The Self-Sufficiency Paradox
The self-sufficiency ideal imagines a homestead that needs nothing from outside. Grow your food, generate your power, build your shelter. Independence from fragile supply chains and distant corporations.
The reality: after 5 years of homesteading, only about 2 in 10 homesteaders grow more than 50% of their own food. Even on hundreds of acres, complete independence remains elusive. You still need seeds, tools, medical care, fuel. The list never ends.
Historical homesteaders understood this. They didn’t pursue isolation — they specialized and traded. One family excelled at grain, another at vegetables, another at livestock. Community emerged from interdependence.
The paradox has a practical dimension. Doing everything yourself leads to burnout. There aren’t enough hours. The skills required span agriculture, construction, mechanics, medicine, animal husbandry. No individual masters all of them.
It also has an economic dimension. Small-scale production rarely competes with industrial efficiency. Growing your own wheat is possible. Growing enough wheat to justify the equipment, storage, and processing is a different matter. At some scale, buying makes more sense than making.
And it has a social dimension. Homesteading alone pushes the next generation away. Too much work, too little community, too few witnesses to shared experience. The sustainable path involves neighbors.
Better framing: self-reliance within community. Reduce dependence on distant, fragile systems. Strengthen local reciprocal relationships. Not needing nothing from others, but needing less from strangers.
The goal is resilience — having options, having skills, having relationships that don’t depend on global supply chains functioning perfectly. Different from growing every calorie yourself.
Related: [[edge-effect]], [[conviviality]]