Ask HN: Did I make a mistake jumping on the homestead bandwagon?

It's the difference between one layman person spending an hour to bake a single bread by hand on a wood stove, and ten persons each operating a part of a machine in a factory that spits out 8000 breads per 8-hour shift.

You can try to replicate factory-style production in your homestead somewhat and get decent productivity numbers. But you'd need to do this for bread, and cheese, and clothes. You simply can't specialise nor get the right scale nor make the necessary capital expenditures across multiple product categories for that to work.

Homesteading thereby really means accepting that your productivity is a small fraction of that of modern life.

Of course you can trade and obtain most of the things you don't produce like any other person on the planet. But what you're trading in the end is your time, and its value is measured in productivity. If you sell an hour of your time but only produce 1 loaf of bread, and you're competing in a marketplace with agents whose productivity is 100 loafs of bread, your purchasing power is very weak, and the prices of everything measured against your own labour-time will be exorbitant.

Of course you can also say you don't homestead but instead simply live in a rural area, in isolation, working a modern remote job (e.g. in tech). That'd work fine, but it's probably not defined as homesteading. But it's a modus that probably works better for you: enjoy the closeness to nature, enjoy agricultural activities as much as you enjoy it as a hobby, live relatively simply and without many expenses and luxuries, and work only a few hours in tech to sustain this cheaper lifestyle.

For example, if you did it due to an ingrained sense of moral responsibility, your current feelings may be temporary and you’ll get through them if you stick to it or hang out with different friends which align closer to your values.

If you did it because it looked like a fun challenge but ended up being more than you can take, the solution may be to abandon the experiment.

Perhaps it’s a mix of both, in which case maybe you can cut back without doing a complete reversal or hire someone to help with the hardest parts.

You mentioned YouTube and Amazon, but not local people in similar situations. Is there no one geographically close to you, a neighbour with a similar setup, you could talk to?

If you are going to stick with it, I get the impression you need a community above all else. Forget youtube, learn from people in person, and share the labour.

If you are motivated by ethical/environmental concerns - there are plenty of other ways to make a positive difference to the world. Some of these are jobs in tech, if you pick carefully. Either in a city, or remote (if you've decided you like country living but not the manual labour).

Or you can go for a hybrid lifestyle - live rurally, grow a little food, also work part time in tech so you can buy more of life's comforts.

But yes, I get the impression that fullon homesteading is hard, e.g. at least some WWOOF hosts couldn't survive without the free work of volunteers. Maximum kudos for giving it a go.

Anyway, just keeping what land is not rented out and the buildings from degrading is nigh on a full-time job in itself; trenches need to be dug and maintained, forest kept at bay, houses painted, roofs mended &c.

I've much respect for anyone who decides to give it a go, but I believe your assessment is correct: It is an awful lot of work for little gain but subsistence, not leaving much time or money for other pastimes.

A couple of hundred years ago, the alternative to this back-breaking work might have been starving or succumbing to the elements.

Today, the alternative is just about any paid job, outsourcing all the backbreaking work to other, larger, more efficient units.

For most people, the choice is simple; for other, more adventurous people, trying out the lifestyle is tempting enough to actually go ahead and do it.

You've gone ahead and done it, found it not to be all it was cranked up to be.

Unless you find (or think you will eventually find) comfort and fulfillment in the work in its own right, I'd say cut your losses, find employment somewhere and try to use the lessons learned while homesteading to your advantage in phase II of your career in the big city.

Cities work great for many people, there’s no denying that. The main question should be what works for you, rather than anything else.

You say your friends are moving from you financially and socially. Did you move to the country for financial and social gain?

Or did you move to gain greater control of your life, be in nature, grow your own food - ie live a more human and less constrained existence?

I don't much like living in cities, but homesteading is a bit of an extreme reaction to it. What brings me tranquility is the ability to be among nature, to be able to talk to my neighbours and get to know them in a friendly way, then come home to most mod cons, and do what I'm reasonably good at - work a tech job - remotely, in comfort. Every now and again I need to go into the city to the office, but those occasional office days become fun, and I can often combine them with going shopping or seeing some entertainment.

If I feel like it I can go get a taste of some 'self reliance' DIY work, but I'm not ultimately required to do it - I can just get someone in and pay them to do the work.

What was it that attracted you to homesteading exactly?

Now, do I enjoy nature and want to live away from the city? Yes, yes I do, but I don’t need to homestead to do that.

Another thing the socials leave out is how damn isolating it is. You're alone buddy. like ALONE ALONE. ever wonder why you see folks stopped on gravel roads chatting for 2 hours? Because they haven't seen another human for a few days or even weeks. Again, living in the country isn't for everyone, and especially hard on people that didn't grow up around that environment or have a skill that helps out here(carpenter, mechanic, etc)

Homesteading and living in the country isn't about following someone else's way. It's about finding your own. Maybe living 20 miles down a gravel road, only using solar panels to heat your tent isn't for you. Maybe living a little outside the burbs, with 2-5 acres and a big garden is your jam.

