An element of intellectual self-reliance in which our ability to question, analyze, and seek increased understanding expands our perspective and brings additional clarity and wisdom.
By now you all know I rather enjoy the site Art of Manliness, though frankly it could almost as easily be called the Art of Common Sense. There are certainly a lot of articles exploring “manliness” from all angles, but there is also a lot about basic preparedness and self-reliance.Take their recent article, Sunday Fireside: Secure Your Base.
Deriving supposedly from Carl Von Clausewitz’ “On War,” writers Brett and Kate McKay discuss what “securing your base” means in practical, civilian ways:
Securing your base means establishing a self-sustaining, shock-resistant “headquarters” that is well-defended against disruptions from external forces.
They list foundational concepts such as:
Good health
Financial independence (avoiding debt)
Mechanical skills
Domestic skills
Strong social relationships with family and friends
Firmness in beliefs
That last point I found most interesting, as it was the least predictable:
Finally, a secure base requires secure beliefs. While philosophic and political positions can and should evolve over time, they should not be so unexamined, so lacking in well-studied context, that every current of change knocks you into an incapacitating stupor of confusion and cognitive dissonance. You should know why you believe what you believe.
I suspect many of us are experiencing some of that confusion and cognitive dissonance these days amid the political and social turmoil in the United States and around the world. We are being simultaneously told that “Speech is violence,” and “Violence is speech” as valid, peaceful protests transform into destructive mobs inflicting significant property damage, cultural vandalism, and loss of life on the very people they claim to be supporting in their “protests.” The only way out of this mess as a society comes from people firm in their principles insisting on a better way forward than what we’re currently getting.
The purpose behind securing your base is best summarized by the authors, and I’ll close with this:
The purpose of creating this kind of personal garrison isn’t to passively retreat from the theater of life; rather, it is to create a fortification from which to better launch your offensive operations.
About a month ago I began discussing an article from Wikihow.com on “4 Ways to Be Self Reliant,” by Trudi Griffin, LPC, MS. The article is more about relationships than what I would consider self-reliance, but she still makes some valid points. Today I want to look at her second point, managing money independently. She breaks money management down into six areas:
Learn how to manage money
Get out of debt
Pay cash instead of using your credit card
Keep cash on hand at all times
Own a home
Live within your means
To begin with Griffin warns against allowing others to manage your money. I agree with her basic premise, that you can lose your independence if you lost control of your money, but that depends on the nature of your relationship with that person. In most marriages one of the two usually assumes responsibility for managing the money. If you are good at communicating, have compatible financial goals, and trust one another it’s actually easier to have one partner take primary responsibility and keep the other informed. Her second concern is more valid: if the primary money manager is unable to continue in that role it may be very difficult for the other partner to step in. Even if you are not the money manager in your relationship, make sure you know how to access everything and are comfortable managing money yourself.
Griffin also encourages everyone to get out of debt, though what she really focuses on is keeping your debt manageable. According to her, your total long-term debt payments (mortgage, auto and school loans, and credit card debt) shouldn’t exceed 36% of your monthly income. If your debt payments exceed this level you should make every effort to get that debt load paid down as quickly as possible.
As a corollary to that, Griffin also advocates paying cash for everything, and to keep cash on hand (and in savings) at all times. This seems primarily to be to keep your credit card debt low, and I somewhat agree with this. If you have difficulty paying off your credit cards, or can’t resist charging more money on them, then by all means you should avoid using those credit cards. But if you have developed financial discipline and never miss making your payments because you’re able to set money aside to make those payments, there may be a way to make your credit cards work for you.
I recently read I Will Teach You To Be Rich, by Ramit Sethi. The man has some good ideas about acquiring, building, and managing wealth–and some ideas I’m less keen on. But one suggestion he makes is to put your regular expenses, as much as possible, on your credit cards and then set that money aside to pay the bill off quickly. If you get the right credit card you can earn travel miles or cash back rewards that amount to free money. I’m disciplined with managing my budget, and so I decided to try it. I haven’t put as much on my card as I could, but already within the past several months I’ve picked up nearly $250 of cash back rewards. It’s free money. But if you’re not so good at managing your credit card debt and paying off your account monthly, it’s best to follow Griffin’s advice and avoid credit cards altogether.
