The False Dream of Cottagecore | How the problematic romanticization of Western rural life reveals our discontent with the modern world : solarpunk

[–] [email protected] 53 points 9 months ago (3 children)

I was missing one aspect as to why so many of us are drawn towards cottagecore, which is that the return to a more simple life means a return towards more connections with non-humans. People and their different non-human allies (plants, animals, fungi) go way back and recently we've lost touch. We don't miss the sourdough for aesthetic reasons. We miss the sourdough because it's an old friend.

The world we have created is entirely human-centric, and now we feel alone.

As to the aesthetization and commercialization of subcultures - that has always been a risk and is in no way limited to stuff liked mostly by girls. As soon as a subculture gains a name the vultures arrive. Just waiting for the new range of solarpunk softdrinks to be available in my local store tbh.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

I like this, except you said the world we've created is human-centric, and I would disagree to say that it's technology or screen-centric. I think it's a craving of connecting with the earth, doing things with your hands, experiencing the satisfaction of hard work, etc. It's connecting with ourselves, others, and the earth.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Revolutionize your thirst with more radical freshness than ever! Makes your barricades burrrrrrn!!!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (3 children)

I can't say for sure, but I wonder about this supposedly lost connection with nature. How long ago did we lose it? Did we ever have it? Rurality was under Christianism, which taught its followers that nature's whole point was to be submitted to us. Education was scarce and ecology did not exist as a concept. Did we really commune with nature, or were are forefathers blindly wrestling with it?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

From my very limited knowledge of history I would wager a guess that humans went gradually from 'natural forces are more powerful than us, therefore godlike' to 'our human-shaped god has given us the power over nature and we must tame it' to 'ooops neither seems to be correct, what do now?'. Quite a few sustainable approaches had been implemented by traditional societies in the past, and we should learn from what worked back then and combine it with what works now. No need to copy the past 100%, no need to reinvent the wheel every week.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

My mother grew up in an atheist socialist society. There was no particular emphasis on nature as something particularly exploitable or overly important. Still she can point out every tree that is common to our area, most bushes and flowers and all common edible mushrooms.

People would simply know about these things because they were relevant, simply for the lack of a TV and internet to occupy your time.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 9 months ago (5 children)

I live a version of "living in the woods" and there is no way to do the white girl hobbit lifestyle without massive modern infrustructure. Also, the amount of resource management destroys any aesthetic satisfaction. You are essentially camping with a house. It eats up all your time and then you are supposed to have time to what? Simplify?! Yeah, nah, gotta pay the bills too. So, you still have all the problems of modern living but with the extra complication making it work far from society. All for a whimsical aesthetic?

The cold reality is this is not a cinematic experience. Its stressful, unscheduled, chaotic, and not always rewarding. I'm the IT for our home network and internet, the lumberjack/arborist, the landscaper, the plumber, the water filtration expert, small engine repair tech, concrete, framing, roof, electrical, HVAC...etc. There are a few of these services I could outsource, but then I'm babysitting contractors who usually don't know what they are dealing with or refuse to travel this far.

Living in a cute little cottage with a cutesy greenhouse or vegetable plot and a goat and some chickens sounds like some beginning to a romance novel. Instead you will be dealing gophers destroying your just tilled rows and foxes eating your chickens. You'll be at home depot all the time and farm supply for feed. You'll end up getting a tractor, so diesel will fill the fresh air. A water main will break in the middle of the night and the septic tank will fill up. The power will go out everytime there is a big storm. The shear amount of work and maintenance it takes is neverending and always growing. You'll be doing so many chores that curling up next to a fire with a glass of wine and a good book will sound like a laughable affectation.

Unless you are independently wealthy, there is no way to have this whimsical fantasy of a lifestyle. Chances are, the people who want/promote it would be bored out of their minds inside a week and wouldn't survive it for more than a month.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I also live this life, and with a dayjob + all the infra work around here I am working harder than I ever have in my life. And I used to literally dig ditches...

The Sunday morning coffee with chipmunks on my lap makes a good picture, but it doesn't begin to capture the stress and sweat that is necessary for this life.

My hope is that in 5-10 years I'll have systems in place that will take some of that work away, and then when I'm done with the dayjob I might actually get to enjoy it!

People who think they can come out to a forest, cut out just enough room for their tiny house, and relax for the rest of their lives are insane.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Also former ditch digger...