You're not alone alone. In some cases you're actively disliked by towns that you'd move into. Sure the stores and such will take your money, but make no mistake you're the city folks moving out to drive up land prices. You will NOT have the network that people that have lived there forever will have. This network is really what makes living extremely rural work. Tree falls on your house? There's no one to call, and if you can get someone out it's going to be 3-5 weeks if they decide to show up. Plumbing or septic breaks? Electric doesn't work? Truck breaks down at home? I really hope you're handy, because you're waiting and paying way more than you'd expect to have someone work on it. Want to buy some cows or pigs? You're paying retail because you don't know a guy. It will take you many many years to build this network up because you didn't goto highschool there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouvard_et_P%C3%A9cuchet (1881) is a novel about two clearks who move out to the countryside and try to learn how to manage a farm (and other knowledge) and completely fail

> the comforts it offers and seemingly pull away from me both financially and

> socially

If you don't find total value greater than your total losses in the situation, the solution is evident. Make a list, do the math. Revisit it periodically.

* https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/the-sunk-cost-fallacy/

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost

Decide whether you're getting any kind of "value" from what you're doing, and take a direction from there. What's done is done, and it shouldn't have any bearing on what to do next.

If yes, I think it was a mistake.

For me homesteading would be a way of escaping the rat race and doing something meaningful. I wouldn't expect to get much money out of it nor any social standing.

NFI about "homesteading" but I've lived out in the woods for a very long time, which has had tradeoffs and difficulties. For me "city life" was like wearing an inside out pincushion suit the whole time; irritations everywhere that never went away. Out here I can calm down and pay attention to things and be something other than a hyper-reactive rage monster all the time.

That's worth more than any of the inducements available in other lifestyles, to me.

It's not the lifestyle's fault if you thought it would be fashionable. Understand this though, that same frustration and regret, folks who move from the suburbs or rural areas into the city feel the exact same thing. I'm speaking from experience. This is why theres such a visceral reaction from people when they hear, "everyone needs to live in the city because it's better". For you, sure. For lots of others, get the fuck off my property because you scared off the birds. They sound better than you. You're blocking my view of the trees too.

Disclaimer: I am not a homesteader.

That said, my understanding is if you're going all the way with it, you're basically living as our ancestors did (maybe with some modern conveniences like better housing and tools) which, yes, required a vast amount of hard labor that would be unthinkable to modern minds. They had a couple of advantages that we don't:

1. They had no other choice, so there was no temptation to quit

2. They were raised in that environment so they were conditioned for it

3. They had a community around them that could help when things got tough (this is true of some modern homesteaders, but it sounds like you've been going solo, which frankly is probably a mistake if so)

My recommendation would be to sync up with other homesteaders, specifically in your area, if you haven't already and share war stories and see if maybe they have recommendations for you or if the stuff you found to be soul crushingly hard is just the way it is, and then you can decide whether that's worth it or not to you.

You mention friends pulling away financially and socially. Speaking to finances, "Keeping up with the Joneses" is hard to do if you're measuring yourself against a peer group that has not much in common any longer. Socially, it would depend on your group of friends. If you just no longer have time for them, then that's a question of "how much do I value this change in lifestyle versus valuing the friendships I'm going to lose?"

Growing up I lived in a small farming community. My parents had essentially a hobby farm, but we were surrounded mostly by large-scale farmers and the occasional farm that would probably qualify as part of the "homestead" movement these days.

It is hard work and not something I would ever seek to do for myself.

BUT: The one thing I found growing up in that community is that for a specific type of personality, that kind of hard work is its own reward. Patching up fences, being able to "create" a thing (even if it's just growing plants), it's a different kind of reward that for some people seems like plenty.

I think if you find that reward offsets the work you're doing, and you generally find your life to be better for you than before, then I think you made the right choice.

I would also say, the stresses of living on a farm are markedly different than job stresses. Being physically tired at the end of the day but having the mental energy (or hunger at points) to sit down and burn through a good book or documentary is something I actually miss quite a bit.

At the end of the day, if you tried it out and don't like it it's not a failure. You've no doubt learned a lot of valuable skills and those can be handy in unexpected places.

You can live rurally and not “homestead” in the sense that you can import many (not all) of the conveniences that city dwellers have.

Perhaps some of the work you find most soul crushing can be outsourced or mechanized.

Do you find any of the positives that you expected when setting out, or did those turn out to be mirages?

I miss hard work. The need to go outside and get things done. My teenage self never would’ve thought I’d be 30 missing old rural Virginia and free lands, while sleeping in an overpriced brick enclosure near DC.

I would advise cutting back and building up slowly. Stay on-grid (if possible), buy as much food from the grocery store as needed, keep your job (if possible). Then, if things get easier, slowly ramp up your self-sufficiency.

The other possibility is that you are re-romanticizing city life. Grass is always greener. Perhaps an extended vacation of a month or two back in the city will give you fresh perspective or the certainty you need.

You’ve started to discover a kind of truth. It’s just not the truth you wanted to find. Which is part of what makes truth—deep emotional truth—annoying, and part of why so many of us avoid it as much as we can.

My granparents were farmers, never had a tractor. When they were 50 they looked like 70. They had no other option.

You have other options.

I'm sure there's many people out there ready to jump onto the homesteading wagon and pick up where this person left off. That is of course if they haven't already done so much that there's nothing interesting left to do.

And why would you call homesteading a bandwagon? It’s a major life decision, not a new kind of yoga pants.

It’s very simple, really. Are you happy? Are likely to be happy? No? Then come home Bill Bailey.

It also seems that OP has done this on their own, without a partner? Makes it an even more terribly lonely path to follow. There's a reason people everywhere get out of subsistence farming as soon as possible: it's _hard_.

This is true, but I understand why OP would say it's a bandwagon. There's been a sharp increase in homesteading as a trend going around Tik Tok, YouTube, etc. People are seemingly more interested in it now.