Infrastructure = stability

I highly recommend watching the Fall of Civilizations series: https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/

...and then think about each civilization as a group of people trying to stay alive in the wilderness.

Most of them collapsed because something went wrong with the water and/or food supply, and they weren't able to recover because they were dependent on a single source. Some event overextends the resources and there aren't enough backups.

This happened to many other smaller groups over the millennia, which never made it long enough to be labelled as civilizations. Most of them we don't have records on.

As human technology has improved and civilization has grown more complex, we've built more redundancies into our system. Drought in an area no longer means the people living there have to leave or die. Famine can be overcome with modern farming technology and logistics. We can even mitigate the impact of diseases that are so contagious they spread around the entire planet in less than a year.

Benefiting from the redundancies of the system requires being attached to the system. Disconnecting might seem freeing on the face of it, but the reality is that it makes you a slave to your basic needs. Infrastructure provides the escape from that slavery, but you can't build or maintain infrastructure by yourself.