The Urge to Buy Land and Wait for Something to Happen

This is one of the longest running conversations I have with my friends. Let’s buy some land. Let’s build a cabin, a fence, a bunker. Maybe haul out some shipping containers and build a labyrinth-style fortress of corrugated steel.

There are websites that auction off land for cheap. Yeah the websites look sketchy but so does everything. Just look for properties that have access to water. Also a good road, ideally. And we’re only talking California—someplace within a few hours’ drive, even if that means wildfire country.

It might sound simple, but god there is so much to figure out. Consider that there might be a global famine someday, so you need a place that can sustain a sizeable garden. You need a place that won’t be seriously impacted by climate change. And when the next pandemic comes, or when the government gets overthrown, or when any other apocalyptic shit happens, you need a place to escape to where you can survive but also disappear for a while.

I’m actually a realist, so I push back anytime my friends start overindulging in doomsday scenarios. I do like the idea of owning land off the grid, but what if none of the imagined bad things happen and in the meantime we’re stuck paying property taxes on a plot of land we rarely—if ever—visit?

Recently I sent my friends a video by RealLifeLore that goes into detail about why the United States will never be invaded.

In response I got an excited rant about how—anyway!—we’re actually going to do it this time. And here are some properties for sale right now. Forty acres for 200K!

I sent back a link to a townhouse in Philadelphia for $250K. “But just for comparison,” I wrote, “you can get a three-bedroom townhouse in Philly for about the same price.”

“Yeah,” my friend responded, actually agreeing, “California prices are so fucked…”

Rich people don’t waste all this time chatting. They just act. They buy their compound in the desert, fill it full of bison jerky and artisanal Cheetos and call it a day. Bill Gates buys up hundreds of acres of farmland with all the forethought of ordering coffee in the morning. China and Canada purchase swaths of American land without even glancing at the price tag.

But here we are in our group chat. Twelve years in. Whose got $10K to throw down? Guys I might inherit some cash from my aunt this year. Oh shit this beat-up shipping container is half price what do you think?

I really don’t know about all this, but I just spent half an hour on Redfin and (seriously) I think I fell in love with a cabin in El Dorado County. Only an hour and fifteen minutes from my place in Sacramento.

I’m sitting here at midnight gulping California wine fantasizing about the possibilities. It could be turned into a recording studio. It could be a writers’ retreat. It could be a place where my friends and I have wild parties just like when I was in my 20s and I used to go out to my buddy’s parents’ lake cabin and drink whiskey and get horribly sunburnt and feel an absurd sense of being alive and being free.

Sex parties. Satanic rituals. Cult gatherings. Autonomous zones. New religions. New nations. New forms of art that redefine and transcend the human experience.

Just give me ten more years, guys. I’ll get my student loans paid off. I’ll get my shit together. I swear we’ll make it happen.