Nate O’Brien moves to a tiny house off the grid on his own rural timber land.
A subway entrance in the woods. (Ambient soundscape by Miracle Forest)
There’s also the mysterious subway station and abandoned subway station. (Miracle Forest) The mysterious subway station is in the Budapest Metro. Can you spot two things unusual about the trains?
This is an open thread.
The first video is a present for tacomee.
Thanks Mike!
He does seem like a “man with plan”. Although living out in the woods cooking down maple sap might get a little lonely. I’m more of an urban farmer. I’ve lived the “homestead lifestyle” without “getting away from everything” out in woods.
From a dollars and cents point of view, urban homesteading might more sense. I used to take a cooler of produce and quail eggs on the #1 bus to a downtown Tacoma restaurant for years. My family in Montana was always jealous of how close and easy buyers were in Tacoma. No hour drive to farmer’s market…
I’ve been watching O’Brien occasionally over the years as we’re both minimalists. He’s also an invest-and-get-rich influencer, and probably a multi-millionaire, but he gave up apartment minimalism to live in his truck for a couple years, and now he has a remote timber farm.
I became a minimalist in high school in the 1980s, when my out-of-state cousin from came to stay with us, arriving with all her possessions in one Volkswagen (or what I thought were all her possessions). That inspired me to live light. We had an 11-room house for three people, and I remember telling my dad we need all of it because “we do this thing in one room, that thing in that room”. He told me, “But you can only be in one room at a time.” Later I understood that, after he lived in a houseboat and then I lived with him in a series of apartments and saw they were big enough.
I encountered the tiny-house movement and Fairyland Cottage (a nurse living sustainably in an old rural house in Ireland with a big garden, and she said her expenses are much lower than when she lived in a city). I considered them briefly, but really, an ordinary American apartment is the size of a tiny house anyway, and you can walk to a lot of things. And I wouldn’t be comfortable on a rural lot where you have to drive to everything and be isolated. In junior high we had a second house on Vashon Island, which we went to on weekends to fix up, so I experienced rural life part-time even if I didn’t realize it at the time. My dad liked building rural houses and fixing them up and installing septic tank systems, but it’s not for me.
I knew Vashon was remote and had a small town center we went to, and we had friends on Maury Island with chickens, but I didn’t think of that as “rural” because I thought rural was like Skagit County or Eastern Washington with larger farms and no town nearby. Still, I remember going to the annual summer strawberry festival, and a booth of King County Library castoff books being sold. I said, “We’re still in King County?” It seemed too far away and different to be possible.
I’m a minimalist as well, Mike. Always have been, even before I knew what a minimalist was. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the ultimate life hack. Living light (and debt free) is the reason I’ve been able to live in high COL cities like San Francisco and Seattle, even when I didn’t earn much money.
I think a lot of urbanists are somewhat minimalists as well. It kind of goes hand in hand. Even today on the biggest consumerism holiday of the year my wife and I simply went out to breakfast, then took a stroll along the Overlook Walk and the waterfront. No stress, no fuss, no drama. Not that we have anything against the holiday, we went to the Seattle Christmas Market and had a blast. We enjoy the atmosphere, just don’t want stuff coming into our home. Personally, I like having money in my bank account and I hate clutter. So being a minimalist is a win-win.
I met Ray Delahanty (Citynerd) at one of his events. I told him he should do at least one video on minimalism, that it’s a means to living in the high COL cities. His videos focus so much on the most urban towns and cities with the lowest COL. In many cases those cities are downgrades from Seattle, SF and the other coastal cities. We need to figure out how to make things work for people who want to stay in the cities they want to be in. Minimalism and frugal living are the keys.
This fits both the Fremont Bridge Car Free article and the Seattle Bus Lane article:
Surrey wants a 6 lane bridge, but adding more lanes would probably have increased congestion:
https://surreycitizen.com/new-surrey-bridge-better-off-with-just-four-lanes-says-expert/
What’s the point of a highway style bridge that just drops you into city streets? The great thing about Vancouver is that it doesn’t really have highways in the city. Why would you start trying to change that?
If you are desperate for a highway, just take the next bridge East and get on the 8 lane monstrosity that is the trans-Canada. Fortunately in mostly skirts the city proper.
…And when neither side of the bridge is really able to handle that much traffic.
Which I think might be worth looking at with the Fremont Bridge: does the road network on either side really have the configuration needed for 8 lanes of auto traffic on the bridge? To me it seems like the limiting part is the tangle of intersections around it, so that maybe cutting out two lanes really wouldn’t be that big a deal.