"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."
—Howard Zinn
I started this podcast a year ago as a bit of an experiment. I want to put some effort into focusing it a bit, or at least making it a little more obvious what it is I'm trying to do.
My aim is to do four episodes a month, and each week being a different format:
Conversation episodes like episodes 12 and 13 with my skoolie friends.
Monthly journal update episodes, like this one.
Book reviews. I've been listening to Founders podcast, which is just a guy reading his notes from biographies of Founders and other interesting people, and it's incredible. I highly recommend it. I'd like to emulate his style but for books more on theme for Advanced Retroadaptics.
Deep Dives either on builds, projects, or special topics, more like the first few episodes I did.
This episode is the monthly journal update. Honestly, it feels awkward to me to talk about details of my life, but on paper at least it's on mission. A big part of what I'm trying to do is demonstrate what kind of living is possible with postconsumer praxis, and so talking about my own life is relevant.
Finances
In January, for the first time, my TTM COL dropped below $10,000. I'm psyched! I finally made it into the four figure club.
Projects:
I'm still eyeballs deep in other people's projects, but I am getting closer to wrapping them up.
I got the solar system for our well complete and fired up, it works, and that is awesome. There are some other minor things to do with it, but for now it's running so I'll get back to those tasks later.
I'm cranking on my neighbor's PV upgrade. I spent the weekend moving a literal ton of concrete bags several times and we poured the piers for the ground mount rack on Sunday. That was a big hurdle, and it feels like the rest from here is downhill.
I've been maintaining progress on my book project, and I'm aiming to publish it by the end of March. I'll have more to say soon, but the gist is that I time travel back to my 25 year old self and give him a piece of my mind.
In the process of this writing project, I went back and read all of my journals, which I’ve been keeping since I was 12. Whoa.
Fear and Love: Hope and Despair
Besides projects, I've been spending a lot of cycles thinking about optimism and pessimism, and love and fear, and how to talk about it. I'm trying to walk this tightrope between doomerism and techno-utopianism. I'm neither, but it feels like people assume if you aren't one then you're the other.
It's difficult to express that while I have a lot of critical things to say about how things are currently arranged, and in fact I think we're in a very precarious situation and the way we run things now isn't going to last much longer...
...that does not mean that I am a defeatist, resigned to the wave of humanity to plunge back into some kind of dark ages. Rather the opposite. I am psyched to not only see what the future holds, but to play an active role in manifesting something really cool.
I talk a lot about gaining personal freedom and broad practical skills, but that's not because I'm a survivalist. Freedom and competence aren't the point, they're the platform upon which we're empowered to act in the world, to show up and express our gifts, free from the infantilizing cages of consumer culture.
The whole reason, the why of postconsumer praxis, is indeed to be able to help make the future, the unfolding present moment, better than it otherwise would have been - not just for us as individuals, but for the rest of the world.
And, there are so many ways in which we can employ our life energies in this purpose, this pursuit, and some of these ways contradict each other, and I think that's great. I am a big fan of dissensus (the opposite of consensus).
A lot of, or maybe all of, what each of us chooses to do, comes down to personality. Some people are going to head for the mountains, while others will double down on cities. Some people will be outside in gardens and food forests and the woods, and other people will be eyeballs deep in code, plugged into the matrix.
Some people will seek out large in person communities to be immersed in, I'm thinking here eco-villages and the like, and other people will be loners and live like hermits. Some people won't know which end of a splitting maul to hold on to, and other people will happily choose to live without electricity and running water.
I think this diversity of life path is unspeakably beautiful.
And this is one reason why I hesitate to share details of my own lifestyle because I don't want you to think that I'm saying everyone ought to live like I do. Heavens no. That'd be terrible.
I live in the mountains because I was born and raised in the mountains, and I hope to die in them. Later. The mountains are where I feel at home.
I'm an introvert and I do best with an amount of solitude that would be unhealthy for most people, but I thrive with this much time to myself.
I'm a dirtbag. I just happen to not care about many of the modern conveniences that most first world humans have learned to take for granted over the past several decades, and so I don't bother putting effort into getting and maintaining them.
In many ways, I'm a little odd, and I don't think most people could or should copy me.
But I do think I'm well suited to be a sort of pioneer species, an advance scout, a guinea pig. I can move light and fast and try stuff and report back on how it went. That's sort of how I see my role.
But the bottom line is, no matter what, my ultimate guiding purpose and mission is to the co creation of a future worth living in. A future that is so much cooler than the current arrangement that we'll want to move in its direction, we'll be enticed into it by our genuine desire.
I love humans just the way they are. I don't think we need to make humans better. I think trying to make humans better is... very dangerous.
I think our systems can use a little TLC. Our governance, our social coordination habits, our techstacks, and our shared cultural paradigms, these are the things I'm interested in fiddling with. This is The Work, I think.
And connecting the dots between the day to day of our lives, the to-do list for next Tuesday, and this Work... this is what Advanced Retroadaptics is about.
The idea of social coordination, tech stacks, and shared cultural paradigms I got from Daniel Schmactengberger on Nate Hagen’s podcast episode #42. I highly recommend it.