Who in their right mind would choose to live without a washing machine? To most of us, life without this miraculous modern contraption is a sign of abject poverty and domestic tyranny. A woman who is forced to wash her family’s clothing in a river is deserving of our deepest pity, her husband of our disdain.
This was not the view of “Guy Alaska”, who earlier this month posted a photo on Twitter of his wife doing just this. “She has been doing our laundry like this for TWO YEARS,” he wrote. “She can’t even feel her feet and she’s shivering in front of the woodstove. A true heroine. Comment ‘❤️’ to show your appreciation for this monument of a woman.”
Quite unsurprisingly, Guy’s post provoked a backlash. Why had his family chosen the harsh pioneer path — living off-grid and without running water — happily and intentionally. What could possibly make this couple choose to live, to put it bluntly, like poor people? The answer, as I found out, is both straightforward and illuminating.
Guy Alaska is originally from Michigan, but his wife, Shay, is an Alaska Native. With several young children, they were living on an acreage in Michigan when their house burned down two years ago. The insurance money didn’t cover a rebuild, so they decided to start afresh in Shay’s homeland, something they had long been dreaming of.
Guy tells me that, for them, Alaska represented “one of the last free places” in America. “There’s still plenty of places in Alaska where you can buy land,” he says. “You own it — you don’t have to pay anybody so-called ‘property taxes’, which means you’re free to not have to earn money, which means you’re free to not participate in a system that you don’t want to participate in.” For him and Shay, the goal was to opt out of what sociologist Michael Bell calls “the treadmill of consumption”, which describes the way in which people in highly developed countries try to “keep up with the Joneses” through more and more material consumption, without any real gains in overall happiness or satisfaction.
After their house in Michigan burned down, the Alaskas started out by camping in a Mongolian yurt in different locations in her home village, but soon grew tired of getting evicted and decided to broaden their search. They soon found the perfect spot: three acres on an island that cost just under the $30,000 they had in savings. The couple bought the land sight unseen and set off. “We just showed up here with all that stuff, and basically blazed a trail into the woods with a pair of loppers until we found a spot that we could build on,” Guy says.
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