Start Here
If you are new to Our Uncertain Future...
Welcome!
We're Eric and Johanna, and we've been living off grid in a strawbale house on the Mesa outside Taos, New Mexico for over six years with our daughter. We started this Substack in 2021, a year into the pandemic and a year after we moved from our home in town to our off-grid tiny home on a high desert Mesa about 30 miles from town. If you want our origin story, start here:
What We Write About
We publish something new every week (at least), from articles to videos to podcasts. The majority of our content is free, but about a quarter of what we share is for paid subscribers only. Our Uncertain Future centers around an alternative lifestyle that is at its core about:
sustainability/conservation/regeneration
minimalism/anti-materialism/anti-capitalist values
slow living/rest
decentralization/localism
nature connections/animism/seasonal rituals
We are not preppers, Chrisitan survivalists, drug addicts, criminals or misanthropes. Eric and Johanna grew up in the suburbs, with different cultural backgrounds and have multiple higher degrees. What we are is passionate about living a life that is healthy, compassionate and rich in all those important things like loving relationships, being close to nature, taking time to relax and following our bliss. Johanna is a Nature Therapy Guide, writer, artist, Reiki practitioner, and yoga instructor. Eric is a DIY enthusiast, runner, mountain biker, environmental writer with a passion for decentralization and he works in communications for a blockchain company. With differing left and right brain strengths, together we try to cover the whole picture.
Only Dirty Hippies and Preppers Live Off the Grid
Eric’s last post about the email criticism we received of our lifestyle choice got me thinking about all the misconceptions out there about people who live off the grid. The person who sent him the rude email did not like seeing our “small and sad” life in the media.
Why are you here?
We’re curious what brought you here. Wherever you are in your journey, whether you are already off grid or ready to go off grid right now and looking for practical information on how to do it, getting curious about the lifestyle and looking for inspiration to take the leap, or more of an armchair voyeur who is happy that other people are doing it but prefers their creature comforts, you are welcome here.
Where to Start:
If you’re looking for inspiration to take the leap, you may like:
Collapse Isn’t Coming, It’s Here
Plenty of people predict a coming collapse while others prepare for a kind of sci-fi apocalypse that sends us back to the dark ages overnight or reduces society to a brutal, Hobbesian state of nature. But history doesn’t play out nicely over 2 hours like a blockbuster screenplay, neither have historical collapses, especially at the scale of something li…
Choose Your Own Adventure: Go Off-Grid, Hit the Road or Hunker Down
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.
If you are interested in discovering ways to integrate the off-grid lifestyle into your life without fully going off the grid, you may like:
Less Stuff, More Life
When we moved into a smaller home off the grid, we relinquished most of our major bills— water, sewer, and electric. Each year we grow a little bit more of our own food, but food is still a necessary expense. Other than that, all our bills come down to lifestyle choices. This means that we can work less and live more.
If you are off grid or ready to go off grid right now, you may like:
5 Best States to Live Off the Grid
How-To is a new sub-section of Our Uncertain Future that provides researched and/or instructional content.
How to Heat Your Off Grid Home
During these darkest days of the year in the northern hemisphere, it is impossible not to think about heat. The days are growing colder as we tilt away from the sun.
And if you are a nature lover interested in integrating more ways to connect with the other-than-human world into your life, you may like:
Throw Away Your Clocks and Follow the Moon
Daylight Savings Time shuffles my body around, trips up my inner clock. My morning light suddenly becomes dim evening light. My evenings are suddenly loud and gloriously flaming into night. How ridiculous that we treat time like this, as something to play with to suit our outdated agendas? While we are captive to the world of clocks to set our watches, calendars and schedules by, though our own bodily rhythms push against these constructs, I remind myself that despite it all, time is not linear.
Dig Deep
Perhaps you think of swinging a shovel as nothing more than manual labor but with intention, digging can be a spiritual practice.
Listen to Us
We have a podcast too. Here’s where to start.
OUFPOD: Reflecting on 6 Years Off-Grid Amid Collapse
What collapse feels like day to day, how our definition of it has changed, and practical takeaways if you’re collapse-curious but still on the grid.
We’re on NPR’s The Modern West
The post about our appearance on the Cheap Dirt series, with links to listen.
How This Works
Free subscribers get most of our posts — essays, podcast episodes, seasonal rituals, and the occasional how-to.
Paid subscribers ($5/month) get everything, including our deeper how-to guides, Earth Sensory Perception essays, the full podcast archive, and Johanna’s nature-based practices. It’s what keeps this going without ads or sponsors.
If you’re new and just trying us out, we’re running a free first month for paid subscriptions.
Subscribe for free | Start your free month of paid
Well, we hope that gives you plenty to peruse and consider. We understand that we live in a world with so much media, and we appreciate that you consider our work worthwhile enough to invest your time and energy in. Our future is uncertain and every moment counts. Make the most of it!
All our best,
Johanna and Eric
Cheers