Would You Live Off-Grid?

It wouldn’t be just the kids playing down here!

As a writer of speculative fiction, I often think about the future. I love disaster and apocalyptic stories, and sometimes wonder if I should do more to prepare for possible calamity. On a basic level, I should probably keep some bottled water and tins of beans in the garage. We once had a power cut for a couple of days and that was disaster enough!

An underground shelter is a great idea, though my kids would probably just use it as a play thing.

Of course if we really wanted to get prepared, we could live off-grid and be self-sufficient. Apparently, all we’d need are some solar panels, a veggie garden (field?!), fish pond, chickens, cows and a filtration system. Sounds easy right?

It certainly looks good! I’m not a keen gardener, though, and would really miss wi-fi and the cinema, so perhaps ‘homesteading’ is a bit of a fantasy for me. One of my works-in-progress is a novel set in a self-sufficient community in the Australian bush, so if we’re talking about fantasy I can at least live there whenever I want!

There’s certainly something empowering about the idea of living independently, and there are some really magnificent pre-made self-sufficient homes on the market to make the idea tempting. This ‘Tinywood Home’ comes with a hot tub!

You can get creative too, building homes from all kinds of things, like hay, old beer bottles, tyres or even a shipping container:

Or many shipping containers:

The sky’s the limit! How about a ‘simple’ caravan?

Imagination is one thing, however, practical demand for such radical lifestyle change is another. So I put a poll on Twitter to ask how many people might actually be interested in going off-grid. I figured a high interest among my part-cyber social media pals would indicate a high interest in the general population. Here are the results:

A few discussions also circulated following on from the poll, which can be summarised as follows:

“I like going off-grid for short periods – walks in the bush, camping, isolated retreats to recharge the mind and soul – but I wouldn’t want to live off-grid permanently.”

“No way, I need my wi-fi!”

“It’s appealing, but I love my buses, shops, hospitals, and home delivery!”

“I love gardens but they don’t love me.”

“Give me enough books and I’d be fine.”

“We’re pulling the plug in five years.”

“It’s a metric of privilege to be able to choose.”

How true. It would be brave and exciting for 67% of us to set up a self-sufficient home, practical too given the impending apocalypse(!). But realistically most of us need society as much as society needs us. We’re too integrated into the system to leave. School and parents no longer teach us the farming skills we’d need to make such a home thrive. The hub and inter-connectivity of modern life has us comfortable.

So it’s settled then, I’m not going anywhere. I’ll have to stick to exploring the concept through my stories, using my imagination to dream ‘what-if’, and cope with the future when it brings whatever it’s going to bring.

What about you? If you had the privilege to choose, would you live off-grid?