biscuits. Including her since she did not have to stress herself out making an elaborate dinner.
The point of all this is that with our phones mostly ignored and just normal, in real life stuff going on, it was really quite awesome.
My eldest daughter taught the 4 and 5 year old to play the card game go fish. The littlest one (she’s just turned 2) got a baby Yoda stuffed toy that she absolutely loves, because she has been addicted to watching the Mandalorian. She literally likes it more than anyone else except maybe the little viking, but even he does not follow the plot as much as she does.
I even managed to read a couple of pages of one of the books that has been on my bedside for the last six months.
But above all, this time has driven home deeply how artificial most of our lives have become.
We are not meant to spend 8-13 hours a day sitting at a desk shuffling electrons from one spreadsheet and email to another poor bastard in some other office doing the same. And even if you are earning millions, which most people in that situation are absolutely not, you can’t enjoy it really. So you may have the nice house and the big cars, and the two week holiday in Bora-Bora, but IF you have children, they are being raised by strangers and you see them less than those strangers do. They are spending hours and hours and hours a day being indoctrinated in ways you don’t even realise are control mechanisms. Like for example, if one kid keeps bugging you and shoving you, and you punch them right in the mouth, that now means you’re a bad kid. Which of course is complete bullshit. And when they are small what do they really learn? What do they really need? They need to be able to rear, write and do math well.
All the rest they can learn faster and deeper at home and without any of the nonsense. You can certainly interest any kid in the Roman empire, or the real history of Christianity, or the (real) reasons for WWI and WWII along with the politically acceptable version to skate by the zombies that still outnumber us.
All while showing them also how to drive a tractor, recognise different plants and animals, teaching them how to track and hunt, cook, keep house, use a spreadsheet to keep track of things, figure out how to survey a piece of land, deal with things like bills and figuring out stuff they never teach you in school. Especially things related to alternative energy sources and so on, as well as classical physics and chemistry. Certainly everything taught at elementary school can be better done at home by any reasonably educated parent that is working as a farmer at home, all while playing/working at the daily things that you need to do on any farm.
And is farm life hard? It sure is.
It’s certainly not for anyone wanting an easy life without physical effort, and it certainly isn’t the idyllic and easy life that pretend-homesteaders on YouTube would have you believe. Especially the ones who in reality have other income which is actually what they really live on.
Even the ones that are not flat out lying about how they live, what they grow and where their food come from, can, inadvertently and unintentionally, give a false impression to people who simply have no concept of how life works when you are really trying to live off the land as your main source of income.
Despite all this, if you plan a little ahead, it is without a doubt a more satisfying way to live than most.
The main issues are to reduce any recurring costs, which means things like land taxes (in the USA at least), electricity and water bills, any recurring services like phones or internet costs, petrol, gas, diesel, and of course the basics of food.
After that, even if you did have enough space and know-how to raise animals, say some chickens and a couple of pigs for butchering and say a few goats too, the maintenance to keep them fed, alive, and protected from predators is not nothing.
And the food you might grow is dependent on the weather and many other factors that are often out of your control.
The ideal situation is you having the property with no debt, some regular income that hopefully is from passive income, and enough savings to tide you over while you learn how to make yourself more self-sufficient. Even then, emergencies or sudden injuries or illness can wipe out your safety margin quite instantly.
These are all realities you need to face and some of them that you didn’t consider will hit you too. And keep in mind that in my professional opinion, being a farmer is at least as dangerous as being a full time martial arts student or instructor in terms of potential injuries, and more dangerous than being a professional bodyguard.
Despite all this, if you manage to make yourself self-sufficient and essentially able to survive even in the event of the proverbial zombie apocalypse, you will be part of a new kind of “elite”, that is, people who no longer need to rely on the conventional dictates of those who run this world through fiat money, bureaucracy, blackmail and force.
The plan is to become immune from the pressure of fiat money first (hopefully you are immune from blackmail as long as you’re not a child rapist on film like many so-called hollywood “stars”), then organise to take over the local bureaucracy so you become immune from rules that you can avoid or countermand officially (or the other way around, whichever you can do first) which is why settling in small hamlets out if the way and populated by like-minded people is step one.
Eventually, if you are successful, force too will be brought to bear on your community, so plan ahead and remember that a smaller but determined force with skin in the game almost always can resist a larger force that is mandated by people and reasons that are completely disconnected from the people on the ground supposed to execute them.
So, yes, real life is “harder” than living online and being a wage slave. But really… is it?
Only you can answer that question, and ultimately it answers the question as to wether you are the type that prefers a gilded cage over your own freedom.
And just like on the dojo floor, all your words and social media posts mean absolutely nothing when compared to the physical reality of your actions. Or lack thereof.
As usual, the point is always the same: Know Yourself.
And if you are a wage-slave type, just admit it and stop lying to yourself.
And if you are not, nothing they do will be able to keep you down anyway, so my posts will hopefully just save you time and effort in terms of what to prepare for and what to avoid.
IRL beats everything
This Christmas I was rather remiss with messaging people and wishing them a Happy Christmas and New Year. Mostly because I focused on doing the things that needed doing for my family to have a relaxed time over the holidays.
On Christmas day we basically didn’t even get out of out PJs and just watched the kids go nuts with their presents, which thanks to my wife was a literal mountain of odds and ends. She also got me some nice tops and colognes.
