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Transcript
The first four episodes were very abstract. I felt like I needed to start with that stuff in order to orient you to where I'm coming from, because otherwise what I'm doing just might not make much sense. I felt we all needed some, ah, philosophical context to get us on the same page. Now we can start diving in to some fun details and practical conversations.
First, let me see if I can succinctly wrap the last four episodes up in just a couple minutes.
In episode one I talked about how I think that the way our global civilization is currently arranged is terminally flawed. It was a good idea at the time, but we need to alter how we interact with each other and the world as a species. I'm not super bummed about this anymore - in fact, I'm excited about the opportunity of simply being alive in such an interesting time, a time when it's possible to have our actions count for so much. What we do matters. That can be pretty heavy and overwhelming, but it's also a call to action.
In episode two I said that the consumer mindset in particular has put us all into cognitive boxes, with terrible unintended consequences for the planet and for our mental, physical, social, and spiritual health. I think we ought to do away with the consumer mindset as quickly as we can, and to the extent we unlearn consumerism in our personal lives, we free ourselves.
The way to free ourselves from consumerism is to pursue broad skills, to become renaissance people. Because abundance in our society is not just a function of money, like we're trained to think. Abundance is a function of money and skills. The more relevant skills you have, the less money you need to obtain the same level of abundance.
The more skills you have, the less money you need, the less you need to work, the more free time you have, the more you're able to develop skills, closing the loop and allowing you to ascend an upwards spiral of autonomy and competent badassery. I called this the skill ratchet in episode three.
The skill ratched is what enables us to become broadly skilled nonconsumers with enough free time and optionality to pursue our purpose and missions in life.
For me, I think about my purpose in life in terms of the lifeboat flotilla, the metaphor I explored in episode four. At this point the ship of industrial consumer civilization is going down, so I'm not interested in attempts to save it or argue about who should be captain next. I'm interested in building a lifeboat flotilla that we can all move to, a flotilla based on ways of relating to each other and to the rest of the world in a more functional way.
All right, great, that's a nice set of principles, strategies, and a neat little story about a boat. Very tidy. But what does that look like? Where do we go from here? How is this relevant to deciding what to do next Tuesday?
Well, it's sort of the point that this is a choose your own adventure. There is no one proscribed path. Everyone has different stoke to chase, and that's beautiful.
Right now, maybe the best I can do is talk about how I'm chasing my stoke, and how what I'm doing fits into all this theory. Later, soon, I want to start having conversations with other people who are chasing their stoke in some kind of alignment with the values and principles I'm talking about. But for now, I'm gonna talk about myself a bit.
I turned my webcomic idea into a lifestyle
I've written stories since I was a kid. Or rather, I've written idea for stories since I was a kid, I rarely ever finish anything. In a sense I just *design* stories.
Over a decade ago I wrote down an idea for a webcomic I wanted to make. I called my idea The Wandering Engineer. The protagonist is this lone eco-engineer who wanders a post-collapse Northern America, providing engineering design/build services to homesteads, villages, and communities. Think Mad Max, but instead of killing people over gasoline he helps design and build earthship kinda stuff.
For example, the Engineer would show up to a place whose constructed wetland was out of whack, or that needed help devising a better greenhouse design to insource nutrient production, or needed to rapidly build a bunch of solar water distillers out of scrap. Payment would be in coin, food and shelter, parts, or feed oil for the Engineer's biodiesel Toyota.
From time to time over the years I tinkered with the idea, filling out backstory, imagining what this future would look like climatologically and politically, and I even attempted to learn how to draw a few times so I could start producing this comic myself.
But then, a few years ago, I thought to myself.... hmmmm... I already live in the unevenly-distributed post-apocalypse, I'm already an engineer, I already have some experience building and making stuff and I want to learn even more myself... I realized that the webcomic idea wasn't a story I wanted to write, it was a story I wanted to *live*.
I started to turn my attention to explicitly arranging my life in accordance with the gist of this wandering engineer idea. After all, the story was nothing more than an integration of my worldview and stoke projected onto narrative.
