I’m doing a newsletter series on the “Principles of Advanced Retroadaptics”. They are a rough primer to the content of the book I’m hammering out. Here’s the Prologue and Long Dance Principle, and here’s the Put Your Own Oxygen Mask on First Principle.
The Learn Useful Skills Principle:
Learn broad practical skills, as directed by interest/stoke
The more skills you have, the less money you need to maintain a certain Quality of Life. The less money you need, the easier it is to attain freedom. The more freedom you get, the more time you can spend developing skills. Crank this skill ratchet until you’re as free as you want to be and then do whatever you want. It’s a positive feedback loop.
It’s also fun because it’s a sensible way to rage against the machine without risking jail time. Consumer society would like us to be incompetent in almost every way except for whatever it is we do for work. This is because you can't sell stuff to people who know how to do things.
You can't sell a three hundred dollar machine that fries eggs to people who know how to use a frying pan and a spatula.
You can't sell high-fee managed brokerage services to people who know how to read books and use a basic spreadsheet.
You can't sell thousands of dollars of gym equipment or memberships to people who know how to do pushups and pistol squats.
My hi-tech gym equipment. Membership fees: $0.
Consumer ideology wants us all to believe that quality of life is a function of consumption, i.e. spending. The more you spend, the higher your quality of life. This is incorrect. Quality of life is a function of spending and skills at least. This is a fundamental principle of post-consumer mindset, that skills unlock access to an entirely new landscape of possibilities for you life.
The choice is yours.
Be a rebel. Learn useful skills.
Excerpt from my book draft:
“What’s the end game with all this skill acquisition? When do I know I’ve learned enough?” he asks.
I laugh. “You’ll never learn enough, that’s the best part. It’s an infinite game. The point of skill acquisition is that skill acquisition is fun, meaningful, and a very natural thing for a human being to do. Skill development isn’t a goal, it’s a process that you won’t want to stop. Once you get a solid practice of skill acquisition integrated into your lifestyle the idea of ever ‘stopping’ won’t make any sense to you. It’ll just be your way of life. Incidentally, this process will make your cost of living very low, it will make your household very resilient, and it will almost certainly make you a valuable contributing member of the unfolding future society that is rising out of the mess of the current arrangement.
“Developing a relationship with skill development that works for you is an important part of all of this. Developing a personalized set of skills that you can use to engage with the world in a productive, creative, unique way is how you simply leave the logic of consumerism behind you. It’s how you craft a lifestyle that is specifically yours and that you love to inhabit.”
More related to the Skill Development Principle:
In other news, more solar panels!
Speaking of skills, I helped a neighbor expand his solar production this month. He had a tracker with 620w panels nominal that were putting out about 450w because of age. Their demand had increased over the years and they had to run their generator a lot, so they wanted to increase production.
I helped swap the old panels out with two new 400w bifacial panels on the existing tracker, and then put another pair on a quickie ground mount rack. The existing solar charge controller is now just about maxed out and the batteries are getting a full charge from the sun every day.
Solar panels are so cheap these days that for these trackers don’t make economic sense these days for most applications. Instead of spending money on a tracker (and the post, and the concrete, and the labor), just buy another couple panels and keep the array fixed.
However, if you’ve already got a tracker on site, use it! They are cool tech and despite literally none of my neighbors doing any maintenance on their units for 25+ years, they all still work.