027 The Other Costs Of Self-Reliance

The most common question we get is “How much does this life cost?” and the honest answer is that money is only the surface. The deeper price tag is comfort. It’s the moment you stop defaulting to “someone else will handle it” and accept that when things break, fail, freeze, or fall apart, you are the plan.

We talk about what “success” can look like from the outside and how easily it turns into a costume: the image, the validation, the fake-it-until-you-make-it momentum that quietly piles on stress and debt. We unpack the difference between risk that truly builds your future and risk that props up a version of yourself you’re performing for other people. Then we get practical and uncomfortable with a simple audit that changes everything: what can I actually do, and what am I paying someone else to do because I never learned?

From there, we dig into two underrated sacrifices on the road to self-reliance and off-grid skills: giving up outsourced responsibility and breaking the approval loop. The forest doesn’t congratulate you for doing hard things well, and that’s exactly why the work can become its own reward. We also challenge the idea that this path is escapism. For us, it’s the opposite: a direct confrontation with accountability, capacity, and real freedom that makes the world feel less scary.

If you get value from this, subscribe, share it with a friend who’s tired of the rat race, and leave a review. What’s one thing you’re ready to stop outsourcing this week?

Transcript

Why Cost Questions Never Stop

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Hi, everybody. Welcome back to the cabin. Sean James here from My Self Reliance. It's the My Self-Reliance podcast. And maybe this will be up on my YouTube channel as well. A little bit later in the day today than I normally record these. Usually it's like four or five o'clock in the morning, but I've taken a little break in the middle of the day, so I'm a little bit more alert. We'll see. I am tired from working. So hopefully I can talk uh clearly enough for you here. Um plus I was just scrolling quickly through my comments, my comment section, and uh getting the same question. I've been getting this this question for ever, for a decade, basically, on many of my videos, but uh more so lately because I'm talking more about the costs. And I think more people are just starting to look at pursuing this lifestyle, like figuring out how they can maybe quit the rat race or get out of the city and live a more hands-on life, more real life, analog life rather than a digital life. Out of the virtual world into reality. And uh question about costs is like I said, is pervasive. So I'm going to talk about that a lot, uh, a little bit. Not just the money part, but also the the other kind, the cost, the cost of a decision, the cost of a direction you chose or you didn't choose, was chosen for you. That um wasn't necessarily the right one for me, and there that came at a cost. Um anyway, this life, choosing this life, doing this life uh is a comfort cost. I've been out here long enough now that I can look back at the version of myself who made certain choices and understand my old self in a way I couldn't probably at the time. I don't judge who I was. Uh he was doing exactly what made sense to him at the time, but I can clear see clearly now that um those choices, what they are actually costing me. I couldn't

Success That Hid Crushing Debt

SPEAKER_00 2:00

see it then because the bill doesn't always come right away, of course. And that's what I want to talk about today. When I was running my business before any of this, the the commercial roofing company, and some other businesses that I had, had a version of success that looked like the real thing from the outside, had nominated for awards, nice vehicles, decent house. Uh, I don't know, just look like I was successful. Had employees, lots of them that looked up to me and relied on me. I had accounts, bank accounts, had a truck with a company name on the door, I had a mortgage. I had all the things you're supposed to accumulate as evidence that you're doing it right. But in the background, I ended up with that $750,000 in debt that I carried from the business. But personally, now some of that debt was the cost of growth and ambition. That's what people tell you. Debt is leverage, debt is how you scale things, and maybe that's true in certain situations with certain people in certain businesses. And generally that's really is the way to get ahead. You leverage the assets that you have. But that every single time you do that, it's a risk. If you mortgage your personal residence, for example, to fund your lifestyle or your business, and you have a failure, you lose your security, that place that you're maybe raising your family. And that's what my situation was. Anyway, some of that debt, a lot of that debt was a cost of a version of myself that I was performing for other people. Version that needed the truck with the logo on the door, a version that needed to look like something before actually was something. I kind of thought of you know, fake it until you make it, I guess, um was kind of my mantra or mantra at the time. And it um it helped us grow that business for sure, but it definitely was a facade that was had took its toll on me, mentally, personally, emotionally. And here's the thing about that kind of cost. It doesn't feel like a cost when you're incurring it. Feels like an investment. I convinced myself it was. Feels like ambition, feels like you're building something. But it's only later when you're broke, when you're exhausted, when you're lying awake at three in the morning doing the math that doesn't add up that you realize that you weren't building something, you were buying a costume, you're putting on that mask that you put on for people, and most of us wear many different masks. I think uh perception of somebody is based on the context that you're viewing it from or them from. Thought about this with people that have been evil, I would say in my life. They were evil to me, but I'm sure they were grandparents and husbands and wives and children of somebody that loved them and they uh got the best version of them. Something to be aware

