Tag Archives: responsibility

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.

Who do we trust our lives to?

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I had a brief discussion with a friend on Facebook the other day in which it became apparent we have differing opinions on the role of government. I don’t think either of us will change the other’s mind any time soon, but he said something that stuck with me. It was essentially, “We trust the government with our lives, so why not to distribute wealth?”

I had to stop and think about that. Do we trust the government with our lives? Should we?

Ultimately I suppose we do trust the government with our lives to some extent. I rely on my local city government to provide me safe drinking water–something they failed at not so long ago. I’ve since taken steps to lessen that risk, but truth be told, if there’s something dangerously wrong with my water I may not know it in time unless the government warns me. I have to trust that they’re doing their best.

I also trust the national government to maintain an army sufficient to deter any other country from coming in and killing me. As we’ve seen in recent years they’re not entirely successful in that responsibility, but they’re keeping the risk acceptably low. And they’re also doing a decent job at deterring those who might take shortcuts or act irresponsibly with our food supply. Incidents still happen, but still, the risk is still quite low.

There are, however, many more ways in which to die. In most of those cases the government acts more as a deterrent than a protection. They can’t keep some idiot driver from cutting across four lanes of traffic to make their exit and plowing into me instead. They can’t guarantee my neighbor’s tree isn’t going to fall on my house as I sleep and crush me. They can’t guarantee the airplane I get on isn’t going to crash, nor can they promise me I won’t die during heart surgery at some future point.

All they can do (or perhaps more accurately, are willing to do at present) is tell people what they should or shouldn’t do, and then affix punishments for noncompliance. And for the most part that is enough. Most people don’t act irresponsibly or seek to do deliberate harm, and they wouldn’t, even without those laws. And many more also don’t because they find the potential punishment sufficiently unpleasant.

And yet 90 people per day are killed in car accidents in America. Several million every year are injured, many permanently. Is the government failing or succeeding? If their responsibility is to protect our lives, I’d say they’re failing. We’ve lost over 80,000 Americans to the Coronavirus this year in spite of all the protections government can provide, including some fairly dramatic precautions. At the same time, those measures have cost lives as well, to say nothing of the jobs at least temporarily lost. The long-term impact on lives may not be fully understood for years yet.

So I guess one question to ask ourselves is whether or not any government can guarantee us our lives. Can a government eliminate all risk? And would we like it if they did? What would our lives be like? I see plenty of examples all around right now of people starting to push back against government control over their lives as the governmental restrictions put in place to save lives from COVID-19 continue in effect well into the second or third months. I live in a state that imposed less strict restrictions and perhaps coincidentally, perhaps in correlation with other factors, has the fourth lowest death rate in the country. I’ve pretty much willingly complied with those restrictions.

But when I hear of some of the other states’ more extensive efforts to control the virus by controlling people I am particularly grateful to live where I live. I fully understand why those states are facing popular backlash. Clearly, even if a government could keep us all from dying, most people feel those all-controlling restrictions would make life no longer worth living, especially when there is no end in sight.

In fact, history seems to prove that a restrictive government, even in the name of protecting life, tends to fall sooner or later. Human nature tends to lead governments to go too far, and usually for decreasingly benign reasons. They may start out well-meaning, but soon grab more and more power simply for the sake of hanging onto that power.

But then let’s look at the alternative. A total lack of government tends not to work very well, either. While I don’t entirely subscribe to the “Lord of the Flies” theory of humanity, a complete lack of common law–or the enforcement thereof–tends toward disaster. People will usually work out some sort of pact, a set of rules for maintaining peace, property, and ensuring basic rights. But as demonstrated by certain parts of our current world, the rule of “might makes right” is more common than we’d like to think.

Humanity needs government. It’s even part of my religion’s basic tenets. Governments that ensure basic rights and basic rules governing human interaction are essential to maximize productivity, cooperation, and peace. But in all cases it falls upon the governed to govern themselves to some degree. The value of traffic laws to a victim is not in the enforcement of those laws, but in the threat of enforcement. It does me precious little good if I’m dead knowing the idiot that decided to continue through the red light at 50 miles an hour to broadside my car will be heavily fined and potentially jailed. The hope is that, knowing he could be heavily fined and jailed, the person will choose not to speed and run red lights in the first place.

