How to be an apartment homesteader... for poor people.

I don't write anymore. My hard drive--which contained years of bits & pieces of my writing, and portions of a chapbook--is dead, its files hopefully to be exhumed tomorrow.
     Oy. And I'm still fucking pregnant. Ce n'est pas juste.

One of the things I wanted to move from spiritually when I moved away physically from Madison was taking its idyllic city charm for granted, such that it obscures any sense of reality for those who don't live like how people live in Madison. Why don't people shop locally? Why don't people work for small businesses? Why don't people just grow their own food and live self-sustainably?     Well, because growing food is hard--especially when you try to do it on a large scale the year you accidentally get pregnant and a massive drought overwhelms the Midwest, oops--to juggle in between a full-time job and less resource-driven interests (like feeding poetry to your hard drive). And because small businesses, due to nepotism compensating for lack of resources, are less likely to hire strangers. And because Wal-Mart's right fucking there, and I just got off work.
     I don't advocate people make excuses for making lousy lifestyle decisions. No, "I'm too poor" is not a good excuse to eat fast food instead of cooking for yourself; go spend that $5 on ingredients you could use to make two meals. But, and this is so hard to realize in a city where dumpsters are treasure troves of bakery goods and last-gen electronics, saving the world is the last thing on your mind when you first get home from work.

I came across a post about apartment homesteading on Pinterest. To be honest, I haven't fully grasped the "urban homesteading" concept craze. It sounds like a lot of ways to make yourself feel better about living in a city while still living in a city. Living in the country is hard, but I've done it; if sustainable homesteading becomes the direction I want to head in with my family, I'll do it again.
     The point the post makes is that the country lifestyle I describe will, as population increases, become less sustainable than urban homesteading. That's an extremely valid point--as is the point that good home habits can be cultivated early on, even with limited space & resources. That said, reading further down the post at the suggested ideas, I get the impression the writer takes a blindly-privileged perspective on the matter.

First of all, I don't even have a porch. Even if I did, I live in a part of the country where food-growing & clothes-drying aren't feasible outside choices nearly half the year. (As do millions in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, D.C....)
     The proposed urban homesteading lifestyle coupled with the inevitable urban responsibility of a forty-hour-a-week job means constantly working--and, forty hours out of the week, working for others. One of the most disgusting aspects of our culture is that it equates service & servitude with personal resources, depleting people of the motivation necessary to actually provide themselves with personal resources (such as home-harvested herbs). The irony of this is that the less motivated people are to take care of themselves, the more they rely on the service of others, who then become similarly sucked dry.
     Like I said, I don't want to make excuses for not doing. I'm just having a hard time putting together the words "urban" & "homesteading" in the same sentence, much less the same phrase. The city as an institution, fueled by its illusion that the institutions you work for will take care of you if & when the time comes--hey FMLA, nice shot--seems a perfect contradiction to the concept of homesteading.