HOAs will be the death of us. Our condo, we've lived in it for 13 years, paid it off before the pandemic began. We can't afford to move. We're still driving hybrid cars that are 18 years old, and hoping to God they make it another few years. Solar panels is something that we would HAPPILY invest in before we'd move. But our HOA forbids it. Something-something-about-the-aesthetic-not-being-ideal, and also that the insurance policy the complex took out on our new roofs would be invalidated by the installation of solar panels. I'm just, at this juncture, trying to accept early death and disease. What's the fucking point, I feel, with virtually EVERYONE in power (BOTH Dem and Rep) trying to hasten our demise and that of the country, and people like my husband and I? We're just drops of piss in a bucket. I do my part to prepare, but I know there is a limit, and that's all I can do.
I'm on the same page. We don't have an HOA, but I feel like we live in a place that would start one if we wrinkled too many noses with our communist compost pits. Dems and Republicans are definitely doing everything they can to speed up the collapse. On the far right, they give every indication they want it to happen even faster.
After living on the East Coast, the acronym "HOA" is a curse to us. Luckily, we refused to buy in one. We heard more than enough from people we knew who did. All you need is one self-important person to get elected to the HOA board to make everyone else miserable.
After reading this excellent essay on everything you have done and learned to do better to help with survival, it is clear to me that I am certainly doomed.
At present, we're also doomed. Alien archaeologists will find our fossilized remains with our camping stoves and preserves. They'll shrug and say, "They sure tried, didn't they?"
I refuse to believe we are truly doomed if we keep trying. Humans have persevered through far worse than what we face today, and unless we just give up I believe we can persevere still.
Thank you for such a brutally honest essay. You mentioned 30-40 year olds not having much time to get ready; imagine being 68 and having to deal with all this.
You neglected to include any discussion about ammunition…lots of ammunition. Maybe even a gun or two. I'm not a 2nd Amendment type, but I did inherit my father's shotguns and grandfather's rifle. I worry about food sources, but I also have reoccurring nightmares about trying to defend our home from well-armed marauders after the collapse of society. Should I buy an AR-15 😠 like all the peppers have, or do I make do with century-old shotguns? Or perhaps I rig the entire crawl space with explosives and take a few of them with me when I go? Talk about resale value!
Anyway, I'm glad you reminded me about bug out bags. I keep putting that off…
It is ok to fail, but failure should also be something we all experience on the road success, and I’m coming away from this wondering, “what do you suppose we do?” Cuz I know that giving up is just gonna hasten whatever bad things may come. Humanity has been through too much for us all to give up and accept armageddon.
When we traveled around the country visiting alternative type thinkers/builders...from straw bale, to tires, to sand bags, to adobe...we always would ask "what would you do differently?" It helped when we built our homestead. I built my house for $3500 by using Mike Oehler's $50 and up undergroundNo need for book, communicating with him and finding what would work better for us. That was 1984. It still works fine, keeps us warm in winter (northern Minnesota) and cool in summer. The solar panels I bought from an ad in the back of a Mother Earth News in 1983, worked for quite awhile, rudimentarily. We have some compact fluorescent lights, a 5" tv when you could still get over the air broadcasts, albeit from three sources we laughingly called Rambo, Bimbo and Dumbo. Over time we upgraded. Did without refrigeration until 1999 when we got a sunfrost fridge. Did without running water and indoor bathroom until late 2007. Hand pumped water and outhouse, our forte. Fortunately the water is great and the pump goes right into the kitchen sink. In 1994 we built my wife a studio for her wholistic health practice out of straw bales on the adjacent 40 acres we scrounged money for. We paid ten grand for the 40 and another 5 grand for a finished building. She's retired now, so I've made that into a living quarters, albeit with a hand pump for water in the kitchen sink, an outhouse and an outdoor sauna for winter bathing. Both of our places have outside propane fired showers for summer use.
I'm 76 now and she's 70. We're running out of steam, but continue to garden and put up canned goods. Still have bees, still have fruit trees. We lost our best friends the past few years. A feral family of 4 orange cats who were all bodhisatvas. They were nearing two decades old.
Always ask anyone what would you do differently. Learn from your mistakes and theirs.
Fortunately we have our earth shelter to protect us from extremes, we have been getting ample rain without too much, our drinking water is fabulous. We have a tear drop trailer outfitted as both a camping unit and a bug out vehicle.
Last year I started a vegetable garden, after many years of raising kids instead. They would have starved if there weren’t grocery stores. This year is a little better, but we’d still be starving. My rain barrel, free from a nonprofit, sat in the basement for a few years until I was ready to set it up. By then it had cracked and had a hole in it and had to be thrown out. I’m scared of canning. I have all the urban homesteading books and live on about a sixth of an acre in the city. But the clothesline has been broken for a few years, and my darning efforts have been terrible so far.