Griffin’s next suggestion is to own a home. I’m not as sure about this one as I once was. Right now interest rates are low, so you may only pay about 50% more than the cost of your house in repaying the loan. Depending on how long you live there, the value of the home may increase well beyond that. Our first house did just that. But you don’t always control how long you live somewhere these days. We had to move when I lost my job ten years ago, and the timing was terrible–the housing market had collapsed and I owed considerably more on that house than I could sell it for.
There’s also the maintenance costs and hassle of a house to consider. So far since moving into our house nine years ago we’ve replaced the roof, replaced the furnace, air conditioner, and water heater, and bought high-efficiency windows. Granted, that last purchase was voluntary, but that was easily an additional 30-40% the cost of the house we had to find within the first six years of buying it. That, on top of a myriad of other maintenance expenses through the years. If you don’t like or can’t afford doing your own maintenance, or if you can’t be sure how long you’ll be staying where you live, a house may not be the best option. Everyone needs to evaluate their priorities themselves in this area.
Last, but by no means least, we should live within our means. That usually means several things that have to happen. First, you need to know (or learn) exactly how much money you spend each month and where it goes. Second, where at all possible, and perhaps not matter what the sacrifice, you need to adjust your spending to where it is less than what you earn. Third, you need to continually monitor your spending and your justifications for spending and see how you measure up against your budget. You need to be willing and able to adjust your spending to remain below your means–and save the difference religiously.
Frankly, learning how to budget and how to stick to that budget is one of the most important skills one can develop for self-reliance. That’s pretty much the key to achieving financial independence and taking care of “future you.” Or perhaps your spouse and children after you’re gone. Usually in life there are only two choices: either your master your money or your money masters you. Money is seldom a kind master, but it can be a real friend when you learn to master it. Mastering your finances is a key step toward true self-reliance.
The problem with being a free thinker is that it just takes so much more time and effort than just accepting whatever your told. Now, of course I’m saying this tongue-in-cheek, as the cost of not questioning much of what you hear is potentially much, much higher. But in an era when information is available at much higher volumes and speed than any of us can hope to consume, it’s a considerable sacrifice to weigh everything critically.
Take for example the reporting on a recent Gallup poll. I first learned of this poll via an article on a news and opinion site that trends conservative. The headline read thusly:
Gallup Poll Shows That No One Thinks the Media Is Doing a Good Job During the Pandemic
The article cites another article from the Washington Examiner also reporting on the same Gallup Poll, so I went to read the Examiner article. Their headline?
Media botched the virus crisis and made it ‘worse’: Poll
And then I got a novel idea: Let’s go look at the poll itself! There were links, so…why not? Note we are now heading three layers deep. And how do they title the results of their poll?
Public Sees Harm in Exaggerating, Downplaying COVID-19 Threat
Following this trail of headlines just by themselves we see the effect of ye olde “Telephone Game.” We somehow went from “over- or under-playing the threat both believed to cause harm” to “The media is doing a poor job.”
But wait, we still haven’t even looked at the actual text of the articles yet. I’m going to ignore the first two and focus in on just the article written around the presentation of the data itself. Here’s their lede:
Media bias is a great concern for Americans, and the implications of such bias for society are magnified when the nation is in crisis, such as the current coronavirus pandemic. A new Gallup/Knight Foundation survey finds that a majority of Americans are concerned about biased news coverage of the coronavirus situation, including reporting that downplays the threat but also reporting that exaggerates it.
Democrats and Republicans diverge on whether exaggerating or downplaying the coronavirus threat is the greater risk. However, they generally agree that the crisis is worse than it needed to be, and that the news media should not wait for the crisis to ease before reporting on official actions that exacerbated the coronavirus situation.
It seems like a pretty good summary. Let’s look at the questions asked and the data obtained and tabulated:
This is as far as the first two articles really get. They focus in on the Republicans vs. Democrats angle, and also on the fact that the majority of all Americans find both exaggeration and down-playing to be harmful. But outside of the data itself, notice something a bit off? They’re asking what they essentially treat as inverse questions, but they word them slightly differently each time. When asking about down-playing they ask if it threatens public health. When they ask about exaggeration, they ask if it causes unnecessary harm to individuals and the country.
