Akiya

There’s another nugget of interest in the article we discussed yesterday:

Maybe we greyhairs could learn from younger people, tired of their own daily grind. A few years ago, Mika and Jesse, a millennial couple from Vancouver, moved to Japan and discovered, on the island of Shikoku, an abandoned house –or akiya — that they could move into for $300 [per year]. At least nine million akiya dot the Japanese countryside, the result of changing demographics and the mass exodus of young people to the cities.

Indeed. I have heard of this. In Japan it’s more usual than in the West to knock houses down and rebuild them instead of moving into an old house. This mentality, combined with the usual tendency for populations to gravitate towards cities, has led to quite a few traditional old houses (often in poor condition, unfortunately) just sitting around. They’re perceived as practically worthless so those unafraid of “a fixer-upper” can pick them up for a song.

They contacted the owner, signed a rental agreement (around $300 for a full year), cleaned the house up and began their new existence, about as different from their old urban life as possible. Jesse works as a blacksmith, forging cooking knives, and Mika as a YouTuber, crafting hypnotic videos of their “akiya life.”

A YouTuber you say? This seems to be them:

These are the adventures of two people who skipped the line of the Western retirement-woe shitshow and found joy in a life that’s sustainable: economically, ecologically, psychically. Their first video has been streamed more than three million times. Three years later, they’re in the black.

They have a blog with important guides to Akiya escape planning, including posts about the real process, things to consider and everything you need to know about akiya.

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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.

Is Retirement Dead?

There some depressing stuff in McLean’s magazine — Canada’s equivalent to Time or Newsweek — in a piece called Retirement is Dead.

There’s a few ways to read that sentence. Maybe retirement is dead because the whole idea of conventional employment — the conveyor belt from school, to work, to grannification, to grave — is out of date. After all, if you bow out of the rat race with a relatively beefy escape fund while generating a small income through investment or by monetising your creative interests, retirement doesn’t make a lot of sense any more. Why would you want to stop if you’re having fun?

The article acknowledges that “an abrupt phase change from productive, useful working life to complete non-work is pretty bizarre on the face of it.” It is quite extreme isn’t it? No wonder so many people struggle to adapt to retirement.

Alas, the focus of the article is that Canadians (i.e. the people of one of the most civilised and efficient countries in the world) can no longer afford a comfortable retirement. The writer clearly has high ideals about what comfort should entail, but the sentiment is probably accurate. It’s not uncommon to see elderly people working in American supermarkets and fast food places. It’s not right.

My 22-year-old daughter is convinced that, for her cohort, communal living will be the norm. I’ve asked her to save some space in the yard for us to pitch a tent — with an extension cord to plug in my laptop.

Meh. As fates go, is that so bad? It’s just a shame (a scandal really) that people might be working for forty years or more, just to reach the basic setup that any barely-employed person can have immediately. It is to toil under a scam.

Reduce your material needs. Adjust your ideas about comfort. Research the alternative models.

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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.