It is impossible to gather food for yourself. We don't live in pre-civilization or even the wild west. Everything is owned by someone, regulated, etc.

How do you expect to feed yourself? Not like you can just gather all day and get lucky hunting.

It is objectively harder to 'live on the land' then it was centuries ago. Borderline impossible, especially if you want to... you know live and interact with people.

I have a wife and cat to look out for, hard to do that when I can't pay rent.

Indoor plumbing. Seriously. Go without for a couple of weeks and tell me how you feel about hot showers and flush toilets.

Also, people really underestimate how difficult it would be to just fuck off into the woods. You'd need a good amount of planning and knowledge to do it. What's edible within what time range. Where the animals are at what time of year. And if you're up north you always gotta be laying in firewood.

Also civilization has taken over most of the good hunter gatherer/ subsistence farming spots. River valleys, estuaries, anywhere with good fertile soil. Most of the places with good desolate wilderness to fuck off into was left desolate because it's fucking desolate.

Fucking cold winters and the effort of growing enough potato, hunting and fishing, gathering firewood all with hand tools is way too much work.

Lack of survival skills

Chronic medical conditions that require medication.

The VAST majority of people simply could not cut living in the wilderness, cutting themselves off from society completely. It is an extremely difficult life. Most people wouldn't know so many critical skills you would need to even begin to think of pulling it off. Even when you look at "successful" instances of this, you find they still return to civilization to make up for shortfalls, like making sure there is enough food, using gas, complex machinery like power tools, vehicles, and generators, etc.

I’m a spoiled brat with soft hands and no survival skills, and even if I were better equipped it sounds exhausting and dangerous.

Living in the woods alone without food input from civilization is incredibly hard if not impossible.

Realistically you'd need like 10-20 people to help out, livestock, a field to grow cereals, large garden and a vegetable field, just to keep everyone surviving.

Moving to a rural area and realizing how fucking hard it is.

The hill I will die on: rugged individualism as strength in a post-disaster world is a lie that is sold to appeal to ego in an individualistic society, and also to prevent the formation of community.

That doesn't apply to many existing rural communities, who of course know better.

I'm waiting for the next book in that series I like.

We have a cabin in the woods so I do it in the summer. I wouldn't want to do it longterm in the winter. (Canada) A couple of days and I'm ready for civilization.

...money

Living in the woods needs a LOT of money

I'm afraid of being alone with my thoughts.

I like enough of the civilized world that I'm still willing to participate in it, despite being relatively removed from a lot of it.

Also, living in the woods in a lot more work than people think it is and I'm lazy.

There are fewer than 10,000 people who, if they just like weren’t around anymore, would inprove everyone’s quality of life like ten fold. I cling to the hope that one day enough of us will realize that and save the world.

I've done it, it's okay. I'm back in the civilized world now. More than anything, it's lonely out there.

Have you actually tried doing that? It can be challenging to say the least.

I do it for fun sometimes, but I do it fully provisioned and knowing I can always decide to bail, hike out, and go home to my nice warm bed, clean hot and cold running water (people don't realize how huge this is), a fridge full of food that I don't have to carry with me, devices to make the food within minutes on a whim, no bugs or potentially dangerous wild animals, etc.

Ticks. Also, probably, my wife and progeny.

not having to shit in a hole in the ground

It's not as easy as Stardew Valley makes it seem like.

Mostly that I like the civilized world.

Like don't get me wrong: Nature hikes? Camping? All great. National parks are a treasure. But I will freely admit I rather enjoy little comforts of modernity like "clean water just comes out of the tap when I turn it on", "fresh food is a 15-minute walk to the grocery store away", and "the spinny machine makes my clothes clean while I do other stuff."

I’ve given it some thought.

There isn’t enough empty land in temperate climates for someone to survive unmolested outside of civilization, and I don’t have the multitude of skills required to make it in less hospitable climates. If I could find a good source of food I might make it past the first couple weeks, but I’m not hopeful. I’ve never harvested an animal, so that’s a big barrier.

If I had a good solar system and a house on several hundred or thousand acres to get me started it might work out. Better yet if I have some seed and starter food.

Volunteering at the native plant garden in the park. Just enough of a hit to keep me going.

Kids. They would hate it. I'm not going to ruin their normal life by being super weird and ditching modern society. As bad as I think things are, this is the best chance I think my family has.

I'm pretty sure I could convince the spouse to do it. She's just as burned out as I am.

Like others have said, it is really difficult. I strongly recommend reading a good book about how hard a life it really is, e.g., Crusoe of Lonesome Lake.

Also, man, warm showers are amazing.

It's hard. Really, really, hard.

Yeah, modern life could be improved. There's a lot of ways society could be better. But you think it's tough now? Wait until literally every comfort you have is gone and you get nothing that you didn't grow, hunt, build, or craft yourself. And that's assuming you even have the skills to do it.

One wrong step and a twisted ankle is a death sentence. In the wild when you stop running, you die.

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.

Civilized world has it's perks. Water closets, supermarkets, social media.

I have a chronic illness, while it's not that serious, I need my meds.

Needing regular doses of my asthma medication.

The fact that living like that is miserable, expensive, and exhausting and I don't want to die from a basic injury.

I'm sorta there.

I live about 15 miles from the nearest town and I can only see my one neighbor in the fall and winter.

Relative comfort and occasionally ditching the civilized world to live in the woods for a bit to remind me how nice that relative comfort really is. Disconnecting from screens ia also a nice benefit (though I do still play video games and read ebooks when I fuck off into the wilderness).