Here’s one thing we can all probably agree on:
We live on the grid.
If you’re sitting here reading this, you have a phone or a computer. You have electricity. You might even have running water and AC. Most of us do. We probably have a backup plan in case all of that goes down, but we’re still here enjoying these modern conveniences while they last.
Of course, the grid hasn’t always been here. When my dad was growing up, the grid was still a relatively new thing. Outhouses were still pretty common. Patrick Stewart? He grew up without indoor plumbing.
His family shared bathwater.
Millions of us are bracing for what’s coming at the end of this decade and beyond. We’re also dealing with what’s already here. The deadly heat waves. The storms. The floods. The shortages. The collapse of our warning systems. The death of disaster recovery agencies. The people who collect our tax money are collectively giving us the finger. They don’t want us to have vaccines. They don’t want us to have public radio. They don’t even want us to have weather forecasts.
Why?
Because they need us working through tornadoes and hurricanes. Close Starbucks for an evacuation? In the words of Greta, “How dare you!”
As this reality settles over the public, prepping has started to go mainstream. Sure, our neighbors still want to have us committed for growing tomatoes in our back yard. At least on the internet, it’s no longer fringe.
So we hear this a lot now:
“I live off the grid.”
We don’t need to bash anyone for trying to live off the grid, or saying they live off the grid. It’s a noble pursuit. And yet, it’s worth talking in more detail about what that means. We’re approaching a day when we’re all going to live off the grid, because the grid won’t be here anymore—at least not for us. Even in the most optimistic sense, it’s going to be unreliable. Our need for electricity and clean running water will come second to a data center’s need to feed MechaHitler.
Here’s a better way to think about it: The grid isn’t going away.
It’ll just become inaccessible.
The grid will continue to exist. We still might even be “on” it, technically. But the power bills will soar as our budgets shrink. So will the water bills. Compared to the way we’re living now, it’s going to feel like we’re off the grid. We’ll need other ways to cook food and keep cool, store food, do laundry…
I’ve written about these alternatives, and I keep doing research about how we can adapt to a world where billionaires have made the planet uninhabitable and our governments have told us to kiss off, if they’re not herding us into camps (which started even sooner than we thought).
But we’re never going to live off the grid.
This phrase presumes there’s a way to live on our own, without any kind of larger network or supply chain. In the history of civilization, that’s a pretty rare thing. We often think about the original homesteaders, but they weren’t trying to flee civilization. They were trying to take civilization with them to the frontier. Some of them even still worked jobs for part of the year, to earn money, so they could buy their homesteading tools and supplies.
More than half of the original homesteaders failed. These were people with the knowledge and skills to live off the land.
They still didn’t make it.
It’s a little amusing to watch homesteading videos where the guy still rents construction equipment to get the job done. All of these people still go to hospitals when they encounter serious injuries and illnesses. A few years ago, I watched a prepper shoot off his thumb and then ride a medevac chopper to an emergency room, where they sewed his digit back on.
That’s very much on the grid.
If you were truly living off the grid, you wouldn’t have a gun to shoot yourself with in the first place. But if you did, you wouldn’t be riding a helicopter to an emergency room full of doctors who could sew fingers and toes back onto you. You’d be cauterizing that wound, chugging mead, and praying to your favorite deity you didn’t die from blood loss or infection. That’s living off the grid.
It sounds like fun.
No matter how remote we feel, we’re living on a reliable grid. Or at least, we’ve been living on one up until very recently. We could run our projects out in the woods, but if nature overwhelmed us, we had a fallback option.
The grid provided sanctuary.
Of course, it’s been providing less and less of that. In some cases, it never did. Ask the residents of Flint. Ask the residents of Baton Rouge, or any of the other cities where governments took their tax money, and instead of investing it in water treatment plants or power relay stations, they gave it to some tech overlord, hoping it would convince them to open up a distribution center.
Nonetheless, something of a grid has persisted for millions of us.
If we got lost in the woods on our survival challenge, Harrison Ford would show up in a helicopter and rescue us. The crazy part is that it’s kinda true. Harrison Ford has actually rescued boy scouts in a helicopter.
But Nazis have taken over our government.
And Indiana Jones is 83.
Many of us live on an invisible grid. It’s not there in front of us all the time, in the form of a car or a gas station down the street, but it’s there. If someone buys water filters for their rain harvesting system, they live on the grid. If they use hammers and nails from a hardware store, they live on the grid. If they use anything that was ever made in a factory, even if it was made decades ago, they live on the grid. If they ever post online, they live on the grid.
If they read a local weather forecast, they live on the grid. They’re just not thinking about all those satellites and weather balloons floating around all over the place. They’re not thinking about the thousands of meteorologists who analyze that data and present it to us in colorful maps. That’s the grid.
That doesn’t mean they’re cheating.
It doesn’t knock their street cred.
It’s just the truth.
There’s a lot of value in trying to wean ourselves off the grid as much as we can. Every little thing we can do now will make life more manageable in the future. I’m very much a fan of ruggedizing. Find ways to do your daily tasks without the grid. Practice them, at least every now and then.
Enjoy the grid, but start adapting now.
But don’t kid yourself.
One of the biggest traps we can fall into is overconfidence, thinking we’re ready for a grid collapse when we’re not. Another trap is assuming everyone else can do what we’re doing. A lot of them can’t. If someone is in a position to judge, they’re also in a position to help. Let’s do that instead.
More and more of us are going to find out what it really means to live off the grid. Even those of us who grew up sharing bathwater like Patrick Stewart are going to be in for a string of big surprises, and we’re not always going to see them coming. Preppers who live off the grid now are going to find out what it’s like when the invisible grid around them falls apart.
Right now, nobody really lives off the grid. They’ve either forfeited the most visible parts of the grid, or they never had access to it.
The grid isn’t going to go away. It’s going to exist for the technocrats for a long time. I’m not sure who they’re planning to sell nano lattes and robot girlfriends to when we’re all sharing bathwater and turnip stew, but I don’t think our dystopian struggles will register on their radar. They won’t care.
For now, nobody lives off the grid.
Nobody.
This bit got me: "If someone is in a position to judge, they’re also in a position to help. Let’s do that instead." That should be a tattooed banner ad for all people reading and responding to shit on the internet. Enjoyed the article and agree.
Maybe even go a step further, isn't the grid kinda the point in the sense that we all rely on each other to make the world cooler than being alone? I get not wanting to rely on "the man" but not leaning on any human seems a little counterproductive too.
Posturer: "I live off the grid"
Me: " then explain how you received this comment. "