From what I have seen, as my family has some personal connections to people like this, they seem to be either very well educated, highly skilled, people who have deep trauma from war (military friends), felt they could no longer live in normal society, and knew they had the skills to do this. So they went out there.
Others were people who sort of always just felt “the call of the wild” so-to-speak. They grew up learning what they would need to know, working on those skills, and pushing their envelope until they felt they had established the capacity to make the move both in regards to the skills to do it, and the financial position to start it off. These people are often very intelligent, driven, and interesting people. They usually have spouses and sometimes kids.
Then there are the people like this. Originally most of these people were very mentally ill. Various paranoia disorders, or illnesses that also include paranoia. However, over the past ~30 years, there has been a gradual increase in people who are just naive, disaffected, people with poor critical thought skills. These people generally fell down some rabbit hole and found a community that accepts them. Unfortunately this community is… well, this stuff. They say that in the last decade it has exploded though. They worry that their remote homesteads will be surrounded by neighbors, shit neighbors, and the success rate for these people is like 1%, if that. It was always low, and even people who succeeded often would move back into society when they started to get old, but now it’s almost guaranteed to fail. However they seem to be sustaining, as a group, and it bothers them.
The smallest group are people with lots of money, who get on the fad waves of this stuff when it spikes in popularity. This often happens when a successful TV show comes out, or there is a spike in these movements online. These people show up in $70k trucks with trailers carrying $100k in tools. Over the next few months there is an explosion of activity as contractors come in and out setting up a luxury life far out in the woods. These people will do a few hours of something here and there, declare all they accomplished, by themselves, with grit alone. Then get bored way out in the middle of nowhere and move back to a metropolitan area.
And by definition, the people who succeeded at leaving civilization aren’t updating the bros on Facebook or getting pulled over on city streets.
That would make the ones we get to see anything about… the failures!
From what I have seen, as my family has some personal connections to people like this, they seem to be either very well educated, highly skilled, people who have deep trauma from war (military friends), felt they could no longer live in normal society, and knew they had the skills to do this. So they went out there.
Others were people who sort of always just felt “the call of the wild” so-to-speak. They grew up learning what they would need to know, working on those skills, and pushing their envelope until they felt they had established the capacity to make the move both in regards to the skills to do it, and the financial position to start it off. These people are often very intelligent, driven, and interesting people. They usually have spouses and sometimes kids.
Then there are the people like this. Originally most of these people were very mentally ill. Various paranoia disorders, or illnesses that also include paranoia. However, over the past ~30 years, there has been a gradual increase in people who are just naive, disaffected, people with poor critical thought skills. These people generally fell down some rabbit hole and found a community that accepts them. Unfortunately this community is… well, this stuff. They say that in the last decade it has exploded though. They worry that their remote homesteads will be surrounded by neighbors, shit neighbors, and the success rate for these people is like 1%, if that. It was always low, and even people who succeeded often would move back into society when they started to get old, but now it’s almost guaranteed to fail. However they seem to be sustaining, as a group, and it bothers them.
The smallest group are people with lots of money, who get on the fad waves of this stuff when it spikes in popularity. This often happens when a successful TV show comes out, or there is a spike in these movements online. These people show up in $70k trucks with trailers carrying $100k in tools. Over the next few months there is an explosion of activity as contractors come in and out setting up a luxury life far out in the woods. These people will do a few hours of something here and there, declare all they accomplished, by themselves, with grit alone. Then get bored way out in the middle of nowhere and move back to a metropolitan area.
Yeah, that division makes sense to me. The people that really want to, do, and the people who just need something to talk about, talk.