I have this dream, where I wake up in the morning to no other sound than leaves rustling in the breeze. I step onto the recycled barn wood floorboards that I laid down with my own two hands (with the help of friends), put on a robe and walk to the kitchen. On my way, I pass by the window that overlooks the garden and I think I’ll go out in an hour to see if any beans are ready. I don’t turn on the lights because I’m conserving the solar energy I’ve stored up over the past few days and besides, sunlight is already streaming in through the skylight. I cut myself a slice of homemade bread and spread it with blueberry preserves (made by my neighbor who swapped it for two bottles of milk from my goat) and think about what I’ll do today. There’s a lot: I’ve got gardening and laundry, and I have to pickle some of those veggies before they go bad. But I’m also going down to the county hospital to see some clients this afternoon (because in this fantasy I’ve already graduated from school and am a practicing occupational therapist). And I have to check the mail because I forgot to do that yesterday.
I don’t get that much junk mail any more because I don’t buy that much. My name and address has slipped off catalog companies’ lists. I don’t get utility bills any more because I harvest my energy. But there is one letter that arrives every month, without fail– it’s the bill from my educational loan company and it’s $1,200 a month.
And then *POP* just like that, my back-the-land bubble bursts. I rub the sleep from my eyes and blink: Ah yes, here I am. Back in Brooklyn, in school full time, pursuing a masters degree, racking up the loans.
After spending my twenties trying out different kinds of jobs and thinking hard about what my life’s work should be, I decided upon occupational therapy. I’m excited to be entering this field in which health is viewed in terms of the whole person and the goal is to empower people to live their lives fully, regardless of whatever disabilities they may have. But right now I am in graduate school and I’m paying for it. Or rather, my future self is paying for it.
I am admittedly romantic about my off-the-grid fantasies but even when I am a little more level-headed about it and think in terms of smaller steps away from the mainstream consumer lifestyle, I am not quite sure how it’s going to work out. When I think of how I’d like to be living five or ten years from now, making a pile of money doesn’t factor into it. I’d like to become more and more of a producer instead of a consumer, a creator instead of a buyer. On the continuum of time versus money, I’d like to be farther over on the time side. But right now, it seems, that in order to make my monthly loan payments, I’m going to have to work like a dog, or rather, like an American (a 40+ hour week, with two weeks of vacation a year) in order to earn enough to retro-actively finance my education.
Now, you may say, I’ve made my choice. I chose to participate in the system, so these are the rules of the game. It costs money to play the game. The system pays you so you can play. I will have an income that pays in dollars. Some people make choices to work outside the system. They don’t get paid in cash, but in the life they have built, the cash isn’t as useful as food, fuel, land and labor. These are the ways of our friends the radical homemakers. I cheer them on! I draw energy from their spirit! I marvel at their creative lives! I envy their higher education degrees earned debt-free and parents who agreed to take over their loan payments (as was the case for a few who were interviewed in the book Radical Homemakers.
So what do we do? We, the ever-growing number of young people with mountains of school loans (for just one mere example, see some of the profiles of these debt-ridden folks) both work to earn the money we owe, and live like human beings and maybe even creative, productive ones at that? I want to bake my own bread and eat it too but my growing fear is that I’m only going to have time for take-out once I step onto money-making hamster wheel.
Your post rang deep with me .. I am in school for Chinese medicine racking up an insane price tag for loans. I can’t imagine learning and doing anything else but my husband who is from Argentina where school debt does not exist and his sister do plan on buying land in te future and creating this life which I hope that we can make happen as I will owe as much as half a house..
thanks for replying, lauren. i hope a lot of folks will write. this is a new and evolving problem for our generation (and those that follow) and who knows how it will all work out. but i am glad we are talking about it and thinking creatively about it together…
Hey,
Great first paragraph. Just some feedback from a writing stand point, I would re-word….”I cut myself” when referring to the “slice of homemade bread.” I understand the perfect-ness of the sentence structure, but due to the first three words and how the copy appears on the screen. I would recommend re-doing that one part to make it more aesthetically appealing for this electronic format. I appreciate how you want to express the freshness/naturalness of the moment, but it caught me off guard and I thought I was about to start reading a Rocky Horror story all of a sudden. I never reply to these things, ever. I just wanted to give you some honest feedback.