The Question That Opens The Abyss

SPEAKER_00 4:55

of. Talked before about that moment of asking myself a real question. What do I actually know how to do? I want to go deeper on that today because I don't think I've fully explained what that question actually felt like for me. It wasn't a rhetorical question, it wasn't something I asked and then quickly answered. It's the kind of question that kind of opens up underneath you and you stare into the abyss. And you think you're going to hit solid ground and you just keep falling and getting deeper and deeper into that rabbit hole. As you know, if you've been watching for a while, I grew up in rural Canada. My father being a baby boomer and coming from a poor background, he did know how to fix things, build things, work with his hands. So I had that in my background. I just had that exposure, even though I was not, I wouldn't say I had good work ethic as a kid, and I begrudgingly would help out around the house and on projects, but uh but it they made me do some of it at least, and I learned from that just through osmosis and a little bit of experience. But then I'd spent about 20 years walking away from that. 20 years of choosing the office over the shop, the meeting over the job site, and uh shortcut over the skill, climbing that corporate ladder and getting more and more urban. When I finally stopped and took stock, really took stock, the list of things I could generally do well was pretty short, and the things that I was dependent on other people for was very, very long. Most people don't make that list, and that's by design. The system works better when you don't make that list and you don't pay attention to it, you don't want to know the truth. But I hit the wall hard enough that I had no choice, and sitting with that list with those two columns, what can I do and what I can't, what am I paying for somebody else to do, and what am I doing myself? It was one of the most uncomfortable and clarifying experiences of my life, especially because I've always had a self-reliance mindset, but I just drifted away from the actual application of that. And it was um not my character, so I think it was hurting my character, hurting my soul. So I want to talk about what self-reliance actually requires, and it's not just the skills. I talk about the skills all the time. I show

Giving Up Outsourced Responsibility

SPEAKER_00 7:10

them on my channel, channels. So I'll keep talking about skills, but today I want to talk about what you have to give up to get it. Because nobody talks about that part, and I think that's why a lot of people get part way down this road and then they stop. First thing you give up is the comfort of having someone else being responsible. Something goes wrong in a rented house, you call the landlord. When your car breaks down, you call the mechanic, your health starts to slip, you wait for the doctor to tell you what to do. Real comfort in that, a genuine relief in having someone else hold the responsibility, someone to blame, you know, when things don't go your way. That was that's tempting. It's been tempting for me to blame people. My uh health wasn't good or my bank account wasn't solid, jobs weren't going well. The tendency was to try to find responsibility elsewhere rather than myself. But when you choose self-reliance, when you actually choose it, not just as an idea, but as a practice, you have to give that up. Things break and it's on you to figure out how to fix them. And the crop fails, which is quite often, and it's on you. That water pipe freezes in February at midnight, and you're the only one in the crawl space with a heat gun, and there's no one to call. It's all you. It's an uncomfortable position to be in. But I don't know, like I said, comfort is overrated, in my opinion. So it's not hypothetical, it's just an everyday situation. For a lot of people, the moment they actually confront that not as a concept, but as a lived experience. They they flinch. And I understand why it's heavy. The responsibility is real. But here's what I found out on the other side of that flinch when you push through that. The weight of the responsibility and the weight of helplessness feel similar from the outside, but completely different to carry. Helplessness makes you smaller over time. Responsibility makes you bigger, slowly, quietly, but eventually it does. The second thing you give up, and this