Why would they ask them differently? Wouldn’t it make the most sense to ask either “Any news organization that attempts to [down-play/exaggerate] the threat of the Coronavirus causes puts the health of the public in jeopardy” or “Any news organization that attempts to [down-play/exaggerate] the threat of the Coronavirus causes causes unnecessary harm to individuals and the country”? Wouldn’t that make the two questions equally weighted and inverse?
This may be displaying some of my own bias here, but it seems to me that framing the harm in terms of “public health” would tend to grab the interest of Democrats, while framing it in terms of individuals and the country would resonate more with Republicans. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that those groups do tend to rate the harm higher accordingly. Independents, predictably, seem to walk the middle of the road. Could it be this poll was designed to elicit a desired result outside of the stated objective?
But let’s look at the remaining questions and results:
The third question is fairly straightforward: Was the pandemic more harmful to the US than it needed to be? Interestingly here the independents agree most, but pretty much everyone agrees that it was. But what I don’t see here is any particular assignation of blame. We also don’t see any attempt to define “harm.” Was the harm in terms of public health, or to individuals and the country? Do people believe the unnecessary harm was caused by media reporting, let alone exaggeration or down-playing? That’s not part of the question. What about a lack of solid information, down-played or exaggerated? Also not addressed. One might infer the Democrats think the harm came from downplaying, while Republicans think it was from exaggeration, but causation was never addressed in this question. People simply think more harm was done than should have been.
The last question is just kinda of weird. It asks how people want the actions of public officials and the effects of their decisions to be reported on. Not surprisingly, as Donald Trump seems to be the main central figure under the microscope much of the time, a very high number of Democrats want them covered now. But also a high number of Republicans want coverage now, as well. But really, what value do we derive from this question? Evidently pretty much everyone wants the media to cover the actions of public officials and the results of those actions. There’s nothing at all here about whether or not we trust the media to cover it fairly, or even if we want it covered fairly. There’s really nothing here to support the Washington Examiner’s supposition that we believe the media botched their coverage. Same for PJ Media’s claim that the poll shows the media is not performing well in the crisis.
Okay, thanks for sticking with me this far. The bottom line here is regardless of what I think of the validity of the poll, the pollsters themselves did not attempt to read anything into the data that wasn’t supported by the data. They did a decent job. Less admirable was the news media’s interpretation thereof. Both headlines and articles try to get more out of the data than is really there. I’m not entirely sure about the Examiner’s leanings, but a quick online search suggests they lean right. And the right tends to be convinced that the media is biased left and/or doing a poor job of unbiased reporting. While it’s amusing that we have media claiming the media is doing a poor job, it seems evident they’re claiming it with very little substance to go on here.
But if we weren’t aware of their bias beforehand it would be easy to assume that the PJ Media article’s assessment is correct because it echoes the Washington Examiner’s assessment. And since PJ Media quotes from the the Examiner, they invite us to not look any further, not even to read the Examiner’s article. We have to dig down two levels to find that both media outlets are creating something out of nothing.
As much as I hate to say it, because I’m basically a lazy man, to be a true free thinker we have to do our homework. To do otherwise is to be misled. And the world needs more true free thinkers.
Scott Galloway, a Silicon Valley prognosticator with a respectable track record is predicting the Cornavirus and resulting stop-gap measures of moving education online is going to become the disruption that changes the university system forever, with tech companies partnering with colleges to become hybrid, virtual campuses. In an interview with James D. Walsh of New York Magazine he had this to say:
Colleges and universities are scrambling to figure out what to do next year if students can’t come back to campus. Half the schools have pushed back their May 1 deadlines for accepting seats. What do you expect to happen over the next month?
There’s a recognition that education — the value, the price, the product — has fundamentally shifted. The value of education has been substantially degraded. There’s the education certification and then there’s the experience part of college. The experience part of it is down to zero, and the education part has been dramatically reduced. You get a degree that, over time, will be reduced in value as we realize it’s not the same to be a graduate of a liberal-arts college if you never went to campus. You can see already how students and their parents are responding.
At universities, we’re having constant meetings, and we’ve all adopted this narrative of “This is unprecedented, and we’re in this together,” which is Latin for “We’re not lowering our prices, bitches.” Universities are still in a period of consensual hallucination with each saying, “We’re going to maintain these prices for what has become, overnight, a dramatically less compelling product offering.”
