Hi friends,
I’m trying a new thing where instead of just automatically posting new posts, I write an actual letter to this email list once or twice a month. I’ll likely fiddle with the format until I settle on something I like.
New Content
In May of 2022 I decided to try to get my cost of living down to $5,000 a year. I wrote an update on how that’s going.
My friend Cody Markelz came back on the podcast and we talked about his ‘DIY Tenure’ concept — in short, to opt out of the structure of academia, engineer your own financial support, and pursue your own intellectual and personal interests with zero third party interference. Or admin meetings. Or interdepartmental drama.
What I’m Reading
Jamie Wheal (author of Recapture the Rapture and Stealing Fire) wrote a post on how it’s all gonna go down, a ten point reality check of what we’re in for. It’s a hard message but not one devoid of hope, for a certain value of that word. “We’re going over the falls in a barrel, wearing what we came in” aka no leveling up in Consciousness or techo-utopia will save the old world order, but also a reminder that “it won’t be all bad, all the time.” I’ve done some very valuable tuning to my mental models of the future (in particular facing the future and the lifeboat flotilla) based on his thinking in Rapture.
I just finished Stephen Kotler’s The Art of Impossible and I am 100% going to be writing a post on it soon. It fits hand in glove with my ideas about stoke, devotion, autonomy, mastery, relatedness, everything - and no surprise, as he cites a lot of the work I’ve been digging into myself in the field of self determination theory.
I stumbled upon the idea of prefigurative politics, which was a “oh there’s a word for that!?” moment for me. It’s the idea that instead of waiting for the revolution to effect the changes you want, you just start living the way you want the future to work from the bottom up. Which makes me think of Peter Kalmus’ book Being The Change.
Skillathon: Permaculture
Skillathon is going well. I’m up to my ears in permaculture books and drafting a Master Plan for Quail Haven. I’ve been scraping and analyzing weather data, I figured out how to grab 3d geometry from Google Maps to built an accurate sunpath model for my specific site (with high mountains all around, horizon sunset and ‘when the sun goes over the ridge’ are two very different times of day), and have been closely studying the local ecosystem and noting things like slope effect, natural windshields, surface runoff patterns, and the like.
I had a moment a week ago where I felt lost in the design theory and details of greywater irrigation beds and plant guild design, and realized I hadn’t stepped back and defined what exactly it was I wanted, and why I wanted it. I wrote:
I want to …. yeah, wtf do I want a permaculture project? It’s green AF and all the cool kids are doing it, but why do I want any kind of permaculture bullshit here? What is it that I actually want, when you strip away the labels and memes and postconsumer status plays?
I want resilience. I don’t want to rely entirely on industrial consumer logistics networks for food, water, fuel, energy, shelter, etc. As much as possible I want to have buffers and flows of human needs decoupled from industrial society flows. I want to live off of solar and rain income.
I want healthy abundance. I want to eat tomatoes that taste like fucking tomatoes. I want kale and spinach that is actually full of nutrients. I want to eat potatoes that are full of flavor like those potatoes I ate in France.
I want to live in a biodiverse garden. I want to hear birds and insects zooming around. I want to see bunnies and critters coming and going, feeding off the surplus abundance of the system here. I want to read a book in a hammock strung between two trees I planted, shaded by the overstory of the food forest, comfortably cooled by a breeze despite it being August in the Mojave.
I want to feel deeply connected to the land. I want the land to claim me. I want to be an integral part of this ecosystem, to be enfolded in the web of life here. I want to have my time here serve to benefit all life.
I want to create one more nucleus of biodiverse abundance for others to see, learn from, and go create their own nuclei.
I want to attract the kind of people I want to hang out with to come here and stay a while. I want to be able to host multiple people to work on my projects, their projects, the lifeboat flotilla, to just be.
I want a resilient homestead, not a farm. I’m not interested in making a living from selling yield.
Projects: The Thermal Energy Storage System
It’s been cold and rainy here. I reestablished my sleeping quarters and office activity back to Serenity, which has a woodstove, and abandoned the Studio to the winter.
But I’d really like to use the studio all year round. So a couple days ago I got my prototype Thermal Energy Storage system activated. Let me explain.
Late last summer, Quadalupe helped me build a shade structure out of salvaged solar panels.
I bought an electric resistance heating element, a replacement part for electrical water heaters.
I stuck it in a 14 gallon stainless steel tank I had laying around, and put the tank under my sleeping platform in the studio.
I wired up a temperature controller and a relay to control the heating element.
The idea is that when the sun shines, it dumps heat into the water tank. During the night the heat radiates (and convects, a bit) to the space, raising the minimum temperature the studio hits in the early morning.
I just got it wired up two days ago, and the good news is that it basically works. The relay isn’t doing anything, and for some reason the panel array voltage drops to 10v when it should be closer to 24v. So I’m only dumping 150w into the tank when I should be getting closer to 450w.
However! Even at this severely curtailed level of operation, initial data is encouraging. I think it’s going to dramatically increase the hours of usable time I can spend in the studio in winter… all for basically free, using salvaged panels that are serving a primary purpose of casting shade in the summer. Stack those functions, baby.
Introspection
In my previous life, when I daydreamed about being in total control of my life and blazing my own trail, I imagined that I would feel light, powerful, and dominant.
Now that I am finally off on my own, it often feels like I’m hanging on by my fingertips. There is always doubt.
I think that this is how it always feels, though, when you’re doing something creative. We’re wired to be doubtful of going against the grain, and for good reason. If this felt good, more people would do it, and society would be total chaos.
The trick is to not mind the pain (quoting TE Lawrence, or at least his line in the movie) - rather, to use it as a sign that you’re on the right path. If you think that the normal way of doing things is insane, and if you’ve committed to yourself to doing whatever is necessary to live intentionally and on your own terms, then you are signing up for fear and doubt. You’re signing up for nights spend wondering if you’re the insane one. You’re signing up to make cringe-worthy mistakes.
The trick is to find the doubt reassuring in its own way. The times in my life I felt most comfortable and most accepted are the times I felt the furthest from myself and what I believed in.
So. Full speed ahead.
—
A Question
In a post 1.5°C world, what makes the most sense to do today? If a 2+ °C world is baked into the cake, what pursuits no longer make sense? What counterintuitive behaviors might look strange now but will pay off in our future and the future of our children?
I’ll mull this one over for my next letter. I’d love to hear what you think.
Take care,
Tyler