Choose Your Own Adventure: Go Off-Grid, Hit the Road or Hunker Down
Covid was a fork in the road. Let's see how much taking the road less traveled cost or saved us.
If you’ve followed many of these posts in recent years, you might recall the lore: middle-aged couple and their tween uproot from comfortable life at the end of a cul-de-sac in a small mountain town less than one month into Covid and move into an unfinished off-grid home made of straw bales and cement.
It’s an adventure we’ve chronicled, told and re-told over and over because it seems to be, by far, the most interesting thing about me to other people despite not really being the center of my identity (yet).
We’re in year six of the experiment now and lately I’ve been running the numbers on how it’s gone so far. You can catch up on that here if you missed it:
The process also has me pondering alternate paths not taken. If this story were a Choose Your Own Adventure title, what would the alternate endings be? The Sliding Doors moment is pretty easy to imagine: what if we had simply never come across the enigmatic Craigslist ad selling a quirky shell of a straw bale off-grid home for the cost of a new car?
I asked a few LLMs to help me imagine two alternate scenarios. I checked in with Johanna and we agreed on what the two most likely pathways would have been:
Scenario 1 - Our family continues to stay in our rented home through the duration of Covid lockdowns and quarantines. During this period we focus our energies more on our love of travel. We surely would have taken lots of road trips as so many people did to escape the claustrophobia during those pandemic years. This was also already our pattern prior to Covid; we struggled to save much money, frequently choosing present experiences over future security.
Scenario 2 - Covid could just as easily trigger a strong nesting instinct (we did carry this out in our off-grid homestead to a significant extent) leading us to opt for a more conservative trajectory. We may have been able to strike a favorable rent-to-own arrangement with our friendly landlord for the home we rented in our small mountain tourist town.
I asked the AI models to help game out these two alternate adventures and compare and contrast them with the current reality, including lifestyle and financial impacts. I spent some time with Perplexity, correcting the off-base assumptions included in its original analyses, giving it as much real data as I could to work with. I even specifically asked it to take off its rose-colored glasses and refrain from blowing smoke up my ass.
