> for the freedom to have my small farm, grow my own food, and be happy with my family and friends, too bad that this is a very, very distant dream
Every now and then I bump into people on HN that have seen the light.
Well let me tell you it's all doable. The tiny bubble of people that live in a non existant alternative reality is just that, a tiny bubble.
I managed to escape all this nonesense, first mentally, then financially, and buy a little house where I can grow my own food - for hobby, I have plant pots in my house growing tomatoes and spring onions, doesn't work but I am learning - and be happy with family and friends.
Naturally I have a very nice tech room with all the cool stuff. I am not rich, but I am free. Fun thing is you don't need to completely erase the paraphernalia. The two things are not mutually exclusive. All you need to do is have a clear mental separation of the two (tech bubble and reality) and compartmentalize the sane from the insane - an easy thing to achieve when you surround yourself with down to earth people that don't run around scared of an LLM and don't regurgitate what a marketing campaign programmed them to do. Those people are the matrix drones that don't want to be saved, and in their mind it's all or nothing - hermit or tech slave. Most normal people are watching in awe how the tech industry turns itself into the subject of ridicule.
To be fair if you live in the US it's probably easier to achieve what you want. For the money I paid for a little box in the UK i'd have been able to buy a mansion there.