Two sisters and a teenage son moved to a Colorado campsite last July, living off canned food. They had wanted to take a break from a world that distressed them, a local coroner said.
Reading the article it sounds like this woman unfortunately just spent too much time on social media reading all the doom and gloom of the media and people amplifying it in places like reddit, Twitter and Facebook.
wanted to live in a land disconnected from the world, which she viewed as chaotic and dangerous
she and her teenage son could be happy and safe away from the news, the viruses, the politics of modern-day America
had been “discouraged with the state of the world”
Rebecca Vance’s fears intensified during the pandemic
Consuming too much of this crap has really affected peoples mental health, from Trump, to BLM riots, racism, covid, it’s broken some people who spend too much time on social media.
So much so that they think the only way out is to hide away from society.
Reminder, friends, to take frequent and extensive breaks from social media for your own mental health.
Please, I knew people who were exactly the same back in the 90s, there are always people who go down the paranoia rabbit hole and don't come back out.
Lot of them were praying for the collapse because that's when God would raise them above the wicked heathens and sodomites because they're secretly special but everyone else is too evil to admit it.
The article said the poor kid was homeschooled, which is often a hallmark of religious fundamentalism. Not trusting the world and thinking it's out to get you is also a hallmark of fundamentalism - but also of mental illness.
100%. Some people exploited the riots to break into stores but they were the significant minority, and additionally some were outed as bad actors who actually didn't support the movement.
You can't lump in blm riots in there, those were protests stoked to violence by police officers, so what you should be saying it's, corrupt police forces resulting in blm protests
Maybe I'm being too generous, but I was reading it as this person consumed too much media, including lies and exaggerations, and it warped their world view. I guess I read it as a topic like and not calling them riots themselves. Kinda like the "race riot" in Tusla, but idk.
And remember that despite some unique large scale issues we have today, there were much, MUCH worse times to be alive. “Majority of Americans live a peaceful life and die at 70-80” is not reportable news but still largely true.
Things are far from perfect, there are major issues, but I’d choose to live today than almost the entirety of human existence previously.
There were definitely way more violent times in the US: there were pandemics, there were revolts, there were wars. We live in an amazing time but it takes a bit of grand perspective to realize that all the bad news is easy to see in a matter of minutes. You can have death and destruction delivered right into your home in a matter of milliseconds. It’s much much harder to see all the wonderful things happening in the world
she and her teenage son could be happy and safe away from the news, the viruses, the politics of modern-day America
Just close the apps. That's literally all it takes to avoid like 90% of the crap that she's talking about. But the viruses.... did she think those don't make it to the forest or something?
I hate how people talk about off grid living as something you can pull off alone, that's difficult even if you allow for buying food and installing all kinds of fancy infrastructure in your home.
The truth is that properly sustainable and reliable off-grid living requires a small community, because you need a lot of labour.
You nailed it. And these folks were simply living off canned food and ramen... For how long?
Communal living is great if you get the right mix of people with a shared vision... In the right location... With the right resources... To be successful it seems you need to have a pretty organic evolution of the process and attract people with shared vision. The dark side of this devolves into cultism; the brighter side is a sustainable living and sense of belonging.
Now there are people who live off the grid in places like Alaska (just watch Life Below Zero) and do it successfully... But these people grew up doing that or studied and prepared A LOT. And man, doing that solo is not easy. None of them seemed to be super healthy or cheerful.
I read a book a while back about the real life of the author of little house on the prairie (it's called "prairie fires") - her books really sugarcoat how hard life was - even people who knew how to live off the land had a really hard time
I am reminded of that guy who did that in Alaska solo, for like 30 years Dick Perniky or some such I believe his name was. He took video of wildlife and got it edited. I think he was 50 or there abouts when he left the lower 48.
I wish people would realize that humans only got to where we are because we are a COMMUNAL species. We developed complex language and tool usage BECAUSE we work together. Being "off the grid" is usually isolationist and therefore extremely dangerous. We need community in order to develop and manage the resources we need to survive.
Well, why aren't we practicing that communal specialty into you know, bettering society from it's current dumpster fire state? Or is that just too tall of a task?
Also, we're living in kind of an unprecedented part of history that enables is to be independent of other people in ways never before possible. So that gives people a very distorted sense of that, a lack of any notion of the importance of community. And of course this "independence" is achieved by a complete dependence on this huge ubiquitous economic machine.
