Chronic medical conditions that require medication.

Fucking cold winters and the effort of growing enough potato, hunting and fishing, gathering firewood all with hand tools is way too much work.

Lack of survival skills

It is impossible to gather food for yourself. We don’t live in pre-civilization or even the wild west. Everything is owned by someone, regulated, etc.

How do you expect to feed yourself? Not like you can just gather all day and get lucky hunting.

It is objectively harder to ‘live on the land’ then it was centuries ago. Borderline impossible, especially if you want to… you know live and interact with people.

I have a wife and cat to look out for, hard to do that when I can’t pay rent.

The VAST majority of people simply could not cut living in the wilderness, cutting themselves off from society completely. It is an extremely difficult life. Most people wouldn’t know so many critical skills you would need to even begin to think of pulling it off. Even when you look at “successful” instances of this, you find they still return to civilization to make up for shortfalls, like making sure there is enough food, using gas, complex machinery like power tools, vehicles, and generators, etc.

Indoor plumbing. Seriously. Go without for a couple of weeks and tell me how you feel about hot showers and flush toilets.

Also, people really underestimate how difficult it would be to just fuck off into the woods. You’d need a good amount of planning and knowledge to do it. What’s edible within what time range. Where the animals are at what time of year. And if you’re up north you always gotta be laying in firewood.

Also civilization has taken over most of the good hunter gatherer/ subsistence farming spots. River valleys, estuaries, anywhere with good fertile soil. Most of the places with good desolate wilderness to fuck off into was left desolate because it’s fucking desolate.

I’m a spoiled brat with soft hands and no survival skills, and even if I were better equipped it sounds exhausting and dangerous.

We have a cabin in the woods so I do it in the summer. I wouldn’t want to do it longterm in the winter. (Canada) A couple of days and I’m ready for civilization.

I’m waiting for the next book in that series I like.

Living in the woods alone without food input from civilization is incredibly hard if not impossible.

Realistically you’d need like 10-20 people to help out, livestock, a field to grow cereals, large garden and a vegetable field, just to keep everyone surviving.

I’m afraid of being alone with my thoughts.

…money

Living in the woods needs a LOT of money

Moving to a rural area and realizing how fucking hard it is.

The hill I will die on: rugged individualism as strength in a post-disaster world is a lie that is sold to appeal to ego in an individualistic society, and also to prevent the formation of community.

That doesn’t apply to many existing rural communities, who of course know better.

It’s not as easy as Stardew Valley makes it seem like.