Depends on how you define meaningful. Raising happy & healthy kids, helping someone in need etc, can be meaningful to many people, but don't require 'collaborating with people in power'.
It’s only a tradeoff if you also want all the convenience of modern society.
Or maybe I just have a gloomy view of what "living off the grid" looks like :] I'll just leave this [1] here, regarding that.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/this-russian-family-l...
That's the thing, the grid covers everyone everywhere now. There is no escape from the planet of the apes.
The problem is that sucks, so people don't actually want to live off grid. They just want to not work but also get the benefits of modern society.
The issue isn't merely that you give up the benefits of modernity, the issue is that industrialized states and corporations have spent the last 200 or so years claiming every resource in the world as their property- that's why you see living off the grid as being in a "mud hut" or something, the resources left unclaimed are the ones that weren't valuable enough for someone to snag them already!
I imagine a motivated individual could find some remote place where they could live undisturbed for a long time but without owning the land there's no guarantee you won't be chased off eventually.
But my main point is that's all kind of irrelevant because no one really wants to live that way. They want a somewhat modern home and access to utilities and vehicles and fuel and medicine and so on. They just don't want to pay taxes. They want to have the cake and eat it too.
even remote and rural they're often still trucking into town weekly for gas and groceries.
source: in laws in rural AB tried homesteading off the grid. all it meant was that their kid was homeschooled and can't do multiplication and they learned how difficult farming is.
You missed this qualifier: "person’s life within a larger social construct."