I think sometimes it's the extreme dependence that makes the attempt at off the grid freedom seem more attractive; it's weird how the technology seems to both take away so much freedom and yet make people feel independent at the same time
It's dangerous to go full off the grid, but in reality it's never complete isolation. In Leave No Trace/My Abandonment (based on a true story) the father relied on disability checks to buy goods and educated his daughter using encyclopedias.. In Walden Thorough is living alone in a remote area, but it's not like he's completely cut off from the benefits of society and has visitors somewhat regularly. I think there's a difference between trying to minimize the brunt of society 24/7 vs going full isolation.
I'm a world of growing instability where the inputs for modern lifehave their supply consistency threatened, learning some basic survival skills is not a bad thing. Many countries will likely have huge energy, food, and water shortfalls in the coming years. Germany is burning what amounts to wet coal to make up for losing Russian oil. Ukraine was one of the world's biggest wheat producers. Russia produced a lot of the world's fertilizer. There are reasons to learn how to live without the entire support network most of us take for granted.
Though you should be pretty decent at living off grid before commiting to it.
Don't assume that you're cougar-proof or that 40°F and below weather with no real insulation is something you can save yourself from with enough bootstraps.
I feel for the kid, who got dragged down by the hubris of his mom. It's troubling that we've grown so disconnected from the world we've built; we dont feel like we benefit from it at all. We can all sit here and shame this mother for being neglectful and stupid, and yet the feelings she had of a chaotic life with no upside...that's so fucking common right now.
Its a commonly floated idea among my circles, and by me personally, that we kinda just want to fuck off and build a comfy commune somewhere not too hot, not too cold, just away from cities, and try to be as self-sufficient as possible. Just a small group of friends and family. It's kinda what I'm saving up for, if I'm honest, because buying a city house is just.... Prohibitively expensive for what it is.
Probably easier to survive in a commune of a few dozen than it would be in tents with 3 people. But yeah I think a lot of us have had dreams of fucking off to the wilds to live like a hermit.
I would probably last like 3 days and only if I'm being extremely optimistic.
The problem is that 'we' didn't build this world. Our society was (is) shaped by people who's situation and life experience have very little in common with the average person, and yet we continue to let them shape policy to their own benefit and our detriment because... money? Or something? Idk.
I feel bad the kid he had a privileged shit life. But going out into the middle of the Alaskan wilderness to survive with no formal training was punching way above his weight...
The thing that dawned on me when I watched it as an older adult was his sheer selfishness. Smug, cliched little prick. His father's violence aside, what about the rest of his family?
What a terrible way to go. They sounded less prepared than even Chris McCandless.
I can't believe I'm recommending reality TV, but Alone is a fairly good representation of being alone in the wilderness with no resources. It is extremely unpleasant.
Alone is a great show. But I’ve got to tell you, while I watch and know I do not (currently) possess the skills to do what those folks do, there is a draw for me to want to do it. I mean I’m sure I’m over-romanticizing the thing to an extent, and - again - I know enough about me to know I can’t do it today, but there’s a distinct pull to want to.
I'm a pretty hardcore outdoorsman. Been hunting and fishing since I was a kid, and I spend a lot of my year maintaining family timberland pretty far out in the cut. I like to think I can handle some shit, and I even attended a wilderness survival camp as a kid. I'm good with knots, plant identification, wood carving, shelter building, and fire building.
A few seasons of Alone showed me that I probably wouldn't last more than a few months if the area I was in had any kind of significant winter. Maybe in the south where it never snows, but even then it'd be fucking unbearable in the middle of summer where you still have to constantly work for food and water and are constantly at risk of dehydration and malnutrition.
I think many people have that pull to nature, but most that do it and survive recognize that living without the infrastructure of the rest of humanity is at least extremely challenging and so will thoroughly prepare.
How did they leave a car at a campsite for months and not have any kind of search and rescue triggered?
My buddy got lost on a trail once and had to do an shitty night out in the woods, the next morning there were forest service personnel out looking for him because they spotted his car parked overnight with no camp permit posted.
