On Grid Off Gridders

Possibly the most unconsciously ironic thing I've noticed online this past year has been people who claim that they gave up a 'normal' lifestyle to travel nomadically in a camper van or a boat or whatever, in order to go 'off grid' then posting videos on You Tube telling us about their new 'off grid' existence.  I mean, I really can't think of anything more 'on grid' than using the internet - the ultimate information 'grid' - to share your travels on the world's largest video sharing site.  It isn't just the odd video, most of them seem to have channels to which they regularly churn out content in order to boost the follower count and chase the views.  Perhaps they don't really understand what 'off grid' means.  As I understood it, people who did this were trying to escape from modern society and ts often excessive 'connectivity', constant scrutiny by the authorities and from being tied down and restricted by such things as mortgages and conventional employment.  Speaking personally, if I ever decided to go 'off grid', I'd pretty much disappear completely from view, abandon stuff like mobile phones and the web and basically become a hermit.  Not that you need to go and live in a caravan in a muddy field in some obscure corner of the country to achieve some degree of withdrawal from society - I do it pretty well from my terraced house. For the past six months, or so, I've gone out of my way to minimise my social presence - I rarely speak to neighbours, or bother keeping up with acquaintances or extended family.  I've just kept myself to myself.

Obviously, I've kept up my web presence - the very fact that I'm writing this attests to that fact - but an online existence is actually easier to manage: you can literally switch off contacts if they get too much and you don't actually have to deal with people face-to-face.  To be honest, I haven't done this in order to go 'off grid' and evade modern life.  With so much having changed in my life over the past couple of years, I just felt the need to drop out for a while and indulge in some mainly solitary contemplation.  Besides, I'd enjoyed the various lockdowns so much that I wanted to extend them a bit.  But I've started to re-emerge of late, having resumed meeting a select few friends at the local, for instance.  I suppose that it has been a way of resetting my life, putting some distance between myself and the past, (those bits associated with my former job mainly).  But I certainly haven't been going 'off grid', or even claiming to have done so.  I certainly haven't been posting You Tube videos about going 'off grid'.  Which brings us back to the original point of this post - the 'on grid' 'off gridders', who eschew a 'conventional' lifestyle and things like houses, jobs and other ties.  There is always the question of how they finance such lifestyles.  Some, obviously, are retired and have pensions. Others have private means.  Some have even managed to combine their new lifestyle with some kind of new self employment based around said lifestyle.  There is another group, though, that seems to earn money through what, to me, seems rather opaque (if that's the right word means.  These are the ones who try to turn their entire existence into a business of sorts, by putting it all onto social media and You Tube and getting their subscribers to make payments via things like Patreon.  

It is probably just my age, but this always feels to me uncomfortably like a high tech form of begging.  OK, I know that actual beggars find themselves, due to circumstances, in a situation where they have no choice but to rely on the charity of strangers in order to pull together some loose change, while the sort of 'on grid' 'off gridders' I'm thinking of are, at least, providing some sort of 'product' in exchange for your support.  Except that this 'product' or 'content' is simply a cannibalisation of their actual lives.  In effect, they are chronicling their alternative lifestyle for public consumption in order to gain the financial means to keep on living this lifestyle, (not to mention the technical means to keep on recording it), and serving it up as entertainment for more paying customers.  Which just seems somewhat strange to me.  Why should I feel the need to pay to watch someone else living their life when I can experience my own, for free, on a daily basis?  Out of curiosity, I recently watched a livestream by one of these 'on grid' 'off gridders', ostensibly intended as an opportunity for 'fans' to interact with them, but had to switch it off after a few minutes, so uncomfortable did the underlying solicitations for money make me feel.  Don't get me wrong, they certainly didn't seem like unpleasant people, but it rather reminded me of those US TV evangelists' televised preaching sessions, where the totals of donations from 'worshippers' keep popping up on screen.  Like I say, maybe its my age, but it just doesn't seem a particularly, I don't know, good way to fund your chosen lifestyle.  (Just for the record, I can fund my current non-working lifestyle as a result of many years of good financial management when I was working, which has left me financially secure for the foreseeable future and with the prospect of a decent work pension (actually two work pensions) paying out within a couple of years).