The Karoo is the last great exit strategy

I’ve been reading Walden again, and as before, Thoreau’s manifesto on essential meaning made me want to escape the world and all its empty value-making, only to realise that I already have.

Walden contains the field notes of Henry David Thoreau, an American writer and professional contrarian who decided that society was moving too fast long before corporate wellness plans existed.

In 1845 he marched into the woods outside Concord, Massachusetts, built himself a one-room cabin, and spent two years performing an experiment in radical self-reliance. He planted beans, took long walks, contemplated the nature of freedom and occasionally visited the nearby village to consume its gossip in “homeopathic doses”.

Walden is the book he wrote about that experience: a blend of natural observation and social critique that says a person can live more deliberately by stripping life down to its essentials, and by learning to question society's values.

I might not be sitting beside a New England pond, but I am in the Karoo, and what started as casual reading has begun to transmute into something surprisingly practical. I realise, with a kind of amused horror, that the Karoo has been forcing me to do exactly that long before I had the language for it.

Walden taught me what to look for, and the Karoo taught me what it costs. Somewhere between those two truths is the sense that stepping back from the global delirium is a reclamation. The more I read, the more I recognise the strange, feral discipline these truths demand.

The Karoo is the last great exit strategy. It becomes a gritty, expansive off-grid experiment where you actually patch your own water pipes. Out here freedom becomes too large to be contained by polite society, and the rules loosen like old leather.

In a way, the Karoo is a potent antidote to global chaos, almost by accident.

The economy is tanking, but the Karoo only kind of cares

You can’t crash what was never built on speculation, and the Karoo has value that is tangible. A tank full of water is worth more than market forces, which you really realise when your tank is empty.  

A solar inverter that works is more reliable than any politician. When everything beyond the horizon is wobbling, this stubborn stretch of earth remains immune to everything but rain. 

Self-sufficiency is not a buzzword

In an age where most people panic if the shopping app glitches for ten minutes, the Karoo cuts that umbilical cord fast. You learn to rely on your own two hands and limited produce instead.

The land rewards effort without fuss. Plant pumpkins and you’ll get pumpkins, build a chicken coop and you’ll have eggs. You are pulled away from the eye-twitch of modern life to something more honest.

Radical freedom found here

A psychological expansion happens when you live with no neighbours for kilometres, and the mind grows feral. You stop policing your own thoughts or narrating your life for an invisible audience. You become far more aware of your place in the food chain.

You are delivered freedom without the lifestyle upgrades; but you do get a life built without a committee meeting.  

What escape really means

Life here peels everything back until you start noticing small, miraculous things: the shade of a soundless dawn, the surprising violence of a desert storm, the deep moral satisfaction of a well-stacked woodpile. You start wanting less, and this feels suspiciously like winning.

Thoreau’s old statement keeps circling back to me:

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary.
I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,
to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life,
to cut a broad swath and shave close,
to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”

The Karoo hands over life's "essential facts" without ceremony, and if the world is stumbling through another economic fever dream, then the Karoo is the cleanest exit strategy left. Karoo life offers a way out that feels strangely sane, already pared down to its lowest terms - not quite a disappearance, but more of an opt-out, a place where you come to live without waiting for things to improve.

𝑊𝒊𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝙝𝙖𝗻𝑘𝘴 𝐟𝘰𝑟 𝑟𝙚𝐚𝒅𝒊𝑛𝙜,
𝘕𝘰🅼𝗶