Category Archives: Commentary

Personal posts on general, administrative, or non-related topics.

And I’m back. Almost.

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It’s been a while. I issued a pre-emptive mea culpa a while back in anticipation of some surgery I had coming up and suggested I might not be posting until it was all in the rear-view mirror. Well, it’s all nearly in the rear view mirror now, and I’m trying to gear up to come back.

So, what have I learned over the past couple months? Well, for one, to quote Count Rugen from “The Princess Bride,” “If you haven’t got your health, then you haven’t got anything.” Knowing for the past couple years that this surgery was possible I’ve made a conscious effort to exercise more, eat a little less, and generally be in better health. I’m fortunate in that my health has never been that bad to begin with, but good health with really helps when facing major surgery. The average hospital stay in my state for the type of surgery I had is six days. I was there four. It may be that I was just so ornery they wanted to get rid of me, but I’ll claim a victory for exercise and eating right.

But even then, once out of the hospital I was under significant restrictions on my physical activity. I wasn’t allowed to drive (not a big deal right now, as I seldom go anywhere anyway), lift anything over ten pounds, and had to avoid reaching very far from my body. Just those few restrictions were frustrating. It’s amazing how much of my normal activity violates at least one of those last two restrictions. I’m fortunate enough to have a desk job that I was already doing from home, so I could get back to work only a week after returning home, but so many other things I wanted to do, or felt I should do just weren’t allowed. I’ll admit I’ve felt pretty useless.

So I can only imagine what it’s like to be someone whose health in general places restrictions on their activity. Value what health you have, and do what you can to maintain it, even improve it. It’s difficult to be self-reliant without good health.

On a similar note, I’ve learned that monitoring your health is important, too, for other reasons. Because I’ve known this was coming I was able to be prepared. As a contractor, I’m on a high-deductible insurance plan. But since I knew this surgery was coming I’ve spent the past couple years saving up enough to cover it.

By contrast, during my recovery period my son crashed while mountain biking and ended up in the emergency room. Frankly, that’s something I should have predicted and tried to save up more money for, but I didn’t. I wasn’t quite so prepared for that one. But thanks to this gentle reminder (which could have been much worse), I intend to be next time (knock on wood, spit three times over my shoulder).

Lesson three was the gentle reminder that sometimes we just can’t be self-reliant. I’m grateful for the wonderful medical staff who took such good care of me. I forgive you for waking me up every two hours; it was your job to make sure nothing was going wrong. Aside from than that, you guys totally rocked! Thank you! And thanks to my wife and my two boys at home who picked up the slack for all I couldn’t do. And also for all those who offered their help. As grateful as I am there wasn’t much my family couldn’t handle, I’m glad to have more family and friends gladly standing by to help.

This week I’m scheduled to see my surgeon. If all has gone well, my restrictions will be removed and I can start getting back to normal. I’ll still have to take some things easy and work my way back, but I’ll get there. One of the first things I need to do is get back on track with our self-reliance plans. And hopefully that means more posts in the works.

Are we really driving safer?

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In an effort to lower our car insurance premium we recently enrolled in one of those safe driver programs where they put a device in your car that talks to your smart phone and tattles on you to corporate. So far we only did it with my oldest son and I, and I have to say, I find it more annoying than informative.

It may be that other companies’ devices are able to gather more information to tell what’s really going on, but I doubt it. Ours basically uses an accelerometer to tell if you start too quickly, turn too tightly, or brake too suddenly. I assume it uses GPS data to tell how fast you are going and what the speed limit is in that area–which raises concerns, as such databases are not always correct. Since it also works with an app on your phone, it also can monitor your cellphone use while you drive.

It does okay. I do need to remind my son to slow down, and to not use his phone while driving. But it’s not as smart as one would hope. It can’t tell if you’re just checking something really quick on your phone while at a light. It can’t tell if you’re braking hard because you aren’t paying attention to the car ahead of you or because someone pulled out in front of you. If you brake hard, it dings you. If you corner quickly it dings you, even though sometimes you are making a left turn and want to get out of the way.

