The glamourisation of off-grid: Getting real about our dreams

Eight months ago, was an ending and a beginning all at once. I said goodbye to a fixed address, a high-paid job in the tech sector, a bathroom, a rental agreement, council tax and a place on the electoral role, and I moved into a van. This trasformation of my cost base gave me the power of choice to leave jobs that paid well in everything but what counts: a sense of life purpose, clarity of conscience, authenticity, freedom.

Now, I’m moving again. Three hundred metres, to be precise, to a more sheltered site. The storms have taken their toll, physically and financially, and I can no longer justify the cost of the view. The practical outweighs the picturesque. Another lesson, absorbed slowly, over months of cold mornings and repairs made with numb fingers: back-breaking work. There will still be a lake, but no swans on it; there is an unbusy road right in front of my new site, and no mountain. Neither the sunrises nor sunsets will be as freshly miraculous. Instead of the vast openness of vista that communicated to me daily my freedom, there is a more cocooned space, and it's nearer shared facilities. It's less wild, less desirable, less Grammable.

I did not begin this life in pursuit of an aesthetic. But the joy of my old view is something I loved to share. It became a rallying point, a very simple and marketable way of communicating an alternative. Even the most ardent of capitalists will tend to admit that skies forever, sunsets, and lakeside dwellings are desirable, if only because they’ve seen it celebrated on Instagram.

Thus in the very DNA of Unplugged Ambition is this fantasy: that we can easily swop the riches of corporate life for the riches of nature. There are other versions of this in play in our community: that by doing the same job as a freelancer we will gain autonomy and escape exploitation, or that by quitting work to live on our savings without actively using our talents for the benefit of others, we can find lasting peace.

Today I want to unravel some of the issues with this. Today I want to get real.

When nature becomes a product to sell

Nature, wilderness, the outdoors, the last remnants of an earth we've pillaged and defaced, have been repackaged in the last decade as something we can own by proxy. Simply by visiting a beautiful landscape we can be and communicate to the world a better version of ourselves.

The false-lashed woman in a tight T-shirt standing in the doorway of a van she probably doesn’t drive, the self-congratulationary summit shots of another peak bagged, the perfectly filtered sunsets from remote locations we burned trees to get to: the visual messages online are all around how we can use this earth as something to conquer, uncover and brag about.