Breaking The Approval Loop

SPEAKER_00 9:15

one surprised me, is the approval loop. Most of us, whether we know it or not, are running some version of an approval loop. We do things and we get feedback. We post something and people respond. We make a decision and someone validates it. We're constantly, unconsciously calibrating ourselves against other people's reactions and other people's opinions. But out here, like taking when you're taking responsibility for yourself, that feedback loop breaks. When I build something, the forest does not apply to. I solve a problem nobody saw me solve. I work through a hard thing alone, and there's no one to tell. The land holds what you build, and that's it. That's the whole response. That's not obviously true with all the things that I show you, but there's a lot in a day and in a week and a year that I just can't film and don't show you. And the little things, the plants that I dig up, or the weeds that I have to get rid of, or the diseases in the garden that I'm dealing with, or the water pump that breaks, or the leaks, all of these things are not things that I that I show. It's just things I deal with. And at first, you're, if you're honest, that's a pretty uncomfortable position. It's a it's a hunger for the loop that you don't even know you have until it's gone. But what happens over time if you stay with it is that that hunger fades, and what replaces it is something a lot cleaner. The work done well becomes its own reward. Not because you told yourself it would, not because you read in a book, but because you lived it enough times that it became true. There's no more satisfaction like living under a structure that you built, for example, or creating a meal and eating a meal and serving a meal that you completely were responsible for, from the meat to the to the vegetable to the fruit, whatever it is. And the only person who knows you figured something out is you, and you know it was hard, and you know you didn't quit. That has a certain weight to it, particular private weight that doesn't need any anyone else to make it real, unless your spouse is your validation, which is I think is a good thing, communicating that and having that you're supposed to be proud of you and and support

Self-Reliance Is Not An Escape

SPEAKER_00 11:20

you, I think is very, very important. It's a version of this life that looks from the outside like escape. Yeah, say that's the most common reason people watch, especially my bigger channel, my self-reliance YouTube channel, is escapism. They say when I've told subscribers in the past why they watch, and it's to live um vicariously through me. I know that's how some people see it. I see it in the comments. Someone who thinks what I'm doing just running from something, from debt, from failure, from the world, from responsibility. And uh, I want to address that directly because I think it matters. This life is not an escape, it's the opposite of an escape. When you escape, you're avoiding the thing. You're putting distance between yourself and whatever you can't deal with. But what I did, what I'm still doing, is the opposite. I came toward the thing. The thing I'd been avoiding was accountability, is the gap between who I was performing and who I actually was. It's the honest reckoning with what I knew and didn't know, could do and couldn't do, and removing that mask that I put on for other people and to operate maskless alone is very um rewarding. So moving out here to the country, to the woods didn't uh let me avoid that. I just forced the confrontation. So when you're out here, there's nowhere to hide, not from the cold, not from the work, not from yourself, not from the people around you. The version of yourself that could borrow against tomorrow could outsource the hard thing, you could perform confidence in a meeting and then quietly not deliver. That version doesn't survive out here. You're totally accountable for everything you do. I want to tell you something that I think is true, even though it sounds hard. Most people are living at a fraction of their actual capacity. Not because they're lazy, not because they're weak, but because the world they're living in doesn't require more, honestly. Every system around them, the financial, social, logistical, is designed to keep them comfortable and dependent and consuming it. It does its job very well. They say hard times create strong men, easy times create weak men. So they never find out, never find out, but they could have learned to build, they could have learned to fix things, to grow, to sit with this discomfort and not immediately reach for a solution that someone else provides. They never find out because they never had to. And I was one of those people. I was comfortable and dependent, and I had the debt to prove it. I had the dependency to prove it. And it wasn't until the whole structure collapsed that I had to find out what I was actually made of. And I was surprised. I don't know, somewhat surprised. I don't say that with arrogance, I say it because I want you to hear it. I was surprised. I did not know going in that I could do any of this. I've mentioned that so many times in the last 10 years. A lot of the things I do, it's the very first time I've done those things. And I don't do them well. I do, I'm one of these people that I'm just all over the map, and I have too many things I like to do, too many things I try to do alone. So I didn't genuinely know what I was capable of. So that's what's available to you, whatever version of it looks like to you. The capacity is there, hasn't been asked for yet, maybe, but it's definitely there. We're capable. Humans are it's one thing I've learned traveling across North America and so many different diverse landscapes and challenges. And I just see what humans have overcome and the things we've created. Um engineering marvels, it's incredible. We're incredibly adaptive and capable, but we our society has been set up, that capability has been outsourced to uh an overseer, unfortunately, that um benefits from us being dependent. And I like to um think that I'm breaking that and I'm hoping to encourage more and more people to break that dependency.