Take Care,
AM
Howdy Bluejay,
I’m 45 and just finished getting my student loans paid off, and that wouldn’t have happened just yet if I hadn’t inherited a little money from my grandmother. I’m not a back to the lander by any means, but even while I was deep in debt I still found the time to have a small garden which allowed me to can my own salsa and make pickles and kraut. It does not take a lot of time or money to do that. I still worked a 40 hour day job through the whole of it.
I live up in Maine so I’m sure its easier here than in Brooklyn, but maybe there are community gardens plots down there? Point is, don’t worry and don’t wait to do the things you want. Gardening and canning (and foraging for wild things) don’t have to wait.
Good luck to you, your dreams are good ones.
ahhhhh, Maine…….
I take the stance of (Good) Will Hunting concerning education – what are you paying for?
I find your story sad. I do live the life you dream about – I am in the process of moving into my home on 40 acres off-grid that I built myself with the help of my friends; I had the bread I baked yesterday for breakfast; and I do the gardening while my neighbor makes gourmet cheese from his goat’s milk. As some old tome says – you have a smaller chance of achieving your dream than a camel has in getting through an eye of a needle.
I get from your post you value 2 things which defeat you before you start: your credit (participation in the banker’s global economy) and the “certification” of your education. If you ever wish to change your life (to be more like your dream) these obstacles must be addressed.
I encourage you to jump ship and chase your dreams. I am 35 and broke away only a few years ago. I went from working with NASA and lecturing on compressible gas dynamics to working with my friends and teaching permaculture to my new students.
I am sorry if my post sounds negative, but it is only meant to reflect back to you that you are in the way of your own progress. You do not see the way to escape your shackles – your values.
Hi Blujay,
I can relate to where you are coming from because my husband and I also have a lot of debt. He got a law degree from a great private school that emphasized social justice, and owes about 100k a few years later. The law job market is incredibly rough, and he is lucky to have a low-paying job in the local courts.
In the meantime we are learning what we can. We practice gardening in the back yard, canning, scratch cooking, composting, lactofermenting, and knitting. However, the debt means that these are only going to be hobbies for a long time. Doing something drastically different and brave where we wouldn’t have 9-to-5 jobs won’t be an option for a while, but maybe I need a decade to work up the nerve anyway!
The workaday routine does leave us pretty tired sometimes but I think that our hobbies are helping us get out of it faster. They are either cheap fun or save us money. I wonder sometimes what our generation is in for. Remember the old curse “May you live in interesting times”? I think we’re in for it.
it doesn’t sound negative. (it sounds superior, since you feel pity for me. not something i am comfortable with, but moving on) i agree with you that i am talking about straddling two systems and in order to be fully successful in either one, a person must fully commit to one or the other (and this might mean in the sphere you reject you are considered a “failure”). at this moment, yes, i do care about my credit. but i see how if i abandoned this system and this path then it would be totally irrelevant. however, i don’t think jumping this ship would really allow me to chase (all of) my dreams. part of my dreams include doing the work in this field of OT, which does require this degree. i want to be able to work with people with disabilities so that they can fulfill their dreams of independence as well. i think this most often will need to happen within hospitals and other established, often-government-run facilities. at this moment i want both. i do see the problem you point out.
