Opting out is a collective act.

Reflections on moving back to the city, lessons from slow living, and the strong desire to escape the bullshit.

In the spring of 2020 as the pandemic was rolling out across the world, my family made an unrelated seismic shift. We packed up our lives and relocated an hour and a half away from our friends, family, and hometown. The move was motivated by an opportunity to start a home-based business, but the honest truth is that my partner and I had been wanting to live rurally for years and really just needed a good excuse to make the leap.

By the time we decided to make the move, we had been homeschooling for over a year, so the seed of slow living had already been planted. I remember unpacking a lot of the cultural narrative around education and previous to that, years of punk subculture already had me questioning a lot about the way our colonial capitalist system works. I was already well on my way to an anarchist ideology, even if I didn’t know it yet.

When we were planning our move, I knew that I wanted to homestead. And I mean like homestead in the fluffiest, whitest way possible. I wanted the idyllic pinterest worthy garden and I wanted to blog about home education and I wanted to bake every day. I wanted, as I assume most homesteaders do, to figure out how to do this life thing on our own terms.

Where I differed from most eager white settler homesteaders was in my motivation. I wasn’t interested in wooden-only toys so that my kids wouldn’t be infected by micro plastics: I recognized that over-manufactured plastic toys were contributing to a global crisis of oil dependency, unfettered garbage production, and over consumption. I wanted to grow my own food, not because of harmful food dyes or too much sugar, but because monocrop agriculture and globalized food systems are harmful to the planet and its inhabitants.

FWIW, I expect there are many other white settler homesteaders who have similar motivations but I also know there are many who view their lives as pure, and everyone else’s as impure. It’s important to acknowledge the nuance required here when having discussions around opting out vs. escapism. It’s not all either or. This understanding was part of what recently brought us back to the city — so that we could address the problems at the root rather than just trying to escape them.

At any rate, by the middle of 2024, this was my life:

• unschooling the kids with nature day hikes, collaborative video games, and daily writing practice with one day of forest school every week for each kid

• fruit trees planted, garden beds established, permaculture map planned including greenhouse and pond

• backyard chickens for egg and compost production

• home-based business helping us meet our very modest financial needs

• all bread products made at home including weekly sourdough

• hosting quarterly clothing swaps to fill my praxis quota

Idyllic, yes? Except it wasn’t. Because we were living in isolation.

And so back we came to the city, leaving the fruit trees, permaculture gardens, and nature walks behind and traded them in for friends and family and the complexity of navigating community. We thought, out of the gate, that we might be able to maintain our low income living and avoid having to get work outside the home, but city living is decidedly more expensive and with more extra-curriculars for the kids, higher property taxes, and a few meals out every now and then, we started looking for work so we could stay afloat. My partner worked double duty out of the home plus running our home business for a bit until I found a really-very-good 9-5 job working with a local non-profit doing conservation work, regenerative agriculture, and integral ecology.

It would be easy to look from the outside and say that life is similar to how we were living before we moved, but I don’t think that’s the case at all. Our 4 year Covid vacation in the country taught us more than just how to chop wood and navigate Christian conservative country (although it did that too).

We learned more about identifying our basic needs.

We learned how to make do without.

We learned a ton of DIY skills that our grandparents would have known but our generation does not.

We learned how to be more self-sufficient, obviously not completely self-sufficient. Self-sufficiency is a myth. But we also learned about the myth of self-sufficiency too.

Ultimately, our time away taught me a different perspective of the world because it gave me time and space to dismantle a lifetime of cultural propaganda and helped me realign my values. Alongside the idyllic homesteading, this slower pace of life paired with financial sustainability gave me time to read, learn, and connect the dots in understanding how home education is connected to racism is connected to over-consumption is connected to American facism is connected to local food systems is connected to the genocide in Gaza. I learned how capitalism and colonialism underpin so much of our lives, and am still learning how to undo that narrative everyday. We are fully steeped in this culture but the time I spent trying to remove myself from this system helped me to see the bullshit more clearly.

