Drop Out Post Mortem and Next Steps

 I've recently been undergoing a type of dark night of the soul. In my experience these are brutal experiences of self doubt and reflection, often coupled with intense feelings of anxiety and failure, that preface an awakening into a deeper level of consciousness.

The short version is that I quit my job after my daughter was born. I wanted to stay home with the family and I was sick of working for somebody else. I intended to homestead our double lot, growing food, making crafts to sell at markets and online, and dabble at odd jobs to make our way. We're pretty frugal and our monthly expenses are around $600 a month. We wanted to take our lives into our own hands, develop skills, connect with others doing the same thing, and create a kind of mutual aid network. Largely I was inspired by anarchist, drop out, collapse, and early retirement trains of thought.

Rather than pulling it off, we floundered. The money we had put back evaporated into several unforeseen expenses. A combination of lack of self-motivation, poor planning, and interpersonal problems kept our business plans from taking off.

So now we're hitting a brick wall financially. I'm applying for temp jobs to get us an income stream. We're switching gears into flipping stuff on eBay. I'm looking at gigging apps like TaskRabbit and Text Broker.

Poor planning was the real killer. We didn't make a budget, plan our expenses, do research, or write up anything at all. We expected it to just work out on intuition and luck. You can't rely on those things. They're good skills to develop, but they don't replace hard work and good planning.

It also takes a completely different skill set to do this stuff than to just find a comfortable office job and coast. When I imagine primitive tribes I imagine people who are good at finding and exploiting opportunities, minimizing waste, and communicating and planning with each other. These are skills that have been crushed out of us during domestication, except in the very limited scope of what's important for capitalism.

The dark night part come in when you start asking yourself self-reflective questions like "where did I go wrong?" and "is it worth it?"

You can't lean away from the pain, then it makes the pain more intense. In a way it's like tightening your muscles in preparation for an impact. You body/soul knows what to do - you just open yourself to the fall and when you hit you bounce.

I think it is worth it. Because in the end we don't have a choice. You can't rely on the availability of jobs in the future. We're seeing that right now. The climate's getting worse and things will get tighter soon. Sooner than we think. It's best to start learning how to do it now. People who wait until it's too late will have a harder time making ends meet than those who have been practicing along the way. I'm thinking of a crash in our lifetimes maybe on the level of severity of the Great Depression.

I say crash but I really mean a lowering of altitude - a forced deceleration brought on by environmental factors and declining societal motivation and buy-in that will force even people in the first world to adapt and recognize the reality.

So that's why I'm doing it. Because I want my kids to have a future.