Hi,
I certainly sympathize with your situation – I have family members who are dealing with the same problem. My husband and I do live out in the country, but we own a small business ( a real small business, not the kind that politicians talk about on tv) which we have about a 40-minute commute to. We plan to run it a few more years, depending on what happens, and then hopefully sell out and stay full-time on the farm. In the mean time, we spend way too much time and energy on the road – certainly not what we want to be doing by any means. I do make my own bread, we do have a large garden, we are somewhat energy independent, but severing oneself from the larger economy is not really an option for us – at this point in time anyway. We are able to supply our basic needs, but it’s not a fancy lifestyle at all, and that’s ok. I think the key is, as a number of wise people have said, figure out what you really need as opposed to what you merely “want”. Sometimes it’s ok to have what you want, though! Good luck with your journey,
PCrouch
Hey Blujay,
I had similar thoughts as well during my college years working at a dreadful internship where I researched getting off the grid instead of doing work. One great site is backwoodshome.com
However the more I looked the more complicated it got. Building a house in the middle of nowhere and still having modern amenities like toilets, running water, electricity involves a lot of stuff.
Toilets lead to a septic system,
Water leads to a well, pumps, and tanks,
Electricity leads to solar cells, batteries that only last 5 years and some fancy ass inverters to control it all.
It got real complicated to live simply, at least to the standards that I wanted.
I asked myself how much I cared about living off the grid, and I came to the conclusion that If I really cared that much about it I could just move to China, South America, Vietnam, etc and easily buy a plot and live off the land like all the locals. Accept they don’t have a choice it’s just their way of live, and it’s not like they need a lot of money to live this way.
I decided I liked having the modern amenities created by humans and that If I was not ready to go all out.
That meant I shouldn’t deprive myself of all the benefits of the infrastructure our system has created for us.
Just think about one piece of wood used to build a house.
That one piece requires a ridiculous amount of industries to produce it.
Just to cut down a tree with an ax means you need an entire steel factory to make the blade. To make the steel factory you need a thousand other factories making the things in the steel factory. That’s just to cut the tree down by hand let alone cut the tree to boards and then deliver it. Each product required to build a house requires a thousand other factories all working together to produce.
This led me to thinking about getting away from the system and it basically meant to me that I couldn’t use
anything that I didn’t make myself with my teeth or bare hands or some rocks.
Stone ages. I didn’t like that and came to the conclusion that I liked the modern world and all the stuff that we have because of it. I decided to fully support it and reap the benefits. I always have the option to live real simple if I want, probably more than half the world does, the funny thing is most of them want to live like us.
Since I’m blogging on my quad core computer using the internet which links us all using millions of feet of copper, fiber optics, all sorts of fancy electronics, etc, I’m not willing to give it up, so I might as well enjoy it all.
My two cents
@Shang Bang: Axes made of steel have been around for hundreds of years, and axes made of copper and suchlike have been around for millenia. If you’ll do some research, you’ll see that tons of infrastructure *are not* required to live a decent life. Sure, you’ll have to figure out how to cool your house using other methods than electrically-powered air conditioning, and purify water by other means than using chlorine, and handle sewage other than by using five gallons of good water to flush it away to a treatment plant, but there are ways to do these things that don’t result in squalor. You can take advantage of evaporative cooling, the fact that the temperature is about 57degF six feet under the surface, using sand and charcoal and algae to make a filter bed for water, and by using a bucket and hot compost heap for sewage (manure), and collecting urine and using it for fertilizer, and so on. All of these things are pretty low-tech, and they’re pretty cheap, which means you’ll have more money so you can pay off those student loans faster.
On the subject of student loans, they’re the ultimate kind of follishness, for the simple reason that the areas of study for the most part do not have sufficient demand for prospective employers to fund education for future employees. If employers had a big need for educated personnel in those fields, they’d fund the education themselves. They don’t have the need, so students are conned by university faculty who need warm bodies in classrooms to get paid, to run up huge student loans in exchange for a potentially worthless piece of paper. Most students would have been better off going to a vocational school in high school, and learning a skilled trade, than going to a second- or third-tier university and getting any sort of degree at all. If you do a cost-benefit analysis, you’ll quickly see that, outside of engineering and certain professional fields, a college education is *not* worth the investment, over the course of the twenty to thirty years it takes the average student to pay off his or her loans.
