My first two years were full of buyer's remorse. I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I had expected, the work was very hard, I felt incompetent, I missed my friends back in the metropolitan area, and I missed out on a lot of the food choices.
...but the buyer's remorse passed. Partially this was my preferences changing, partially it was making new friends, partially it was hiring on help to do some tasks (farmhands to install fencing and clear an overgrown pasture, etc.), partially it was acquiring the skills and equipment that made work easier, and finally it was cutting back on the task list.
I'd be happy to share more thoughts if you want to go into more details on your thinking.
I'll be very upfront: homesteading is a money losing proposition. It's a consumption good - it costs more than any (monetary) profit it brings.
And my writing about it is ALSO money losing. I'm a coder. When I write and sell novels, the opportunity cost is huge - at an hourly rate, I lose about 90% of what I could otherwise be making coding.
Writing about homesteading is much better - I only lose about 50% of what I could otherwise be making.
I write because (a) I am more driven to create and share my ideas with people than I am to make a marginal dollar, (b) I am ideologically in favor of people moving to the countryside and living a different lifestyle, so writing is an ideological / political choice.
There is a an issue in all statistics: "the seen and the unseen". It basically means "measuring benefits but not measuring costs".
Even if the statistics is accurate.
Even if denying people the right to self-determination is a positive in your ethical system.
Even if X, Y, Z are true... I still have to ask: what about the COST? Pesticides exist because they do something useful - kill off pests. They increase food production and decrease labor.
What if we've saved some lives...but also made 200,000 farmers each spend an extra five hours a week bent over in their fields, picking bugs off leaves? Or made them plant more land in order to harvest the same amount of food?
I've been using emacs for about 27 years, and even wrote two novels ( e.g. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005JPPMS6 ) in it. Author friends tell me that I've really really REALLY got to try Scrivener, but I know from previous attempts at using other tools that nothing but emacs feels right to me.
I should give it a try, I suppose...but it's going to be really weird.
I live in NH, I got a well paying contract in MA, and they needed me to work 60 hrs/week to rescue a project.
The 60 hrs/week is key, because it made the ratio of billable hours to wasted hours plausible - 15 hours of commute to 40 of billable is terrible, but 15:60 made some sense.
Those six months (plus the side remote consulting gig I did on the weekend) almost killed me, but they also let me pay off about 1/3 of my mortgage in half a year.
> The geodesic dome is brilliant in how it minimizes the amount of materials needed to enclose a given space.
Except sheet material is sold in rectangles, so you end up with a huge pile of offcuts.
As a child I was entranced by geodesic domes in the late 1970s (part of the hangover of the utopian back-to-the-land movement), and I read up on them extensively over the following decades.
I've also done a bit of construction.
Domes are wildly impractical for almost every purpose.
Yes, the hold more volume per surface area. That's great for a liquified natural gas tank. It's not so good for humans who live on flat surfaces.
They are very hard to plumb and wire.
They generate tons of waste.
They are hard to maintain.
Roofs and walls have different purposes (structural support vs shedding preciptation) and different materials are best for each.
The list goes on.
I could write a 500 page book on why domes are almost always the wrong answer, but the shortest proof I have is: if they were so great, they would have caught on.
From running two small ecommerce companies I think I've learned enough about MVP, shipping, inventory management, etc.
From 25 years as a software engineer I've learned about building tools to automate steps.
I'd pick some "hard to find / expensive niche (e.g. Greene and Greene, Art Nouveau, etc.), but offer repeatable designs, not do custom work. That would allow for lots of jigs, fixtures, using cheap machines in duplicate to eliminate setup times, etc.
...and then after growing sales and shaking the bugs out of the production, I'd hire assistants to keep cranking stuff out.
Eventually I'd allow customers to start turbing a few "knobs" on products, via a website tool (this isn't too much falling back into software, is it?), which results in customized cut lists being kicked out for my assistants. Mass customization.
I'm a coder, ran my own "startups" (small businesses, no VC, no hypergrowth) from 2000 to 2014, my .emacs is thousands of lines long, etc.
TY for the positive reviews of my books!