There is a romanticism surrounding living off the grid.
Most of us have daydreamed about leaving the modern world behind and retreating to an off-grid homestead to unplug and live off the land.
Getting off-grid and self-sufficient may seem like the most difficult part, but once you are off the grid, there are challenges that most preppers do not want to think about.
Everything Takes Work
The great part of modern life is that everything has been designed and engineered to make our lives as simple as possible.
Water flows freely from the tap, electricity is only an outlet away, and any food or supplies you need are close by and readily available.
In some cases, Amazon will deliver the goods you need on the same day, and you do not need to get out of your pajamas.
Once you are off the grid, there is going to be a lot of extra work that you need to put in to get the necessities of life.
You may be able to get running water, but this will involve pumps and pipes taking that water from the source into your home. Realistically, many off-grid homesteads will need water to be fetched daily, which is the first of a long list of daily chores.
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Food is grown, raised, harvested, or hunted, and if you do not have enough, then you will either starve or you’ll have to drive into town to buy more supplies.
Gardens and raising animals take a lot of work, and hunting is very time-consuming. And these activities are critical to your survival.
Everything that is around your off-grid homestead can be broken or destroyed. You can’t call in a handyperson or contractor, so you need to be able to fix everything.
This takes knowledge, tools, supplies, and skills that can take quite some time to develop or acquire.
The Work Is Hard
When was the last time you swung a hammer all day? Have you spent an afternoon hauling bricks or boulders? Or digging in the dirt for days on end?
The truth is that 99% of people reading this do not have the physical fitness needed to truly live an off-grid life.
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The manual labor of off-grid life requires a level of physical fitness that you can’t get from your 30-minute Peloton workout or daily gym session.
Being able to run a marathon doesn’t mean that you can haul five-gallon jerry cans of water every day or chop firewood.
The only way to get in shape for off-grid life is to focus on functional fitness that imitates the types of tasks that you will be doing off-grid.
No Sick Days
When there is a list of chores that need doing, you don’t get to lay in bed with the sniffles or if you are too sore from the previous day’s chore list. You need to be ready to go every day, and if you get hurt or sick, your survival can be in jeopardy.
The healthcare system effectively treats common injuries that most of us encounter throughout our lives. However, when you live off-grid, you become your own healthcare provider.
Nurses and doctors can efficiently address issues like broken bones, deep cuts, or burns at the local urgent care center. When you live off grid, these medical mistakes can put your life in serious danger.
Included is ensuring that your water and food are clean and will not get you sick. One sip of bad water will make you ill and could potentially kill you. The same goes for undercooked or spoiled food. Maintaining robust physical health is critical to off-grid life and needs to be carefully considered.
Power Is Always Going to Be a Problem
Most preppers will have some sort of off-grid power when they decide to live off-grid.
Whether it’s solar, wind, or hydroelectric, these systems require care and maintenance that you have to do yourself.
Also, the batteries in these renewable systems have a shelf life, so there will be a time when the batteries need replacing.
During a long-term SHTF situation, you cannot access any replacement batteries.
The same is true of solar panels; they, too, have a shelf life, and when they die after SHTF, there will not be any way to get replacements.
Mental Health Issues
Even if you are living off-grid with your family, you will miss the social interactions of modern life. It is easy to stay connected to friends and family through texting or social media, but when the grid is removed, these connections require much more effort.
We need these social connections to support our mental health, and when they are removed, people living off the grid will start to feel very lonely and could become depressed.
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There is a lot of added anxiety that off-grid living will also present us. Everything that can go wrong requires solutions that only you can provide. The success or failure of your off-grid homestead rests on your shoulders, which can lead to stress and anxiety.
There is also the lack of mindless entertainment that we distract ourselves with. Modern life is full of distractions that keep us from spending too much time in our headspace.
The silence of off-grid living will result in having to spend a lot of time in our heads, and if you do not like yourself, you will have a bad time. We must spend more time getting right with ourselves during daily life because waiting until we live off the grid or SHTF will not have good results.
Preppers strive to be self-sufficient enough to live removed from the grid and become reliant on no one.
While it is nice to have fantasies about this lifestyle, we also need to be realistic about the challenges we will face.
To that end, if you plan to start an off-grid homestead, consider the dark side before it’s too late.
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This article helps if you have a go to bug out location in mind. With the current open Southern Border situation those bug out places are all occupied.
Did you know in Texas there is a growing illegal community expanding daily. It is run by the Mexican drug cartels. Even our police and emergency services won’t go into these no go American areas. Cops and other services are getting hassled or shot at.
This is also going on in other States, where do you think these illegals are ending up at, besides the city streets of America?
