Animals
"Go live on a farm."
That's a pretty common one.
You hear it a lot if you complain about the way things are.
Along with things like:
"Your life is much better than ours was,"
"You have it easy,"
"You don't realize how hard things were,"
"If you hate it so much why don't you change it."
Very reasonable and well-reasoned arguments I must admit. Nothing unfair or privileged about those perspectives.
The trick, of course, is that you cannot simply go and live on a farm. Do you own a farm? Can you buy one?
The way it was, an incomprehensible number of years ago, you walked until you found somewhere nobody was and you took the risk. Was this good? I think, in the grand scheme of things, it was neutral at best. I'm sure plenty of people died this way. Probably ran into a bear or whatever.
I'm sure there are some suitable farms, and technically, if you go and find one of them and live on it you might be able to grow your own food. But let's be honest and admit that this doesn't solve the problem.
You'd still have to pay property taxes.
What about electricity? Water?
Difficult to grow food without water I've heard.
Where do you get the seeds?
Naturally occurring crops aren't as abundant as they used to be.
We'll throw out healthcare, if you get an infection it's in Zeus' hands.
Ditto with a natural disaster or pestilence or your groundwater being polluted by a corporation.
The other issue is more mental than physical or financial. The cosmic horror of the information hazard that is modern life. You can't unknow things and can't unlearn them. You know that you can Google to find the right answer. Or hit the AI button to get an instant reply (regardless of its usefulness). These things your brain and body now know, unconcerned by your feelings or principles.
And they will tempt you.
So when someone says to me
"Go live on a farm,"
I hear them say
"Go fuck yourself!"
so I smile and say
"Thanks, you too."