Utopian Lifestyle vs Reality

Utopian Lifestyle vs Reality

So how do you see the situation in your local area?

i mean there are people out there living in villas in some beautiful
places in Miami or Costa Rica, life is so... can be so idyllic,

and you wake up in your 5 bedroom home you go to your
bathroom size of a small flat with jacuzzi and crystal lights
shining your marble statues, you have your smoothie from your
giant fridge and you find there your fresh raspberries delivered
to you by a drone... fresh pick... (perhaps by mexican immigrants...)

you edit your videos on your sofa and you press publish,
you get a lot of monetizing for whatever reason

is such a lifestyle possible for everyone uniformly so?

like you see those boundless slums in india and you might
have some doubts...

i mean a big house with a swimming pool if you were to live
all by yourself is quite difficult to maintain, and in this
scenarion you live a total bourgeois dream, you have a bank
account full of zeros on it, and you just buy stuff, so too
you buy service in form of a labourforce to vacuum your carpet,
to clean your pool, to clean your windows and occasionally
take care of plumbing... i mean even calling and supervising
all those passer-bys can get annoying too, but at least you
get your raspberries fresh and on the spot without as much
as lifting a finger... and then you can dilly dally all
day long and party all night long if you wish...

where does that take you?
Have you Arrived?
Is this Dream come true?


welll... i  don't know about you, but when i see that
(and some do akshually do have capacity to experience some verjon of that)
to me its so unreal, so too good to be true, that when i think
of it in therms of a storyline - that's exactly when in the life
of a protagonist who's living such happy, carefree life just something
has to go wrong and when the proverbial compost hits the fun;

please tell me what you think

I think you will find that a significant number of members here have the resources to live in a more conventionally upscale manner than they are.

John F Dean wrote:I think you will find that a significant number of members here have the resources to live in a more conventionally upscale manner than they are.

I agree with John.

We sold our homestead and eventually ended up with some tiny homes.

Part of the permies' lifestyle is getting away from the "keeping up with the Jones".

For fun, here are some threads from folks wanting to "downsize":

https://permies.com/t/206821/Downsizing-Questions

https://permies.com/t/158095/Downsizing-homestead-items

https://permies.com/t/86683/Downsizing-GA-Shed-conversion

Zaratustra, I agree with what you've spelled out. It's somebody's "Utopia" but it's only realizable & maintainable by a tiny fraction of humanity. I stopped believing the popular-culture hype, the general myths behind advertising & TV commercials, and all that sort of stuff by the time I was 17.

Not to say that I haven't worked hard to achieve the lifestyle we have on the land, but I had a different aim than that portrayed by those Hollywood protagonists you allude to. I wanted to learn to do things for myself & family, live on the land, pay bills & save money, take part in the positive aspects of the local community, and help with environmental conservation/restoration (in some of whatever spare time I might have).

If you want to read a thread yielding a sort of synopsis of how a number of Permies.com members actually live & have worked to achieve their intended situation, try this one: https://permies.com/t/62005/don-job.  (By the way. some posters didn't necessarily agree with the blunt message of the thread's title, or at least expressed some well-founded caveats.

Zaratustra Narsudin wrote:

i mean a big house with a swimming pool if you were to live
all by yourself is quite difficult to maintain, and in this
scenarion you live a total bourgeois dream, you have a bank
account full of zeros on it, and you just buy stuff, so too
you buy service in form of a labourforce to vacuum your carpet,
to clean your pool, to clean your windows and occasionally
take care of plumbing...

please tell me what you think

I think this sounds really lonely. Alone in a big house with nothing productive to do sounds terrible.

Hi Cat,
It certainly isn’t a good fit for me.  For some others, I imagine it is their dream.

John F Dean wrote:Hi Cat,
It certainly isn’t a good fit for me.  For some others, I imagine it is their dream.

If, by some magic this happened to me I'd fill that house with foster kids and fill the grounds with goats. Or sell it as fast as I could.

I feel strongly that as much land as possible should be covered in 7 layers of plants, so I'd want to modify that plan significantly.  That and I really like picking my own berries while wandering within that 7 layers of edibles.  

Greg Martin wrote:I feel strongly that as much land as possible should be covered in 7 layers of plants, so I'd want to modify that plan significantly.  That and I really like picking my own berries while wandering within that 7 layers of edibles.  

Owning land in a Permies' "Utopian Lifestyle" is okay especially if there are 7 layers of edibles.

I love the idea of picking my own berries while wandering within that 7 layers of edibles.

Cat Knight wrote:

I think this sounds really lonely. Alone in a big house with nothing productive to do sounds terrible.

I would say "sad" instead of "lonely". I live alone in a medium size house and I don't feel lonely. In fact, I don't want  to live in any other way. Besides that, I am productive and I feel fullfilled tending my tiny piece of land.

Oh my, that sounds awful. What a horrible vision. Such an empty life. Empty, with so little meaning.

My wife and I have never made more than 100k/yr collectively, but live a pretty utopian life on our 25acres in NW CA without debt. Alas, no drone delivered raspberries;(, I actually think its the female bees that pollinate them.

One of the greatest things where I live is that people just don’t care.

It sounds trite, but recently on here a guy was looking for a place to retire too and seemed quite concerned about neighbors and their political affiliation. Why? I am not sure, neighbors come and go.

Myself I don’t really care what my neighbors do just as long as they don’t complain what I am doing. In short, do whatever floats your boat but don’t try and sink mine.

As for surbubia and Permie farming: it is just in a slump right now. It constantly happens because as the economy is strong, homesteading has little interest with the mass population, but when the economy tanks, providing more for yourself becomes a much larger concern. I have seen this in the late 1970,s, in the early 90,s, just after the 2008 crash, and it’s starting to get that way again.

Myself, I am retiring from homesteading after 40 years, but it’s been a good run. The lessons learned have set me up well, being debt free, having a vast skill set, and accepting change and failure.

In the end it comes down to this, I have mowed grass for 40 years, and now it is nice to see the grass still growing and someone else mowing it. I achieved being a GERT and that is a good thing to have accomplished.

For those who don't know GERT's story click here.