In fact, the coronavirus is forcing people to take a hard look at that $51,000 tuition they’re spending. Even wealthy people just can’t swallow the jagged pill of tuition if it doesn’t involve getting to send their kids away for four years. It’s like, “Wait, my kid’s going to be home most of the year? Staring at a computer screen?” There’s this horrific awakening being delivered via Zoom of just how substandard and overpriced education is at every level. I can’t tell you the number of people who have asked me, “Should my kid consider taking a gap year?”
…
Ultimately, universities are going to partner with companies to help them expand. I think that partnership will look something like MIT and Google partnering. Microsoft and Berkeley. Big-tech companies are about to enter education and health care in a big way, not because they want to but because they have to.
Let’s look at Apple. It does something like $250 billion a year in revenue. Apple has to convince its stockholders that its stock price will double in five years, otherwise its stockholders will go buy Salesforce or Zoom or some other stock. Apple doesn’t need to double revenue to double its stock price, but it needs to increase it by 60 or 80 percent. That means, in the next five years, Apple probably needs to increase its revenue base by $150 billion. To do this, you have to go big-game hunting. You can’t feed a city raising squirrels. Those big-tech companies have to turn their eyes to new prey, the list of which gets pretty short pretty fast if you look at how big these industries need to be in that weight class. Things like automobiles. They’ll be in the brains of automobiles, but they don’t want to be in the business of manufacturing automobiles because it’s a shitty, low-margin business. The rest of the list is government, defense, education, and health care. People ask if big tech wants to get into education and health care, and I say no, they have to get into education and health care. They have no choice.
There’s a certain amount of sense in what he’s telling us. American universities have begun to lose sight of their original purpose: to dispense knowledge. They’ve become factories for wholesale social change, and in the process have added so much overhead to their cost structures that the price of their knowledge-offering has increased exponentially while the actual value grows increasingly questionable. And now the Coronavirus has shown students that not only is the knowledge product not worth the cost, but the online experience has diminished it even further. It seems doubtful that universities will be able to continue charging $50,000+ a year for Zoom classes. Where they once derided online universities such as University of Phoenix (my MBA alma mater) they may find themselves studying their models, perhaps even purchasing them outright.
However, if such a model is to work there will first come a major upheaval. Today’s teachers are ill-prepared for the online classroom. I’ve been watching as my sons have struggled with on-line school from their local high school. The quality and intensity of the assignments have diminished, while the teachers largely have retreated to a consulting role, not even attempting to teach the subject matter in even a virtual classroom setting (with the interesting exception of their release-time religious studies teacher). One son is struggling mightily to complete the two classes most critical to his future career plans because the teacher had largely left them on their own.
I don’t doubt there are teachers who can adapt, improvise and overcome, and perhaps even thrive in this new model, especially at the college level. As I mentioned above, I earned my post-graduate degree in a hybrid setting, long before video conferencing software became cheap and ubiquitous, and we were able to make it work. But we were all working professionals who had outgrown the need for classroom learning. We knew how to learn. This model may not work so well for K-12 education, and I suspect it won’t be applied any time soon.
The university system, however, is ripe for it. The real question is whether universities will be willing to give up their role as engines of social change and retreat back to mere education. Or will the corporate partners assist them in policing the minds of their students more efficiently than ever before? We may be on the verge of a fundamental ground-shift, and only time will tell if it was for better or worse.
The story is told of Alexander the Great visiting Diogenes and finding the philosopher laying in the sun. Alexander approached him and asked him if he could anything for him. Diogenes replied, “Yes, stand a little out of my sun.”
Diogenes’ simple, ascetic lifestyle may seem to exemplify self-reliance, but these externals are not its essence.
Rather, self-reliance is a mindset, an approach to life that can be adopted whether you live in a wilderness cabin or a “little box” in the suburbs. Self-reliance is about living a life in which you make decisions and opinions with primary respect to your own experience of the world. You trust yourself. You’re true to yourself.
This doesn’t mean living in a void, it just means that we’re conscious about our relationship to the world and other people. It’s not rejecting external advice outright, but trusting ourselves enough to sift through which advice is worthy. We’re aware of the agendas of others, and don’t let them sway us from our self-determined path. Self-reliance doesn’t necessarily mean rejecting all established customs and values, it just means experimenting with them so we know if they work for us. It’s putting stock in our inner wisdom.
