It's not just about the stove. It's also about the state of the wood you're burning (humidity mostly). Very dry wood burns much more cleanly than less dry wood.
> fixing our broken culture and allowing the average parent the time, financial security, and social connections to cultivate a meaningful, fulfilling life
why focus on parents? People who became parents have supposedly already reached a baseline of stability and security (otherwise they wouldn't have the resources to have children). There are plenty others who are struggling without a partner (or children).
I'm curious how you came up with that rent values ($800 - $1200). I'm in Western Europe, a medium sized city, and I can't get a studio without 1000 EUR. Similarly, I imagine that in most places in California, that amount won't get you much of a home.
Out of curiosity, do you have a partner/girlfriend/wife?
Because much like you, I haven't really kept good friends along in life. I've had periods in my life when I had a "good" friend, that I could talk a lot of stuff with, share my problems, and generally do activities in common, but I moved around, I haven't really kept in touch.
Problem is, without a social circle, it's much more difficult to find a partner, and I'm at an age now where that's the main thing I think I'm missing.
But I understand the issue very well from a theoretical standpoint. At its core, it's about a disordered attachment style, a sort of fear of attachment, or a failure of the brain to regulate the affect resulting from interactions. A result of early developmental trauma. I'm also familiar with some techniques that are supposed to fix the problem (I was building a neurofeedback system based on ADS1299 at one point), but life got in the way. Which is ironic, since I think this is the most important aspect of any life, social functioning.
I've done it at the edge of a small town (~12k inhabitants). My grandparents' home was sitting uninhabited for a few years and it once had a beautiful vineyard, a big orchard, and generally a wonderful view. At the edge of a forest.
I've always wanted to live close to nature. I was burned out with my corporate programming job, and I was dreaming of starting out some life-style businesses/SaaS/ something of that sort. I already had some investments that allowed me to live there without financial stress (i.e. the passive income more than 2x covered my living costs).
I was within walking distance of grocery stores, ~1-2km from downtown.
Did it work? Hell no. The biggest issue was I think that I was single, knew nobody in the area, and basically the time spent with just maintaining the house and the surroundings would take more than half of my energy and time.
5 months out of 12 I had to take care of the fire for heating. The whole garden and vineyard were invaded (still are) by a few species of trees such as black locust, that were growing faster than I could cut them, but also oak, birch, basswood and so on. I had a chainsaw and still couldn't keep up. Even after I had a big stack of dried firewood, I still had to spend 40 minutes every morning with actually setting up the fire in the woodstove and so on. And then the snowfall. It was not like in my grandparents' time, when they occasionally had 50-80cm of snowfall, but if I didn't want to be completely stuck there, I had to shovel a lot. The house was about 3 flights of stairs and about 10 more meters away from the street, so it was a bit of work.
Doing the groceries, while not that far away, less than 2km, the return trip usually meant about 150m of ascending. I didn't use a car at the time, so it was a bit tiring. Cooking also takes a big portion of your time.
Then the house itself. I had to do a lot of repairs as the house had been uninhabited for a few years, after my grandparents passed away. The roof. Humidity problems. I had to do some concrete underfloor, that meant carrying tons of sand and bags of ciment uphill, again really hard tasks.
The house had electricity from the grid, and while all the other amenities were available, I chose not to connect to them. I was using water from a well.
In late summer, autumn, I was picking fruit, making jam, also spending a lot of time with that. I tried my hand with organic agriculture, planted vegetables such as tomatoes, potatoes. But then I had issues with wild boars that would come and ransack a lot of it.
I spent about slightly less than an year there, all in all. Did I accomplish much of my main goal (that is business-wise)? Not really. It was a nice experience that maybe I'll repeat some day, but probably only with a partner so that we can split some tasks, and not be almost completely isolated.
Going there for the purpose of having a really low cost standard of living so that I could focus on my priorities didn't really work, because I had to spend a majority of my time just to live there. I could have invested money to make it easier. There were a lot of things that simply made living there harder than it should have been and could be fixed with some investments. I decided that I would be better off in a bigger city at this point in my life.
> It is very noticeable on a bicycle at high speeds
Huh? I've been cycling for 15 years, many of those years doing 15k km a year, all year round. Mountain biking on mountains at -15C, down to urban cycling in 38-40C scorching summer heat. I've never noticed speed, effort, stamina changing with temperature as you suggest.
And I've done lots of road cycling at constant 35-40km/h, descents of up to 70+km/h.
I lived for a while in a 12-15k small town, having spent most of my life in much bigger metro areas. As a single, 20-something, who spends a lot of time alone, and loves nature, it was fine, for a while. But the fact that I had very few connections there, very few like-minded people, gets to you in time.
If you're in a similar situation I think you'll do a lot better in a bigger city, even though you may not think you need those things for the time being. Eventually you will.
Homelessness alone is only a small factor for that drop in life expectancy. Lack of social bonds is probably way bigger (of course, you probably don't end up homeless if you have strong bonds). There's ample research and evidence showing the lowered life expectancy of housed people with few social connections.
I find it very easy to understand where parent commenter is coming from. Even though this may not be obvious, this is very much a competition. A competition for attention, for emotional support, or simply for validation. And when you've experienced the neglect, being ignored by society and generally the experience of homelessness or any other terrible circumstances, and see someone with better circumstances getting support and help, it should naturally lead to a feeling of anger, unfairness (whether conscious or not).
This is what's happening here. Also, all the comments complaining of "whataboutism", "not true scotsman" and so on show a profound lack of empathy with this commenter. You're complaining that this commenter is not showing empathy to OP, when no-one is showing any empathy to his (or other people's) harsher circumstances.
Out of curiosity, what country offers disability benefits for these conditions?
This is for me a (as a fellow sufferer of some of these conditions, who has never received any state support and doesn't even have health insurance) an extremely shaky moral ground.
Because 95% of the homeless population and drug addicts are clinically diagnosable of most of these conditions under DSM IV definitions. And almost none of them receive anything.