Notes:

You can avoid depending on low-quality furniture from big-box stores; you can make your own.

You can avoid pesticide-laden vegetables that get shipped halfway around the world; you can grow your own.

You can avoid paying 3x the cost of ingredients at a restaurant; you can cook yourself (... and you can use your self-grown exotic veggies).

You can learn enough programming to write applications that don't exist as free software.

In the process, you will meet incredibly skilled people who are wonderful to talk to and to work with. And you'll have taken a little step to transition out of the mainstream system.