Are My Family and I Ready to Live Off-the-Grid?

No, Seriously, Are We?

Photo by Peter Lloyd on Unsplash

Sometimes, I feel a deep yearning to return to nature, to live a simple life.

I picture myself, along with my wife and kids, abandoning everything to live a meaningful existence closer to our roots. I imagine us sailing across oceans, embarking on road trips through expansive and dreamy landscapes, and taking train rides alongside enigmatic valleys. In my mind's eye, my family lives off the land, conscientiously farming, milking our own goats, crafting cheese, and sourcing fish from frozen lakes with long, handmade spears. Yes, in my imagination, I slay these fish with spears. Then I bring back my catch, harrowed, to my hungry daughters, and my serene wife brushes the ice off my bushy beard in our self-built igloo.

Such a beautiful life; a life of essentiality. Eating just what we need, reading poetry to our kids in front of misty dusks, and serenading howling wolves with a cello.

These fantasies usually collapse as soon as we have to dress up our two toddlers to go to the playground downstairs, which roughly takes forty minutes. Also, as much as I would like to have a big, manly, bushy beard like an explorer, my beard is nothing but a patchy disappointment.

My wife is even worse than me when it comes to these sorts of delusions. She once came to me, her eyes lit like two large discs, waving an Instagram story from a family "living off-the-grid," and mused about how they could do it. I mean, the fridge in that video cost as much as our car, I pointed out, but she wouldn't hear of it. "Look, they are milking a goat in the video! And they have vegetables under a greenhouse!" In fact, I found myself questioning, could we too move to the countryside? We had to experiment. So we decided to go with our newborn daughter to a fully natural little hostel deep in a forest to get a feel for it. The small cabin we had rented was so bucolic; it had a thick layer of moss on the roof, was fully made of wood, and was surrounded by nonplussed animals in pens. The bed was a charming small wooden paillasse on which a thin mattress of dried grass was nonchalantly laid. The doors didn't quite close, which was unfortunate as mosquitoes also love nature a lot. Ah, there was no hot water. To be honest, I was too distracted to laugh at my wife. She resisted admitting that she hated it for one full evening but the next day, she asked to pack up and leave first thing in the morning, after the cockerel had dutifully woken us up with the sun.

On our way back, as we joyfully drove through heavy pollution on a wide, polluted road, crossing smoggy valleys of tower blocks and heading straight to get a good old Starbucks coffee, we realised that unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately for any goat we would have adopted—living off the grid wasn't really for us.