Living Off-grid: Is There a Way Out of Capitalism?

“He can’t focus,” the teacher tells me.

It is not a diagnosis. The doctor gave me one. And it’s certainly not a solution. That would be too bold. Changing the school system is not just about inventing new cycles with different names. School needs to be different. Not as in for “different” children like here in Germany. An inclusive school where my neurodivergent son is not the problem and his condition is a talent to be explored, not a deviation to be corrected.

I keep sending my son to state school because I believe in his abilities, but I have lost faith in the current system. It pains me to see how much effort he puts into tidying loose photocopies in his folder. I watch with resignation as he slumps over textbooks devoid of visual stimuli, overwhelmed by his anxiety about tomorrow. The problem seems to be him, not the system.

“He can’t focus,” the teacher tells me. Neither can I. I think of the “family in the woods”. What could have driven them to turn their backs on this system?

I have always been something of an outsider myself. At the age of 30, I was the only one crying in the company toilets because I did not agree with the company’s ethics. On the one hand, I was running a project on organic pesticides in Africa; on the other, the company was signing a partnership with a major chemical conglomerate. At the second tech company, it was the hospital that made me realise I could no longer work there. On the one hand, I was trying to position the product’s environmental sustainability; on the other, it was being pushed into the oil industry.

It was precisely at that moment that I realised there is no escape from capitalism and all its ramifications in society. Perhaps because my father died of asbestos. Perhaps because we ingest the equivalent of a credit card’s worth of microplastics every week. I understand the Australian “family in the woods” living off-grid in Italy. That desire, at all costs, to sever ties with a global system that pollutes the environment, that enslaves you to consumerism, and that wants children sitting at school desks rather than out in nature discovering the world.

Amid the media storm surrounding the Palmoli family’s story, there may be a hidden truth: anarchy and total isolation cannot, in fact, be the solution, but creating an alternative reality is not a utopian dream. We have seen this with the emergence of cryptocurrencies in 2009, in the BDS (boycott, divest, sanction) movements against apps and consumer goods linked to Israel, in the resignation letters of co-founders and senior engineers at AI platforms, and finally in the proposals for constitutionalised (and therefore self-regulated) anarchy put forward by researchers Alex Prichard and Ruth Kinna.

The difference between these examples and the radical choice of the “family in the woods” perhaps lies in the form: the Palmoli’s have expressed a need for individualistic rupture, although off-grid living is a collective experiment already widespread in the 1960s as ‘eco-anarchism’, where, however, it is community groups that organise themselves in the woods, not the individual family unit.

What makes the tragedy of a family being slowly uprooted and torn apart all the more harrowing is the political backdrop against which this is unfolding. On the one hand, the case is being reduced to a propaganda tool by those who defend traditional values (and thus seek popular support) and attack the judiciary (for further political ends). At the other extreme are those who rightly defend children’s rights to education, hygiene and healthcare, but who lack absolute certainty regarding the extent of the neglect, the cognitive gap and the children’s physical and mental state. Then there remains the cognitive dissonance of a certain section of the population’s fervent commitment to the protection of children, provided they are white, yet a total lack of empathy towards immigrant families who should have access to the same rights, if not greater support.

We can therefore only rely on the state’s decision, which, after trying in vain to mediate the situation, has decided to apply the law in its strictest form: to remove the mother.

I think back to my son, to what his teacher says, to what they used to tell me at work, to what it means to be, or even to remove yourself from the group. I, who have always been used to questioning authority. I, who come from a city where the state, owner of a highly polluting steelworks, fails to protect children from cancer in the Tamburi neighbourhood. I, who, living in Canada, discovered Indigenous communities living by ancestral traditions in the middle of nowhere. I, who have two children in a German school paralysed in front of neurodiversity. I know that conforming to the system is no longer sustainable.

Something must change, starting with the school, where accepting and including neurodiversity means contemplating the possibility that an alternative path exists, a different logic. Perhaps a way out of the system, without having to isolate oneself from the rest of the world.

Was this their aim? I observe the story of the family in the woods from Berlin, amidst diagnoses, wars, climate change, the nuclear threat and the reinstatement of military service, and I try to understand whether we can see the wood for the trees.

Illustration created by Viviana Laperchia