Bluejay–
It is a great dream to have and work for. But, as with all things, it is rare that you can have all you want. Life in the country can be very expensive with little opportunity to earn the money to pay for it so life comes down to prioritization. What is your ultimate goal–total self-sufficiency? producing as much of your food as you have time for? having animals and their byproducts? canning? fresh produce from the garden? producing your own energy? All these things require various (normally huge) inputs from you in terms of time and money.
Attempted self-sufficiency requires an immense amount of equipment. I have had to buy the land, put in PV panels and batteries, have a passive-solar house built, buy a tractor, haying, logging, gardening, canning, cheesemaking, etc. equipment. It can be done bit by bit, but be prepared to face the costs. School loans add to that.
Self-sufficiency, to whatever degree, also has learning curves. Those you can work on now along with acquiring simple tools. Someone suggested community gardens. Even without a garden, you can learn canning now using fresh produce from local farmers markets. You can start baking your own bread or grinding your own grain. Find other people in the community with the same interests or who might even have some of the skills you seek and work together.
And start acquiring the practical knowledge you will need. There are many magazines (Countryside, Backwoods Home, Back Home, The Mother Earth News, Grit, etc.) as well as many books on topic.
One book you should read is “Back From the Land” by Eleanor Agnew. She interviews many, many back-to-landers from the 70’s (who read the early years of TMEN) and discusses why many of them ultimately left the land and the lifestyle. One of the major reasons was under-capitalization, an important point when, as you are doing, someone dreaming of going back to the land is adding debt through school loans.
Going back to the land can be done, but rarely meets the idealized dream we all had. But it can still be well worth it.
Best of luck.
Blujay,
I’m going to sound very negative, but this is some serious realism. ShangBang captured quite a bit of it already. First let’s look at your dream life. Lounging in your robe after dawn? If you seriously want to self-sustain, you had better already have put in a couple of hours of work outside. Thinking about what to do today? No way, you get work done while the season is available. We so easily forget that pre-modern life was, and still is for many people around the world: a serious dusk-to-dawn effort. Unless you plan to have slaves, be prepared to _work_.
Second, your chosen career: occupational therapy. That is only a “large community” career. I.e., it can only be viable within a civilization large enough to sustain a need for it. Living “out there” away from people (or with only a few people around) ain’t gonna provide the employment base. Nothing wrong with that, but you’re not likely to be living among only a few thousand people (not without serious government subsidy, in any case). Again, nothing wrong with that, cities are extremely efficient people-support mechanisms. Also you made it sound like you only have to work afternoons to make ends meet. Is that realistic? If a farmer has to work all day to make ends meet, why is your job so much more important that an afternoon will do? Seriously. You might say “because I’m deciding to live simply, with less”, but that is assuming that today’s economy (or even yesterday’s economy) will hold and that you will simply live differently than everyone else. If the future forces _everyone_ to live more simply, you might find yourself simply one among equals, all working hard to just keep that “simple” life.
Finally, student debt; I completely agree that our model of financing higher education is having serious repercussions, and I believe it will collapse in the near future. Not that that helps anyone currently holding student loans. I had them, my wife had them, we’ve been fortunate enough to be able to pay them off early, and they weren’t too big, but they are going to be a tough burden on many people in today’s economy.
My husband and I have been helping our children pay for college, so we’ve put many things on hold. We have imagined escaping too, but have worked out this fairly satisfactory lifestyle:
We straddle the two economies: he works full time, I work part-time and scratch cook, garden, bake, crochet, sew, and in general, anything we can do ourselves we do. What is key for us is that we live in a progressive inner-ring suburb in the midwest, where we have a yard, no overly restrictive homeowner covenents, and public transit. Our town has a long-running farmers market, people in town keep chickens, there are community gardens and several CSA plans to choose from. Our goal is for him to ease into part-time work.
In short, don’t give up on your OT dream (I notice that Lloyd has the credentials–and probably had a high enough paying job to be able to set himself up in his dream life).