In short, it can’t tell if you’re a bad driver or consciously trying to avoid an accident. If some jerk cuts in front of you and then hits the brakes hard you’re supposed to just run into the back of him while you brake slowly, I guess.

We’re still in our first monitoring period, so it remains to be seen just how much this will impact our discount, but we’ve never been able to manage better than around 94%, and have usually been in the high 80% range. I’m starting to understand that commercial with the people yelling at other drivers, “DON’T MESS WITH MY DISCOUNT!” Because you can be safe driver (I’ve never had an accident, and it’s been nearly thirty years since my last ticket) and yet responding to someone else’s bad driving will still bring your score down.

If we don’t get a good discount this next time I’m yanking the whole thing. I don’t need to stress while I’m driving.

Unfocused and missing in action

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Speaking of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, I recently received a Need up-side the head. You’d think that fifteen-plus years of monitoring a pending health problem would make it difficult for it to surprise you, but… surprise! It’s time to deal with it in a surgical way.

I guess the one advantage to this being something always hanging out there on the horizon is that we’re financially prepared for this. That part shouldn’t be an issue. It’s just the actual surgery part that I’m struggling with. The risk is low at my age and general health, low enough that most people would gladly take that bet, especially if the stakes were lower.

In any case, I’ve not been thinking self-reliance much lately, and probably won’t be again until this is all in the rear-view mirror. Though much of what I’m currently working on is self-reliance centered, or should be, I’m not interested in talking about it yet. I’m sure that will come. I may post some, I may not, but for the next month at least it’s probably safe to assume there’ll be no more content forthcoming. Unless there’s someone else out there who would like to guest post for a while.

Until then, see you all on the flip-side!

Is self-reliance a white invention?

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I don’t want to get political on this blog, but this week saw a rather…interesting…publication from the National Museum of African American History and Culture, part of the Smithsonian Institution. The publication* attempts to spell out the elements of “White” culture that, because of the white majority status, may have been adopted by minorities. As with most generalizations, it’s difficult to know what to make of it, but I did find interesting what it had to say about self-reliance:

Rugged Individualism:

– The individual is the primary unit

– Self-reliance

– Independence & autonomy highly valued + rewarded

– Individuals assumed to be in control of their environment, “You get what you deserve”

Taking all of this at face value, it would appear that self-reliance and individuality are inherent in being “white.” Less clear, however, is whether they can be assumed to be unique to Caucasian peoples, or even if there is any ethnicity to which they are not inherent. Certainly cooperation and compliance are more prevalent in some other cultures than in America, as witnessed by the willingness in other countries to adopt blanket measures against the COVID-19 virus.

But is this generalization even true of Americans as a whole? Identity has become a major issue in America, with individuals relating more closely to factors other than race. I’m not so sure we can claim that the individual is the primary unit anymore–if it ever was. Likewise, independence and autonomy is increasingly downplayed, even criticized. Helicopter parents and lawnmower parents are witnesses for the contrary opinion.

In some ways independence and autonomy are still valued and rewarded, but there seem to be plenty of rewards for going with the herd these days, as well. Both sides of the increasingly prevalent “cancel culture” reinforce this. Usually the one being canceled was doing something independent and autonomous, and the mobs doing the canceling seem to lack independence, if not autonomy.

I would also argue that the individualist and the self-reliant understand they are not in control of their environment. What they “deserve” scarcely enters into their calculations. What they want is what drives them, coupled with focused, committed work to overcome or compensate for an environment that is ambivalent at best, hostile at worst. They don’t assume the environment is just going to roll over and give them what they want.

What one “deserves” is more the watch-cry of the entitled, a most decidedly reliant group if there ever was one. It’s the motivation of the proverbial “Karen,” who assumes he/she deserves everything precisely the way they want it, with no more effort on their part than to harangue into compliance those who stand in their way.