It's taken some time to sort out the transition from 'idea for a webcomic that looks nothing like my actual life' to 'integrated lifestyle and purpose'. I started thinking about this seriously something like three or four years ago, and only in the past twelve months have I felt like my actual life is juuuuust beginning to overlap with the narrative I have in mind. For a long time I struggled because I just didn't have the free time to devote to this, because I had a full time job.
The missing piece for me was learning the nonconsumer praxis via Jacob Lund Fisker's work. As I learned how to live just as well, or even better, on a tenth of what I used to spend a year, I quickly saved up a financial buffer of several years. And, wow, let me tell you what a difference it makes in your attitude when you know that if you lost your job tomorrow, you'd be just. fine. for... years.
The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. Less than a year into my nonconsumer praxis, in the middle of 2020, I gave 80% of my job away in order to save my team, dropping to one day a week. A year later, that would be a year ago exactly actually, the final axe fell and my team was laid off.
If these events had happened even a year earlier, I'd have been sweating it, scrambling to get a job to keep the income flowing.
Instead, the first thing I did was to take a two month long road trip with my girlfriend through the pacific northwest. We slept in a tent every night in beautiful forests for free, spending money only on fuel and food.
Shortly after that, a friend in Oregon asked me to help them with their skoolie build. I rode my motorcycle up, taking my time and enjoying the pacific coast highway, again sleeping in a tent in beautiful forests over the ocean, spending almost nothing. I stayed with my friends for two months in their spare room, working on their school bus, hanging out with their free range kid, and earning a little bit of money. Not much, but slightly more than I was spending.
A bit after that, I decided to build a tiny studio on my parents property in the desert, with sheep's wool insulation, a 'green' roof, and salvaged metal siding. That's what I did this past winter.
So far so good, but that's a far cry from being highly competent at the kinds of projects I'm really interested in. I want to know how to build solar thermal systems, vertical-axis wind turbines, I want to begin my collection of natural building techniques, I want to build and operate living machines - cultivated wetlands that treat "waste"water into water almost safe to drink, I want to build greenhouses that allow food to be grown year round even in extreme environments - and I also want to learn about the social dynamics of living in groups of people all with a somewhat similar vision for the future, people bringing their own unique gifts to the task of building some corner of the lifeboat flotilla. I felt that I wasn't learning these skills or having these experiences fast enough.
In the midst of the delta surge, I was on the internet looking at flights a year in the future. I found tickets to Lisbon for 150usd for February 2022. I bought them.
So right now... I'm a month and a half in to a one or two year round the world trip, volunteering at eco projects to lend a hand and learn skills. At the moment I'm staying in an actual treehouse on an offgrid fablab in the south of Portugal, working parttime on building geodomes and solar thermal hot water heaters in exchange for a place to sleep and food. Last week I used a custom built CNC machine to cut out the pieces for the solar thermal collector, and then helped build the foundation for a geodome. You can see pictures of these things on my website, tylerjdisney.com. There are anywhere between 6 and 12 other volunteers here at a time, all working on various projects. We have a shared kitchen and eat dinners together. I sleep in a treehouse with a cat and Jean, a French mechanical engineering graduate.
Next week I'm likely heading for Morocco, where I'm going to help a family renovate an old family building using traditional mud-brick building techniques. My cost of living is tiny - I'll be posting cost details for those interested month by month - and I could do this for years if I wanted before I have to earn any more money.
So to recap, I'm wandering the earth, spending very little, working on cool solarpunk eco projects. My actual life now significantly overlaps with the story I wrote for myself all those years ago. And it would not have been possible if I hadn't begun the (very much ongoing) work to unlearn the consumer mindset, stop spending so much money, and skill up in the pursuit of becoming a broadly competent nonconsumer.
And to hammer the final point, the point of episode four, it's not just that I'm living some random fantasy I wrote in my early twenties. I feel connected to my purpose, my stoke, my mission in life. Every day I wake up and I think about my to do list, and it feels relevant to why I'm alive. It feels relevant to the lifeboat flotilla, to the project of having my actions mean something in the world.