She wanted to go crazy with Christmas dinner but I finally managed to break through the usual female delusion that whatever they imagine is reality —the five small crazy people running around the house helped of course— they tend to break through most self-inflicted delusions of blissful parenting, and she finally realised no one cared for a specific Christmas dinner as she envisioned it, and everyone was happier just chilling out and eating random stuff and pigging out on panettone and biscuits. Including her since she did not have to stress herself out making an elaborate dinner.
The point of all this is that with our phones mostly ignored and just normal, in real life stuff going on, it was really quite awesome.
My eldest daughter taught the 4 and 5 year old to play the card game go fish. The littlest one (she’s just turned 2) got a baby Yoda stuffed toy that she absolutely loves, because she has been addicted to watching the Mandalorian. She literally likes it more than anyone else except maybe the little viking, but even he does not follow the plot as much as she does.
I even managed to read a couple of pages of one of the books that has been on my bedside for the last six months.
But above all, this time has driven home deeply how artificial most of our lives have become.
We are not meant to spend 8-13 hours a day sitting at a desk shuffling electrons from one spreadsheet and email to another poor bastard in some other office doing the same. And even if you are earning millions, which most people in that situation are absolutely not, you can’t enjoy it really. So you may have the nice house and the big cars, and the two week holiday in Bora-Bora, but IF you have children, they are being raised by strangers and you see them less than those strangers do. They are spending hours and hours and hours a day being indoctrinated in ways you don’t even realise are control mechanisms. Like for example, if one kid keeps bugging you and shoving you, and you punch them right in the mouth, that now means you’re a bad kid. Which of course is complete bullshit. And when they are small what do they really learn? What do they really need? They need to be able to rear, write and do math well.
All the rest they can learn faster and deeper at home and without any of the nonsense. You can certainly interest any kid in the Roman empire, or the real history of Christianity, or the (real) reasons for WWI and WWII along with the politically acceptable version to skate by the zombies that still outnumber us.
All while showing them also how to drive a tractor, recognise different plants and animals, teaching them how to track and hunt, cook, keep house, use a spreadsheet to keep track of things, figure out how to survey a piece of land, deal with things like bills and figuring out stuff they never teach you in school. Especially things related to alternative energy sources and so on, as well as classical physics and chemistry. Certainly everything taught at elementary school can be better done at home by any reasonably educated parent that is working as a farmer at home, all while playing/working at the daily things that you need to do on any farm.
And is farm life hard? It sure is.
It’s certainly not for anyone wanting an easy life without physical effort, and it certainly isn’t the idyllic and easy life that pretend-homesteaders on YouTube would have you believe. Especially the ones who in reality have other income which is actually what they really live on.
Even the ones that are not flat out lying about how they live, what they grow and where their food come from, can, inadvertently and unintentionally, give a false impression to people who simply have no concept of how life works when you are really trying to live off the land as your main source of income.
Despite all this, if you plan a little ahead, it is without a doubt a more satisfying way to live than most.
The main issues are to reduce any recurring costs, which means things like land taxes (in the USA at least), electricity and water bills, any recurring services like phones or internet costs, petrol, gas, diesel, and of course the basics of food.
After that, even if you did have enough space and know-how to raise animals, say some chickens and a couple of pigs for butchering and say a few goats too, the maintenance to keep them fed, alive, and protected from predators is not nothing.
And the food you might grow is dependent on the weather and many other factors that are often out of your control.
The ideal situation is you having the property with no debt, some regular income that hopefully is from passive income, and enough savings to tide you over while you learn how to make yourself more self-sufficient. Even then, emergencies or sudden injuries or illness can wipe out your safety margin quite instantly.
These are all realities you need to face and some of them that you didn’t consider will hit you too. And keep in mind that in my professional opinion, being a farmer is at least as dangerous as being a full time martial arts student or instructor in terms of potential injuries, and more dangerous than being a professional bodyguard.
Despite all this, if you manage to make yourself self-sufficient and essentially able to survive even in the event of the proverbial zombie apocalypse, you will be part of a new kind of “elite”, that is, people who no longer need to rely on the conventional dictates of those who run this world through fiat money, bureaucracy, blackmail and force.
The plan is to become immune from the pressure of fiat money first (hopefully you are immune from blackmail as long as you’re not a child rapist on film like many so-called hollywood “stars”), then organise to take over the local bureaucracy so you become immune from rules that you can avoid or countermand officially (or the other way around, whichever you can do first) which is why settling in small hamlets out if the way and populated by like-minded people is step one.
Eventually, if you are successful, force too will be brought to bear on your community, so plan ahead and remember that a smaller but determined force with skin in the game almost always can resist a larger force that is mandated by people and reasons that are completely disconnected from the people on the ground supposed to execute them.
So, yes, real life is “harder” than living online and being a wage slave. But really… is it?
Only you can answer that question, and ultimately it answers the question as to wether you are the type that prefers a gilded cage over your own freedom.
And just like on the dojo floor, all your words and social media posts mean absolutely nothing when compared to the physical reality of your actions. Or lack thereof.
As usual, the point is always the same: Know Yourself.
And if you are a wage-slave type, just admit it and stop lying to yourself.
And if you are not, nothing they do will be able to keep you down anyway, so my posts will hopefully just save you time and effort in terms of what to prepare for and what to avoid.
May God show you the way.
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