Not so sure American Sheeple know the difference anymore who’s country this is.
A few years ago in Europe this same mindset placed illegals, mostly from the Muslim Middle Eastern countries into honest working European cities without the citizens having a say in the political matters.
The same thing is happening in America. The only difference is we have at least the 1&2 Amendments we Americans can use to fight back intelligently against a socialist political movement suffocating the American Dream legal citizens have had. Now that American Dream has shifted to the illegals of the world cramming into an unsustainable situation by the globalist. America pays all the world last, and everybody else is first jumping ahead in line of Americans.
The illegal invasion is like previous invasions done over history. Start small grow your populations strong in numbers to spread to other locations and overwhelm.
We are in the middle phase of the American Southern Border Invasion. Biden’s Homeland Security Mayorkas and VP Harris Border Czar are doing an excellent job for the opposition. Too many lawyers running government not enough common people in charge, like farmers. The US government sponsored midnight flights of illegals in America has shortened the time for an all out invasion to occur. We have unvetted military age males, especially the Chinese Nationals, what could go wrong?
We are seeing an uptick in unvetted illegals with diseases America eradicated decades ago now coming back to sicken us. The second Covid scare to mask up our kids again. While the illegals send their kids to American schools with unknown diseases and Covid.
What happen to the American citizens of today? This stuff would not get a foothold with ‘The Greatest Generation.’ America kicked butt in World War 2.
Not with the wingnuts currently running our present government.
So you think you will be safe in the bug out location any better than being in the city today? Measure twice, cut once. Think twice, act once. Your life may depend on your actions.
There’s actually a name for this. Jihad by Immigration. They have used it for centuries. Don’t think a certain president elected in 2008 hadn’t heard of it. This was the “fundamental transformation” of which he spoke so articulately. There was a book written about this back in those days called “While Europe Slept.” Also, David Horowitz has been warning us about it for more than a decade. We are in a lot of trouble and it’s due to a lot of “it can’t happen here” thinking.
Right now we have union workers protesting for too high of wages of about 40% more than the average worker.
We got people voting in the same old smelly Demoncrats with economic polices that are bankrupting America faster than the first Wall Street Crash did back in the 20th century.
American taxpayers gave billions an trillions of money away in foreign aid while our America’s infrastructure crumbles.
Afghanistan Withdrawal armed the radical terrorist with billions of US dollars not backed by a gold standard. When do we think those tools won’t be used against, not in a court of law but on a future battlefield?
The off the grid or bug outs are another wishful pipe dream that a majority of John Q Public and sister Jane will not be able to attain in this life.
The Biden open borders and midnight illegal plane flights all over the nation has consequences. Where do you think the illegals are going with the aid of the Mexican drug cartels? Your bug out locations, the abandoned condemned city homes and brownstone buildings. The rural country will being seeing an influx of foreigners pretty soon.
We have our own loony’s, mentally ill and drug addicts, American Vets on the city sidewalks camping. And Biden administration is adding illegals to the human soup.
We are being over whelmed for something bigger than the original Great Depression was. America as we know it is about to collapse in preplanned tack over from within our America. Who is orchestrating this, it’s any number of countries that want America to go down in flames. BRICKS could be a coup attempt to devalue what is ever left of a once gold backed currency America had.
We preppers know even all our preps are temporary. In the long run we have to resupply. The supply chains like food, clothing and machinery parts, we depended on foreign countries for the raw materials to repair or mend things.
Who is standing up for us senior citizens? You don’t see us protesting on the streets for increases in Social Security and Medicare? Well do you?
Retirees are hit the hardest by State and Federal taxes, fees and so on.
Having to pay an extra $1.00 to $15.00 dollars more for someone who wants a higher wage is ridiculous, period.
We didn’t ask for the activist and politicians to go barrow money for more government over addicted spending from the Chinese, did we?
Why don’t we Americans call out Washington DC tell them to file Chapter 11 Bankruptcy and end all the 33 trillions of debt dollars us Americans owe?
Who says we can’t have Miss Liberty go bankrupt? The current government shutdown fear mongering only kicks the can down the road, doesn’t solve anything meaningful.
“sheeple”?
Off grid living is FUN !!!
Everyone wants the American dream, but no one is willing to sacrifice to achieve it in their country. I always maintained that if you gave each illegal citizen three thousand dollars and or sent them back to their country, when that corrupt and corrupt government arrives, it will come to stay with you. and this since before they became independent from Spain, they would take it away and throw them back, the second time send them with three thousand rounds of ammunition so that they can get their hands dirty and know the value of freedom and progress