Early on in my journey back to nature, I realized that I was going to have to get creative in order to overcome the unique obstacles in my path. Knowing that I would never work towards a six-figure salary or a thirty-year mortgage, I had to seek out ways of working with the land that did not involve ownership. …But what does it even mean to “own” a piece of land, anyway? In what sense do space and time and ecosystems “belong” to you? Rather than working harder to increase my income over years or decades in the interest of a future life, I opted to downgrade over a period of several years, whittling away my lifestyle and my material needs down to the bare necessities, in order to maximize my personal freedom from day to day — in the present moment. I consider it an ethical imperative to minimize my participation in the forces of exploitation and oppression which fuel our modern culture. Understanding that there is no such thing as “opting out” of civilization, I prefer to focus my time and energy on work that is largely *irrelevant* and *illegible* to the dominant culture.  Why pursue this path? Why swim upstream and create problems for oneself that can easily be solved through conventional means? It’s not for everyone, and what works for me may not necessarily work for you. But I hope my approach to lifestyle design in the context of irrelevance and illegibility might help you to better frame how you view your own goals and desires in life. The Powers That Be will never offer you an exit, so it’s up to you to seek out novel strategies for engaging on your own terms.