It would be interesting to conduct a study of non-white immigrants to the United States, and to other countries. Do those immigrants who succeed here do so in spite of their non-compliance with dominant, white culture? Or do they succeed because they came here already equipped with similar values instilled by their native cultures? Or is it that they recognize in American culture the same values they have sought to develop, and that drives their decision to come here instead of other places they could go? Can immigrants without those values succeed just as easily or well in countries with entirely different values?

I’m willing to accept, depending on definition, that America, by and large, is an individualist society. Individualism, however, is a two-edged sword, and could just as easily manifest in very un-self-reliant ways. But in any case, if the above assumptions on individualism and self-reliance can currently be considered true, it’s also true that those values are very much under siege, and the undermining of those values is largely the source of any decline in the effectiveness of our culture. If it is indeed becoming increasingly harder to “make it” in America, there’s as good a chance it is due to the quality and approach of Americans trying to make it, as any change in the environment in which we operate.

From a self-reliance standpoint, at the heart of self-reliance is the assumption that we are not in control of our environment, but that knowing that, we can do things to be prepared for when things don’t go our way. We can anticipate the most likely fluctuations in that environment and be prepared with backup plans. We can build up reserves of whatever we need to ride out periods of scarcity and uncertainty.

If the self-reliant attitude were truly intrinsic in American “white” culture this blog wouldn’t be necessary. It would be as redundant as sites pushing the value of education, or clean water, or wearing clothing. But it is precisely because many of those values listed by the NMAAHC are not prevalent in modern culture any more that we see much of the turmoil we currently experience in this country. It is a return to those values that is needed if we’re going to reverse the decline we are in.

*- The publication has evidently been removed now because of the controversy.

Living with self-reliance

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Okay, let’s go back and look at the third section of Trudi Griffin’s wiki-How article, How to Be Self Reliant. Last time we talked about managing your money independently. This time we go broad with the following topics:

  • Identify and have knowledge of which things you must be responsible for
  • Cook your own meals
  • Plant a garden
  • Master emergency health basics
  • Understand basic auto mechanic repair
  • Maintain your health
  • Know when to visit your doctor
  • Live off the grid

The first, knowing what you are responsible for, seems fairly obvious, or should be. Unfortunately we live in a time when people really don’t seem to know. Filing taxes, paying off credit card bills, paying the electric bill–these should be obvious. But whose responsibility is that patch of grass along the side of your house on the other side of the sidewalk from your fence? Do you know how your estate is handled in your state? Do you know where to vote? There is a lot to get to know in any new situation, and for many of them ignorance is no excuse.

When it comes to cooking I may diverge from Griffin a little. I think there’s a difference between not cooking for yourself and not knowing how to cook for yourself. If your priorities and income are such that you want to eat out, that’s not necessarily bad. Griffin cites money savings and better health as benefits, and while I agree on the monetary savings, it’s entirely possible to eat unhealthy at home, too, so perhaps learning about nutrition should be included in this?

Planting a garden within whatever space you have could be rewarding, educational, and cut food costs a little, even if it’s a little window-ledge herb garden in an apartment building or a lemon tree on the patio. Knowing how to keep plants alive and grow them to maturity is always a good skill to have in your self-reliance toolbox.

To Griffin “emergency health basics” includes things like learning CPR, first aid, or helping someone who is choking. It may also include learning basic and emergency treatments for hazards common to your area, like ticks or rattlesnakes, or exposure to poisonous plants. Consider the most common “what-if” scenarios where you live. She also recommends learning any basic medical procedures or operating medical equipment needed for your care or others around you so you can do them yourself in a pinch or even save some money on nursing care.

Knowing how to maintain or repair your car may not be so important if you don’t have one, but if you do, learning to change a tire, examine your engine belts for wear, checking and changing fluids, or other basic maintenance items can save you money and time or help minimize the fallout from otherwise nasty situations. Keep an emergency kit suitable for your area in your car at all times.

I would add to this that learning how to perform basic maintenance around your home is also important. Fixing a leaky faucet, hanging a picture, changing a light bulb, oiling squeaky hinges or other items, rewiring lamps, backing up your computer, installing anti-virus, cleaning a dishwasher, using a garbage disposal, and many other tasks can save you money down the road.

