A few days ago I woke up intending to edit a podcast episode but my batteries had lost charge because they're old and it was cloudy, so the inverter low-voltage tripped. Instead of working on projects I lounged on my new loft platform in the studio, drank coffee, and read books all day. At some point, the novelty of the day struck me and I thought
I can do anything I want. I'm free.
I'm still getting used to this idea. I've always thought this was true philosophically, but I rarely have felt it to be true. I've struggled my whole life with overcoming the illusion of false obligation, the illusion of lack of choice. Oh I *have* to do this, or I *can't* do that because X.
Some people are really good at doing whatever it is they want to do, even if they really do have lots of obligations. One term for these people is 'free spirits'. Another is 'irresponsible'.
I am not one of these people.
"I'll do these things I want to do just as soon as I finish up these projects I've got to do."
I've been saying that sentence my entire adult life. The projects keep rolling. It's like saying I'll do what I want to do just as soon as the waves finish crashing on the beach. Just a couple more. Just these. There's only two left. Oh--three.
I don't like this about myself. I wish I were more free spirited. I wish it were easier to just blow off fake obligations. I wish I were more irresponsible. Truly. I'm not being flippant. I wish I was a less responsible person.
It's taken me a while to figure out why I am this way, but I think I've got it: it's difficult for me to do what I want because I believe that I don't deserve to do what I want to do. Deep down, I mean, tucked within the folds of my psyche, there's a voice that insists that I'm not worthy of following my own north star.
I rarely bet on myself because I'm too full of internalized guilt and shame, to be blunt. I hide from my own desires, schemes, and plans because they scare me. The plans themselves don't scare me, it's the arrogance of acting like what I want matters that scares me.
It's far safer to follow someone else's visons, schemes, and plans. I can just go along with them. I just work here. I'm just the help. It feels much safer to pretend like my greatest ambition in the world is to fart around working on other people's stuff.
Over the past yea--two ye--five-- okay, god, for the past fifteen years or so at least I've been DIY therapizing myself, excavating the inner recesses of my psyche, trying to figure out how I tick. I don't recommend this, really, by the way, this isn't advice, I'm just telling you what I did. I haven't been satisfied with how I tick since forever, and I've been trying to fix it since forever plus five minutes.
(Some people have an old classic car in the garage that they tinker with nights and weekends, right? I tinker on my brain, my psyche, my will. It's sort of a hobby. Yeah, I ought to have gone to a therapist, sure, but also, I think I never did for the same reasons that the weekend classic car restorer doesn't take their hot rod down to the jiffy lube for a tune up. Are you kidding? This is my brain, and this is my version of fun. Sort of.)
This fear of my own desires is something I've specifically been working on for a long time.
My first clue came many years ago sometime past midnight in a room filled with shadows when a girlfriend cried "What is it you want?" and I opened my mouth to respond and nothing came out. My mind was a blank. Oh! Well that is very interesting, yes?
For a decade and a half I've been dreaming about taking the reigns of my life, fulfilling my own vision, being responsible for my own choices, every single one of them, in a real, scary, meaningful way. I recognized early on that I had some hangups around pursuing my dreams. I'd come up with an idea for what I wanted, and then I'd.... do something else.
I fell into traps of giving away my sovereignty over and over again. I'd go along with other people's ideas of what to do. And if no one else came up with a vision, I built a vision based on what I thought the other people around me would come up with, if they'd actually just come out and tell me what they wanted, and did that.
Isn't that wild? I was so dedicated to sabotaging my own dreams that I'd pursue other people's dreams even if they were also sabotaging themselves and I had to guess what their dreams were. What! The! Fuck!
(I was always wrong about what they actually wanted, by the way, every single time, so those always turned out lose-lose.)
I've been sabotaging myself for as long as I can remember, while simultaneously working relentlessly on increasing my capacity to pursue my dreams. There are two things here:
1) The direction I want to go in, and
2) The capacity to pursue that direction competently.
