How to Exit the Empire (Without Burning Out or Going Offgrid) Pt. 2 - Resources

We can’t be upset at where the empire is taking us and still put gas in its tank.

Last week we talked about land as the first step towards divesting power from the empire.

How to Exit the Empire (Without Burning Out or Going Off-Grid) Pt. 1

Now we’re going to specifically look at migrating resources away from these systems in the context of building modern villages and collective circles of care.

In other words, finding ways to stop fueling The Machine.

couldn’t do without a FernGully reference

Exit 2: Resources

We are used to the narrative that we depend on these large systems to survive.

When you depend on systems that are built to extract from you, eventually you’ll feel yourself on the very sharp edge of survival, as many of us do now.

But the empire also survives on our consumer choices.

Our labor, our attention, our spending, our subscriptions, our time. Withdrawing these significantly weakens the empire.

This is where some village builders assume the solution is “grow all your food and weave your own underwear”. A charming fantasy, but ultimately another trap.

We can do much better than just returning to subsistence living.

In this article I lay out three concrete levels of resource exit: sharing, distributing, and divesting, to evolve from consumer to collaborator to co-owner.

I like to have something to run towards, rather than away from. This 4-part series on how to exit isn’t only about starving the empire — it’s about feeding the village.

Level 1: Sharing

Requirement: Trust

The systems I advocate for are built on community and circles of trust.

When you organize resources together, you don’t just save money. You save time. You reduce stress. You reclaim capacity. You build resilience.

This is where your energy actually comes back to you.

This looks like 3 people planting a microgarden, 5 neighbors bulk-buying food staples, or 10 families sharing a solar array. Think of a community tool library, instead of thirty identical weed whackers rusting in thirty lone garages.

My own coliving community saves $14,000 per year just from sharing our streaming service subscriptions.

This doesn’t include the other ways we organize our resources, like bulk food buying and monthly paper product subscriptions from package-free companies.

We aren’t abstaining from modern privileges. We’re refusing to be individually gouged for them.

move nights at the ranch are so big we had to build a mezzanine for couch #3

Some resources are only possible to share when you live together, and others can be shared across neighborhoods, friend groups, or loose collectives.

Here are a few places to start:

• Digital resources
  Streaming platforms, paywalled news, meditation apps, creative software, language tools. Most already support multi-device use. You don’t need six identical subscriptions in one friend group.

• Plans that scale
  Cell phones, insurance, even utilities often get cheaper under family or organizational plans, especially if you have a shared legal entity.

• Food & consumables
  Buying essentials in bulk saves real money. The empire charges you more for snack-sized versions of the same damn nuts, so buy a big bulk order instead.

• Tools, Equipment & Occasional-use items
  Tool libraries don’t have to be industrial. It can be as small as a shared dog nail clipper. Consider things like a ladder, sewing machine, musical instrument, air mattresses, or event supplies. Borrowing beats buying things you’ll use twice and store forever.

You’re still participating in the system, but you’re just not letting it bleed you dry.

Why Sharing Doesn’t Come Naturally

Many people already share resources out of necessity, but many others — including people who need to — don’t.

Not because they’re selfish, but because sharing requires trust, and trust has been systematically eroded through scarcity conditioning. We’ve been trained to fear dependency, and equate independence with safety.

So we default to control instead.

For example, at my same community, quite a few of us have personal Amazon prime accounts (yes, I know we shouldn’t have anyone using this service, but it’s just one of those things we haven’t been able to replace yet).

Even though we adore each other, we don’t really trust each other to not accidentally charge the wrong card, and we don’t really feel like monitoring if that happens to begin with.

Most mutual aid advice that I read feels tone-deaf when it doesn’t acknowledge that it can be very challenging to overcome this conditioning.

You don’t need to start big. You just need to start together.

first principle of potluck economics: you have more together than apart

Start here

Pick one essential resource (food, water, tools, transportation) and ask: “How could this be handled better together than alone?”. Start building the trust it takes to collectively manage resources with others, and slowly add people to your circle of trust.

You’ll find that every resource you share multiplies. And for everything you save money together on, you’re weakening the engine of the machine.

Level 2: Distributing

Requirement: Coordination

The next level is distribution: reorganizing labor, responsibility, and ownership so that more of your needs are met without money changing hands at all.

