How I Ironically Yeeted Myself Back Into Capitalism
OK, so I suppose that sort of claim warrants a bit of explanation:
When I was in my 20’s, I quit college to be a career bartender and never once regretted it. I mean, everyone in the industry has those days where they are seriously questioning their life choices, but then you kind of just dry your tears with dollar bills at the end of the night and sleep like an angel knowing you just made rent. “Bartending” through Covid however, was straight up not a real good time— y’all, it’s 2023 and I’m still salty. Long story short, I wasn’t loving it anymore.
***This photo was not taken at the job referenced. That would be rude.
The following summer, I got in a car accident that… really sucked. At first, everything seemed fine, and then my body just kind of rage quit on me. Absolutely everything hurt, and nothing worked the way it should. I don’t know if theres a way to really quantify how much I did not enjoy my experience. Enough that I don’t particularly want to waste any more time talking about it.
After what seemed an eternity, I went back to work. Sort of? I did go back to work for a few months, but it seemed I could not shake the feeling of burnout I had been experiencing before the accident. So one day, on a particularly random Tuesday, I decided that surely I had grown weary of being a cog in the capitalist machine, and that a sustainable life must be the solution, and I quit and went fishing about it.
I caught a lot of fish that day, and had made a conscious decision to chase this weird millennial dream of a more beautiful and simple existence. But my family could not survive on fish alone. So I went home and planted a garden that, against all odds, did produce! But we needed another protein source, so we got chickens and turkeys!
Several homesteading books, blogs, journals, and articles later and I had come to the part of every modern homesteader’s journey where they need to monetize what they do. This is especially challenging when transitioning from a conventional lifestyle because like, most people just don’t own farm tools or equipment, much less know what to do with them, and for whatever reason, that’s what my brain had decided that monetizing your lifestyle must look like.
Turns out, what it actually looks like is fishing with my family to put food in our freezer and harvesting skins for jewelry, running around picking berries to make jams and gather inspiration for design, testing new gear in extreme cold conditions with my friends (Sledding. We went sledding.), etc.
Alternative living wasn’t as clear a course as the clock-in/clock-out grind I had been doing, but the fear of missing out was too real, so I did the thing people keep referencing about “betting on yourself” — the thing that feels like insanity when you’re actually doing it— and started a business doing something I enjoy.
It has been nothing short of a truly weird and wonderful journey every step of the way and I intend to fill in the blanks as I go, but for now— WELCOME! This is my new life. I don’t know what the future will look like, but today, I am very excited to share the next step of our journey into sustainable living in the last frontier!
