I’m ready. I’m changing the way that i choose to live. A few things have happened recently, and I feel as if I have been struck. The weekly video series is no longer being developed, but that is only one small change. Here’s why:
I have given up several addictions, and this is a form of that.
On 2/20/2015, one year and one day ago, I was struck over the head at some point during the night. I was in LA, I was drinking, and I do not know what happened to me. I found myself restrained by police, in a hospital. They told me they found me in the street. I walked back to my hotel, several miles away, and have not drunk since. If I was drinking, none of what follows would be possible.
About a month ago, I gave up e cigarettes. I had smoked cigarettes and cigars in the past, and took up ecigs to escape a daily cigar habit. Several thousand dollars later, I am finally off a 24% nicotine habit.
I have researched and practiced many other forms of balance against addictions, including food and porn, and have learned a lot. As a result, I feel like I am ready to live more simply, in an unconnected way.
I’ve lost faith in media and tech. I want it to change.
I’m a technologist, but I am quickly losing faith in technology. I have seen it create factions (Windows vs. Linux), addictions (porn, gambling, gaming), new false economies (bitcoin). I understand the hypocrisy of using a technology like WordPress, but I don’t feel that technology is inherently bad, but that most people end up using it in bad ways, or more correctly, false ways.
I recently read Ernest Cline’s Novel ‘Ready Player One’. It upset me so – the idea that people would live in a diseased, dismal world, but would spend most of their time inside of virtual reality (VR). VR is making its rounds again as the next big thing. The novel is incredibly possible, and scary to consider as a likely outcome of our trajectory. Huxley’s Brave New World talks about dissolving society and humanity via technology and soma. Orwell has been proved right again and again and again in both Animal Farm and 1984. Their predictions and warnings have been mostly unheeded.
I’ve lost faith in ‘society’. I still love people.
I keep looking at the way that people are asked to live today:
- working all the time in jobs that they don’t remotely enjoy.
- Finding and emphasizing differences and not celebrating individuality.
- Comparisons, ratings, likes, and follows are the only end goal.
- Suffering physically, mentally, and ideologically in the effort of having the biggest, best, fastest, newest.
- Struggling through stressors to make their means meet their ends.
- Giving away money to keep a status quo which often never gets any better.
- Striving for convenience over respect for ideas, processes, or outcomes.
- The effort towards status, fame, and attention and not anything like universal human kindness or understanding.
Life is hard enough. We have to survive: make and prepare food, be temperate, find joy. I want to do those, and what I’ve concluded is that I need little more than a few acres of land, time, effort, and knowledge and experience.
Recently, in talking with my closest friends, especially those concerned with my announcement, I find myself saying repeatedly: We excreted before there were toilets, we were comfortable before we had central air, we had food before Walmarts, and we had houses before we had lumber mills.
I want to prove it.
I am escaping the traditional dream for a different one.
I’m excited to be learning a lot about a lot of topics to support my plan: Permaculture, technology anthropology, gardening, green housing, cob building, fire making, and so on. It will be difficult, interesting, and experimental. I’m happy that I am fit, sound, and prepared to learn what I need to.
I’m leaving, to the degree that I can. I plan to move to a 3-5 acre plot, set up a tiny homestead with a wood burning stove, a clivus multrum, and a bed, and relearn what it is like to be human on this planet.
I want to remove myself of falsehood and manufactured debt, slavery, and despair. Above is a model of what you can do with well-connected 4 foot sticks and vine in just about every forest I’ve ever stepped foot in. Thatching and mudding are the next step.
I want to live in a little hut in the woods, and occasionally come out for coffee or other things not on my land. On the land, I’ll make art, read, cook, garden, and live. I will possibly use solar power to support some electricity, but that is optional. I may have cellular service to offer some connectivity for emergencies, but that is optional. I will not have plumbing, wiring, electric lights, or other typical amenities.I desperately do not want to drive. I will trade goods for services and services for goods. I will work at farmers markets and schools. I will help people in real, true, obvious ways. I think we all can.
I am scared, for us.
I am thoroughly progressive, politically. I think that the idea that Trump can be elected into an office where he can use nuclear weapons is the scariest idea that has ever been. I thought it was a joke when he first announced he was running, and I think it is a bad joke now. I am retreating from a society that supports anyone like Trump. I am leaving. Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged was something I struggled to get through as a twenty something, and I had no idea that it was so conservative at the time because I was not nearly so aware of the imaginary lines we place on things yet. Her ideas there of creators and makers and thinkers simply walking away is a valid solution for me, and I am doing that.
I am actively filtering out that which does not make me better, or worse yet, what burdens me. I love all of you, and I’m not disappearing, though you will likely see a lot less of me after May, 2016. We will see.