OT requires credentials–there’s a huge body of real knowledge to be learned, grad school is the most efficient way to do it, and the certificate will enable you to practice your profession.
There are other ways to live green than going back to the land. If everyone went back to the land, there’d be no land! I suggest finding a community in a smallish city where you can work, but also live sustainably.
In coming years your skills will be needed, both professional and sustainable.
How about those programs where you go to work in Alaska in your chosen occupation, or some other place, for cheap, but your student loans are forgiven?
Remember that show, Northern Lights? The urban guy was out there practicing in the town clinic, getting rid of his medical school loans.
Best of luck! Don’t give up!
I surely didn’t have the mythical tuition-paying parents to finance my radical homemaking. I postponed paying off my loans until I could no longer postpone, which coincided with the unjobbing path I trod–fabulous timing. We halved our income several years in a row, while paying off school and massive credit card debt. I have excellent credit now, having no debt except my (very affordable) mortgage, and most of my days are my own, to do with what I like. Today included a whistling bike ride meditation, writing musick, and sending out writing in hopes of making a living doing what comes naturally.
Radical homemaking can be anything–it starts anywhere you have the time and inclination to do so. But yeah, if you’re working full time, or doing anything full time, you’ll probably not have enough time for anything else.
As someone once told me, focus on what you want to happen, because what you’re focused on is what will happen. I mean, yeah, focus on what is important to you! You know your wants and needs better than anyone. But honestly, you sound kind of bitter toward those who are living the radical homemaking life you desire. Certainly a good many of us are NOT trust fund recipients.
I don’t live in Brooklyn because I could never afford to live in Brooklyn. It’s a choice I make. I live in Springfield because I can afford to, with the rest of my life left over to do as I please. I give up things to live here, like culture and all that, but I gain things as well, mostly my sanity and sense of self. And I can create my own culture.
I will be glad when the cash economy crashes, so all of those owing student loans can shake off their shackles and get down to doing what they desire.
I managed to convince my son not to borrow much money, he has only $7,000.00 in loans from one semester that he now admits he should have skipped and waited for the next fall when he received funding. The world has really changed. When I started my freshman year at UW-Madison in 1980 tuition for the fall was about $350 and back then, 30 years ago, a guy or gal could work at Great America all summer and make enough money to pay for tuition, books and part of their living expenses with summer money and a part-time job during the school year. Last summer we had a girl working on our farm that just graduated with $60K in loans for a communications degree and a year later is still waiting tables. Not a happy ending, especially when people realize that the program they were in was basically taking them for a ride and there is little or no employment or they decide their field sucks as my son has. He’s glad he didn’t borrow any more than he did.
It’s not just your generation. I’m 56 and graduated with a PhD and $130,000 in student loans. Everyone in my class was told how we’d get jobs in academia–come on in, the water’s fine! But then the Greatest Generation decided not to retire, and the Republicans cut higher education funding so that even with a book out and conference papers and articles, having gone to a top school in my field, with stellar recommendations from world-class scholars, I could not get a tenure-track job in my field. So I said screw it. I’m glad I did, now. But then I was bitter.
I ended up giving up the world of credit and as you or someone else said, would be considered a failure in that world now. It’s been so long since I made a payment on those loans that they can no longer do anything about them–until I start receiving Social Security payments, at which time they can seize everything I get over $730/mo (which will be about $11, if it’s still there). I don’t own an Earthship or 40 acres or even a trailer. I own nothing but a tiny little business where I make very little money, but I love it. I get to talk to all sorts of interesting people and indulge my creativity in all sorts of ways. I order my own days. Today I canned plum conserves in brandy, worked on my book, and watered my garden in the little city lot of my little city rental. And stayed in my robe until about 10 am.
Sometimes the back-to-the-land thing gets contaminated by the acquire-stuff thing. That’s what I think of Earthships and Mother Earth with their 20K lawnmower ads. Brooklyn can be your place. People are urban farming there right now.