This is where communities begin to feel like villages again.

Distribution looks like:

• Shared care
  Community childcare and eldercare pools free up working hours, reduce burnout, and create real interdependence. Care stops being a private crisis and becomes a shared effort.

• Distributed education
  Homeschool co-ops, skill-sharing circles, and intergenerational learning replace outsourced, expensive systems with knowledge that lives inside the community.

• Holistic care pots
  Instead of relying solely on insurance systems that profit from denial, communities can create shared funds for preventative, mental, and holistic care.

• Distributed infrastructure
  Solar microgrids. Shared water catchment. LoRa internet networks that you own. When infrastructure is co-owned, no one is held hostage by monopolies or outages.

This level is harder because it requires more than money or belongings. Besides time, which many of us are already short on, they require higher levels of coordination, clear roles, and organized systems. And crucially, the willingness to be in each other’s lives.

Start here

Map the people already around you using the social circles diagram. Not who you wish you had — who you actually have. Then ask where life feels tightest. Time, care, transport, food, money, energy. That’s your entry point.

With a bit of coordination, that pressure can become shared. Invite one or two people slowly inward and experiment. Needs get met faster when they’re held together, and often, relationships deepen in the process.

Level 3: Divesting

Requirement: Skill

This is the tier most people never reach.

Level 3 is when communities stop acting like consumers and start acting like financial ecosystems. When your money sleeps inside institutions aligned with your values, or institutions that YOU own, it wakes up working for your future, not against it.

• Cooperative business ventures
  Instead of working for extractive companies, communities build enterprises that they own to circulate wealth internally and serve real needs.

• Community real estate investment & regenerative funds
  Small amounts pooled together become meaningful capital for land, housing, food systems, and local sustainable infrastructure.

• Rotating lending circles & co-investing
  Friends and neighbors fund each other’s projects instead of begging banks for permission.

• Local credit unions and community development banks
  Savings are used to strengthen your region instead of financing destruction elsewhere.

• Shared emergency funds
  Because relying on FEMA or insurance alone is a gamble most of us can’t afford.

my community training to take down the empire

If these feel rather complicated to pull off, honestly, I get it. My hands get clammy thinking about “building a fund”. Because I haven’t yet learned the skills of how to do this.

We can totally pull these off, though.

Start here

They didn’t teach us these things in school on purpose, but the resources to learn how to build these things are available online for free.

Pick 1 thing you want to learn more about in the next week — cooperatives, green banking, or community real estate — and find time for mirco-learnings. Just understanding what’s out there helps you peel your eyes away from the train wreck of the empire.

Full Exit

My most important thesis: The real goal is not just weaken the empire, but build alternative solutions that outcompete capitalism and become the new standard.

The economic dependency created in our lives — and the sense of inevitability when it comes to witnessing the system’s corruption — is very real and not easy to simply leave behind.

We begin to build parallel institutions when we invest each other to collectively to buy land to create a regenerative offgrid community, or purchase a broken down building to turn it into a mutual aid center and affordable housing for artists.

Exiting the empire only works when we combine all 3 levels and build new systems. Start learning how to pull each of these levels off by building these strengths:

1. Sharing takes high trust

2. Distributing takes high coordination

3. Divesting takes high skill

We start as consumers. Next we become collaborators. Eventually we become investors in each other.

Then the empire loses its grip on us.

The Real Checkmate

Whether you’re sharing a ladder or withdrawing billions in collective spending power, these principles remain consistent.

I live in the United States.

Currently, US citizens are actively planning a tax strike against the federal government for violating civil rights, and coordinating to withdraw money from big corporations supporting the violent, racist secret police.

I used to be bewildered that we weren’t rioting in the streets every day. While I’m outraged on a daily basis, I now understand something else. Violent rebellion gives the system exactly what it wants: justification for more force, more surveillance, more control.

Building alternatives starves it instead.

Whether it’s the Target boycott or the tax strike, withdrawing money from these systems is how it begins. As we peacefully allocate resources to nurture thriving communities we can actually live in, we’re building a world we don’t have escape from.

My mantras: Focus on what we can build. Focus on the positive choice. Focus on building the better alternative.

That’s the moment the empire has no leverage left.

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