How to Exit the Empire (Without Burning Out or Going Off-Grid) Pt. 1
Series on 4 pathways every modern villager can start today
I recently finished watching Andor, a Star Wars series about the beginning of the rebellion.
The world building was exceptional, and the parallels were chilling. It felt far too relateable to watch a group of rebels resist a cold, calculating empire driven by hunger for power and resources. But it started a joke between me and a fellow solar punk, community-builder friend of mine about the movement and what “the rebellion” means to us.
We live inside a machine that insists it is too powerful to escape.
This conveyor belt humming beneath our feet keeps us working, spending, and numbing. How are we to have energy left to resist or rebel?
Most people feel this in their bones, even if they don’t have the language for it. Many of those that can name it feel trapped on the spectrum between outraged activism, existential hopeleness, and passive acceptance.
No more.
The first order of business as a village builder is to unplug from the empire. It only has power because we give it power, and because it has manufactured our dependency on it.
But divesting from the empire doesn’t require you to disappear into the woods, renounce electricity, or become a homesteader with 16 goats and a sourdough starter named Ezekiel.
It requires something far simpler, far more subversive, and far more communal:
A return to sovereign power.
A reclaiming of resource flows.
A switch of technology choices.
An unapologetic choosing of belonging over separation.
Let’s call these the Four Great Exits. They will the be topic of a 4-part article series of how to unplug from the machine published here on Terrenity.
And they don’t take you away from society. They take you back into humanity.
Exit 1: Land
According to me, the societal ills and power dysfunctions we see all have a surprising root: land use.
Land allocation has historically been decided entirely by commercial interests, not social or communal ones. Yet all of our societal behaviors are dictated by how our environment is set up.
Ask yourself these questions:
Where do you live?
Who are you surrounded by?
Does your survival depend on systems that do not care about you?
Land, agency, and the right to decide your own rhythms is the most basic form of power.
As it stands, building our environment is left up to urban planners forcing densification in the interest of big tech and real estate (when it’s been shown that it doesn’t actually lower the cost of living).
I assume that the majority of people reading this don’t have access to or influence over land. Much of wealth concentration has to do with creating a landless class. This creates economic dependency on others to work and survive for shelter.
So it would be insulting to simply tell you to go buy land when:
You might not have the capital and
You might not have friends or family you trust enough to do that with.
This isn’t as much about owning land, although that is ultimately crucial to truly exit. It’s much more about how land is used and what for. For example, rather than separating agriculture into giant farms miles outside of the city, shifting towards local urban farms is part of the solution that divests from the machine.
What’s important is understanding how land use is the foundation for your dependency on the empire, and orienting towards a future where you can control a bit more of land.
This is why I originally started this societal redesign journey with ecovillages, because control over land use is control over the systems we live inside of.
What You Can Do
The most ancient form of power is territorial, relational, and personal.
Even if you might not have the high trust relationships (yet) to buy land with friends or cofound a village, you can begin taking steps towards place-based autonomy.
1. Start with proximity
Choose where you live based on who you want to build with, not how close it is to work (or a Whole Foods). Even one aligned neighbor can change the math of your life more than 30 minutes shaved off your commute.
2. Grow food where you are
Rent a plot in a community garden.
Grow herbs in your kitchen window.
Join a CSA run by someone you can hug, rather than feeding a supply chain that ships chemically sprayed lettuce across three borders.
Food is power. When you grow even 1% of what you eat, the empire loses a tiny tributary of control.
3. Live in clusters, not islands
If you want collective ownership someday, start with collective living now.
Move in with friends.
Choose a multifamily house.
Coordinate so three of you rent apartments in the same building.
And here’s the thing: the cost curve flattens when you share walls.
One family might pay $800k for a single house. Three families could pay that same amount (each paying far less) for a larger shared property with more rooms, more utility, and more collective power.
Personally, I am able to enjoy 4 beautiful acres in nature on a creek with event venue space, an art room, coworking offices, an edible garden with fruit trees, a hot tub, and so much more because I live in an intentional community. Whereas normally I would never be able to afford living on a 2 million dollar property, I get access to all of this because I don’t care about needing my own kitchen.
There are many ways that you can go about cohousing and coliving in order to enjoy ownership despite weak purchasing power.
Eventually you might be able to form an LLC to buy property collectively instead of battling soaring rents like a Hydra that just regrows its goddamn serpent head.
This is important in an economy where the next generation only makes up 29% of home purchases.
In these times, collective living is almost an economic necessity, but it can also be a form of resistance.
The potential challenges
Reclaiming power is not frictionless.You will run up against:
Zoning that privileges nuclear families
Banks that don’t know what to do with cooperative buyers
Families who think you’ve joined a cult
Friends who balk at shared decision-making
Your own internal fears about commitment
I was talking through the concept of ecovillages with a PhD scientist who leaned in and said “It’s like in school. I always ended up being the one who pulled the most weight in group projects. I’d be terrified of this same thing happening in shared spaces — always having to be the most responsible one.”
This is normal. We are unwinding 200 years of cultural conditioning toward isolation, and paranoia towards shared burdens.
The best way to start is to choose a place to plant roots — physically or relationally — and begin designing your life with people you trust rather than systems that assume your compliance.
Final Words
Power is the most misunderstood challenge we face in this rebellion.
At the writers retreat I’m hosting this month, someone is authoring a story about cats that correlate to different parts of the brain, and all of them are endowed with some special skill. I asked the man, “What are their powers?”
He sort of grimaced and said “Well, their functions are…” and it stopped me in my tracks.
Power reimagined as function doesn’t put valuation on the ability. Instead of discussing what has power over your life, you can ask what function it is serving. If you remove the functions that it serves, and fulfill that function somewhere else, well congratulations, you’ve just divested a little bit more from the empire.
The empire thrives on isolation.
Villages thrive on proximity.
Your first move is simply choosing not to be alone.
Read Part 2
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Basically, community. It's what's needed and what the majority of us are lacking most. But also I'd like to add that foraging is another useful knowledge. It's another survival skill to add.
This year myself and a friend have food security in mind and the wish to remove the power of cash from the connection with mother nature's abundance so we are collecting excess fruit and veg from homes in the local community, usually left rotting in gardens and green houses and we plan to create free markets where anyone can come and take home food gifted from nature rather than exchanging cash. Be the change you want to see in the world.....
We have abundance around us when we pull together and stop thinking "mine, mine, mine" . A shift in Outlook is necessary to survive collectively.