How a marginal travel practice is already outlining the contours of a post-growth world
☘️On the Wicklow Cliffs with Blue
Blue contemplates the Irish Sea from the cliffs of Wicklow. This eight-year-old husky-eskimo cross possesses that particular wisdom of Nordic breeds: patience in the face of the elements, an instinctive adaptation to changing conditions. In this moment, sitting in the wild grass of the cliff, he embodies something I explore in my collapse narratives: the ability to find one’s place in an environment, to temporarily take root without denaturing it.
We are in Ireland for four weeks, caring for a house and its four Nordic dogs. The owners, Maxine and David, specifically invited us to come from France because we have experience with these particular dogs. They themselves set off to explore Croatia with their van – just as we came to Ireland with ours. This symmetry is not coincidental: we all practice the same chosen nomadism, the same quest for authenticity. A gesture of hospitality that far exceeds the transactional framework of conventional house sitting.
What if what we’re experiencing here, in this house facing the Irish Sea, is a foretaste of the post-collapse world?
What if house sitting, far from being a simple travel economy trick, prefigures the lifestyles our societies will have to adopt when current logics reach their limits?
When travelling becomes an act of resistance
In my novella collection COLLAPSES, I explore post-catastrophe communities that have developed « social technologies » of resilience: networks of mutual aid based on trust, skill exchange systems, forms of adaptive nomadism. House sitting already embodies these logics.
The economy of trust : Entrusting one’s home, animals, and most precious possessions to strangers met on the internet is an act of faith. This mutual trust creates bonds that transcend mere service. With Maxine and David, as with most of our previous hosts, we stay in contact long after the sitting. These relationships become a genuine international friendship network, a diaspora of benevolence already functioning on a planetary scale.
Expertise as Passport : Our experience with Nordic dogs opened the doors to Ireland, just as our diverse animal experience (dogs, cats, horses, rabbits, chickens…) had taken us to Germany, Belgium, Spain, and of course France. In my post-collapse narratives, characters traverse territories thanks to their specialized skills – mechanic, herbalist, translator. House sitting reveals that these dynamics already exist: our practical knowledge becomes currency in a parallel economy of gift and counter-gift.
Multilingualism by necessity : Each sitting forces us to practice foreign languages, to adapt to local cultural codes. This linguistic and cultural plasticity, naturally developed by house sitters, strangely resembles the adaptive capacities cultivated by travellers between communities in my stories.
The ghost infrastructures of mass tourism
While Blue watches the waves, I reflect on the thousands of seasonal accommodations that will remain empty this winter across Europe. Airbnb, second homes, hotel complexes: a titanic infrastructure mobilized for intermittent occupations. Mass tourism has created a world of ghosts – spaces dedicated exclusively to holidays, emptied of all authentic life.
In my narratives, post-collapse communities always reinvest the abandoned structures of the old world. They transform shopping centers into greenhouses, offices into workshops, parking lots into gardens. This logic of creative reappropriation, I already see at work in house sitting: we temporarily inhabit places designed for daily life, we animate them during their owners’ absence, we avoid creating additional dedicated infrastructures.
House sitting reveals the absurdity of our system: why build hotels when millions of homes remain periodically unoccupied? Why move masses of tourists when a few individuals can temporarily inhabit the places?
Yves Cochet and Travel Vulnerabilities
In « Facing Collapse, » Yves Cochet analyzes the systemic fragilities of our thermo-industrial civilization. Jean-Marc Jancovici, in his reflections on future energy constraints, evokes a drastically reduced « carbon budget »: perhaps 4 flights in a human lifetime. But careful – not 4 flights for compulsive weekends, 4 flights for multi-year immersions, stays that truly justify the astronomical carbon footprint of air transport.
This vision perfectly aligns with our Irish approach: 600 kilometers by road and 19 hours by ferry for 8 weeks of total immersion – 4 weeks of house sitting extended by 4 weeks of itinerance on the Wild Atlantic Way. A travel time/discovery time ratio that optimizes every kilometer travelled. And our water consumption in the van — 10 liters per person per day — reveals that a nomadic lifestyle can be drastically more sober than our usual residential comfort.
Mass tourism perfectly illustrates these vulnerabilities: dependence on fossil fuels, unsustainable hypermobility, standardization of experiences, growing disconnection between places and their inhabitants.
