man i feel your pain ARG... compromises always leave some blood on the walls. well done for listening to your inner yearning to live more appropriately than the model the cultural forces were pushing you towards. you certainly have a more interesting story to tell because of your choices, and those years of better sleep will help you stick around longer, and help educate future generations. i'm sure your efforts to hew to principle have done much to encourage others to strive similarly.

great diary, paul. well written and personal. i really liked your inclusiveness.

@magnifico... i see it differently. the means used to reduce carbon eventually first used more, (the 'speeding up to get to the rest spot' syndrome.)

ultimately though the means to get there (simpler, less consumption-driven life) can be upgraded, what's important is to keep the thread unbroken between city and farm, and to keep alive the knowledge and skills.

with the global exodus towards cities, any move the other way is worthwhile in the interests of balance.

there are already too many overcrowded cities, overdependent on fossil fueled supply lines.

some people will still move from countryside to city without any economic pistol goading them, for though farming supplies physical needs, it cannot concentrate culture like cities can, so we need transport and travel between the two, though i suspect it will have to be a lot more ecologically justifiable than popping out to the local bigbox supermarket a few dozen driving miles away for something trivial, or just going out for a spin.

it comes down to country culture desperately needing right sustenance revival, and public and/or private transport that is both carbon neutral and plentiful, both tough nuts to crack, though i believe we the people have all kinds of intelligent solutions that are being and have been suppressed in order to keep the dying elephant stagger on another few miles.

but die it must, and unless more people do similarly to paul, there will be far too many city folk wondering where their next meals are coming from, and realising late in the game that farming is not going to be as simple as chemfert-plough-herbicide-combine-truck-to-table has been making it since the beginning of the last century.

it's not whether we can't afford it, we have to, instead of dismissing it we need to make it easier and above all ecologically cheaper, that way removing, by incremental amelioration, the validity of your objection.

some things are worth the cost, most aren't. time's lessons will add considerably to our somewhat atrophied powers of discrimination in this regard, methinks.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty