Off the Grid: Meet the People Leaving Modern Life Behind

Two years ago, Kirsty Tizard’s morning routine was exactly that: a routine. Every day she trekked up the road, checked into work at her café, spoke to the same people and completed the same tasks as the day before. On paper, Kirsty was ticking all the boxes of affluent middle-class existence – as a café owner her work-life was something many dream of. But just below the surface she felt restless with the repetition.

She and her husband had always been staunch believers in sustainability, and the idea of doing something radically different had been hanging between them for some 10 years, like an unfinished conversation. The ball finally dropped when, in April 2017, a close relative the same age as Kirsty passed away, prompting a moment of deep reckoning for the two. “I got an intense sense that life was short, that I should do with it what really mattered, and fast,” she says. So goodbye café it was. The pair quit their jobs, uprooted their four kids and left a comfy house in Devon behind to move 60 miles away into a wonky woodland cabin – and a brand new existence.

Tinkers Bubble is a 14-member-strong community of like-minded people in Somerset, England who have decided to untangle themselves from the bondages of modern life to pursue a simpler existence. Kirsty’s new morning routine goes like this: wake up with the sun, head down the hill, milk the cows, followed by communal breakfast complete with gas-heated tea, freshly harvested vegetables and eggs laid that morning. The rest of the day she spends weeding and tending to the flock while others around her cut wood, maintain homes and cook. When she washes, it is usually in the nearby lake.

Kirsty is part of a movement quietly spreading throughout Europe and the United States: the off-gridders. People who have, for whatever reason, decided to live off the radar, away from supermarkets, power bills and traffic jams, closer to nature and their own sustainable power solutions.