One problem that may be encountered out on the desert is a variant of cabin fever. Cabin fever may be a variant of boredom. It can be encountered in space, too.
Many years ago, there was this program about such phenomenon. Nobody could understand why a boat was abandoned in the middle of the ocean. It was speculated that the people on that boat went nuts, because of the uniformity of the surroundings imposed a type of sensory deprivation on them, driving them mad. They may have jumped overboard and drowned themselves.
Human beings require stimulation. In the absence of it, the mind may invent things that may be very much like psychotic delusions. In other words, madness.
There are such things as sensory deprivation tanks, which are designed to test this phenomenon. It has been confirmed that the experience is not a pleasant one. If someone spends too much time in one of those things, they could go nuts.
Literature on the subject includes some stories about how Artic explorers were able to deal with the isolation. One way is to stay busy. Staying busy keeps one's mind occupied, and is a way to ward off the cabin fever.
I write this after taking a completely unnecessary, and uneconomical trip of a couple hundred miles yesterday afternoon. It seems that my work off grid has slowed almost to a complete stop. It is ironic then, that my trip was a hundred miles in that direction and back.
A question for me is can I control my own tendencies to do counter productive things? Perhaps it wasn't useless trip, as I learned a little from it. On the other hand, was it really worth it? This costs money, and I don't have money to spare.
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