Broad skills (plus systems thinking) is what distinguishes postconsumer praxis from frugal consumerism.
A mature postconsumer lifestyle decenters money as a problem solving solution. It’s not that postconsumers don’t solve any problems with money. It’s that money isn’t the only tool they use to solve problems. Postconsumerism is sexy and fun, whereas extreme frugal consumerism is tight and rigid.
(It is possible to live on very little simply by being highly frugal — shopping at discount stores, clipping coupons, stalking garage sales, buying used, and the like. But that’s not a very sexy way to live, and it’s still very focused on money. It is stuck in the paradigm that all problems are solved with money.)
The point of what I’m trying to do isn’t to spend very little money. The point is to reject the paradigm of consumerism and invent/adopt a less dysfunctional one, and to free myself in a profound way in the process.
Diverse and appropriate competencies are the backbone of postconsumer praxis. The other primary mechanisms - frugality, wise resource management, and systems thinking - can be considered just further skills, further areas of competency.
In this post I want to do a deeper dive on skill acquisition for the aspiring polymathic postconsumer. Relevant previous posts are the Skill Ratchet, The Hypercompetence Loop, and Skills.
As my path on this journey progressed and I got freer and freer, I found myself faced with the dilemma of which skills to pursue. Which areas of competency ought I invest time and energy in? How should I think about and approach skill acquisition? This post is my attempt to round up how I think about skill acquisition to date.
First, I’m going to cover a few frameworks for thinking about skills.
JLF’s Renaissance Categories
Jacob Lund Fisker wrote about the seven categories of the Renaissance person in his book, and I think he would now include an eighth. They are
Intellectual
Physiological
Economic
Ecological
Social
Emotional
Technical
Spiritual (the eighth category not in his book, which you should read if you haven’t already)
A balanced postconsumer ought to exhibit basic competency in all of these areas. It’s hard to imagine a solid polymathic lifestyle if you are extremely deficient in one or more of these categories.
The pay to play, break even, or make money metric
Another lens on skill level from Jacob’s book is to ask whether it
costs you money to do the thing, whether you
break even, or whether
you’re good enough at it that people would pay you to do it for them.
This metric doesn’t apply to all activities or skills, but it points in the direction of economic resiliency.
If there is only one thing you’re good enough at to get paid for, you have only one skill that will bring in income. What if your skill is stenography but you break your fingers? What if your skill is something AI is going to take over next week? Having one remunerable skill is fragile.
Just because you could get paid for a skill doesn’t mean you have to. You might be a good enough cook, bicycle mechanic, or tax expert to generate income from that activity if you wanted to, but not have any reason to seek remuneration for it. That’s fine. That’s a more robust circumstance to be in than that of the specialist.
The Three Category Model
The final way I look at skills is via the three activity categories of Fundamentals, Stoke, and Vocation.
Fundamental skills are the basic life skills that almost everyone has to do: cook, clean, dress, be warm and dry and secure at night, talk to other human beings, make decisions about what to eat, methods for consuming and processing information, get around, use technology.
Vocational activities are skills related to your job, career, source of remuneration, or life’s-work. You don’t have to be paid for something to be in this category, but it is where activities go that you consider Important and are outward facing. They have something to do with other people.
Stoke activities are whatever you are intrinsically motivated to do. This could be anything. Climbing, paddling, painting, hiking, reading, socializing, playing DnD, or building really elegant spreadsheets. These are things you do for the sake of the thing itself, not for any external consequence.
A single activity can be in two or all three categories. Maybe you love (are Stoked) to cook (a Fundamental activity) and you start a popup restaurant or cater or something (Vocation). The boundaries between the categories are blurry and I spend very little time fussing about where any activity or skill ‘belongs’.
An early draft of my skills and interests based on the Three Categories
Where to start?
It can all be overwhelming. Also, it is tempting to jump in to developing sexy skills while leaving boring fundamental skills half-learnt, or to jump between interests and not really getting anywhere with anything. It’s best to be strategic about skill acquisition. There is a point to this, after all.
I tried to start at the beginning and with my weaknesses. Who cares if I can save myself $300 per year on clothes because I learned to sew if I don’t know how to feed myself for less than $750 a month?
The first imperative is to increase freedom as quickly and durably as possible by decreasing expenses. Decreasing my burn rate would increase my runway, which would give me more time in the future to develop skills that might have no monetary payoff. I describe this idea in more depth in The Skill Ratchet.
I figured out how much I spent on stuff by building a spreadsheet, analyzing my expense data, making a number of forecasts, and playing with the numbers to see what I could make work. This makes me wonder if the first and most important Fundamental skill is “how to build a spreadsheet.” I lucked out and already had the skill from a decade and a half of engineering. (True story: the only tattoo I’ve ever seriously considered is an inner lower lip piece that says “VLOOKUP”.)
I know spreadsheets are boring… but they’re also tools of delicious freedom. I’m sure some personalities are capable of attaining freedom and sexy postconsumer lifestyles without any kind of financial tracking, but it sounds like voodoo magic to me. Good on ya if you got that kind of magic, but for the rest of us, skipping the skill of spreadsheeting is extremely bold, and not in the fun sexi pirate sort of bold, more like in the ‘I’ll try anything once, how bad can meth be?’ sort of bold. (I’m thinking about making some tutorials on ‘spreadsheeting for freedom for people who don’t like computers’. Anyone interested?)