There’s a lot to unpack in this, but the last paragraph is especially of interest to me, especially these two lines: “It’s not rejecting external advice outright, but trusting ourselves enough to sift through which advice is worthy. We’re aware of the agendas of others, and don’t let them sway us from our self-determined path.” Put simply, we need to think for ourselves.
Far too often these days we are expected to buy into an ideology and follow it to the exclusion of all else. If we relate with an identity group we must think a certain way to remain in step with our fellows. Our news media, where once they would simply report the facts and let us decide what those facts mean, increasingly tells us what to think of those facts as well. Anyone who disagrees needs to be beaten down. We get our information from headlines and proceed as if we know and understand not just the details, but the nuance.
But how can we? Why should we? Why should we blindly accept another person’s “truth?”
The short answer is, “We shouldn’t.” We need to question, to seek to see as broad a perspective as we can, to measure what we’re being told against what we have learned through our own experience. We need to seek to verify, not just accept. We have far too many examples of history where terrible wrongs were committed under the cover of “I was just following orders,” or “It didn’t want to go against the crowd.” If we are to be judged and sentenced we should at least be so for our own beliefs, not for someone else’s.
Intellectual self-reliance is not an easy path. The world is a complex place, and it takes time and effort to sort through that complexity. But while we need to question, we can’t afford to continually question everything. We need some solid ground to stand on before we can move forward. We should be willing to adjust as we discover new information and encounter new perspectives, but be prepared to stand firm on our own foundation when a choice must be made.
Perhaps most importantly, even when we come to reject a particular philosophy or ideology, we need to resist the easy temptation of “that which we cannot believe we must despise, must hate.” We can oppose, but even when our own thinking in solid we can still learn much about ourselves and our beliefs through associations with those with whom we disagree. Someone with whom we can disagree, yet still respect and listen to, is invaluable in this world. It’s far too easy these days to dismiss anyone who thinks differently, but such intellectual reactionism is as wrong and dangerous as those who follow the herd. From Eschenroeder again:
In fact, there may never have been a time when developing this type of self-reliance has been more important. We’re over-politicized and polarized. Advertisements are creeping further and further into our content, making them less obvious. The Internet has given us two or two-thousand sides to every story. Social media feeds allow our peers to weigh in on our every decision. The comment section of a blog post allows us to see what other people thought of an article before we’ve formed our own opinion. It’s increasingly difficult to live a life that is inner-directed rather than other-directed.
In order to operate effectively in this kind of autonomy-sapping environment, developing a strong sense of self-reliance is crucial.
To be truly self-reliant may mean we not only stand firm, but that we stand apart. To follow the crowd too closely, however well-intentioned, is to invite disaster. As anyone in a mob or riot or Black-Friday frenzy understands, if you stand in the middle of any crowd it can be extremely difficult to escape before they run headlong off the cliff. Keep an intellectual distance, and trust in yourself to decide what is best for you.
When most people think of self-reliance, when they think of it at all, they tend to think of emergency preparedness, homesteading, or living off the grid. True self-reliance, however, encompasses much more than just the external factors in our lives. It’s as much an internal state of being as an accumulation of physical resources.
This was reinforced for me by an article co-authored by Trudi Griffin, LPC, MS on “4 Ways to Be Self Reliant.” I’ll probably revisit this article more than a few times; there’s a lot there, and it covers a lot of ground. The article begins, however, with emotional self-reliance, or avoiding relational dependency:
Although being in a committed, bonded relationship can enrich your life, feeling unable to function without another person could lead to a problem like Relational Dependency.[1] Relational Dependency is a progressive disorder, meaning that the relationship may start off healthy but one person becomes gradually more controlling of or dependent upon the other, which can lead to an unhealthy relationship. Furthermore, self-actualization is needed for personal growth and is thought to be an essential need that motivates our behavior.[2] In general, those who are independent and self-reliant typically survive and function better in society than those who are dependent on others for happiness and sustainability. Taking control of basic tasks and life skills will not only help you stay in control of your own life but will ultimately contribute to making you a happier person.
Some of the steps Griffin recommends:
Assume responsibility for your life: This I took as meaning taking control of the little things in daily life, such as cleaning up after yourself, paying your bills on time, getting to appointments on time, etc. It begins with the realization that no one else is responsible for your success or failure. It’s up to you to take care of yourself and your environment.