Mindset Shift From Consumer To Producer

SPEAKER_00 15:18

So self-reliance to me is three things. To me, it's a mindset shift from consumer to producer, from asking who can I pay to solve this, to asking, can I learn to do this myself? And does it make sense for me to do it myself? It doesn't mean you never hire someone, it just means you stop being helpless by default. It's not a skill set, not a personality type. Every single skill I have, I learned. I wasn't born with any of it. I was born in Canada into a family that knew some things, and I walked away from that for 20 years and then came back to it. Everything I know how to do, I learned by watching and practicing and getting it wrong and trying again and getting it wrong again, and and it just kept going. And some things are still wrong, but at least they're done, or at least they're functioning. So that path is always open and anyone can walk it. And of course, self-reliance is to me freedom, which drives me. You know, freedom of not being afraid when the store runs low or not being trapped by a paycheck because you can't do anything yourself. Being able to look at a problem, like the real physical problem in a real physical world and know that you have some version of the tools and the knowledge to face it. That freedom is quiet, it doesn't announce itself, just changes the way the world feels. World definitely gets less scary, you get less reactive. I didn't expect that really. It was a side effect of the skills. I came for the skills and the nature and got the quiet, the peace as a bonus. To me, the direction matters more than the destination. I don't think you need to sell everything tomorrow, and I don't recommend that you do. I don't think you need a cabin in the woods necessarily either, although I like that I have. Maybe that's your path. It's obviously was mine, but I came to this at the end of a very, very long, painful detour, and I'm not suggesting you need the same do detour to get something that works for you. But I am suggesting that you pick a direction. Like try to do it today and not put it off, not procrastinate. Not a destination, just a direction. Something you can do today that moves you slightly more towards being able to do things yourself. Girl one thing, fix one thing instead of a calling someone, learn one thing you've been outsourcing, just take one step, and then tomorrow take another one. That's it, the whole program. It doesn't require a farm either, like even a small homestead. It doesn't need to be growing your food for for um necessarily. Doesn't you require you quitting your job or moving your family, even just requires a decision about what direction you're walking. Because

Groundedness And A Quiet Kind Of Freedom

SPEAKER_00 18:05

here's what I found once you start walking in that direction, even slowly, even one step at a time, something changes in you. Start to want more of it, skills start to feel like evidence of something, of your own capacity, of the fact that you're not only a consumer, that you can produce something, make something, fix something, understand something about the physical world you live in, which is very contagious. It's addicting. You start learning something, and you're definitely going to feel fulfilled, and that that reward is enough. That's something you want to continue to pursue. It's a relationship you can have with the physical world, with the land, with weather, with seasons, with tools and materials that people in the modern world have completely lost. When I say people in the modern world, I'm talking about all of us. Not last lost as in abandoned, lost as in they never had it to begin with because we lost it generationally. It's lost before they were born, quietly across a generation too, as the systems got more efficient and the skills became less necessary. That division of labor meant that we were all only responsible for one single component in our life, maybe one you know, one part of our life, and that um we don't see the overall picture, so we don't get to benefit from the fulfillment of having done something completely. And with it, something else was lost as well. I don't have a perfect word word for it, groundedness, maybe, sense of being genuinely located in the world, not just in a geographic sense, but in a practical sense. Like knowing where your food comes from, knowing how your shelter was built, knowing how to make fire, knowing what cold actually costs and how it feels and what it takes to stay warm. When you have those things, even partial versions of them, the world feels different, feels more navigable, less like something happening to you and more like something you're part of. So that's what this is about. It's not survival, survivalism, not ideology, not politics. It's just the simple, hard, deeply satisfying work of becoming someone who can actually do things, whose hands know things, whose body knows things, who has in some quiet corner of themselves a confidence that comes not from what they can buy or who they can call, but from what they know and what they've built and what they've done. That version of yourself is available to you. Whatever your version of this life looks like. I hope you're moving towards it.