I’ve got a confession that might make some of you question my credentials as a homestead blogger: I bought a cookbook last week. Not just any cookbook, mind you, but one of those glossy, full-color affairs that costs more than my monthly chicken feed budget.
And I felt guilty about it.
Not because I couldn’t afford it—though my practical Wyoming brain definitely winced at the price tag—but because I’ve become so accustomed to getting all my information for free online that paying actual money for knowledge felt almost… wrong?
This got me thinking about something that’s been bothering me for a while now: we’ve created a culture where information is supposed to be free, and it’s destroying the value of expertise.
Think about it. When’s the last time you paid for a recipe? When’s the last time you bought a magazine for the gardening articles instead of just googling “how to grow tomatoes”? When’s the last time you invested in a course instead of piecing together information from random YouTube videos?
We’ve trained ourselves to expect knowledge to cost nothing, and we’re paying a hidden price for that expectation.
Here’s what I’ve realized after spending over a decade online: free information is usually worth exactly what you pay for it.
Don’t get me wrong—there’s plenty of valuable content available for free on the internet. I’ve learned tons from blogs, videos, and social media posts. Hell, I’ve contributed to that mountain of free content myself. But there’s a fundamental difference between information that’s designed to be genuinely helpful and information that’s designed to be… well, free.
Most free content online has a hidden agenda.
It’s either trying to sell you something, build an email list, generate ad revenue, or establish the creator as an authority so they can eventually sell you something. And there’s nothing wrong with that—creators need to make a living, and I’m certainly not opposed to making money from my content.
But here’s the problem: when content is designed primarily to be free rather than primarily to be useful, the quality suffers. When the goal is to get clicks rather than to provide genuine value, the information gets watered down, sensationalized, or dumbed down to appeal to the widest possible audience.
Free content is optimized for consumption, not for results.
Take cooking videos on social media, for instance. They’re designed to be watched and shared, not necessarily to help you actually cook better food. They show you the exciting parts—the satisfying pour of cream into soup, the perfect golden crust on bread—but they skip the boring, crucial details that determine whether your attempt will succeed or fail spectacularly.
The cookbook I bought, on the other hand, is designed to actually help me cook better food. It includes detailed instructions, troubleshooting tips, and all the boring-but-essential information that doesn’t make for engaging video content but makes the difference between success and disaster in the kitchen.
The author spent months or years developing these recipes, testing them repeatedly, and organizing them in a way that builds skills progressively.
That expertise has value. Real, tangible value that deserves to be compensated.
But we’ve become so accustomed to getting information for free that we’ve forgotten what quality expertise actually looks like. We’ve trained ourselves to expect instant answers to complex questions, and we get frustrated when those answers don’t work perfectly the first time.
This is particularly problematic in the homesteading world.
Homesteading skills require real expertise. They require understanding local conditions, seasonal variations, and the kind of nuanced knowledge that comes from years of experience. You can’t learn to raise healthy chickens from a 3-minute YouTube video, no matter how many views it has.
But because we expect information to be free, we often end up with surface-level advice that sounds good but doesn’t actually work. We get tips and tricks instead of genuine understanding. We get quick fixes instead of sustainable solutions.
And then we wonder why our chickens keep dying, our gardens keep failing, and our sourdough keeps turning into concrete.
The problem isn’t just that free information is often lower quality—it’s that we’ve devalued expertise so much that even genuine experts feel pressured to give away their knowledge for free.
I see this constantly in homesteading groups online. Someone will ask a complex question about livestock management or soil health, and multiple people will respond with detailed, thoughtful answers drawn from years of experience. These experts are essentially providing free consulting services to strangers, and nobody thinks twice about it.
Meanwhile, those same experts are struggling to make a living because nobody wants to pay for the knowledge they’ve spent decades developing.
This creates a vicious cycle where the people with the most valuable information are the least incentivized to share it, while the people with surface-level knowledge are the most motivated to create content because it’s easier to monetize shallow information than deep expertise.
The result is an internet full of mediocre advice drowning out the voices of genuine experts.
I’m not saying all paid information is better than all free information. There are plenty of expensive courses and books that are garbage, just like there are plenty of valuable free resources. But I am saying that we need to start recognizing the difference between entertainment and education, between content and expertise.
Real expertise takes time to develop, and it deserves to be compensated accordingly.
When I bought that cookbook, I wasn’t just buying recipes. I was buying the author’s years of experience, her testing process, her failures and successes, her understanding of how ingredients interact and how techniques build on each other.
I was buying knowledge that could save me months or years of trial and error.
That cookbook cost me $40. If I had tried to develop those same recipes myself through experimentation, it would have cost me hundreds of dollars in ingredients and countless hours of time. Plus, I probably would have given up in frustration after the first few failures.
The expertise I bought for $40 is worth far more than I paid for it.
This is why I’m becoming more intentional about paying for quality information instead of always looking for the free option. It’s why I invest in courses from people whose results I admire. It’s why I buy books from authors whose expertise I respect.
It’s why I’m trying to break myself of the habit of expecting everything to be free.
Because here’s what I’ve learned: when you pay for information, you value it more. You’re more likely to actually implement it instead of just consuming it. You’re more invested in getting results because you’ve made a financial commitment.
And the people creating that information are incentivized to make it as useful as possible because their reputation and income depend on your success.
So here’s my challenge for all of us: let’s start investing in quality information again. Let’s buy books from authors whose expertise we respect. Let’s take courses from people whose results we admire. Let’s support creators who provide genuine value instead of just entertainment.
Let’s stop expecting expertise to be free.
Because in the end, cheap information usually costs us more than expensive information. It costs us time, frustration, and failed attempts. It costs us the opportunity to learn from people who’ve already solved the problems we’re struggling with.
And it costs us the chance to become genuinely skilled at the things we care about.
That cookbook I bought? It’s already paid for itself twice over in successful meals and new techniques. The guilt I felt about buying it has been replaced by gratitude for the author’s expertise and excitement about the skills I’m developing.
Sometimes the most expensive information is the information that doesn’t cost anything upfront.
Investing in knowledge that actually works,
-Nichole
P.S. This doesn’t mean you should go out and buy every expensive course or book you see. It means being thoughtful about whose expertise you want to learn from and being willing to invest in quality information when you find it. Your future self will thank you for choosing education over entertainment.
