Why We Gave Up The City Life

Why would two gainfully employed people quit their jobs in Dallas, Texas and move to rural Tennessee? By most people’s standards we are successful people living the American dream. However, after years of working in the city we became convinced that the nine-to-five corporate job, while living in the suburbs, was for us an unfulfilling, stressful and mind-numbing way of living.

I would calculate how much time I spent in the car each day, or each week traveling to and from work. I spent about two and half hours each day in the car. That adds up to over 50 hours each month spent driving to or from a job. Over a weeks’ worth of labor each month was wasted just to get to and from the job. I was spending most of my life trying to earn money to pay for the car and gas that I need to get to the job, to buy the food that I can’t grow myself and pay for the house that was left empty most of the time. It seems a rather silly way to exchange day after day of my life. ¹

More and more of our modern life, especially in the city, is based on consumption. Once all of the basic human needs are met, how is an economic engine supposed to keep growing? In part, by a continuous barrage of marketing messages that have the effect of manufacturing ‘wants’ and promoting overconsumption.² Even before a child starts school, they are imprinted with thousands and thousands of corporate marketing messages almost ensuring that they will grow up thinking that they need to eat a certain type of food, or wear better shoes, or even take a certain kind of drug just to be normal.³  We end up thinking we won’t be complete, or won’t be as happy as we could be unless we have ‘more’. This type of marketing actually changes the way a person thinks about him or herself and the world in which he lives. In the last 30 years we have gone from being citizens to being consumers.

In our economy, the more problems we have the more opportunities there are to make money. It is kind of absurd that we are part of an economy that systemically seeks out or promotes inherently bad things, but upon examination, our economy is decoupled from the well-being and health of the people and nature. GDP growth and thus our financial health doesn’t take into account resource depletion, or dirty water, deforestation, species extinction, or climate change⁴. Those are called negative externalities in the pseudo-science of economics, and the social cost of those externalities are not paid for by the corporations that caused the problems⁵. If a fishing industry wipes out the Cod population, they don’t have to pay the cost of replacing it. If the tobacco industry’s products kill over 400,000 people a year⁶ they aren’t paying the full social costs of all of those deaths.  Even in a different context, a train wreck has a positive impact on the Gross Domestic Product. Someone has to rebuild the track, the train and replace the goods lost in the wreck. Natural disasters have a net positive impact on GDP. All those homes have to be rebuilt and all the infrastructure repaired. A litigious culture has a positive impact on GDP. All the lawyers, and consultants have to grow their businesses too. A complex tax code has a positive impact on GDP. Most of those CPA’s and IRS agents would be unemployed if we had a simplified system of taxation. An increasingly sick population has a positive impact on GDP. The medical industry is booming right now. There is very little money to be made in healthcare if we are a healthy population⁷. And on it goes like a snake eating its own tail, but unaware that it’s doing so. 

In the city I couldn’t grow my own food, I had to pay for it. The cheap food is frequently subsidized⁸, and will eventually make you sick, thus the healthy food costs more up front. The processed food is cheap but nutrient deficient and is engineered to make you crave more of it.⁹  The chemically grown, and GMO foods are also cheaper than organic, but there are health risks with eating them¹⁰. In the city I couldn’t get my own water, I had to pay for it. Most of the municipal water has toxins in it ¹¹ and people pay twice for water. Once for tap water and again for bottled water. The bottled water is frequently hoarded from local water supplies even in times of drought by large corporations¹². In the city I couldn’t generate my own electricity, I had to pay for it. Entire mountain tops are being removed for coal. You can see them on Google Earth; they look like lunar landscapes. The people who live close to the mountain top removal sites are much sicker than average.¹³ The marketing from the coal companies promote ‘clean coal’, but that is an oxymoron of huge proportion.¹⁴In the city I couldn’t dispose of my own waste, I had to pay for it. Wastewater is treated and released into our waterways to be used again, but it still contains harmful chemicals.¹⁵ Landfills are not designed to breakdown garbage, but rather just to contain it, and they frequently leak toxins into the ground.¹⁶ The biomass that goes into a landfill is frequently wasted when it could be used in compost instead of buying chemical fertilizers. In the city I couldn’t affordably build my own house, I had to pay someone else to do it. With all the building codes, restrictions and high property costs it would have cost a fortune to build my own house in the city. It seems that city living is very much like being a part of a large dependent community. One in which each person has to spend an enormous amount of his or her time trying to make lots of money just to provide the basics of life.

I didn’t want to take on a 15 to 30 year mortgage in order to live in the city. The word mortgage is derived from the old French ‘mort’ which means dead or death, and ‘gage’ which means pledge, which equates to death pledge. A home mortgage is such a huge debt that for many working people that debt is with them until they die. I didn’t want to give up 30 years of my life, if I live that long, to pay a bank twice what I borrowed. It is no accident that most online mortgage calculator from banks don’t actually show you the total cost of the loan. A 30 year mortgage on $100,000 at 5.0% interest will cost me over $93,000 in interest payments alone.

In 2010 I got rid of my cable TV. I started spending some of that extra time reading books. I gravitated towards non-fiction, I guess because I like to figure out how things work. I started to read about finance, religion, healthcare, psychology, science, politics, natural resources, food production and business. I started to realize just how unsustainable my way of life, our economy and our predominant worldview really is. Initially I began blaming others for not implementing all the possible solutions from this new information (new to me anyway). I thought that if politicians would only do these things all would be well. If only corporations would do these certain things that we could be much happier. If the media would only change to support certain values we would all be better off. If Americans would embrace a healthier lifestyle we could have much better lives. All of these things were what other people should do to make our lives better. I didn’t want to live my life being bitter about what everyone else should do, but wasn’t doing, to fix our problems. What am I responsible for? I can only control my own mind, and that is a bit of stretch most days. Instead of looking outside for change, it would be better to look inside and make the changes in my own life without depending on someone else.

Buckminster Fuller said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality.  To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” It turns out that the new model that most intrigued me isn’t that new, and has been around since the 70’s. It isn’t some religion or political ideology. It is called permaculture. It is derived from “permanent culture” or “permanent agriculture” depending on the source. It can be defined as a design system for sustainable living and land use. I’ve heard it described as “a revolution disguised as ecological gardening”. In many ways it’s a comprehensive array of old and new solutions that offers a way of living that anyone can do in order to provide for themselves, their community and nature. Regardless of the debate about climate change, population growth, resource depletion, or the global financial crisis the more I studied permaculture the more it made sense to me that this is what I should be doing. Maitri Homestead is the beginning of this new way of living for us.

You can read more about permaculture, here. You can watch some YouTube videos that give a really good introduction, here.