I thought this was standard practice at every national and state park. An unattended vehicle is seen as a sure sign that someone is in trouble. I guess I’m never going hiking in Colorado, cause if I get in trouble the CO forest personnel are apparently just going to leave me for dead.
The roads would have gotten buried with snow. One snowy day would do it. By the time they realized it, too late. Those forest service roads are not plowed.
They must have made some sort of effort to hide the vehicle, or park it somewhere it wouldn't be questioned for some time. If the goal is to get away from people, you don't want your vehicle to cause someone to come looking for you.
It wasn't a park, so unless someone filed a missing person report the car itself wouldn't necessarily trigger anything since people abandon all kinds of crazy shit on national forests.
I feel like too many people do not respect nature. They romanticize it, and that’s a very dangerous thing. They forget that you need actual skills to survive in the wild. This didn’t have to happen.
That has gotten worse with all the "survivalist" shows acting like its easy to survive with just a knife and fig leaf in the wild.
They see a show grab some gear and off they go. Not realizing those shows are often fake and when not, the star has many years of actual experience and training.
I'm a huge fan of Alone, but would never in a million years think I could do it. Those people are literally survival teachers or Bushmen/women who have done this their entire lives and even then only make it 20 or so days before calling to gtfo.
I'd say they increased their distress, they were naive too. Living off the land is a major commitment and requires skill and knowledge. People in the past still used trade and tribes to survive that way. Even back then they didn't try to live in something as flimsy as a tent. Also, going 100% solo was a death sentence. Reminds me of Chris McCandless ("Into the Wild").
Sounds like this wasn’t thought through and was perhaps an emotional decision. True off-grid living takes lots of knowledge and prep. Surviving 100 days is basically conservation of resources to last till the e d. Off grid still requires shelter and resources.
For once though, their motives seem more noble/less crazy than most of the headlines. Heck, a bunch of us are here on Lemmy cause we got fed up with a system and want something better. At least they wanted something better.
Another article I read stated that the incomplete beginnings of a lean-to or similar shelter were present at the camp, seems like they tried to build something more permanent but ran out of energy to finish it. Which is why you build your shelter first.
In the show Alone the take away is that fat beats skills. All of the super fit "survival experts" with 5% body fat are being carried out on stretchers in a couple of weeks. The 300lb dude with minimal skills out lasts all of the experts.
The environment just doesn't have enough fat calories available. Skill won't change this.
If you can’t at the very least identify what mushrooms you can or can not eat in the forest, you should not go out there to live. I 100% can not, so my dumb ass will never try to go live off grid out in the woods. I can’t find food and I acknowledge that. More folks need to realize their limitations.
For most of us, going to live in "the wild" is as preposterous as us returning to the oceans we crawled out of eons ago. We've evolved past that, and are no longer suited for that environment, at least not naturally anyway.
You also need someone who isn't with you to know where you are and arrange check-ins of some sort, or at least give them a time frame of when they can expect to hear from you again if all is well.
The fact that a hiker found one and the other two weren't found until the next day makes me think that one left to try and get help, froze to death, and the other 2 died waiting.
Apparently this was during winter. If they got hit by bad weather unprepared, they might not have had any options left once they realized they were fucked.
I just feel bad for the kid. Mom wanted to get off the grid but Colorado has a history of killing those who try it without a lot of money and infrastructure to support it. Go off the grid in like South Carolina, not Colorado.
Lol this is ridiculous. I’ve been hiking in the Rockies plenty of times during the winter, as long as you take the proper precautions you will be fine.
During winter, in bad weather it might take a while to get back to civilization if you are somewhere out there. I mean sure you should always plan for stuff like that and be prepared (and look for help well before running out), but this really wasn't a well planned thing from the start.
I understand many people are frightened in this strange world, but this is outright murder-suicide by stupidity. The kid didn't know what's happening to him. Don't run away, change the world. Or -at least- try to.
Are you trying to "well, actually" me? There were a myriad of choices made here, all under the guise of "living off the grid." I very specifically used a plural word, not a singular one. Choices. All of them stupid, including the one you protest as not stupid. It is made stupid by way of their sheer incompetence, unpreparedness, lack of education and training in the matter, and their sheer stubbornness to not call it quits when reality descended upon them.
They had a 14-year old kid with them. That poor kid didn't deserve to have been led to his death because of the adults he had no choice but to depend on.