Hopefully we already know what it takes to maintain your health. We should know about regular exercise and a healthy diet. If not, that’s a good place to start. Similarly, avoiding the doctor altogether is not necessarily the best plan, any more than is going to see the doctor for every little ailment. Make sure you schedule regular checkups appropriate to your age group. Be aware of health conditions that run in your family or result from your lifestyle. Learn the warning signs for life-threatening conditions, and what to do about them.

“Living off the grid” is not something I really recommend, and I’m a little surprised Griffin even brings it up. Fortunately she at least recommends starting with a vacation at an off-grid location so you get to experience it temporarily first before you decide. In any case, her advice here of considering growing your own food and exploring alternative energy are just the beginning of adopting that particular lifestyle, so if it interests you, do lots and lots of research first.

I’ll admit that to me this section of the article seems less useful, but perhaps that’s because I was involved in scouting growing up, and had parents that made sure I could handle most all of this before I left home. I don’t do much auto maintenance, it’s true, but I know at least to get my car in for regular maintenance, which had really saved my bacon on many occasions. They’re usually able to spot problems before they happen, which is important when most of your driving time is spent on the freeway. Breakdowns can and will happen in the worst possible places.

But even while I find the first point (Identify and have knowledge of which things you must be responsible for) a little silly (it’s like saying make sure you know about all the things you don’t know about), I find it also somewhat profound. Far too often these sorts of things are learned by accident, in the school of hard knocks. Schools don’t teach the basic life skills they used to, like maintaining and balancing a checking account, or registering your car, etc. Finding out before you start “adulting” just what all is involved will spare you a lot of pain.

But in the end, this is really what self-reliance is all about. It’s figuring out what can go wrong in your life, weighing the costs of dealing with that problem vs. the cost of avoiding it, and planning accordingly. I don’t need to learn how to prepare my house for a hurricane (in Utah!), and the cost of which far outweighs the risk of doing nothing. Learning how to recognize heat stroke and how to treat it, however, may be worth the time and effort.

Much of this no one else can fully prepare you for. You must be self-reliant toward achieving self-reliance.

Securing your base

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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.

Life comes at you hard sometimes

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Our neighbors’ eleven-year-old daughter has cancer. I was going to say that I don’t know how they can handle it, but I know better. You do, because you must. You take it one step at a time, any way you can, because that’s what you do.

I recently came across an interview between Jordan B. Peterson and his daughter about his recent recovery from benzodiazepines and how he became dependent in the first place. It’s really a frightening story when you realize this was someone who stood to legitimately benefit from a drug prescribed by his doctor, but it went on a little too long until it was almost too late. It may still be. Life came at him hard, and what was supposed to help just made it exponentially harder.

In both cases there are support systems in place. Our neighbors have family and friends within range to help. They have us–we’ve been cultivating a relationship for years. They know we can and will gladly do anything within our power to make this easier on them. Peterson had a daughter and son-in-law willing to go to incredible lengths to get him help, who quite literally saved his life.

No one wants to need help. But that’s the problem with self-sufficiency. Everyone has their breaking point, where you just can’t cope any more, when doing the most basic of tasks seems pointless. It’s important to have friends, to have that network who care enough to step in and take care of whatever can be reasonably delegated so that you can focus on what’s most important, what only you can do.

No one wants to be a burden on others. On the other hand, people love to feel useful, to be needed, especially by those they care about. I was thrilled today when my neighbor approached me about taking care of something for them over the next couple of days while they’re seeing to their daughter. We have a chance to show them we care and how much they mean to us as neighbors.

This is the reason why I’ve always insisted that self-reliance does not mean becoming a hermit. Some of the greatest satisfaction in life comes from being useful in some way to others. I believe everyone has something to give that at the right time would mean the world to someone. It’s not where the rubber meets the road, but where people meet people that magic happens.

Just how much DO we need?

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So, let’s talk about toilet paper. It was very much in the news not three months ago, and now we hardly hear about it. How many of us have already slipped back into our old habits of not keeping more than enough to get us through to the next shopping trip?

