There’s a couple of related but seperable impulses here.
One is the desire to live in an intentional community. Well, you can do that in New York, there are plenty of them. The upside is that you live with a group of people who have the same life goals as you and share a philosophy with you. The downside is that the above isn’t really true. Everyone is in this community for their own idiosyncratic reasons and have their own ideas about what they want to get out of it. So the biggest hassle of living in an intentional community is the endless political bullshit where everyone tries to impose their vision on everyone else.
The other is downsizing your monthly bills. You don’t need to move to the countryside to do this. You can cut out all kinds of bullshit purchases from your life. Stop buying new clothes, new gadgets, dining out, monthly cable, monthly phone, all the optional stuff. Get a much smaller cheaper place to live. Get a cheaper car, or get rid of your car. Get rid of your credit cards, pay cash for everything or do without. If your lifestyle requires a lot less money to maintain you have a lot more freedom. You can save money and take a year off from work, or move, or change jobs, or freelance, or whatever. When your monthly nut is equal to or higher than your monthly income you’re a slave. When you can save hundreds or thousands of dollars a month, you have all sorts of options.
Another is the idea is leaving the city and moving to a rural area. But most people who live in small towns aren’t off the grid, they have monthly electric and so on, the main difference is they tend to pay a lot less in rent. The problem is finding a job. What can you do for a living, and could you do that in a rural area? Or you could live in a more rural area that’s commutable to a bigger city. I live on a five acre rural property on Vashon Island, we have chickens and fruit trees and one neighbor. But I commute to work in downtown Seattle (or Redmond) every day. It takes an extra couple of hours every day.
Or there’s going off the grid, becoming a truck farmer. Thing is, people who do this aren’t really “off the grid” in the sense that they’re totally independent. They still trade, they take odd jobs, they buy and sell, they might have electricity and so on. But a big part of their income comes from their land. Um, have you ever had a garden? Did you enjoy it? If you want to become a goat farmer, that’s a job that requires a lot of backbreaking work. Some people find it suits them. Most people probably wouldn’t. How do you know which type you are? And you’re still dealing with bills and expenses, probably worse than before since you’re essentially a small business owner. Does running a small business sound like something you’d be good at? Lots of people are good at growing vegetables, but terrible at managing a business, you need to be good at both and love doing both to make it work as a small farmer/artisan.
Or you could move to a small town and get a job at the grocery store and have a garden for personal use to supplement your meager income.
You should figure out what what’s really behind your desire to chuck everything. Because no matter where you go there you are. You can run from your problems but you can’t run from yourself.
