Resuming Off-Grid Projects for 2024

Acorn Land Lab Projects are ready to kick off again for 2024

We’re back to releasing educational videos for off-grid projects!

It’s been 6 months of much change and adjustment for our Acorn Land Labs off-grid experiment! We finished our proof-of-concept micro cabin in 2023. Our Acorn team had to downsize at the end of 2023 but we’ve been organizing the off-grid property, adjusting to new jobs, and prepping for the next season of Acorn projects.

We just released our newest video giving you a tour of our new off-grid location we’ll be using for the long term. We’ll eventually offer hands on classes here for anyone interested. We’re on 7 acres in the woods here as we expand this off-grid framework.

Why this matters more in 2024 than 20 years ago:

As inflation grows, cost of living increases, house prices skyrocket, and social unrest increases we are convinced these off-grid projects continue to matter a great deal for securing future freedoms, especially with a family.

Western lifestyles over the past 80 years have been a miracle of overabundance, just not a miracle that can (or will) sustain forever. Between the debasement of global fiat currencies, growing political strife, ecological damage, and growing societal tensions we think off-grid solutions are a key niche for people to pursue for simple freedoms.

• Living in the suburbs will become harder as things get more expensive.

• Living off-grid is hard as you have to build new skills and roll up your sleeves.

• Living in the city will be harder as certain stresses increase and costs go up.

Nothing is easy, and each path will be “hard” in different ways. Pick your hard :)

Life over the past 80 years might have been as “abundant” as it will get for “the highest percentage” of people globally. We don’t know this for sure, however, the gulf between the wealthy and poor is accelerating more and more. The global middle class is being eroded due to numerous factors.

We’re not offering a silver bullet to an easy life, however, after much study I do know this is the lifestyle myself and my family will invest in for our preferences. We want to live simply, spend less, save more, own a small rural property to garden on, utilize solar power, learn to use less energy, build soil, and spend more time together as a family homeschooling the kids.

Housing is broken. Homes are shelter, not investments.

We’re currently in the process of selling our suburban home in order to have a laser focus on building a simple and affordable lifestyle that’s more embedded in nature.

Home prices are not guaranteed to be high forever. Homes can either be affordable, or be an investment. Today in the USA homes are a financial investment rather than an affordable shelter. Sadly, this dynamic harms young people, renters, and poor people. Sky-high housing prices benefit current homeowners (equity), banks (interest), local governments (taxes), builders (profits) and realtors + lawyers + brokers (commissions). I don’t think we’ll have a healthy society until we agree that homes are not supposed to be artificially constrained investments - they are supposed to be practical shelter.

Businesses are investments. Farms are investments. These are productive assets. Homes are not productive assets, however they have been treated as such because the supply has been constrained through zoning, bad policy, lack of building, etc.

While the solution of building lots of small homes is simple, in reality, this is a hard problem to solve in the modern landscape. Old people with homes and equity have a vested interest in limited new home construction (NIMBY - not in my backyard). The local government is not truly incentivized in solving affordable housing, because this looks like less tax revenue to them. Builders will only build if there’s a profit, which makes sense. Modern zoning makes building small homes not possible or profitable. The answer is allowing tiny homes, yurts, cabins, and all sorts of creative, owner-built, flexible housing options. Politics and zoning prohibit this, not technical ability.

I’ll save the housing deep dive for another article. Suffice to say, I believe the suburban housing model in particular is broken and wildly unsustainable. Suburbs are subsidized and are unable to pay for their upkeep longterm. The last owners of suburban homes in decaying suburbs loses. The tax base moves away and the infrastructure crumbles. We’ve seen this time and again over the past decades. Hence our family selling our home in the suburbs after I’ve learned more about this dynamic. We don’t want to perpetuate this cycle of “disposable communities” further.

“In or out” is the new motto I like for housing. A small house “IN” a little town or city is great. OR a small house OUT in a rural area is great. These are the models I prefer for practical reasons. However, in an age of more civil unrest I opt towards the rural towns and rural areas rather than metro areas or urban areas.

The Big Cycles

Scholars like Peter Turchin, Ray Dalio, Joel Kotkin, Neal Howe and others have dedicated great time and research to illustrating the “rise and fall” of societies and empires. These big cycles involve society going through hard times, tackling a crisis, rebuilding trust and strength, peaking, and then descending into decadence and crisis again. This is a pattern as old as civilization. It seems new to us Americans, but it’s an old story.

The world is not coming to an end. However, today’s warped Western world as we know it is cracking apart. It’s predictable. It’s not even a bad thing. This is what happens.

Our job might not even be to fix it. I don’t think anyone can fix it.

Our job is to learn, observe, adapt, change and ride out this wave.

History’s wave is often inevitable for the single human.

It doesn’t mean we don’t try to do good. We just cannot try to preserve systems and institutions that are too big and broken to fix.

We are homeschooling our sons with this mindset. Public education has systemic issues I cannot solve in my sons lifetimes. Our only logical option then is to live frugally, homeschool our boys, and adapt.

At the risk of rambling, I’ll wrap up this article.

We’re back to working on off-grid projects! We’re happy to be back. :)