Wanting something different

One of the primary reasons I'd really love to become self-sufficient is because I can earn my food and the clothes on my back in a way that feels a lot more natural and a lot more rewarding and meaningful than going and doing a traditional 9-5 to earn money purely to fit in with the way society has told us we should live and buying all the things we're 'supposed' to have in order to be deemed 'acceptable'.

If you're one of those people that is perfectly happy to work at a regular job and have a regular life with regular things then you're lucky, but it's not the way I want to live and I feel pretty trapped. I'm from a very normal traditional background but I don't want to fit into the standard traditional way of living. I feel absolutely backed into a corner by the people who care about me telling me that I should be more realistic.

Don't get me wrong, I am not adverse to earning money or working my butt off at all! For me it's more about having control over my own life - I want to work and actually feel rewarded for it, not just working in order to pay bills. I want to feel stable - that if a job falls through, or a relationship fails or a housemate decides they don't want to renew a lease, I don't want to constantly have to uproot my life because of other peoples decisions. I've moved 14 times in the last 4 years and I'm sick of it. I hate feeling like I have no control over where I'm going to be in the next 6 months let alone the next 5 years. I thought that earning a bunch of money would solve that problem, so I earned a bunch of money and it didn't make the blindest bit of difference. I just felt bored and stifled on top of stressed and unhappy.

There ARE alternative ways to live, and to earn money that don't require doing a traditional day job and sticking to traditional working hours that give us 2 predetermined days off a week (if we're lucky and not having to work overtime) and 25 days holiday (or 10 if you're unfortunate). Who said you can only do one job? who said that working your guts out every day at an office is the only way to earn a living and who says getting a mortgage and a normal house is the only way to live?

More importantly, why is it that if we want to do something different and experience life in a different way we are so often met with so much negativity? Like I said, it's not like I want to sit on my backside and sponge off other people - I want to work, but I don't want to fall into this routine, or template that we're supposed to fit into.

I'm not planning to run away to a hippy commune. I'm not even planning something particularly radical in my near future - I'm just trying to figure out what I want my future to look like and work towards achieving it instead of blindly following the crowds to get something I don't even want and following a work-life-balance formula that's not only unhealthy (literally - my vitamin D level dropped to 'critical' after working in an office for 3 years), but a formula that has only been around for the last hundred years- because that is what I'm 'supposed' to do.

Normally I don't really care too much about what other people think of me or my life choices, but when it is coming from people who care about me greatly and have what they perceive to be my best interests at heart, it is exhausting feeling like you have to justify every single thought or decision about the lifestyle you want to them and constantly reassure them that wanting to have a very simple life is yes, very different to the 'norm', but is not totally unrealistic or insane.

I know at least one person on this forum has chosen to live their life by their own rules. How did you deal with all the adversity?