People keep talking about resilience like it’s a gym membership or a zip code. But this is the real thing. Not a YouTube homestead with perfect lighting, but a life held together with zip ties, stubbornness, and the occasional motorcycle helmet.
You’re not just surviving. You’re confessing. And that’s rarer than a working bugout bag that actually fits behind the driver’s seat.
Thank you for saying it’s okay to fail. We needed that. Because some of us are composting our shame in DIY bins next to our moldy onions and half-finished dreams.
You’ve made it sacred.
Virgin Monk Boy
(who once tried to filter rainwater through a sock and got baptized in E. coli)
This post really shows me that we’re supposed to fail. In a lot of ways, you’re way ahead of a lot of us. I will never own a home. I am struggling to figure out how to even relocate beyond the US. Many, many people are renters or can’t afford their own places at all. A huge number of people are unable to relocate. My partner and I are disabled. Even if we could be “off grid,” the chances that we’d be okay without access to our meds and health care, as shitty as it may be, are so very slim. You name the disaster, if we’re in the middle of it, there’s very little we can really do. People saying “grow your own food” are laughably out of touch with how hard it is to grow enough food, reliably, and how much space is needed for that. I’m lucky if I’ve got room for a few herbs on a balcony, and even then, I don’t have much wiggle room for the expense of soil and plant containers. We’re on food stamps. I try to stock what I can, but it’s not a huge amount. Oh, and I don’t have kids and never will. I definitely see myself offering support to kids in need…if I have any support to offer someday.
Congrats on the steps you're taking. The knowledge you are developing, plus the understanding that you can eventually get it right is likely the thing that will help the most.
Your comment about building community is probably the biggest thing. Likely, things will transition slowly, so it's good to know other people you can count on and have those relationships established before you need them.
Maybe have a 3 or 4 people over, serve them some food from your garden, talk about the things you are building and ask them if they want to help. Practice knowledge sharing. That way, you aren't responsible for holding all the information and understanding.
“Off grid anecdote”- in our state you have to be attached to the grid to have a certificate of occupancy- I don’t know if it’s the same everywhere. We have a beefy solar system with 2 power walls. During a recent storm the linepersons busted a tire, could see on their in-truck app that we were up and running, limped up here through the mud and asked to use our air compressor 😂
(our system is definitely a privilege and we used Biden’s tax rebate thingy, our system is so beefy because we are at the end of the powerlines in a exurban/rural area, and our AC still requires grid power to be comfortable- we keep it around 78/80, we use an outdoor boiler heating system in the winter and can keep the house at the same 78 while sending electricity back to the grid, but this is in NC so I’m not talking about cold cold)
What an outstanding personal essay on survivalism. Long ago I met a woman who was writing a book on the subject that was later published. I'm sure it still stands up. Maybe you'd like it. Your voice (and what it seems to say about your artist-activist sensibility) reminds me of hers. She's been doing it imperfectly ever since: as far as I know she's been working through the pandemic as a hospice nurse. She may even be grandmothering. Her three kids must be grown by now. https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B007RPRKCW/about
I had to stop and share this when I got to the "2 bathrooms" part. Here goes:
Few years back, this at least a solid decade b4 the scam-demic, my ex's mom got to the point where she decided to sell her house and bought a condominium. On the condominium there were 2.5 bathrooms. It was a nice place. But she somehow was fascinated by the fact that it had 2.5 bathrooms, so she kept on bragging to everybody about it. At one point her son went " Gee Ma' you could sh*t aaall day!"😂. I don't know what's wrong with builders in the US, they decide not to include something indispensable but add an extra of something that is already there. How does that make sense?!?!
I grew up in a house with only one bathroom. I never remember a line in front of it. Not once.
Great article. I am going to get back to my reading. Thank you so much. Great topic, considering the angle and approach.
I would quickly add, that during the scam-demic lots of home owners in Cali started building panic rooms under their houses I read. The guy who wrote the article spoke to couple construction companies owners and he was told that many keep it under lid so the neighbors don't know what one is up too for obvious reasons. So, if you have not already, you might want to consider something like that. And that could be used as extra space storage.
