The video below this post is a queued up at a point where John Lovell discusses homesteading on the Shawn Ryan Show. He talks about why homesteading makes him feel freer, healthier, and better prepared. “We have our own little spot carved out,” he said. “We have a simple little farmhouse on our own little homestead, and we are very content there.”
He approaches homesteading not as a prepper so much as from the perspective of someone who wants self-sufficiency in good times and bad. He discusses why it might be important to grow your own food and how living on a homestead could free him from needing wealth.
“The whole idea of homesteading is self-sufficiency. What if I got myself to a place where my skills and my resources around me are at such a place where I no longer required wealth? … I would like to no longer require wealth,” he says, later adding, “I want to live humbly and simply, and I just want to be left alone.” Don’t we all?
This is an interesting perspective and I recommend you watch at least this portion, if not more, of this segment of the other three sections of the podcast. You can also check out some of the Warrior Poet Society videos.
(For those who don’t know, Shawn Ryan is a former Navy Seal and CIA operative and John is a former Army Ranger door-kicker who did four tours in Afghanistan and one in Iraq, then worked as a missionary for four years and eventually put his military skills to work as a trainer and founded the Warrior Poet Society.)
Similarities
I like his view on homesteading for two reasons: One, it is similar to mine, and two, although he does not position it as such, it is very much a John Galt perspective. Why be part of a society you disagree with? Stop being a cog in their machine. Stop contributing to that which you dislike. Withdraw and live independently.
When you grow your own food, you can make less money. When you make very less money, you pay very less taxes. This is how I choose to starve the beast.
“Homesteading is a natural shift in priorities and a natural orientation. It’s a natural reorientation in moving from a lavish lifestyle and that carrot to something that is forcibly more pragmatic and practical,” said Lovell.
As the video proceeds, he talks about how the pandemic was a wake-up call to him. This surprised me because people who deployed to Iraq and saw how quickly a modern society could fall often became preppers once they came home and started a family.
In what I found to be a humorous portion of the interview, he talks about how they initially failed at producing food and how they raise beef to put food in the freezer. Trust me, it’s an untraditional approach.