I mean, I don’t have it all sorted. I trip and fall over my beliefs and truths all the time. I feel like I’m gaslighting myself on the regular. But I know this is what it means to be doing the work to simultaneously dismantle a cultural narrative while still being immersed in that culture.

When we came back to the city, I wanted to keep doing this work. I will admit it’s harder here in ways that I can’t fully explain. The rat race runs faster here. The push for consumption is everywhere. I won’t say that my time away gives me an outsider’s perspective, but I do think that living at the pace we did has allowed me to examine patterns and behaviours more critically, something that has always been part of my nature.

Here are some things that I’ve noticed:

1. People refuse to acknowledge that their over-consumption is a significant part of the problem. We call for boycotting, sanctioning, and divesting, but I often wonder why this is required at all. If we all changed our consumption permanently, many of the companies causing so much harm wouldn’t have the leverage they do. As always, this is nuanced discussion and there’s no need to come at me with specific use cases. I am confident standing on this hill: we are all consuming way more than we need and our consumption is collectively driving capitalism: a harmful oppressive social and economic system which is collapsing in on itself. Our refusal to change behaviour makes us all complicit in this collapse and the harmful effects thereof.

2. We can all slow down. Culturally, we tend to operate with this sense of urgency which I think is completely manufactured out of a need for self-importance and centering. The speed of business as usual is part of a colonial capitalist mentality that efficiency is the measure of success and that we can only prove our worth by our busyness. It’s an obvious lie. If anything, we could all likely improve our effectiveness by moving at a slower pace and removing bureaucratic bullshit in order to save time and energy, finding more meaning in the work that we are doing so we spend less time crashing and burning.

3. SO MUCH could be resolved by emphasizing relocalization: sourcing materials and goods within a smaller and smaller radius of where we live, work, and play. Again, yes, nuance is needed for this conversation, but we could definitely start with things like building local sustainable food systems, increasing active or public transportation, working in close proximity to where we live, reconnecting with neighbours to foster resilient community, shopping at stores closer to home to increase local economics and prevent big box from taking over (and reducing all those local job opportunities). I could go on. Relocalizing our economies, our technologies, and our communities seems to have an exponential impact that effectively rewinds the harms that global capitalism has caused.

4. Opting out isn’t the same as escapism. I used to think it was and it made me ashamed. Escapism is when we try to adjust our lives so that the problems don’t apply to us anymore. This doesn’t solve any problems, it just ignores them. Opting out, on the other hand, is a refusal to comply and, in my mind, an essential part of opting out is finding sustainable alternatives that can be used collectively: time banks instead of money; food co-ops instead of grocery giants; communal child care instead of educational institutions. Opting out is a collective act. As I said above, self-sufficiency is a myth.

Millions of human beings have laboured to create this civilization on which we pride ourselves to-day. Other millions, scattered through the globe, labour to maintain it. Without them nothing would be left in fifty years but ruins.

There is not even a thought, or an invention, which is not common property, born of the past and the present. Thousands of inventors, known and unknown, who have died in poverty, have co-operated in the invention of each of these machines which embody the genius of man.

[…]

By what right then can any one whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say – This is mine, not yours?

The Conquest of Bread - Peter Kropotkin

There is much work to do. SO MUCH WORK. But it’s not the same as rat race 9-5 bureaucratic drivel work. It is the work of relearning how to be humans together. It is slow work. It is decolonial work. It is post-capitalist work. It is internal work, but it’s also external work. I keep coming back to a quote from Blaise Moritz in our podcast together, and I’ll paraphrase here: we can all be artists, but that means we also need to build together, harvest together, and eat together. We need everyone working together in alignment to write a new cultural narrative, building new institutions, and co-creating a liberated community. This work must be built on a collective understanding of what’s currently broken, so we know how to fix it.

So yes, make art. Share news on social media. But also share food, learn skills, and for fucks sake, slow down and stop buying new things you don’t need. We can’t afford to ignore the problems any longer, and we can’t solve the problems on our own. Find a neighbour, maybe two. Start working together. Take that first step, wherever you are, and I’ll see you on the path down the road.