Be informed: “Information is power, so having information will give you the power to make your own decisions and assert your independence,” Griffin tells us. To do that she recommends a rounded approach to keeping up on what is going on in your neighborhood, your job, your town and so on, up to the level of world events. The more your know the more influence you can exert on the world around you.
Know where you are going: Decide what you want. Develop a plan. Break that plan down into goals. Seek guidance where needed. But if you don’t know where you’re going with your life the world will always step in to offer alternative options–most of which will not ultimately benefit you.
Make your own decisions: All of the above work together to help you make your own decisions–and make better decisions when you make them. It’s okay to consider the needs of others, or to seek their advice, but take the final responsibility for your decision and do what is best for you. Letting others make decisions for you is to give up your independence.
There is more–much more–to this article. I suggest you read the entire thing…or hang around. I’ll more than likely come back to it again.
As a general rule, buying bulk is a good way to save money. But one has to be careful. Take for example my recent toilet paper shopping for my business. We have a regular catalog for a business supplies, so I first looked there. We could buy TP by the case, getting a case of 96 rolls for about $50. Sounds good.
But then I compared it with our household brand. We get that stuff in packs of 24 rolls for about $4.80. That’s about 20 cents compared to about 50 cents in the bulk case. Not so great. But then I remembered that there are different sizes of rolls. I quickly checked the stuff we use at home, and it worked out to 88 square feet per roll. Armed with that information I checked the bulk stuff again. They didn’t give any figures on square footage.
Comparing apples and oranges–the bane of bargain shopping.
Fortunately they did list sheets per roll, and so did our household brand. It turns out the bulk stuff has about 500 sheets per roll, whereas the household stuff only has about 175. Simple math reveals that with the bulk stuff you’re paying about .112 cents per sheet, where the household TP comes in at .114 cents per sheet. Woo. Big difference. You’re not really saving much going bulk in this case.
Now the supply catalog gives even bigger discounts the more cases you buy, but we’re a small business. It’ll probably take us a year to use up the entire case. It’s worth it to always have some on hand–we can’t exactly close the shop while we run to the store for more TP–but really, it’s not that much of a savings.
Far too often that’s how it is buying bulk. Rather than really providing savings, they will mask information to make it only look like you’re getting more for your money. They make it as hard to compare with the “regular” quantities as they can. You may save some money, but you have to buy a lot before you really start to see any significant savings.
Do your homework and your math. There are real deals out there. But now that bulk is big business, it’s still very much “Let the buyer beware.”
What is the mentality of “free”? It’s the belief that “free” means there is NO cost! Take the lunches I mentioned: sure, they’re not asking the kids who come to hand over some cash to get lunch, but that food doesn’t just materialize out of nowhere and the people there cooking and serving aren’t just doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. SOMEONE is paying for this program — in this case the federal government, which translates to the taxpayers!
Rhonda Hetzel at Down To Earth Forum has an interesting essay examining the idea that unwarranted concern over food safety has made us all dependent on pre-packaged foods. I think there is something to that.
For one thing, marketing has long focused on showing how a product fills your needs, and they’re not above creating a need where there is none, even if it means scaring you to death. I remember a friend of mine years ago trying to sell me on a vitamin program based on this apocalyptic presentation that did its best to convince us that we would all die terrible, awful deaths without their vitamins. I didn’t buy it, or the vitamins.
For another, though it may have gotten its start in marketing, the anti-germ crusade has taken on a life of its own. We are so concerned about germs that we are using stronger and stronger products whose only real effect is to force-evolve more potent germs while simultaneously weakening our own natural defenses.
Now, I’m not an un-hygenic person, but I often observed at work how many people would take their paper towel they had just dried their hands on and use it to open the door out of the restroom so they wouldn’t have to expose themselves to the germs on the door handle. I don’t know if this helped them any, but I suspect all it did was make the door handle moist, thus extending the life expectancy of any germs that were there. In any case, I didn’t do that, and I was, if not sick less often, not sick any more frequently than they were.
At the same company we had executives who would spend months at a time at our India office, living amid conditions that would make most of us shudder. Invariably they would all get terribly sick within a few weeks of arriving there. Yet they all observed that the Indians themselves were very seldom sick–and they (the executives) seldom got sick again.
Now I’m not recommending we all start living in squalor or abandon basic hygiene in order to start building up immunity to common germs, but I do think we could relax a bit and not insist on surgical-theater cleanliness for every room in our house.
