My wife is getting a copy of this the next time I hear her complain about doing the landry!!!!!
I lived totally off grid old style for many years. Home made candles for light, the whole nine yards. The number one modern convenience is hands down clean running water from a tap. That makes everything else so much easier, starting with freeing up your time to do all the other stuff. Get your water in buckets from a dug well or spring, etc, then boil it is the option open, which means carrying that to where you need it. Being able to just twist a tap open, man! I'd take that over electricity, easy descision, too.
Hand cutting and just using an axe, etc, doesn't take too long at all to get pretty good at it. Once you develop the specific muscles and have that "muscle memory" thing going, it's doable. You certainly learn how important sharp is over dull, you really feel it more hand sawing. It's really not all that bad getting up personal firewood for heating and cooking.
You also learn not to waste wood. This is a pet peeve of mine now..... Chainsawing it is really really easy to start wasting wood and to consider perfectly good wood "slash" only suitable for piling it up and burning it in a bonfire, or just leaving it there in a heap. Cutting by hand, and doing all your heating/cooking/water heating with wood, you don't waste nuthin'. Not a stick, down to pencil size. Bust up a few handfulls of that size wood, that'll cook your breakast. All That smaller stuff is what you cook with, and you don't need to split smalls if you already have the small size sticks right there off the tree. Can't tell ya how many discarded "slash" piles I have seen that could easily be a family's entire heating and cooking fuel supply for a year.
I honestly can't even remember the last when I "split kindling", not for myself anyway. done it working for firewood sellers when they had an order for cookwood, that's it,and people won't buy small rounds for some reason, even though it works.. But for myself, no. I'll split big rounds for firewood heating chunks, but no need to split for "kindling". I don't recall doing that. Just grab the smaller stuff, it comes ..err..pre split! It's already kindling sized for starting a fire, getting it going again fast over some coals, or for cooking.
Learned that cutting by hand and dragging all the wood out by hand. You *work* for every larger round, and every tree felled, so you don't add on and do double the work for small pieces when you can just look down and around and see you are surrounded by branches.