I've put a lot of effort into (2). (1) has eluded me. I'm a GTD black belt, a student of Deep Work, a collector of productivity strategies and life fulfillment philosophies, everything from Tim Ferriss to Miyamoto Mushashi. But then I take that capacity to perform and... do some random stuff with it that maybe I don't really care about.
It's like I've been building a really high performance race car, and then just loaning it out to whomever to take for a spin. I never took it out for a spin myself.
It's time to take myself out for a spin. (Hmm. That's a weird way to put it but I guess I'm committed to this car metaphor. We'll have to leave that last sentence like it is.)
One of the things that attracted me to postconsumer praxis, to ERE, to radical frugality, to this journey I've been on since 2020, is the promise of freedom. Follow these steps, incorporate these philosophies, and you'll have no more excuses to not do whatever you want to do, to fulfill your potential, to explore your own edge.
That's it, right there, the key, did you see it? --no more excuses. I've tried and tried over and over to do what I wanted, but I always manufactured excuses. Can't, have a job. Can't, have a partner. Can't, have to finish this project.
These excuses were all bullshit. Plenty of people pursue their dreams despite having a job, a family, and loads of projects on their plates.
I used these excuses to keep myself safe from the terror of being responsible for my own life. I *knew* this, I could see this, but I couldn't stop myself from using those excuses because they were really handy.
I've been chipping away at those excuses for years, now. I'm running out of them. I don't need a job. I don't need to earn money for half a decade at least. My material needs are basically set. No one is relying on me to put a roof over their heads.
I have no more excuses. There's nothing left. No more obligations, false or otherwise.
I'm out here completely exposed to myself because of the choices I made over the past three years and it's obvious now in an unavoidable way what the real reasons for not doing what I want are: old, habitual patterns of guilt and shame. The unworthiness narrative, the story that I don't deserve to do what I want, to have what I want, to self-determine my own path, was fueled by these excuses, but I've now cut off the supply and I'm starving this narrative and showing it to be ridiculous.
(Is this level of emotional vulnerability making you uncomfortable? Do you think maybe I'm sharing too much? C'mon. We all have this, most of us, we just all deal with our guilt and shame in different ways. My way is common. It's weird not to self-sabotage. We're all wounded little creatures, bawling into the night from the hidey-holes we press ourselves in to, wanting oh god wanting to be the swooping silent giants of the void but paralyzed by fear. It's fine. We can talk about this and rise up together.)
Over the years I've been relentlessly breaking down every single hiding place for these excuses, every single possible innocent-sounding justification for not grabbing my own life by the horns. The tide has gone out and it's obvious who isn't wearing pants. I've drained the swamp. All of my excuses are either already gone or sheepishly slipping out the back door. I've created an unwelcome environment for self-sabotaging excuses.
I wish I'd been born with an indominable will, or a level of self-regard impervious to whatever little monster has been living in my brain all this time, whispering at me to remain small, keep my neck tucked in, be safe, don't rock the boat, just follow.
Well, I wasn't born that way, which is a bummer.
I was born really stubborn though, as in, born with a certain kind of stupidity, and so I just haven't quit. I just haven't quit trying to get that level of self-regard, trying to uproot that elusive something that causes me to sabotage myself. Surely there are better ways. In fact, I'm not sure if there are worse ways. But oh well, here I am, fresh out of excuses to not do what I want to do because I've ran them all down and there's nothing left to do but what I want to do.
This is what I want to do.
Make the studio interior actually beautiful, a little built work of art. I want people to walk into it and go 'wow, this is a very compelling and artfully executed interior design'. I'm an engineer. Making a space more than just functional, more than just a copy of something I saw in a magazine, would be a coup. I don't understand color in interior design, I don't really understand space and volume, or proportion. Making this space actually beautiful would be an admission that I actually care about beauty, and that I think it's worth putting in the effort to pull it off. Some part of my soul needs me to do this.
Build a mojave-appropriate bioshelter. I'm hugely inspired by the work of the New Alchemists. The coolest thing they did was develop the bioshelter/Ark concept. They were in New England, so I need to modify it to suit my environment. Briefly: an earthsheltered greenhouse with aquaculture/solar algae ponds that accepts rainwater and greywater and recirculates all water, so the only moisture loses are evaporation. I have a hunch that these structures are actually important, and I intend to play this hunch out.