I think the sequence looks something like this:
Start with Fundamental skills to get your burn rate as low as possible as quickly as possible. Use a spreadsheet to identify the easy wins and go after those first. Then go after skills that will make your life better. If you crowbar’d your food budget down to $100/month but really dislike eating beans and rice with DIY hot sauce three meals a day, then spend time becoming a better cook.
Fundamentals are always the first step, but then I’m not sure it matters if you look to Vocation or Stoke next. It either depends on your circumstances, or it doesn’t matter, or you should do both at the same time. This is part of what I mean about not fussing about the boundaries between the categories. This whole process is actually iterative and non-linear, so it’s far more important to start anywhere than to start perfectly. Just start.
If you have and need a job but it is stressful, you want to succeed harder at it, change jobs, or have any other goals, spend time in Vocational category next. Read Cal Newport and Scott Young, build a solid GTD system, learn attention control, identify important vocational skills to work on, etc. There are an enormous amount of free resources out there that will help you level up whatever vocational skills you identify as needful. Not sure where to find those resources? Put ‘learn google-fu’ at the top of your list.
The nature of the Stoke category is that you do whatever you want, whenever you want, as long as you have the time to do so responsibly. Arguably, the point of postconsumer praxis is to maximize the amount of time you have available to spend under conditions of Stoke. It is for me. The quickest and easiest way to do this is to find activities that fall under Stoke AND Fundamentals or Vocation.
As your freedom increases (due to having an FU stash, wise resource management practices, and a frugal lifestyle) and you ease back from the stressball burnout brinkmanship of ‘normal life’, you can take a harder look at Jacob’s eight categories of the Renaissance Ideal. Look for natural strengths to encourage and for limiting weaknesses to address.
Remember, this isn’t some linear process you are going through. It’s cyclical.
At some point you may find it useful to consider how many of your skills are potentially remunerable. It’s one thing to have a big pile of cash laying around somewhere. It’s another thing to know that you can generate income in any of six different ways. Having a big tank is nice, but if you have three to seven spigots all feeding from different springs, that’s a whole ‘nother level of robustness. Big tanks can burst or siphoned off by thieves in the middle of the night. Three springs can dry up but it’s all good; you’ve got access to four more.
Let Your Identity Be Your Guide
Everyone is unique. Everyone has a different destiny to fulfill. That’s why there is no prescriptive path for skill acquisition. Some things I want to spend thousands of hours on makes no sense for another person to spend more than a handful on.
Getting a clear sense of what your theme, identify, dharma, purpose, etc is will help guide you through selection of skills to pursue.
How do you discover what that identity is?
By trying a bunch of different stuff, probably. It’s iterative! I think it is rare to know or decide what your purpose/mission/dharma is and then get after the skills necessary to achieve it. Again, the linear model isn’t of much use for us.
As you clarify your purpose, or come up with hypotheses to test, that will guide your skill selection process.
For example, my ever-evolving statement of purpose at the moment is something like “become a polymathic pioneer species focused on iterating a new extra-paradigmatic techstack and cultural rule-set appropriate to the Deindustrial Revolution/Long Descent.” (This is why I’m terrible at answering the ‘so what do you do?’ question at cocktail parties. Or, would be, if I went to cocktail parties. Anyone throwing a cocktail party? Invite me?)
As such, the following skills are more or less aligned with what I’m trying to do with my life:
Getting salvaged materials. I know how to build and bodge stuff, but I have almost no experience sourcing salvaged materials. This skill touches on Technical, Social, and is primarily Vocational as I see ‘building stuff’ as a component of my life’s work. Also, I spend a significant amount of money on building materials. This is my next lowest hanging fruit in terms of reducing my cost of living even further.
Vegetable gardening. I’m a ‘good enough’ cook and eat for less than $200 a month, but since I live so far from town and don’t have or want a car getting good fresh vegetables is the weakest part of my food system, and what I either spend money on or do without. A bountiful garden up here would be just the thing. Trick is, I live in the Mojave desert! So another skill I want to learn is
Indoor passive solar greenhouse design and construction, a la the New Alchemists’ Ark except modified for this climate. This skill incorporates the previous two and involves earth-sheltered building science analysis and modeling, climate modeling, learning what plants crave, et cetera. I think it’s also likely to be an important skill in a world where the weather is getting less predictable. This skill is Technical, Ecological, Vocational, Stoke, and Fundamental.
Event hosting. I want to get good at initiating gatherings of people. This is primarily Social.
A nature based spirituality practice. I’m intrigued by modern Druidry and by Bill Plotkin’s work.
Writing fiction and creative nonfic. I’ve wanted to write fiction since forever. I’ve got a stack of books on the craft and once I’m done with my current writing project I’ll switch over to real fiction. This is pure Stoke with incidental Vocation as a potential side effect.
Motorcycle repair and customization. Pure Stoke. Motorcycles are fun.
Aesthetic Design. I’m not even sure what the right words are to describe this skill: I mean I want to make my builds beautiful and not just functional. Stoke, Vocational, Fundamental, Technical. This fits my purpose because I’m keen to make the lifeboat flotilla attractive both structurally and aesthetically, not only because I like beautiful things as much as the next guy, but because I don’t want to turn off people who would otherwise be down for flotilla life.
What Ties it All Together: Systems Thinking
I’m beating around the bush of a systems thinking approach, but this post is long enough. We’ll have to save a discussion of systems thinking for a follow up post. It’s highly relevant to the decision making process around skill acquisition, though, so keep that in mind as you think about the frameworks we’ve talked about here.