House sitting proposes the antithesis of each of these flaws:
- Slow travel versus hypermobility: four weeks here rather than four destinations in one week
- Immersion versus consumerism: we live Irish daily life instead of consuming it
- Reciprocity versus extraction: we give as much as we receive
- Local versus global: we adapt to the specificities of each place
These practices already outline the contours of « resilience tourism » compatible with the constraints of a post-growth world. In my stories, travellers between communities function exactly according to these principles: slow and deliberate movements, temporary integration, service exchange, respect for local balances.
What four Nordic dogs teach us
Living with Blue, Boone, Cosmo, and Yogi teaches us different rhythms. These dogs, genetically programmed for long distances and extreme conditions, possess a patience that our era has forgotten. They observe, adapt, conserve their energy. They embody a wisdom of duration that we will need to relearn.
Each morning, our cliff walk follows the same rituals: checking the wind, observing the sky, adapting the route according to conditions. We are in the grey seal breeding period, and their silhouettes and grunts regularly punctuate the marine landscape — wildlife that testifies to the vitality of these preserved coasts. This fine reading of the environment, this attention to subtle signals and natural cycles, my post-collapse characters constantly practice. It’s the difference between surviving and truly living.
Maxine and David’s hospitality reveals something else essential: in their gesture of offering us their own bedroom (when a smaller room was available), I recognize this generosity that characterizes the resilient communities in my narratives. Not market exchange, but the gift that creates bonds. This logic of shared abundance against hoarded scarcity.
This logic shows through their gesture of offering us their own room, but even more in their recent invitation: « Stay as long as you wish after our return. » A hospitality that transcends the house sitting framework to become pure generosity.
This openness, we have mainly encountered with our Anglo-Saxon hosts — Irish, British, Americans, Canadians. For them, we temporarily become members of the extended family, permanent guests. French or Belgian owners, in our experience, maintain a more… transactional approach. A cultural difference that reveals distinct conceptions of hospitality and trust.
The trust between us is total: when one of the dogs fell ill, a few WhatsApp messages sufficed to obtain authorization to take him to the vet. No surveillance, no micromanagement — this absolute trust creates bonds that resist distances and time.
This is exactly the type of strong social bond that my story characters cultivate — these human connections that resist collapses because they depend on no external infrastructure.
A global network that already functions
Writing these lines, I realize that we house sitters already form an informal but real community. Our hosts from Périgueux, John and Wendy, regularly update us and invite us to follow them to England as they move closer to their children. Like Alexandra, English in Belgium, informing us of her move to London and asking if we can follow her there. Or this invitation to come to Vancouver, Canada!
These bonds create a genuine international trust network, an invisible but tangible social infrastructure. When everything collapses — when low-cost airlines go bankrupt, when digital platforms stop, when cheap energy belongs to the past — these human connections will remain.
In my post-collapse narratives, alliances between communities always arise from these pre-existing personal relationships. Characters who have travelled, who speak several languages, who have woven bonds in other territories, naturally become ambassadors, bridges between worlds.
House sitting already prepares us for this reality: it teaches us to quickly adapt to new environments, to create trust with strangers, to function with fewer material possessions, to develop our adaptive skills.
Start now
Yves Cochet insists on the importance of anticipating collapse rather than suffering it. House sitting offers this possibility of gentle experimentation: testing more sober lifestyles, developing resilience skills, creating mutual aid networks, while keeping the comfort of reversibility.
Each sitting is a micro-experience of post-growth life: consuming locally, walking rather than driving, observing nature, cultivating authentic human relationships, learning new skills. Without the forced austerity of a real collapse, but with its benefits: simplicity, presence, connection.
Blue, from his Wicklow cliffs, reminds me that adaptation is not a tragedy but a dance. These eight weeks in Ireland are not « alternative holidays » – they are learning for the after, gentle training in the lifestyles humanity may need to rediscover.
If this reflection speaks to you, if you want to join this informal network of traveller-guardians, house sitting awaits you (the link gives you 25% off the annual subscription, and extends our subscription by two months). Your registration will give you access to these transformative experiences, while economically supporting this alternative to extractive tourism.
And you, how are you already travelling towards the after?
**Note** Some visuals illustrating this article were created with the help of artificial intelligence from detailed descriptions, then selected and optimized for their editorial relevance.
0 commentaires