HOAs will be the death of us. Our condo, we've lived in it for 13 years, paid it off before the pandemic began. We can't afford to move. We're still driving hybrid cars that are 18 years old, and hoping to God they make it another few years. Solar panels is something that we would HAPPILY invest in before we'd move. But our HOA forbids it. Something-something-about-the-aesthetic-not-being-ideal, and also that the insurance policy the complex took out on our new roofs would be invalidated by the installation of solar panels. I'm just, at this juncture, trying to accept early death and disease. What's the fucking point, I feel, with virtually EVERYONE in power (BOTH Dem and Rep) trying to hasten our demise and that of the country, and people like my husband and I? We're just drops of piss in a bucket. I do my part to prepare, but I know there is a limit, and that's all I can do.
I'm on the same page. We don't have an HOA, but I feel like we live in a place that would start one if we wrinkled too many noses with our communist compost pits. Dems and Republicans are definitely doing everything they can to speed up the collapse. On the far right, they give every indication they want it to happen even faster.
After living on the East Coast, the acronym "HOA" is a curse to us. Luckily, we refused to buy in one. We heard more than enough from people we knew who did. All you need is one self-important person to get elected to the HOA board to make everyone else miserable.
After reading this excellent essay on everything you have done and learned to do better to help with survival, it is clear to me that I am certainly doomed.
At present, we're also doomed. Alien archaeologists will find our fossilized remains with our camping stoves and preserves. They'll shrug and say, "They sure tried, didn't they?"
I refuse to believe we are truly doomed if we keep trying. Humans have persevered through far worse than what we face today, and unless we just give up I believe we can persevere still.
Thank you for such a brutally honest essay. You mentioned 30-40 year olds not having much time to get ready; imagine being 68 and having to deal with all this.
You neglected to include any discussion about ammunition…lots of ammunition. Maybe even a gun or two. I'm not a 2nd Amendment type, but I did inherit my father's shotguns and grandfather's rifle. I worry about food sources, but I also have reoccurring nightmares about trying to defend our home from well-armed marauders after the collapse of society. Should I buy an AR-15 😠 like all the peppers have, or do I make do with century-old shotguns? Or perhaps I rig the entire crawl space with explosives and take a few of them with me when I go? Talk about resale value!
Anyway, I'm glad you reminded me about bug out bags. I keep putting that off…
Yes, I think without guns I’m doomed at the “raiders” part of the collapse. I won’t survive the raiders.
It is ok to fail, but failure should also be something we all experience on the road success, and I’m coming away from this wondering, “what do you suppose we do?” Cuz I know that giving up is just gonna hasten whatever bad things may come. Humanity has been through too much for us all to give up and accept armageddon.
I needed to read this today, thank you. ❤️
When we traveled around the country visiting alternative type thinkers/builders...from straw bale, to tires, to sand bags, to adobe...we always would ask "what would you do differently?" It helped when we built our homestead. I built my house for $3500 by using Mike Oehler's $50 and up undergroundNo need for book, communicating with him and finding what would work better for us. That was 1984. It still works fine, keeps us warm in winter (northern Minnesota) and cool in summer. The solar panels I bought from an ad in the back of a Mother Earth News in 1983, worked for quite awhile, rudimentarily. We have some compact fluorescent lights, a 5" tv when you could still get over the air broadcasts, albeit from three sources we laughingly called Rambo, Bimbo and Dumbo. Over time we upgraded. Did without refrigeration until 1999 when we got a sunfrost fridge. Did without running water and indoor bathroom until late 2007. Hand pumped water and outhouse, our forte. Fortunately the water is great and the pump goes right into the kitchen sink. In 1994 we built my wife a studio for her wholistic health practice out of straw bales on the adjacent 40 acres we scrounged money for. We paid ten grand for the 40 and another 5 grand for a finished building. She's retired now, so I've made that into a living quarters, albeit with a hand pump for water in the kitchen sink, an outhouse and an outdoor sauna for winter bathing. Both of our places have outside propane fired showers for summer use.
I'm 76 now and she's 70. We're running out of steam, but continue to garden and put up canned goods. Still have bees, still have fruit trees. We lost our best friends the past few years. A feral family of 4 orange cats who were all bodhisatvas. They were nearing two decades old.
Always ask anyone what would you do differently. Learn from your mistakes and theirs.
Fortunately we have our earth shelter to protect us from extremes, we have been getting ample rain without too much, our drinking water is fabulous. We have a tear drop trailer outfitted as both a camping unit and a bug out vehicle.
Be safe all. Oh, btw Jessica, if you haven't already I recommend watching 2073. Its currently on HBO Max. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2073_(film)
Last year I started a vegetable garden, after many years of raising kids instead. They would have starved if there weren’t grocery stores. This year is a little better, but we’d still be starving. My rain barrel, free from a nonprofit, sat in the basement for a few years until I was ready to set it up. By then it had cracked and had a hole in it and had to be thrown out. I’m scared of canning. I have all the urban homesteading books and live on about a sixth of an acre in the city. But the clothesline has been broken for a few years, and my darning efforts have been terrible so far.
