I'm not saying "in the event of a coronal discharge" or some shit. This hypothetical is set right now, in any of the first world countries. The things you are not allowed to use are any pieces of tech that release EM fields strong enough to fuck with your own EM fields. So anything that releases microwaves or radio waves, like wifi, Bluetooth, or anything of the such. 'non ionizing radiation' is still bad. House wiring seems safe enough so long as you aren't making out with a wall outlet or some shit. Living in range of a cell tower seems like a bad idea but I don't have any figures on that. Any tech that doesn't use significant EM fields is still allowed. Would you be able to live a normal life (not as a hobo bridge troll) whether that be homesteading or getting a job, or whatever.
I've thought about this before. Here's the scenario I came up with. It's probably only possible in the jurisdiction I live in:
So the local government offers these permits called a "license to occupy". They are $500 every five years and they let you build a remote, off-grid cabin as long as you are at least 1,000 metres from a public roadway or body of water. They are meant more for hunting or fishing shacks, but nobody would stop you from living in it. There are many unincorporated small towns here that don't have a cell signal, yet still have a little general store. So you pick a site the minimum distance from the road and water that's maybe 5-6 km outside a small town with a store and build a little Thoreauesque cabin. You dig an outhouse and build a system to catch rainwater. You can hike to a pond or river 1 km away to bathe and fish. Brown trout are abundant locally, you don't need any kind of permit to catch them for personal use, and they will have pretty well everything you need in terms of fats and protein. You take lots of jars and preserve wild berries which are abundant here to avoid vitamin c deficiencies and to get fibre and sugars. You use a cast iron cookware to avoid iron deficiencies. You buy shelf-stable provisions once a year to supplement your diet. You can eventually get into growing potatoes, because they are easy to grow, easy to preserve in a little dugout and easy to propagate. If you dug the rocks and weeds out of a 12x12 area, made a few trips to the beach to pick up dried seaweed, and kept throwing things like fish skin and bones into it, you'd have a real nice spot for a potato bed after a few years. Not enough that you could live off potatoes, but enough to grow a few hundred pounds a year to supplement your diet.
So every fall, you have these guys selling wild blueberries on the side of the highway for $20-25 a gallon. It's very normal here culturally. So you have a gallon bucket and a bunch of plastic bags and you spend pretty well all of September picking blueberries and measuring out gallon bags and that's how you make your money for the year. All cash under the table. It'd be hard work, but I have no doubt you could maybe make $4,000-$5,000 a season. Enough to stock up on provisions like rice and beans, pay your license to occupy, buy gear like axes and fishing tackle and maybe buy some new clothes and shoes once a year. I feel like you'd still need to find a way into a bigger town once a year to buy some of that stuff.
So that's how I think you
could do it. But
should you do it? It was always just more of a thought experiment for me.
Of course, that's probably getting a little close to the hobo under the bridge thing. Those small towns with no cell phone reception I talked about do have cheap houses, and you can choose not to get Internet, listen to the radio and read for entertainment and work somewhere seasonally like the local fish plant, but there are going to be people around you the entire time with cell phones, even with the spotty reception. People buy stuff like signal boosters to put in their trucks to make them work.
So yeah, I guess at the end of the day I think it's feasible in a first world country to have a home with no strong EM fields, but if you want a relatively normal lifestyle, there's no avoiding those signals at work. It can be minimized if you get a seasonal job like at a fish-plant or on a farm where you only work half the year.
Various thoughts on stuff other people have said:
What jobs could you do? Can you even still pay taxes and stuff in person?
I know first hand there are a lot of 50-60 year old labourers that do not use the Internet, have email, and live with nothing but a flip phone or landline and cable TV. A lot of construction companies and fishing outfits and stuff still hire unskilled labourers with nothing but a paper resume. They pay their taxes by taking a paper tax slip they get from work to a walk-in tax place. Not exactly off the grid, but certainly technologically a lot simpler than anyone posting here. Those are hard jobs, though.
I miss using the fax. It feels like I used it every day and then about 10 years ago it just rapidly declined over the course of a year or so, and now I might send a fax a year at work. I think it only works over copper phone lines because the signal is analogue. So as they replace traditional phone lines with digital ones connected by fibre optic cable, fax will eventually not work anymore at all. I used to find it really handy for signing agreements and purchase orders and stuff. I know you can sign a PDF directly now, but a fax coming in on the machine, signing it, putting it back on the machine and punching in the number was so straightforward and it worked so well.
Wow that is incredible, it definitely could be used in place of the mail system then. Not only that but with a small solar panel and a battery you could do away with the entire postal system and still have it all be relatively simple and straitforward.
It is not possible to use fax and live off grid. It requires copper phone cables as the signal is analogue, so you'd need to at least have a copper phone line.