Work on those systems. Think about what they need to be for someone less agile or just less physically capable in general. Think about what it takes to train someone new on those systems.

We went with pellet stove over traditional wood stove because of the ease of use and the lack of local wood supply. Three trips to the city with our pickup gets us all the pellets we need for winter. I think that the combination of improved technology and government subsidies will see us with a heat pump and electric baseboard heaters for backup this year. Easier yet.

We scrapped our indoor plumbing because keeping it from freezing was a full time job. Now I fill 7-9 20 litre jugs once a week and top up our gravity filter system a couple of times a day. Next step is to route some self-draining lines to an interior tank in the unused space above our filter system to get rid of the jug hauling.

We bought a snowblower, because shovelling a 300 metre access road by hand was getting old. Next step is to go electric so that we don't have to deal with fuel and small engine repair and maintenance.

Our yard is being converted from lawn to fruits and vegetables. A bit more each year as we figure out what grows, what we like, and what keeps or can be preserved.

We've made connections in the community, both personal and commercial, so that assistance is a phone call or cheque book away.

Those and other things have brought the time and effort difference between current life and our city life down dramatically. We now have plenty of time for a variety of hobbies. I retired last year and now I can't say I really even notice the impact of chores on my freedom to do as I will. Keeping in mind of course, that some of those "do as I will" activities might be seen as chores by others.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Commenting here to remind me to flesh out my reply when work isn't breathing down my neck.

Short form - This comment is so very similar to how we think and work. I would love to discuss more.

Especially this part: "some of those “do as I will” activities might be seen as chores by others."

My morning chores are the best part of my day. Probably because I chose them, and do them in conjunction with the flows of seasons and the natural changes in which animals and weather patterns are visiting us. Chores indeed... More like meditation!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

I look forward to more!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

@[email protected] Tagging because I thought you might not get a notification from me replying to my own post instead of yours :p

Finally have some downtime to flesh this out a bit.

We are in our mid-40s.

Thinking ahead about the systems we use is paramount, as I have crohn's and other immune-related problems surface as debilitating gout and/or iritis, and my wife suffers from hip issues. Everything is being planned on single floors, with as little stairs or walking as possible. We both know how hard it will be in another ten years.

We use a standard woodstove mainly due to the fact that we live on a bunch of acres of trees, and there is enough standing dead to get some 'free' firewood every year, and I truly enjoy dropping and splitting trees.

Our main water source is a creek about 200 feet from the main house. In the winter I have to keep 200 feet of hoses and the gas-pump in the bathroom to have it thawed when I need to run it and fill our two 1000litre totes. From there we have a 12 volt pump that is connected to a small charge controller with two 100watt panels and a lithium battery (cannibalized from the 5th wheel we lived in while building our tiny house)

This system is working 'ok', but if a well company would actually show up we would probably trade it for a well in a heartbeat. Especially my wife, who is very tired of driving to the city to do laundry.

The actual method of getting hot water to the kitchen tap might drive some folks nuts, but for us it has just become part of life. it goes something like:

Our water heater is one of those propane driven camping units with the propane bottles stored outside. And our cookstove/oven is also propane (shout out to unique appliances for their sweet offgrid models!)

Turn off the bath's hot tap (this is connected directly to the water heater and acts as a relief valve in case the water heater fails to shut down the flame and build pressure in the system)
Turn on the Kitchen hot tap
Go back into the bathroom and turn on the valve that allows water to flow through the camping heater, and since the bath tap is closed, the pressure diverts into the kitchen where the tap is open.
Reverse all of that to ensure the pressure doesn't build in the system when shutting down. ...

For lighting we primarily use solar string garden lights due to the fact that it took us over 13 months to get grid power which gave a lot of time to get used to minimal power from a little all-in-one bluetti power bank and a couple of 750watt panels. And now we just enjoy the light they give off, and the fact that they just turn on and off in conjunction with the sun.

We have since switched most of our internal things like computers, pet lights and a small emergency space heater to 110v, but being out in the boonies means a lot of power outages and glitches, so we also have the bluetti ready to serve things like the fridge, snake light and heatpad, and our internet, when the mains go down.

We are always finding little things to help, like installing a usb fan above the woodstove to supplement the anemic air movement from the little stovetop fan that we bought, or improving the efficiency of the small heater in the bathroom to also warm the incoming water lines when they are hovering around freezing temps so we don't get frostbite on our fingers under the tap.