See imperialeconomics.blogspot.com
Forget about university degrees and credentials. Walk away from the system, including the debts you have.
http://www.ishmael.com/welcome.cfm
Read Quinn’s “Ishmael” series and “get it”.
The Oil Age is over and re-primitivism and neo-tribalism are as likely as the techno-utopian drivel one hears so much, perhaps as part of a neo-feudal, private, state-less, and increasingly non-literate, i.e., verbal, society.
Boomers will be leaving the full-time labor force involuntarily in many cases by the millions with only a fraction of the savings required to maintain their standard of material consumption, not to mention being unable to afford medical services and costly life-extending treatments.
The Oil Age-related composition of household spending will shift from high-multiplier housing, autos, and children to low-multiplier spending for property taxes, insurance, maintenance, and out-of-pocket costs for medical services and medications. Discretionary spending on recreation, entertainment, travel, and women shopping as a hobby is coming to an end.
Over the next 15-30+ years the number of persons per household will rise from 2.6 to 4-5 and higher, and sq. ft. per person will plunge from ~900 today back to the level of the 1940s-50s at 300-350.
The number of autos per person and per household will plunge as “driving while poor” is no longer possible for a growing share of the bottom 80% of US households by wealth and income.
Prepare to adapt to living on first 50% and then just 33% of the level of the material standard of consumption Boomers and the GI generation (your parents and grandparents) enjoyed, requiring you to live communally; share autos; grow your own food; take care of each other’s children (if you decide to take the considerable risk) and elders; and entertain yourselves without i-thingies, cable TV trash, video games, etc.
Learn to play musical instruments, sing, paint, build, repair, plant, weed, harvest, cook, can, suture wounds, set splints, pull teeth, etc.
And, for pity sake, please STOP THE TATTOOS!!!
Forget about “retiring”, as your retirement will be your death, hopefully among lots of people with whom you work, love, and support in countless ways. Your best investment will be to learn useful skills and contribute to a productive tribe (be it ethnic, religious, trade based, cultural, geographical, occupational, or all of the above and then some). The corporation and gov’t will no longer serve as useful “tribes” in the future.
Don’t worry about saving money; rather, save your good health, healthy relationships, reusable materials, cloth, string, rubber, copper, metals, plastics, arable land, clean waterways, vehicle parts, and so forth.
With high unemployment and underemployment rates, your personal labor product to yourself and your extended communal unit is cheap!!! Don’t think of your inability to obtain wage/salary employment as a negative!!! Make use of your cheap labor to produce what you and your “tribe” consume. Don’t give one-third of your labor to the rentier mortgage master or landlord and another third to Caesar. Own your labor product for yourself and your tribe.
There is no such thing as “Social Security”; it’s a scam which robs the working-class masses and their small employers of 7-14% of labor product to feed a militarist-imperialist system of mass violence and plunder. Just don’t do it! Walk away!
Don’t send your children to the mind-numbing, soul-destroying public “school” system. What the “educators” are teaching, you don’t want your children to know. Teach them what they will need to know about the natural world, real life skills, family, community, production, and so on. If you don’t know enough to teach them what they will actually need, then learn so you can, or find someone who will teach you and them. Don’t delay!!!
Resist the incessant infantilism of the mass media, “education” system, and militarist-imperialist corporate-statist propaganda machine. Grow up!!! Seek wisdom and understanding. The gov’t is insolvent. The military is bankrupting the country and is hopelessly overstretched. The private oil-based economy cannot “recover” or grow with the price of oil above $35-$40/bbl; it’s over. Get over it, and move on to changing “your” world to one in which you want to live, or at least one in which you can adapt and contribute to a tribe working for the same thing you need.
The US is a militarist-imperialist rentier oligarchy that can only continue to grow by military occupation and expropriation of resources and labor product of the world’s masses through compound interest, taxation, and credit-money and price inflation.