Thank you Jessica...Your essay is filled with such excellent advice...It puts my mind at ease...
This was holy.
People keep talking about resilience like it’s a gym membership or a zip code. But this is the real thing. Not a YouTube homestead with perfect lighting, but a life held together with zip ties, stubbornness, and the occasional motorcycle helmet.
You’re not just surviving. You’re confessing. And that’s rarer than a working bugout bag that actually fits behind the driver’s seat.
Thank you for saying it’s okay to fail. We needed that. Because some of us are composting our shame in DIY bins next to our moldy onions and half-finished dreams.
You’ve made it sacred.
Virgin Monk Boy
(who once tried to filter rainwater through a sock and got baptized in E. coli)
R'amen, bro.
This post really shows me that we’re supposed to fail. In a lot of ways, you’re way ahead of a lot of us. I will never own a home. I am struggling to figure out how to even relocate beyond the US. Many, many people are renters or can’t afford their own places at all. A huge number of people are unable to relocate. My partner and I are disabled. Even if we could be “off grid,” the chances that we’d be okay without access to our meds and health care, as shitty as it may be, are so very slim. You name the disaster, if we’re in the middle of it, there’s very little we can really do. People saying “grow your own food” are laughably out of touch with how hard it is to grow enough food, reliably, and how much space is needed for that. I’m lucky if I’ve got room for a few herbs on a balcony, and even then, I don’t have much wiggle room for the expense of soil and plant containers. We’re on food stamps. I try to stock what I can, but it’s not a huge amount. Oh, and I don’t have kids and never will. I definitely see myself offering support to kids in need…if I have any support to offer someday.
I don’t know how to describe my feelings reading this. It’s hilarious and very sad at the same time. Hugs, Jessica… ❤️
Congrats on the steps you're taking. The knowledge you are developing, plus the understanding that you can eventually get it right is likely the thing that will help the most.
Your comment about building community is probably the biggest thing. Likely, things will transition slowly, so it's good to know other people you can count on and have those relationships established before you need them.
Maybe have a 3 or 4 people over, serve them some food from your garden, talk about the things you are building and ask them if they want to help. Practice knowledge sharing. That way, you aren't responsible for holding all the information and understanding.
Love your posts! Thank you for what you're doing.
“Off grid anecdote”- in our state you have to be attached to the grid to have a certificate of occupancy- I don’t know if it’s the same everywhere. We have a beefy solar system with 2 power walls. During a recent storm the linepersons busted a tire, could see on their in-truck app that we were up and running, limped up here through the mud and asked to use our air compressor 😂
(our system is definitely a privilege and we used Biden’s tax rebate thingy, our system is so beefy because we are at the end of the powerlines in a exurban/rural area, and our AC still requires grid power to be comfortable- we keep it around 78/80, we use an outdoor boiler heating system in the winter and can keep the house at the same 78 while sending electricity back to the grid, but this is in NC so I’m not talking about cold cold)
What an outstanding personal essay on survivalism. Long ago I met a woman who was writing a book on the subject that was later published. I'm sure it still stands up. Maybe you'd like it. Your voice (and what it seems to say about your artist-activist sensibility) reminds me of hers. She's been doing it imperfectly ever since: as far as I know she's been working through the pandemic as a hospice nurse. She may even be grandmothering. Her three kids must be grown by now. https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B007RPRKCW/about
This is an excellent piece. I upgraded to paid for a year.
I had to stop and share this when I got to the "2 bathrooms" part. Here goes:
Few years back, this at least a solid decade b4 the scam-demic, my ex's mom got to the point where she decided to sell her house and bought a condominium. On the condominium there were 2.5 bathrooms. It was a nice place. But she somehow was fascinated by the fact that it had 2.5 bathrooms, so she kept on bragging to everybody about it. At one point her son went " Gee Ma' you could sh*t aaall day!"😂. I don't know what's wrong with builders in the US, they decide not to include something indispensable but add an extra of something that is already there. How does that make sense?!?!
I grew up in a house with only one bathroom. I never remember a line in front of it. Not once.
Great article. I am going to get back to my reading. Thank you so much. Great topic, considering the angle and approach.
I would quickly add, that during the scam-demic lots of home owners in Cali started building panic rooms under their houses I read. The guy who wrote the article spoke to couple construction companies owners and he was told that many keep it under lid so the neighbors don't know what one is up too for obvious reasons. So, if you have not already, you might want to consider something like that. And that could be used as extra space storage.