In a recent episode of his WTF Podcast, Marc Maron talked about his fantasy of moving off the grid. As in, moving into a cabin in the woods or on a mountain somewhere, completely cut off from the outside world. Like most fantasies of this type however, the inevitable problem of boredom and a nagging addiction to modern technology makes it difficult to see how this dream could ever be made real.

But the idea of disconnecting from the rest of the world remains attractive, even if most of us will never see it through. This is chiefly because much of the media that we’re exposed to is bullshit, to put it bluntly. And, even if you were to try to tune it all out, well that just makes it feel all the more inescapable. You may not watch Access Hollywood, or Extra, but that doesn’t stop you from interacting with people in your day to day life who do; and those people sometimes want to talk about it. You also might have to buy food every now and again, and the supermarket checkout line is not willing to back off with that stuff.

Sometimes, you just want to buy some bananas without seeing pictures of Kate Gosselin, you know?

But there’s always something that keeps us from flying off into the wilderness with a bag of oats and a gun. For many of us, we know we’d miss the little things that only a decadent, late-stage capitalist society can provide. Like, I don’t know, Kit Kats. Or Purell.

Of course, thousands of preceding generations didn’t need any of this stuff, which simultaneously enhances and enervates the desire to break away from consumerist society. It shows us that the most important task of consumer culture is to create need, and that’s a realization that frustrates us. But knowing the facts doesn’t take those needs away, nor does it replace the system of artificial demand that keeps the economy going with anything useful. It just kind of pisses us off.

We sometimes hate that our culture and economy have made themselves indispensible to our comfort and wellbeing. You sometimes see this in the bitter acquiescence on the face of people who can’t get through the morning without that first cup of joe. They grimly file up to the counter to get their fix, but there’s no pleasure in the act; a sure sign that they’ve moved on from the recreational, and into the maintenance phase of an addition.

I don’t think that the latest comings and goings of celebrities, or the need for caffeine are what’s keeping most people from dropping out of society, necessarily, nor is it the lust for ultimately pointless high tech toys. It’s people that most of us need—to make our food, to fix our teeth, to generate power for heat and light—to survive. You—all of us—are at the center of a complex web of support that keeps us fed and clothed and comfortable. Some of those people like to spend their off hours playing Xbox, or reading trashy books, or looking at computer porn, or not spending a whole heck of a lot of time considering the consequences of their political beliefs.

The price we pay for that, of course, is the pointless, distracting chaff that fills our awareness of the world. Self-sufficient isolation is possible, but very difficult to achieve for most people. Our reliance on the vast network of human interaction means having to deal with all the interference that is generated to supply the needs (even if it’s the need for gossip and scandal) of others.

You may hate NPR, for example, but your car detailing service customers like it, so it continues to exist. All of the stuff that we want to run away from has a value to someone else out there who, indirectly perhaps, we rely on.

But, so what? The whole point of disconnected self-sufficiency is to get away from all that. If we don’t need other people, then we no longer have to deal with all of that shit that’s constantly being blasted out into the culture for their benefit, either. You can live in your cabin, keep to yourself most of the time, and come back to society for brief visits when you need something like cataract surgery, right?

Well, yeah. If you can afford it. What kind of insurance does a mountain man get, these days?

If your desire for isolation is inflexible, then you may have to accept the fact that you’re not going to live as long as you might have it you stuck it out in the sick culture you’ve abandoned. Lot’s of people might be willing to give up their creature comforts, but it’s something else entirely to gamble your existence on the possibility that you’ll never need serious medical assistance, or any other kind of expert help that you can’t provide yourself.

That, I think is what keeps many of us around. It’s very easy to claim that we’ve all become weak, effete marshmallows, addicted to cheap luxury. But people are remarkably adaptable, and as this economic downturn (and the New York Times) has proven, people can and will go without when it’s important to them.

Rather, what we really need is the help and expertise of others. Even if we’re not taking advantage of that stuff now, our continued participation in society at least makes it an available option, for most of us anyway. (And social progress is really about widening that availability—why should we have all the advantages?)

That’s what keeps us around. We are hedging our bets.