Ever since we got caught with our pants down (seldom has an expression been more appropriate and inappropriate at the same time!) our household has vowed “Never again!” It’s not that we didn’t have enough on hand, mind you. It’s just that, because of everyone else panicking, we were forced to see just how long our supplies would last, and while it lasted close to a month, we were getting pretty darn close when the wheels of commerce ground to the rescue.

So what have we done since? Well, to start with we had to, like most of America, do be patient. Initially we could get more, but in limited quantites, and not in our usual brand. We were a bit dismayed to find that what we could get, while certainly cushier, was so thick that there was only about a day’s worth on a single roll, perhaps a little more. Just holding the line was a bit dicey.

But now that things are getting back to normal, our usual brand is available again and life is good. We also have about three different brands in our growing TP reserves, which we are building up slowly, so as not to appear panicked. And, sadly, some of that reserve still includes some of the one-day rolls. And with a variety of rolls still in circulation, it’s been difficult to measure just how much we’re using.

Solution? White board marker on the bathroom mirror! Every time we change a roll we record the date on the mirror. After a couple weeks we have enough data to start making estimates. It appears that we average a new roll every four days, +/- a day. Divide that into 365 days, and we need about 91 rolls of our usual brand to stock that bathroom for a year. We still need more data on the other bathrooms in our house, but I suspect that even combined they won’t use more than our main bathroom.

So all told, we probably would need 180 rolls to last us a year. Hopefully we would never need that much, but it’s not like TP is perishable. It’s easy to rotate (’cause it goes round and round on the holder, get it?!), so having too much isn’t really a problem, so long as we take our time building up that much. More likely we would start with half a year and see how that goes. But provided we have the storage space (we do) and are willing to keep track, we should be able to rest easy next time the cr– …. uh, the next time people start going crazy.

Check your smoke detectors

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Our upstairs smoke detector has gone off a couple times in the past week or so, most recently on Father’s Day morning, around 5 am. (Grrrr….) Both times there was no apparent issue, and it soon stopped. The second time I pulled it off the way and dumped a stack of quilts on top of it. That should shut it up. The darn thing was probably just getting low on batteries.

This morning I decided to take another look at it and found some instructions on the back of the unit. The signal it was giving off was supposedly the smoke alarm; the low battery signal should be different. And I bought these smoke detectors because they would last at least 10 years. It’s been nowhere near that yet.

Then I read that you should remove all dust from the unit every so often, with canned air, or whatever. I blew it out, and there had been dust in there all right. I don’t know if that was what was causing it to go off yet–only time will tell there–but it was a good reminder. Even if we have a smoke alarm built to last a decade we should still test–and clean–it regularly. It’s recommended we choose a normally-occurring yearly even to help us remember when to check, like Daylight Saving, or your birthday, or something else fairly regular. However you choose to remember, remember! Though house fires are less common than they used to be, they can still happen. Give yourself and your family as much time to respond as you can.

Asking the right questions

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Nick True at Mapped Out Money often has good budgeting and personal finance advice. This episode looks at the questions we ask ourselves regarding money and suggests maybe we’re asking the wrong things.

I find there’s a lot of value in what he says, especially in comparing yourself to others. My wife and I could drive ourselves crazy if we were to compare our grocery budget to others. We’re vegans, which tends to be more expensive for base ingredients, but we don’t eat out very often, mostly because of the expense. On a strict analysis that doesn’t make sense. If we’re really interested in saving money on food, why shell out for vegan food? Or, if we’re so interested in health, why not go even more expensive and buy everything organic? (That’s not why we’re vegan, but that’s another story for another time.) The answer lies with our values. We do value vegan living, and we also value saving money. This is the balance we’re comfortable with.

At the end of the day, if we don’t live in accordance with our values we’re going to be dissatisfied with whatever other choices we make. Granted, values can–and sometimes should–be changed. If your primary value is to live as large as possible regardless of income, then you’re headed for trouble and either need to to not disregard income so much or decide not to live so large. But on the whole, money needs to serve our needs and not the other way around.