What Can You Make?

What can you make?  The answer can't be money.  Can you make bread, or sew a rip in your pants, or build a book, or invent a game?  I think it's useful to take a little assessment of what tangible skills you have.  If the supermarket were closed all month, how would you eat?   If the internet and cable TV were out, how would you entertain yourself?  We've been in our new place for a month and don't have internet.  For the first few days, I would get home from work, settle in, and have an urge to get online, which I couldn't do.  Then I might start reading a book.  Or plunking out something on the piano-keyboard.  Or playing cards, or making some weird food, or calling a friend... Considering the fact that I have internet 8 hours a day at work, I'm not exactly disconnected, but I realized that I was disturbingly dependent on the internet as a source of time-filling entertainment.  Instead, we're filling that time with activities like music, art, reading, cooking, writing, etc.

Some rights reserved by ryochiji

In her article "Solving Unemployment through New Uses of Time," Julie Schor writes that
"declining [work] hours could re-balance the labor market and free up time for people to engage in low-impact, self-providing activities that reduce their dependence on the market. These include growing food, generating energy, building housing, and making small-scale manufactured goods, such as apparel and household items."  Some people are calling this reskilling.  Transition Town Totnes frames the need for reskilling pretty well: "we have lost many of the basic skills taken for granted by every previous generation – to grow, gather, preserve and cook local and seasonal food; to repair clothes and household goods; to make and mend rather than throw away; to work with local materials such as wood and clay for items of function as well as beauty."  I'm 10 pages into Radical Homemakers by Shannon Hayes, a book which I foresee will get me very jazzed about at least trying to make a sourdough starter.

Consider this angle.  What gives you feelings of accomplishment, what makes you feel satisfied?  At the end of the day, what was your favorite activity?  For me, the answer to these questions shows a pattern:  I feel most satisfied when I create instead of consume, ie making a little mosaic instead of watching Psych, even though Psych is funny.  And delightfully, being self-reliant and creative in meeting your needs is often very frugal.

 

Create or Consume?