Build a LOT of direct solar devices: solar cookers, stills, pumps, motors, and thermal energy devices. Harnessing exergy from the sun - directly, 8 minute old electromagnetic energy from the sun - is like magic to me, it fills me with wonder, and I just want to tinker with direct solar devices for hours.
Thruhike the entire PCT, the whole thing
Hike the HSR (like the PCT, but shorter and with fewer actual trails involved).
Establish summer ridge traverse routes in the Mojave, or learn by doing why that's a terrible idea.
Fix and customize my motorcycle (I'm more interested in building it than riding it).
Ride my bicycle around the Mojave. I mean, literally, ride around the perimeter of the bounds of the entire Mojave, self supported. Then do it again but on foot.
Ride my bicycle across the country, or at least to the front range. I'm not sure if I actually want to ride all the way to the Atlantic. I'm in love with the West, and I'm jealous of my time there.
Dirtbag climb up the Eastside of the Sierras for a season, living off my bike or motorcycle.
Crewhitch down to South America, and then worktrade around for a year or so.
Write books. I know I have in me at least a couple books that don't suck, although it may take some time to unearth them.
Build the required infrastructure here at Ft. Dirtbag so that 6-12 people can stay here, living in posh postconsumer comfort. I want people to be able to crash here for 1-52 weeks, in their rig or in an on-site shelter, and live relatively autonomously. Something in between Mark Boyle's Free Hostel, workawaying, and an ecovillage. A bit like the Fablab I stayed at in Portugal last year, but more autonomous. I think a crew of people up here with the right infrastructure could get into some good times.
Host workshops and events here at Ft. Dirtbag. Host an annual Thing.
Build a company that makes and sells composting toilets that don't suck. The world needs more composting toilets, and I'm just the guy to do it.
Learn to brew biodiesel and fix up an older diesel truck.
Ride my bike to friend's places to do 'vacation' solarpunk construction pushes.
Eat for an entire year only food grown on site. (This implies I need to learn how to grow food, first...)
Build the infrastructure necessary to get Ft. Dirtbag to run on rainwater income. Push the state of the art of drylands life support systems.
Buy a wreck of a house, do a deep green front-door-renovation, and sell or rent it.
Repeat that last thing, if I enjoy it, until it catches on.
There's more, but you get the idea.
Some of these desires are serious, and some are whimsical. Some ought to be straightforward to pull off, and others I'm not even sure are possible. Some I might realize I don't actually want to do, and scratch them off the list. I'm on the fence as to whether or not I'm being too scattered, if I ought to focus on a smaller list of things. There surely are important things I've left off.
They all have something in common, though.
They're all MY goddamn vision. They're MY dreams, even the goofy ones, even the ones that make me feel selfish and indulgent to admit that I want them. Doing them, pursuing them is like singing a love song to myself and the universe at the same time. (Yes, I know how that sounds. No, I'm not going to edit it out and write something more reasonable sounding.)
And - it's the pursuit that matters, not the achievement. If fail to pull off anything on my list but I actually tried, honestly and earnestly, then that'll be all right. I'd rather fail pursing my dreams than succeed at someone else's.
I know this list will change. In a year it'll look different. But I want it to look different because of the self knowledge I've gained from throwing myself body and soul at my true, actual, authentic desires, rather than because I've spent another orbit around the sun farting around doing other people's stuff and have let the blossom of my dreams wither and die due to lack of forward action.
That's the thing with dreams, I think. They feed on action. They feed on momentum. They grow on belief, faith, hustle, effort, doggedness, and resourcefulness. Any dream worth having won't give itself up easily. It'll make you work for it, sweat and bleed for it. It'll make you question whether you're being a total fool and should pack it in, and then it'll hold you there in that space of doubt for weeks, months, years. I love that. I think that's how it should be. It's how I want it.
Your dreams covet your attention. Your desires demand your devotion.
Give it.