I dug a septic tank and field myself last year, and moved the toilet from an outhouse to an actual flusher. That was like moving from the slums into a palace for us! No more 3am runs to the outhouse at -30C!

I am starting to feel like we are getting less work than our old life, but the truth is probably that I am just more used to the work I do every day, and can even enjoy some of it.

Oh yes... A snowblower. I blew the bank on a used commercial 48inch blower last year after we got stuck in our driveway by a plow piling literal 100 pound ice blocks at the end of our driveway on christmas eve. I'm a strong guy, but those bastard blocks were just impossible to move by hand. NEVER AGAIN. Now I run the big blower every time I see even an inch of snow. And I go out past our driveway so the plow doesn't have anything to push in my way.

I won't even start on thawing the incoming water lines every morning as that has just become part of life, and/or the removal of snow from the roof of the house or the outbuildings.

Spring is coming. And this year is the year of 'improving, not building' so we shall see what comes out of it.

I'm sure I missed 100 things here. But I have to get back to work now. Thanks for giving me a reason to type all this out :) I sometimes forget how far we have come from carrying buckets of water from the creek, and digging an outhouse...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Thanks for tagging. I would have missed it.

It sounds like you're on the right track. Unsurprisingly, we have some substantial differences, some based on the fact that we live in a park.

We are not allowed to have a septic field, so we just have septic storage tank. Getting an off-season (winter) pump-out is very expensive, so we do a lot to keep pump-outs to once a year.

RV-style toilet for occasional guests
composting toilet for us (only urine goes to the holding tank)
clean grey water (most laundry, most personal hygiene, most dishwater) goes on our raspberries and fruit trees.

We are not allowed to have a well, so we put in a freshwater cistern. I haul water from a very good well. Our household use is about 180 litres a week. I pump from the cistern into jugs that I bring inside. Most gets poured into a highly rated gravity filter. Laundry and showers use unfiltered water.

We got used to living out of jugs before we had a cistern, so giving up on plumbing after the 3rd freeze-up was a no brainer.

Laundry water gets warmed up either by the pellet stove or sitting in the sun, depending on season. All other hot water comes from a kettle on our propane range.

Depending on the season, our laundry either gets hung outside to dry or hung on drying racks in front of the hot air blowing from our pellet stove.

Irrigation water comes from the season water distribution system that the park has. It's just raw lake water.

Our power used to be just 30 amp service, so we're quite accustomed to low power living. Up until the last couple of years, our grid was so unreliable that our standby generator ran about 100 hours a year (probably closer to 400 hours if we didn't ration how long it ran). Grid upgrades mean that we've only used it about 4 hours in the last 2 years, and mostly during planned outages as they continue to work on the lines.

My plans for this year are:

Install an interior water tank against the ceiling, filling it manually via a permanently plumbed, self-draining line. No more jugs! Then I'll hook up our hot water heater and bathroom/laundry plumbing to make showers and laundry easier.a

Crawl under the trailer (a mobile home) and remove the axles. This means it'll no longer be classified as a mobile home so we can take advantage of subsidies for energy efficiency, heat pumps, etc.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

... and then there is drainage.

Our lot is positioned to collect all the runoff across a few acres. In itself, that's manageable, but the septic holding tank is sitting under the trailer with insufficient height above the ground. Even that wouldn't be a problem, but a new neighbour did some perfectly legitimate landscaping that causes a pool to form where runoff used to make its way directly to the creek behind our lot.

So now, every spring, I have to take a shovel and do drainage management to try to get the water running down the road instead of into our yards. It's kind of fun in its own way, except that I cannot get people to understand that they have to stay to one side of the road, even if that means taking turns. Every time someone drives in the wrong place, it creates ruts that direct water to the wrong side of the road.

I just got in from trying to break up an ice dam that is causing water to run into our septic tank.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

The way to "experience" cottagecore is honestly to support the local farmers. Go to farmers markets when you can, visit the apple orchard with a friend, make a pie using local berries

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

You put it best. Many want the cottage/cabin in the woods for the vacation space to post pictures on their instagram or such. There is little allure to the true nature of the lifestyle, the simple cruelty of it. The aesthetic is not the lifestyle, and I wish people would understand that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

The way you uphold this sort of lifestyle is through community along with recognizing that even the "simple" life requires someone dedicating their time to keeping up the infrastructure and that those who do so deserve to be compensated fairly for doing so.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

"Compensation" kinda detracts from your "community" point.
If everybody's contributing according to their strengths, that's community.
If everyone's doing it to make a profit, that's no longer community.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

By "compensation" I meant "have their needs met" not "profit." I shouldn't have assumed it would have been understood that way.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I remember when cottagecore first came into my worldview. By this time, it seemed to have already been an established aesthetic.

