Getting Back to Basics

I’ve been planning to delve into the adventures of the couple who spent a month on a dollar a day diet . From what I’d read in one article, it seemed that they had no idea what they were doing, and the experiment cost them dearly.

So, I just backtracked to the first couple of posts on their blog, and it’s already clear that they know nothing about a balanced diet, and not a whole lot more about cooking to save time. There are little things that don’t make any sense at all in the context of wanting to understand how people survive on very little money. I doubt that many third-worlders would have peanut better around, much less consider it a dessert — five cents for one tablespoon. Or how about twelve cents for a tablespoon of taco sauce? Continue Reading »

I added a new website to my reading list the other day: Choosing Voluntary Simplicity . It’s not only a fascinating and inspiring site, full of ideas for developing a more frugal lifestyle and making your life less complicated and more enjoyable, it’s also a source for recipes that I’m itching to try, and for triggering ideas about life, the universe, and just about everything.

It answered one question that’s been rolling around in my head for quite a while: whatever happened to the concept of voluntary simplicity? Its principles are alive and well, of course, and becoming ever more healthy and vigorous as the economy sinks into a pool of quicksand. But the term itself disappeared from the media after a brief run that seemed fueled more by hype and bandwagon boosterism than by a deep commitment to our welfare as residents of the earth. Continue Reading »

Over the years, I’ve learned a lot of skills, including some that are comparatively rare these days. Some I learned some in response to necessity, even to emergencies, but most of them I learned because they were interesting or a challenge, or because I thought they would improve my life in some way.

There are probably skills I’ve completely forgotten about but that would take just a little practice to get up to speed if they entered my life again. Sort of like riding a bicycle for the first time in years. And an important thing about many skills is that they carry over and can be generalized to help us learn new skills in new situations. So the more skills you have in more areas, the more likely it is that if you bump up against something new and unfamiliar, you’ll be able to handle it.

Just out of curiosity, I decided to make a list of what I’d learned. I’m sure there’s more, but I think I can feel pretty optimistic about my ability to be moderately self-sufficient if the apocalypse showed up.

• Cooking from scratch, including ethnic dishes
• Baking bread — focaccia, anyone?
• Making jams and jellies — often from fruits gathered from the wild
• Canning and freezing — homemade peach pie for Thanksgiving. Yum.
• Gardening — growing vegetables and herbs, propagating new plants by division, cuttings, air layering, seeds
• Raising and butchering chickens — got old after a while, but store-bought can’t compare
• Electrical and plumbing repairs — rewiring lamps and outlets, replacing plastic pipe and faucets — fun occupation: crawling under a single wide trailer in the dead of winter to repair frozen pipes
• Drywall repairs and minor carpentry
• Crafts — crochet, knitting, macrame, needlepoint, quilting, and probably a bunch more
• Sewing — making clothes from scratch, repairs, and alterations

What are you waiting for? Go find something useful to learn.

Bread has traditionally been called “the staff of life.” It was made of whole grains, and together with a chunk of cheese, a loaf of bread could sustain a person through a day’s hard work. You could make it at home or buy it cheaply. Only the very rich could enjoy the luxury of white bread. Today, white bread is the norm, the very cheapest form of bread. And good quality whole grain bread, similar to what you could make at home, is priced far out of reach of the poor.

But far more has been lost than a food capable of sustaining life. Also gone are the necessary skills, which are more complex than those needed for baking cookies or a cake. You can get a little sloppy about following the cooky or cake recipe and still come out with a perfectly edible product. Baking bread is about more than the recipe. It requires the powers of observation, the willingness to do some physical work, and patience — lots of patience. Continue Reading »

In a forum discussion a few days ago, someone asked “Doesn’t anybody make anything these days?” He was lamenting lost skills, and even enjoyments, that seem to have fallen into disuse. He wondered whether any hands-on hobbies, like the woodworking that he does, still hold interest for very many people. A day or so later, I came across a news article discussing the fact that American children seem to be losing their problem-solving skills.

