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My wife and I made the same decision - I sold most of my equity in my business, stuck the apartment in the city on Airbnb, and moved to an ancient water mill in
by madaxe_again 7y ago
My wife and I made the same decision - I sold most of my equity in my business, stuck the apartment in the city on Airbnb, and moved to an ancient water mill in the countryside near a backwater of a backwater. We spent three years wandering the earth, before settling down here - it’s only been a few months, but walking out straight into nature is glorious, rain or shine.
I do a bit of consulting, maybe 20 days a year, and the Airbnb pays the mortgage and overheads at the apartment - a residential let wouldn’t, unfortunately.
It’s a simple and quiet life, but we’re both less stressed and happier than we ever were in mechanistic life.
I think we are at a tipping point - we have the technology and the means to make this kind of lifestyle possible. Only a few years ago having power and internet access here would have been impossible. Now, solar is cheap and easy, as is hydro (next project!), and sticking an LTE relay mast up a hill was a trivial job.
We are still following an old way of thinking, in general, while we could instead be reaping the benefits of the technical uplift our society has realised, and living a life we left so long ago we barely remember it - but with modern comforts.
This is a small home - a bedroom, a bathroom, a living room, a shed - 90sqm total. It’s everything we need. If we have a family, we build a cabin, or a yurt, and we expand our infrastructure as needed. We have hot and cold running water, more power than we can use, fast internet, underfloor heating (next week - working on it), and we’ve only been working and living here for two months.
I can see myself living here indefinitely, and as a result of our vastly reduced overheads, even our reduced income gives us a sizeable budget for travel.
I think it’s crazy to live any other way. So do an awful lot of others who have done or are doing the same as us - we’re far from alone in our direction.