Interlude: Why I won't be joining your movement
A lot of the elements of something like homesteading holds a lot of appeal to me. I am an inveterate believer that society is insane, and severely doubt anyone's ability to choose consistently wisely in its midst. I think it is possible but difficult, and unlikely to happen: we barely even have the ability to be consistently aware of the changes our environments are inducing in us. We are too good at learning without trying, without realizing. But, I just happen to also have a resistance to impinging on the autonomy of others, to the hubris of believing I both know better than others for themselves, and that that would grant me the excuse to shape their decisions. I don't want to change the way people are, but I want for them to change. It's clearly a weak stance derived from some sort of romantic ideal gleaned from wistful pessimistic early science fiction, or something.
But this lines up all my instincts with the impulse to withdraw and eschew participation rather than changing myself, rather than reaching in and trying to take control. It makes me sympathetic to the notion of extricating oneself from society and all its structures, of being good enough to be self-reliant. This makes me susceptible to certain strains of thoughts surrounding the concept space of home-steading, of making your own items instead of buying them, of understanding how things work well enough to not be held in their sway or the sway of their mechanics; essentially all of what I imagined to enable one to not be weighed down by the so clearly misguided or out-and-out wrong norms of the people you just happened to live around.
I probably just saw, disheartened, what I perceived was my lack of control over my own psychology, my consistent failures, disappointment in myself as well as how I often witnessed people act. I wanted more out of each individual person, I wanted to be everything in myself.
Whatever the reason, it has put me in a place of distrust and discomfort with a great deal of the world I find around me.
But, as I grow old and all but the pang of regret of my ideals fall away, I have been coming to admire things that are more practical. My old interests and visions of what a good life was have been losing their appeal; seeming superfluous, nonsensical and vain. I still react strongly to the dream of a life where all that you do is read and learn; where the main focus is on taking something in; of at most, creating something beautiful.
But this doesn't seem like enough to me, and I am beginning to struggle with my outmoded rubric that judges my behavior by an aesthetic standard. I'm starting to want more something that *does* something, that at the least allows some human to eat.
And I've been learning more about the things that populate my environment, and getting just the vaguest idea of how they came to exist. Even devices that seem incredibly simple are designed to deal with unforeseen problems that I would take years to anticipate. Try to do anything like fix your own bicycle or build your own house and you'll see that there's a reason for specialized tools and inventions. I am not smarter than all that exists in this civilization and it's beginning to seem more insane to expect myself to give up everything I can't figure out myself. Maybe I'm just more lazy, but I want all the things that I would never discover. Merely hiding away and pouring everything into my own brain seems not only selfish but completely in my own way. The way to learn everything is to take every advantage you can find, not turn your nose up at it. "Natural" does not mean "better." All the sympathy I had for things like valuing 'natural' over 'manmade' is almost completely washed away. I think the sentiment shows up in places I had not always expected; but whenever I recognize it I am disappointed. The universe can be manipulated through the means of understanding it; by extending the mathematics that describes the behavior of matter we can find the extreme cases and exploit them, and this is all just by having brains that fell together over eons. "Natural" is just the way things happened to be, and has nothing to do with the way things "should" be. Being unlike we naturally are is often the best we can do, not something bad merely by virtue of being self-created. Yes, I am frightened and overwhelmed by the sheer vastness of the available information in the world that I can never understand, that is utterly like anything I have learned to be prepared for. But I don't want to reject it simply to hold onto my fears. I want to become more like a thing that can adapt to any world it encounters, even this one, and failing that, I don't hold that maintaining my own comfort could possibly be considered important.
But this lines up all my instincts with the impulse to withdraw and eschew participation rather than changing myself, rather than reaching in and trying to take control. It makes me sympathetic to the notion of extricating oneself from society and all its structures, of being good enough to be self-reliant. This makes me susceptible to certain strains of thoughts surrounding the concept space of home-steading, of making your own items instead of buying them, of understanding how things work well enough to not be held in their sway or the sway of their mechanics; essentially all of what I imagined to enable one to not be weighed down by the so clearly misguided or out-and-out wrong norms of the people you just happened to live around.
I probably just saw, disheartened, what I perceived was my lack of control over my own psychology, my consistent failures, disappointment in myself as well as how I often witnessed people act. I wanted more out of each individual person, I wanted to be everything in myself.
Whatever the reason, it has put me in a place of distrust and discomfort with a great deal of the world I find around me.
But, as I grow old and all but the pang of regret of my ideals fall away, I have been coming to admire things that are more practical. My old interests and visions of what a good life was have been losing their appeal; seeming superfluous, nonsensical and vain. I still react strongly to the dream of a life where all that you do is read and learn; where the main focus is on taking something in; of at most, creating something beautiful.
But this doesn't seem like enough to me, and I am beginning to struggle with my outmoded rubric that judges my behavior by an aesthetic standard. I'm starting to want more something that *does* something, that at the least allows some human to eat.
And I've been learning more about the things that populate my environment, and getting just the vaguest idea of how they came to exist. Even devices that seem incredibly simple are designed to deal with unforeseen problems that I would take years to anticipate. Try to do anything like fix your own bicycle or build your own house and you'll see that there's a reason for specialized tools and inventions. I am not smarter than all that exists in this civilization and it's beginning to seem more insane to expect myself to give up everything I can't figure out myself. Maybe I'm just more lazy, but I want all the things that I would never discover. Merely hiding away and pouring everything into my own brain seems not only selfish but completely in my own way. The way to learn everything is to take every advantage you can find, not turn your nose up at it. "Natural" does not mean "better." All the sympathy I had for things like valuing 'natural' over 'manmade' is almost completely washed away. I think the sentiment shows up in places I had not always expected; but whenever I recognize it I am disappointed. The universe can be manipulated through the means of understanding it; by extending the mathematics that describes the behavior of matter we can find the extreme cases and exploit them, and this is all just by having brains that fell together over eons. "Natural" is just the way things happened to be, and has nothing to do with the way things "should" be. Being unlike we naturally are is often the best we can do, not something bad merely by virtue of being self-created. Yes, I am frightened and overwhelmed by the sheer vastness of the available information in the world that I can never understand, that is utterly like anything I have learned to be prepared for. But I don't want to reject it simply to hold onto my fears. I want to become more like a thing that can adapt to any world it encounters, even this one, and failing that, I don't hold that maintaining my own comfort could possibly be considered important.