But the resources of the finite, spherical planet on which we live are limited and slow to be replenished, unlike what conventional economic theory contends. Population overshoot means that these resources will become acutely scarce, risking resource wars and threatening the very existence of an overwhelming majority of human apes in the decades ahead.
“Globalization”, “growth”, and Anglo-American rentier militarist empire are over. Done. History. “Get it”! Move on.
Sincerely and without reservation,
Nemesis
Well, I’m gonna keep on with the tattoos. 😀
I think growing up in poverty, with the adults in my life removed from the money economy, was a blessing, considering the ease with which I currently live my unjobbed life. It’s amazing what I’ve learned to do because it’s been necessary to do so since I can’t afford it. Also, it’s amazes me what I’ve had the opportunity to learn since I’m available for opportunity.
If I had debt now, I’d surely walk away from it.
But still, the radical homemaking life is not for everyone, and needn’t be for everyone. We all have what we consider beauty in our lives, and that’s how it should be.
I don’t know how young people do it today. The system seems gamed against you all.
The student loan racket is gamed now so you basically become a debt slave.
Affordable education is slowly becoming a thing of the past.
I sympathize with your situation. The situation is similar in the UK with student debt – though perhaps not quite so severe yet. OT sounds like a worthwhile careers also, where you can give something back to society.
I work in IT and now see it as a fairly worthless deadend now and want to change my life. I have a back to the land dream too. I’m making small steps in that direction. Me, my wife and two kids are fairly properous. I’m now feeling that I need to adjust my views/expectations of what a back to the land life is like. I’ve read a lot, “Surviving and Thriving on the Land” is a good book to read, it is UK specific though but the principles are universal.
But once I’ve adjusted my own views I need to convince the rest of the family. Which will be real hard and the best situation (maybe) is probably to compromise, keep everyone happy and live as sustainably as possible. I’ve been depressing myself for the last 2 years that my life isn’t as ‘green’ as a could be. Its somewhat better than the average but short of whats I know is needed. But is it sensible to beat yourself up over not living and dream life, its better to feel positive for every green step you do make. And there are many you will and can make without much money without living the ultimate dream.
i live in brooklyn too! but i’m in a slightly different situation: i’m done with school, so is my husband (hopefully), we’re debt-free, and i’ve got a great job.
i also totally want to wake up in the morning and glance out the window at my garden – but there are no windows in my kitchen, and my vegetable “garden” is a 3-foot by 4-foot plot three blocks away in the community garden, so i rarely make it there before 6pm, after work, to do some quick watering… it’s sad, and sometimes not enough.
so, my question is, do i:
a) accept the promotion that will probably come my way in a few months and thereby commit to longer hours but better pay, and buy a piece of land upstate somewhere on which to plant fruit trees and whatnot that i will only visit regularly only if i, realistically, also buy a car, OR
b) turn down the promotion and soldier on with my much-neglected community garden plot and jars of blueberry preserves bought at the farmer’s market cause i have $8 to spend on blueberry preserves but not enough time/willpower/organization to spend $6 and 3 hours on making blueberry preserves in a non-air-conditioned kitchen with no windows?
in general, i believe people do their best with what they have. i just hope i will.
also, blujay, we should hang out. 🙂
You say what my heart has been stuck on for sometime. I’m thirty, I teach at a university. I have mountains of loan debt. And all I can think about is a few chickens and a garden. Thanks for recognizing a dilemma so many feel. Thanks for inviting a discussion…
Best of luck…
[…] FIZZLING DREAMS OF “BACK-TO-THE-LAND,” by Blujay “And then *POP* just like that, my back-to-the-land bubble bursts. I rub the sleep from my […]
That’s the problem. We’re working to pay off our debts, which pile up faster then we can pay them. I remember when People worked for gain. You worked and saved to buy a house, your little piece of The American Dream.
But it’s become a never ending nightmare of trying, and failing to catch up. If there’s a difference between this and slavery, I can’t find it.