I love youtube off-grid/homesteading videos because they're always like "living the simple life" and then depict a life ten times more complicated than mine
Like I'm sure it's way more rewarding to grow and can your own tomatoes and they're probably healthier or whatever but is it simpler than me giving Coles one dollar to bring a much more safely canned can of tomatoes to my house? No. No it is not.
growing your own tomatoes is a fuck load more simple than having a job and keeping a job plus paying all the fees of living in society.
Most homesteaders still need to have a job and keep a job and pay all the fees of living in a society. There seem to be a lucky handful who have reduced their costs by homesteading (usually due to the free labour of friends and family) but there were easier ways to reduce those cost. In the vast majority of cases, homesteading is a lot more expensive than not homesteading. And where people are saving money, the amount of labour per dollar works out to well below minimum wage in savings.
From what I've seen, successful homesteaders do it because they find it rewarding. Rewarding does NOT mean simple.
I can't speak to Australia, but at least in the US there is another group of homesteaders who are trying to live self-sufficiently off-grid because they expect the imminent total collapse of civilization, and they have fantasies of themselves living happily on home-grown produce while everyone else is killing each other for the last can of tomatoes at the store.
Another thing about this subset of homesteaders* is that they are insistent--proud, even!--of doing things that are unsafe, and encouraging others to also do those things.
One example is canning dairy products (milk, butter, cheese). They'll show up in a canning group and say something like, "Look how I canned all this milk that the store was getting rid of this milk for 50 cents a gallon because it's the last day!"
Sane and responsible members of the group will say things like, "Dairy isn't safe for home canning; if you have fresh milk that you need to save for later, you can freeze it or make cheese!" And, "If you need shelf-stable milk you can buy powdered milk," or "You can dehydrate it at home, but you need a really good dehydrator, plenty of trays, and it takes forever; you're usually better off just buying it."
And then the person who just canned 20 quarts of botulism will start frothing at the mouth about how when the shit hits the fan--
And yeah, I'll grant that if grocery stores cease to exist, and you are entirely reliant for your winter survival on what you can put up during times of plenty, the risk-benefit analysis would be different. But in the actual world that we currently live in, it's false economy at best, and at worst a stupid flex that could end up killing somebody.
Anyway, TL;DR, "simple" often refers to an imagined past when the problems of modernity did not exist--yet somehow, the problems of that era have been left behind--which in turn is often a racist dogwhistle.
(*Besides their substantial overlap with weapons stockpilers/"militia" types.)
The Can/Dehydrate Absolutely Everything people baffle me. Most homesteaders (sensibly) have personal solar panels, because they want to live off-grid and still have electricity. When Shit Hits The Fan, their solar panels will not stop working. Their freezers would work fine. Canning or dehydrating or salting is great for certain foods (especially if you want to ferment, pickle or flavour something) but for so much stuff the best thing you can do to preserve nutrients and preserve it safely is chuck it in the freezer.
Freezers just aren't homesteady enough I guess.
The simplest, but also the most immature, answer is that solar panels are 'cheating.' These people base their doomsday images on Fallout and zombie apocalypse movies. But not even on them but this lone wolf stereotype of a stereotype. If you can just create electricity from the sun, then it means you can bypass the gritty survival of eating canned goods and just live like you used to. And that kills the fantasy.
I haven't seen that kind, all the ones I've seen get solar panels as soon as they can afford them because living off generator power is expensive and sucks (and, unlike solar panels, would not serve you well in an apocalypse because you need to keep buying petrol for them). I don't think I've ever seen these anti-solar-panel homesteaders that you deal with. Variety in every community I suppose.
Whenever I hear homesteaders and trad wife people talk about how much better it is to do your own canning I remember my grandmother telling me about the canning days from her childhood and how she would help her grandmother can fresh fruit (we lived in orchard country) in a hot canning shed built for that purpose for days at a time in the middle of summer
Specifically about how it was hell on fucking earth and how her grandmother fucking hated every single second of it
The moment her grandmother could buy canned fruit easily in the supermarket? Never fucking canned a thing herself again and was so relieved and grateful that she would never have to again
Canning as a hobby in your kitchen? I can see that being fun
Canning because you have a fuck ton of fresh fruit coming off of your trees and if you don't can it all NOW you won't have any fruit for winter and it's all you do from sun up to sun down in the middle of summer?
That isn't a cute fun rewarding time. It's hard fucking labour
When all of us kids were finally grown and out of the house, my parents (finally) separated and sold their house, my mom used her half of the proceeds to rent a nice little apartment that is now filled with her diamond art and the other little things that make her happy.
(Tbh, I think she's the happiest she's ever been since I was born. She would probably agree.)
My dad, on the other hand, took his half and bought a tiny parcel of land with a rickety barn on it with the determination to do the homestead life. It's in the middle of nowhere and off the grid completely: no electricity, no sewage, and has a well to draw water from. It's been a little over a year since he moved onto it full time and he explains his life like this:
"It's simple — simply harder."
Every moment of his day, from the moment he gets up to the moment he goes to bed, there's something that needs built or repaired or prepped. Now that it's warmer, it's a race against the clock to grow and can his food and cut down enough wood for the winter because he lives on a mountain and that means snow comes in much earlier for him than everyone else. There's just not much downtime if he wants to be comfortable and, idk, alive, after the snowfall has blocked him in for weeks.
On top of that, something is always going wrong from the generator (decided to quit working in the dark in the middle of winter), to the barn he renovated to live in (mystery hole in roof discovered just as it starts to piss pour outside, along with a bat just chilling out and pissing off the cats). And it's not like he can just call a guy to come fix it because he's living quite a way from civilization, so dad has to do it all. He's always been the guy to call when you need something fixed, so it's whatever to him, but how many of these "preppers" have that kind of know-how?
Shit, my dad doesn't even have a mailbox bc the mail carrier says that putting one at the end of the little road to his property would be too dangerous, which it would be because it's located on a blind corner with no lights. And that road is nearly always foggy (from the low lying clouds) and driving it at night when you can't see far ahead and there's no street lighting is terrifying.
Despite everything, he likes his life and its inherent challenges, but all these internet personalities trying to sell it as something worth giving up all modern conveniences for because it's "simpler" make me uncomfortable because, no, it's not — and saying so is just downright stupid.
