Homesteading: A Dying Trend?

Nancy (Little Homestead in Boise) posted an interesting question the other day, What The Hell Happened to Homesteading??? I suggest you hit that link to read it (and the comments), because it points to a chain of people who have observed a decline in the popularity of homesteading. As a movement or trend, “homesteading” seems to have reached it’s peak and is now on the downward side of popularity. 

Eighteen years ago, when Dan and I started a serious search for the place where we now live, our goal was a self-sufficient lifestyle. We weren’t even familiar with the term “homesteading.” And we weren’t influenced in this goal by online “influencers.” We were influenced by the books of Eric Sloane, Ralph Moody, and Laura Ingalls Wilder.  

When I started this blog, it was as a place to share some pictures of our new property. I had been successfully fiber blogging for about three years, so this blog was a place to document what we were doing. Instead of a fiber journal, it’s a homesteading journal. Over the years I’ve enjoyed having a popular homesteading blog and writing homesteading books (of which only 5 Acres & A Dream: The Book sold well.) During that time I resisted the advice to “monetize” my blog. I had lots of advertising requests, but I always demurred, saying that my blog was just a personal journal. In my mind, if my goal was to help people be less dependent on the system, then using that same system for profit was hypocritical. 

The problem is that our current system model is Industrialism. Previously, society had an agrarian economic system, where sustainability and self-reliance were the norm. But an industrialized system has no room for these things. Everything must be a cog in the great wheel called “progress.” The only thing that makes sense to people is making money because economic growth is the goal of the System. Personal wealth is the bait. None of this facilitates personal independence. Trying to establish a homestead in an industrialized system takes a lot of work, time, and money, starting with a huge mortgage. People have to have a job. So in essence, homesteaders have two jobs, one from which they “make a living,” and one by which they hope to live.

It’s no surprise then that people came up with ways to make money with homesteading. Heck, I did it with my books. I just refused to go any further. To support themselves, people develop homesteading blogs, websites, books, video channels, products, product review affiliations, and subscription content. “Branding” became the trend. As I mentioned to Nancy, it seems to me that people stopped promoting homesteading and started promoting themselves.

What Dan and I have learned over the past seventeen years is that the more we can produce and do for ourselves, the less money we need. Especially once we got our mortgage paid off. But that required lifestyle changes that the System doesn’t support. The System needs cogs, not independent doers. We’re trained from birth to be consumers of disposable goods. We’re trained to think physical work is undesirable and that convenience, entertainment, and leisure are desirable goals. This mindset isn’t compatible with the lifestyle called homesteading. 

Trends and movements grow, peak, and then fad away. Lifestyles, however, are more resilient. By producing at least some of our own food and staying out of debt, we’ve weathered unemployment, inflation, supply chain disruptions, lockdowns, and stupidity (remember when people were boasting about buying up all the toilet paper?). And we’ve weathered it all quite comfortably, I might add. We’ve had very little lifestyle disruption.

Is homesteading dying? My conclusion is that there’s a difference between homesteading as a trend and homesteading as a lifestyle. Of the trend, I think perhaps we’ve strangled the goose that was laying the golden eggs. As a viable lifestyle, I can only say that for Dan and me, this is the way we think we were meant to live. That is another story, however.

Thoughts?