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Cottagecore and associated cultural trends are 95% LARP. Obviously, there are a few people who really are into it, but my observation so far has been that this is far more likely to mean "I moved to an exurb and picked up a horticulture hobby" than anything remotely resembling actual rural or off-the-grid living. Actually, 95% LARP might be being overly generous; I'm going to guess the conversion rate on people taking the Stardew Valleypill is extremely low. Most people entertaining sanitized fantasies of tradrural lifestyle aren't even going to get as far as the exurban house and gardening hobby.
All of which is to say: I don't think this is a real trend. To the extent that it is a real trend, it is mostly the product of backflow from young professionals crowding into major cities, enabled by the rise of remote work. Social media may be having a corrosive effect on social cohesion, but it's not making people yearn for the pines.
We can. It's not particularly hard to set up your own forum, and if you're willing to put in a little effort and tolerate some jankiness you don't even need to reply on a 3rd party service to do it. This reminds of third place discourse, where people talk about third places disappearing as if someone came and tore them down, as opposed to that people stopped going to them. You can very easily leave the major social media platforms. We just don't. The problem is
a) these algorithmically driven services may be inferior to organic, homegrown human interaction, but, crucially, they are free and offer a path-of-least-resistance option. You could start your own forum or even go outside and meet people, but Facebook is a click away. Whatever your community of interest is, it probably already exists on reddit.
b) network effects mean there's a lot of value lost in leaving the big platforms for a smaller one. Being the first person to break away from twitter gets you little but
a massive improvement in mental healthisolation. And, especially for people who view themselves as incumbents, the suggestion that they should leave because of what someone else is doing is deeply irritating - "why should I change, he's the one who sucks". So everyone stays on the big platforms and complains about the moderation policy but never leaves.That's more a reflection of how a subset of hardcore American conservative low-key hate America and have despaired of reasserting control by force.
I think you're right that the overwhelming majority of people aren't going to seriously take up off-grid living, but I think we are seeing a slow shift in the zeitgeist around the margins. Sure, someone who fills Pinterest boards with cottagecore styles and buys a potted plant isn't personally making a huge shift, but I do think from talking to friends and co-workers that we're seeing a bit of a rebound into, for lack of a better term, touching grass: hobbies, IRL social groups, and such. It's less clear to me whether it's countering the broad, growing online-ness of the last two decades, or more specifically the stark digital isolation of 2020 (likely both), but the social status of "being online" has, to my eyes, peaked as of a year or two ago.
The Internet has completed a full cycle from being the exclusive domain of weird academic types, to primarily high-paying tech workers, to everyone's parents, and I wouldn't be surprised if the median (American) internet addict already has or will soon have a lower income than the average American. Admittedly, that's ill-defined: it's hard to escape the Internet completely, but it feels to me like constantly burying one's nose in a phone playing games or watching videos is becoming a low-status behavior. Less so for email, reading books, or texting friends, but I've seen people engaging in analog activities (writing, drawing, photography) get explicit positive reactions.
That I agree with and think is a more substantial point - pure anecdata, but a huge share of people in my social circle have leaned hard into physical hobbies (woodworking, blacksmithing, gardening, etc...). Notably, things which are kind of difficult and require (or at least benefit a lot from) specialized knowledge and equipment, and which produce some physical proof of effort.
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I lived in a rural area for 3 years, not because I was trying to LARP a lifestyle but because I was working in the outdoor industry at the time and that's where I needed to be. I guess I was semi "off the grid" but not in any meaningful sense. I had electricity, but well water and a septic system. No TV or internet and really bad cell service (I left the property if I really needed to make a call, but if I sent a text it would send eventually). My house had an oil stove but it also had a wood burner and I decided to use that thinking it would save money. Well, maybe, a little. First, I had to get a log splitter, and even buying a used one split with two of my buddies was enough money to pay for half a winter's worth of oil. Add in the chainsaw and it became a whole winter. Then, every time someone cuts down a tree you have to be ready to go to their house that Saturday to cut it up and load it, and spend Sunday splitting and stacking it. I also didn't have much to start with so I had to buy a cord to get through the first winter, which was a brutal one. Then, when you go to use it, you have to load the stove up to capacity before bed lest you wake up in the morning freezing, making the house so hot you have to open the windows. You freeze in the morning anyway, and you have to get a fire going again from coals. Trust me, the last thing you want to have to do in the winter at 6 am is build a fire. Repeat the process when you get home from work. In the spring and fall you have to use aux heating anyway because any fire is entirely too hot when you're only trying to warm up from 50 degrees. The amount of time I spent dealing with the thing, had I spent it working, would have more than paid for me to run oil full time, and that's not including the cost of the splitter, chainsaw, blade sharpening, gas to haul all that wood, etc. That being said, nothing beats the feel of a stove going in the dead of winter, and it added a rustic charm, but I could have gotten that with a lot less work if I would have just bought wood and burned occasionally rather than committing to it as a heat source. And this is just one, relatively minor inconvenience that comes with living "off grid". But, I still have access to a log splitter I may decide to use again someday.
Yeah, I've lived in villages that use wood only heating in the winter, and if you want to go to sleep warm, everyone has to move into the main room in the winter.
One of the things that wasn't mentioned much in the discussion about traditional housewife work but is huge in some climates is keeping the fire burning in the winter, and waking it up again from coals before dawn, as the father gets ready for work. In villages without was heat, that's very important, and a fair amount of work. One household I lived in had only daughters at home (I think there was a son, but he was working elsewhere and couldn't return to help), who spent several weeks splitting wood by hand.
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This description of heating with wood is giving me flashbacks to a winter I spent in a yurt near the California/Oregon border.
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