What’s the relationship? Problem-solving skills are developed by solving problems. But solving problems out of a book, with a teacher to tell you whether you got them right or wrong, isn’t real problem-solving. It’s just finding a pre-determined answer. If you want to learn to solve problems that matter, you have to do it in the real world. Just about the only hands-on skills that most people learn these days are how to use a keyboard or a game controller. Neither formatting a report nor negotiating your way through a virtual maze will teach you how to cope in an emergency situation, or how to do something for yourself when the person you will be paying to do it for you doesn’t show up. Continue Reading »

I saw an article in the New York Times today that highlighted for me the degree to which people have lost basic skills, including the skill of spending their money wisely, and of thinking their way through problems to a sensible solution. I’ll be writing about that article in more depth another day, but its lessons are relevant today. It was about a couple that decided to try to live on $1.00 a day for food. The article didn’t say whether the dollar was for both of them, or whether they each had a dollar to spend, but in a way, that doesn’t matter. If you live in America, even if you get food stamps, you have more than one dollar a day for food, so the experiment was unnecessarily extreme to start with, and highly unrealistic.

More important, the couple didn’t have the skills to manage a very basic diet, and the month they spent on it was so miserable that they were overjoyed to leave it behind. Did they learn anything from their experiment? I doubt that they learned anything that would be of value to them in the future. Making tortillas from scratch every day after work only teaches you that making tortillas is hard work.

If you’re going to change your lifestyle, there are two simple rules to follow: 1. Do it gradually. You don’t learn how to eat more cheaply (and sensibly) by plunging into a near-starvation diet. 2. Learn the necessary skills first, if you can. If you have to learn them as you go along, that’s the best possible argument for going slow. Learn one skill and put it into practice before going on to the next. Learning and using new skills is supposed to improve your life, not make it worse. If it’s making you more miserable, hungry, and confused, you’re doing it wrong.

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
Time Enough For Love, Robert Heinlein

Some of the skills Heinlein proposed as necessities may be outmoded or unlikely to be called on — after all, how many of us would ever be called on to plan an invasion or conn a ship? The basic idea — that humans should have a basic set of survival skills, will never go out of date. But we now live in a society in which we can pay others to do things for us. We either don’t have the ability to do those things for ourselves, or we don’t have the time. We’ve also been taught that most of the things that need to be done in this world require formal learning, degrees or certificates, and membership in professional or trade organizations.

Grandparents no longer hand down their skills, because most of those skills are out of date. Parents don’t pass down skills because they don’t have any. And the current generation lives in a state of learned helplessness about anything but amusement and spending money.

What have you learned over a lifetime that could sustain you in a real emergency? If the electricity goes out for long periods — or forever? How would you feed yourself, stay warm in the winter, clothe yourself? What would you do if someone in your family became sick, with no doctors or medicines available?

There are many skills that I should have learned along the way and didn’t. I don’t know how to resuscitate someone who’s stopped breathing, though television has showed me how it’s done. Would that be adequate in an emergency? I don’t know. And how much does television teach that we can actually use? In his book, On Writing, Stephen King talked about being part of the last generation of writers before TV. Maybe he’s also part of the last generation to learn practical skills.

So far, this blog is probably giving the impression that my idea of getting back to basics is entirely about scolding people to change their way of thinking. Not so. I practice what I preach, but I admit that I had a great head start, growing up the oldest of four kids, with a father who was usually working one or two side jobs to supplement his teacher’s salary. We had our own home, thanks to the G. I. Bill, but there was rarely any money left over from meeting basic needs, so I learned to pinch pennies very early on.

For some reason, growing up comparatively poor rarely bothered me. Maybe it was because television advertising hadn’t yet created a culture of conspicuous consumption for the average person. Spending money on expensive non-essentials was still mainly for the wealthy. And it probably helped that I was an introverted loner who spent enough time observing my school mates to realize that I didn’t want to be like them.

Being able to make my own clothes was a matter of pride, and having a father who was crazy about gardening and horticulture meant that I learned a lot without even knowing that I was learning anything. Both of those areas of knowledge served me well over the years, along with the many skills that I picke up, sometimes from necessity, but mostly because learning to do for myself was always an interesting and worthwhile challenge.

All of that means that I’ve always felt kind of sorry for people who can pay other people to do things for them. They don’t have the pleasure of a job well done, or pride in knowing how to do something that takes skill and effort. But pity has given way to dismay with the realization that a country full of people who don’t know how to do anything for themselves except the job that they’re paid for is a country in trouble when the economy slips more than a notch or two. That’s what we have today: a country in trouble.

So scolding, and nudging people to think, has to be a good part of what this blog is about. But there’s no point getting you to think and then not offering any ideas about what the next steps might be. Lots of folks are feeling pretty wobbly these days, and need a helping hand till they’re steady on their feet. That’s what I want this blog to be — a helping hand.