2020: The Year from Hell

What a horrible year 2020 has been.

However there is a silver lining of sorts, with respect to the off grid community: A lot of people suddenly became very interested in living off grid away from the rest of society.

Go figure.

Every year at the end of the year I look back at the site's popularity and try to learn something from it. What did I do right? What did I do wrong?

ProjectGridless.ca saw a huge surge in popularity this year, despite only 15 new blog posts (including this one you are reading). I was super busy this year and had lots of other writing projects on the go. I didn't really have much time to do blogging this year. Far too busy.

So how popular was ProjectGridless.ca during 2020?

105,000+ new visits.

For context I started this blog in April 2011 and during that time 414,000+ visits. 25.4% of all visits were just from 2020. The other 74.6% is from roughly 8.75 years of writing 365 blog posts, during which the average monthly views during many of those years were between 2000 to 3000.

The average monthly views for 2020 were 8750.

So we're talking about over 3 times more popular than regular years.

My blog isn't the only site benefiting from this sudden interest in living off grid either. I witnessed the same trend on Facebook, where I manage / administrate a Facebook group called: Off the Grid: Eastern Canada.

The Facebook group in question saw a huge bump in new members during 2020.

It went from 300 members in January 2020 to over 1800 by the end of December 2020. 1500 new members in less a year. Multiplied in size by a factor of six.

This was also the first year that I was contacted by a journalist regarding going Off Grid... What was the topic of interest? People wanting to leave the cities and go off grid because of COVID.

So that just shows how far reaching COVID has been in 2020. It altered home prices across the country, both in cities and in the countryside.

It changed how we think about economics, about health care, about our idiot politicians and their vacations...

But it was still the year from hell. COVID was just the biggest thing to happen this past year. There were also wild fires, massive explosions due to incompetence, terrorist attacks and more. Pick a subject and something terrible probably happened in 2020.

But on the plus side we now have vaccines and this problem will soon be solved.

There is only one hitch. The moronic anti-vaxxers who would rather drink water (in the form of bogus homeopathy cures) rather than accept a vaccine proven by science to be effective at protecting people from the virus.

In early December I did some calculations for Canada. Based at the current rate of spread in Canada almost everyone in the country would be exposed to the virus by September 2021. It would just multiply exponentially until eventually almost everyone has it or has had it, and the death toll would be catastrophic.

Getting the vaccine thus becomes imperative.

And the people who don't get vaccinated because they don't see the virus as being a serious threat will be the ones who end up getting it. Maybe they die. Maybe they don't. Maybe they survive and end up with permanent health problems because they refused to get vaccinated. Maybe they survive and don't have any permanent problems.

But whatever happens if just a percentage of anti-vaxxers die then they will serve as a reminder as to why people should be vaccinated in the first place.

And you will note that I don't believe in any bogus hoaxes that Bill Gates or aliens are trying to track people with tiny microchips in the vaccine. Utter nonsense. If any industry wanted to stick microchips in people they could just put them in McDonalds hamburgers, Starbucks coffee and various other foods.

Seriously people. Use your brains. You're already being tracked with your cellphone every second of the day. There is no need to track people using any other method.