I have written some of my reflections for the last couple of days regarding the ideas behind the life I want or think I wand. I want advice from the people actually living the type of life I would like to have myself. Feel free to share your thoughts.

Self Sufficiency. 19/04/2026

For the last couple of days, I have been getting a lot of self-sufficiency reels on my Instagram feed. Before this, I had deleted Instagram because I was wasting too much time on the app and social media (which is a problem again, of course). This idea of deleting the app and other distractions from my phone, originated with the game Red Dead Redemption 2. It’s a beautiful game with a wonderful story. Playing it made me crave something I never really had. I wanted to see the world, nature, people, and life. I started to notice the little things I didn’t before. I found myself looking at the clouds and their beautiful patterns, the beauty of the desert I despised before. The plants, the smells, the taste of good food. All of this led me down a spiral, which ended up making me want to go out there and see what the world had to offer.

Recently, I downloaded Instagram again, and to my surprise, it showed me an immense number of videos of people doing precisely that: living. Of course, these were all curated videos that feel immersive to the viewer and left the viewer craving even more. I scrolled for hours on end looking for more. A phrase that was very reoccurring in those videos was something around the lines of “Wealth is not only gold and silver” and “You are telling me that we are meant to work 9-5s all of our lives and maybe retire at 60 to then maybe see all of this?”. This made me feel something.

Around this time, some reels about educating children in nature, making them capable at very young ages, made me envy them because I wasn’t raised that way, and I am currently lacking in a lot of areas, such as crafting, building, and enduring hard tasks. I feel incompetent in areas that may not be required in the modern world, but that I feel are as important as knowing how to read.

I have almost finished my first year of medical school in Mexico, and I am currently still debating with myself whether this is for me. Then I noticed that my motivations were money and economic stability, which, (don’t get me wrong, are still very valid reasons to pursue a career) I would use in the future to get the life I wanted of exploration and discovery. However, even with some economic stability, heavy shifts, and a regular nine to five will continue to take away a third part of my life. Do I really want to do that? On the other hand, I can’t completely abandon my studies; if I don’t have the resources to go out there and live the way I want, even less so could I do it without a career.

This loop led me down another road. I started watching a different type of reel. They first started as quick hacks and quality of life tips. Then it started turning into tips and tricks for things to last longer, especially about buying good clothing, iron cast pans, starching jeans, how to reuse waste, how to grow small plants, how to cook good and healthy foods. After some time, all of this guided me towards self-sufficiency. I now wanted to buy land, “off grid” and build a community, or place myself into one. I want to learn how to raise animals, how to grow my own non-processed food, how to build and craft, how to fish, how to cure people and myself with natural remedies, how to build a healthy family, to be reliable, to have something that belongs to me.

I don’t believe that it is sustainable to live by oneself disconnected from society, but I really wish that society was so much more decentralized. I wish that communities were stronger, and villages nourished themselves from markets instead of Walmart or in my case, Soriana. We are damaging ourselves with our habits and ultra processed foods. We are damaging the ecosystem by producing too much of what we don’t need. The widening of the economic gap is making it harder to live overall. The loss of nations culture due to a new cosmopolitan culture pushed by consumption and social media. The list could go on forever, and it is very worrying.

Right now, I am very scared. I have consumed an enormous amount of media regarding the current socio-economic state of the western world, and I’ve been getting anxiety just from the thought of what may happen to me in the future. I am Mexican and have lived in Mexico for almost all my life, and things don’t seem to be getting any better. Like I said, I don’t have the resources to do what I want to do. I am barely 20 years old, and I am very fearful of trying what I’ve mentioned before and notice that it was all a fantasy. Is all this unrealistic?

I am not thinking about escaping into the woods, I want a better world so that I shouldn’t want to escape. But what is my role in making it happen? What would be the wise thing for me to do? I don't mean changing my life immediately or throwing everything away, but rather, how can I do better with my time, my body and my thoughts?