5 Ways Homesteading Improves Your Life

If you’re on the fence about homesteading, chances are good that you’ve already thought about this topic. Most people choose to homestead to simplify their lives, slow down, and be more self reliant. There are 5 other ways that homesteading improves your life overall that many don’t consider.

Time Slows Down – It’s amazing how much time you really have when you aren’t spending 2 hours driving back and forth from work. Add in the hour or so for lunch, then consider you need to cook dinner, try and keep house. In our modern world, so much time is ‘wasted’ just trying to maintain and live the lifestyle. Each day is pretty much the same as the last!

When you homestead, you have more time. Mind you, that time may be frantically filled to get the garden planted in time but still, the time is yours. You reclaim those hours from the commute. How about the time spent waiting in lines? Take that back, too! Regain some sanity from the fast paced world out there!

Increased Freedom in Your Schedule – Along the same lines of slowing down, your freedom to decide how your time is spent is something few people ever really get. Some people might actually find it difficult to make their own schedule but thankfully, Mother Nature tends to kick things into gear.

Though you will still have a schedule, it will be dictated by weather, nature, and your own preferences. Decide you want to go fishing that day instead? Chances are pretty good you can and if you’re lucky, bring home dinner or maybe enough fish for a few meals.

Increased Control Over Food Sources – Anyone who has followed Homestead Dreamer for more than a few months knows I’m a big advocate for people regaining control over their food. How it’s grown, processed, and packaged is all controlled and regulated by someone else. Do you know what all those huge words are in the ingredient list? Do you know how it was processed?

There is a real peace of mind when you go to open a jar of food and know exactly what’s in it and how it was processed! One of our favorite things to make (and eat) is a meal in a jar. Some meat, beans, carrots, onion, and celery makes for a fantastic meal! The best part (other than knowing all about how it was made) is that the food is shelf stable and doesn’t require refrigeration. Even if the power goes out, you have food that is ready to eat!

Reprioritizing What’s Important – When you live in the corporate, rat race world, what’s important can be skewed. “Keeping up with the Jones” is a real thing and can pull you away from what really matters in the end. Ever heard of someone on their deathbed lamenting the lack of time spent on their computers? I didn’t think so.

Being part of the world in a very organic way tends to shift a person’s line of thinking. There is something very comforting about knowing your life is working with the natural world instead of simply consuming it to ‘get ahead.’ Imagine how much less stress your body will go through when you wake up each day happy to face whatever it brings you instead of worrying about what kind of drama there will be at the cube farm that day. Less stress improves health overall in so many ways, I could write an article on that alone!

Stronger, More Meaningful Relationships – When you homestead, there are little challenges everyday and larger ones you don’t expect. When you only have yourself, your family, and the collective skills to pull from, relationships tend to become more solid. You need each other to make it. Each person brings something new to the table. In this modern world, people are so much more disconnected from their fellow man that they’ve ever been before.

When you spend day in and day out working together, it makes sense that relationships will grow stronger. Consider people who’ve become good friends that started out as co-workers. When you spend that much time with a person, even in a business setting, friendships are bound to happen. It’s even more true on a homestead. You will likely experience closer family bonds, better communication, and all of that leads to a better life.

Homesteading is a lifestyle. It will change absolutely every facet of your life. For me, it changed so much in my world views and beliefs that I wrote a 5 part series on it. It covers Food, Work, Recreation, Relationships, and How We Live overall. I encourage you to read them as well to get a better perspective into this simple (and yet crazy) lifestyle! It’s incredibly rewarding!