And yet we still lose around 40,000 Americans to car accidents every year. If we apply the same logic to cars I’ve been hearing about the coronavirus, we should all be voluntarily getting rid of our cars or agreeing to cap our speed at ten miles an hour. We’re not, and we won’t. Deep down even the strongest proponents of government protection in all area of life seem to accept that communal rights must be tempered by individual rights. We’re willing to accept responsibility for protecting ourselves in order to avoid our own inconvenience.

In fact, as a society in America, we still retain far more personal responsibility for our own protection, prosperity, and happiness than we surrender to government. There is constant pressure from some to push more and more of that control to government, but much of it seems to be due to some mistaken belief that such power could never be abused, or that the other party who we distrust/hate so dearly will never actually hold power, giving them the opportunity to abuse the power we want to hand the government when under our side’s control.

That’s why I tend to believe that we need to be self-reliant rather than government-reliant, especially when it comes to protection. The deterrent power of government is important, but they can’t (and probably shouldn’t) be everywhere. As the saying goes, when seconds count, the police are only minutes away. Ultimately we can’t completely avoid all danger in life. But we can take responsibility for our own safety.

Hopefully every one of us who has taken formal drivers education has been taught to be aware of what’s going on around us in order to anticipate threats. Hopefully none of us, seeing that idiot in the far left lane who suddenly realizes they should be in the far right lane, just continues on at the same speed, staring straight ahead, trusting entirely in the law to protect us. We slow down. We start looking for room for evasive action. We do our best to make sure we are not in their path.

Most anyone who is looking after their financial future recognizes the inadequacy in America of the government safety net to support the retired. Even assuming Social Security will survive all the political wrangling around it, most retirement plans include coming up with funds well above and beyond what we can count on from the government. Similarly, during the two years I spent on unemployment, had I needed to rely on that alone my family would have really struggled.

We can’t anticipate everything, but we can take reasonable precautions in much of what we do. We can take steps to reduce negative impacts on those we love. We can act morally and responsibly in our interactions with others. We can think before we act.

I think, whether we like it or not, so long as we choose to live within society, within the bounds of modern infrastructure we’re going to have to trust government at some essential level. If we don’t trust in our social structures to at least some degree we will spend the majority of our time and resources trying to eliminate any and all dependence on government and other people, effectively pushing us to the lowest level of Maslow’s Hierarchy, and that’s not where we should be. We need to be able to trust that a vast majority of the time when we turn on our faucet, when we flip the light switch, when we set out to drive to work we’re going to have a predictable, quality experience.

At the same time, where the absence of that predictable result threatens our lives, we need to be prepared to shoulder that burden ourselves, if only for a short time. I’ll drink tap water, but I’ll make sure I’ve got a reserve supply in case I can no longer trust that water. I’ll enjoy all the daily benefits of electricity, but have other options available in case it fails. I’ll do my best to assume every moment I’m in my car that other drivers may not abide by the law. Government is very good and beneficial for many things. But over-dependence on them can be deadly. Our own safety and happiness must always be our responsibility.

Emotional self-reliance

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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.

How does one "sell" self reliance?

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That’s the question taken up at the California Preppers Network:

And we’re all clearly fighting an up-hill battle against government’s well-funded campaign to remove all risk and consequence from our lives.  We’re encouraged to live as milk-calves to government’s bottomless teat.

Responsibility and self-reliance require effort on the part of the individual.  Why put forth effort when you don’t have to?

I think Greece is providing a great example to us all on why we don’t want to become too dependent on the government. Too few politicians are businessmen, so they don’t pay attention to such minor details as solvency. When the state goes down a lot of people will suddenly be helpless and looking for someone to teach them what to do–that is, after they give up looking for someone to bail them out.