It gave off the same vibes as minimalism to me. A white washed, mass marketed solution for a busy world wanting simplicity. Commodified to show how simple a person can be. Another form of perversion and exploitation of simplicity by capitalism. Just like anything capitalism touches, it sucked every bit of meaning, soul and passion out of the concept of simplicity to sell more soulless junk.

I do agree that behind the aesthetics is a real yearning for simplicity. Technology is abstract and complex. For every bit of technology we add in our lives, it's yet another layer of abstraction and complexity ontop countless more layers of abstraction and complexity. To me it feels like I am maintaining maintenance for abstract and complex ideas that I barely understand.

If this sounds like the ramblings of a crazy person talking in circles then you are beginning to understand why I feel so insane. I hate it.

I often fantasize about what life would have been like as a pre-colonialist indigenous person. Living in a way that honoured nature instead of controlling it. Observing and learning from nature. A closer connection to plants, animals and everything that lives. I don't mean to romanticize this way of life. It has it's challenges and limitations. It would be a harsher and possibly shorter life. I would give up all the modern technology for fewer simple tools, a smaller local community and a closer connection to the land and the life it offers. I want my story of a short, intense and meaningful life to shown on my skin through the scars and tattoos I have collected throughout it.

I feel both minimalism and cottagecore both offer modern approaches to simplicity and fail to properly address the disconnect between modern living and nature. Even before being perverted by capitalism. I'd prefer moving forward a combination of modern understanding and indigenous land practices. Reconnecting with community and nature.

I want people to feel joy the same joy I felt after I created a healthy, living pile of soil for my veggies to grow in. I've felt more satisfaction from that than fron any object I've ever bought.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I often fantasize about what life would have been like as a pre-colonialist indigenous person. Living in a way that honoured nature instead of controlling it.

This is a huge myth. Anytime natives got access to new technology, they went on a rampage with it (just like everyone else). Horses and rifles being the best examples. Humans are humans and everyone does equally dumb human shit.

Your dream is a mostly standard pre-agrarian fantasy, only you've projected it onto a cultural group. But pre-agrarian lifestyles were harsher than you can possibly imagine. Having that kind of balance with nature mean nature is going to kill you more often than not.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago

I've had the opportunity to live in Australia and had a chance to learn of the indigenous people there. Their stories and history. I made an effort to learn a bit more about how life was like before colonialists. Or at least what we were able to learn about life before colonialism as a lot of that information is filtered through colonialist eyes.

When I returned home to Canada, I was able to unpack all that I learned from the treatment of Australian indigenous people and apply that perspective to the Canadian Indigenous people. Honouring the land doesn't simply mean how we treat our food or living sustainably. It includes the nature bound history and stories that communities have created and shared as it moved forward in history. A story of a volcano that was so destructive could live on for many human generations to come as it becomes a crucial story of the peoples that lived in that area. Breaking away from modern perspectives on human histories is difficult because there's so much nuance that never gets recorded.

I don't know how fair it is to compare pre-colonialist indigenous people's behaviour to post colonialism. There are a lot of factors and skewed perspectives that need to be understood before I could talk more on that. From what I have learned, I also don't think it's fair to judge indigenous people's behaviours to new technologies that was introduced after the arrival of Europeans. I feel it's somewhere on the level of blaming children for the problems of today when it's always been the adults who exploited and crafted everything there is today. I don't believe the indigenous people's ignorance to their own genocide should be their blame. This is just my perspective on things and I still have lots to learn regarding indigenous people and their history. I can always be wrong.

I also feel you quoted me unfairly. Later in that same paragraph I try to express that pre-colonialist life would not be easy, that it would be short and harsher and full of it's own unique challenges. I'd prefer a short and intense life with daily struggles compared to a long, drawn out existence maintaining complex machines and worrying about the future. But that's just me.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 9 months ago

Lol, RTFA

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago

The whole movement seems to revolve around pictures of hot young women in loose garments.

Just sayin’

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

i really enjoyed that

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

Reminder that substack supports nazis

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

I don't believe it's a "false" dream.

The dream is true, just the implementation is difficult.

Solarpunk