Succeeding at failing

I follow several homesteading pages on Facebook. One of them recently asked of its readers, "What is the one thing about this lifestyle that sometimes rubs you the wrong way?" This is my response.

The thing about it that bothers me the most is that success is failure.

When you first start out, you may have a normal life. You can have a full-time job, go on vacations, have an active social life, and maintain a respectable reputation in the community. You may have a small vegetable garden in your yard and have a worm bin under your kitchen sink--maybe you even can your own jelly or applesauce once a year--but none of that interferes with the other aspects of your life.

Then you get a little deeper into it. Your garden is large enough to attract attention. You want chickens and a clothes line and a rain barrel. Maybe you start making your own bread. You still have your job, and your social life is mostly intact (though a few friends might start expressing concern), but going away for more than several hours requires more planning than it used to, and you start having to be concerned about rules. Maybe it's the HOA or a municipal code--nothing you'd go to prison for--but in your quest to live more freely, you're experiencing some push back for the first time.

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I wrote the above stub around Thanksgiving 2016. Where I was going with it was to say that when you're a super-boss, living-off-the-land homesteader, you're more than likely living a life that mainstream society sees as the opposite of "success." You're not a celebrity. You're not rich. You might be poor. You may live in a house you made yourself out of sticks and mud, that doesn't even have running water or electricity. You poop in a hole in the ground and have to dig in the dirt or kill animals to find something to eat. They'd call this "abject poverty" and see it as a sad sign that you had failed to amount to anything, instead of seeing that you were fully immersed in living your dream lifestyle. You wouldn't be popular, probably not even with your own extended family. Your neighbors would describe everything about your life as "an eyesore" and "a blight on the neighborhood, pulling down our property values." You won't be well-traveled, as someone needs to stick around to feed the animals. Most Christmas gifts from you will be handmade. That cousin who was hoping for a gift card from Best Buy will likely get a mason jar of honey or some homemade venison jerky. In a consumerist culture, thrift is not a virtue.