A third-wave feminist comes full circle and discovers that women have been had. She wants equality, but finds out to her dismay that "equality" turned out to mean being stuck in W-2 hell just like the men, trading all her time for consumerism and a long commute. And so she explores an entirely different solution, drops out of the rat race entirely, and comes to realize that "homemaking"--despite all the disparagement it got from second-wave feminists--can actually be an act of feminist identity.
The author interviews a wide range of women and couples on similar paths, showing that we become healthier, wealthier and even happier the more we can master a wider and wider range of domestic skills. And we can still call ourselves feminists! Homemaking isn't making a comeback, it's been here for years.
It's intriguing to follow along on this author's mental journey, as she and her interviewee subjects find they need substantial deprogramming. They learn to reject consumerism and all that comes with it. They develop more and more skills and interests--and, interestingly, they develop friendships and far more robust social lives along the way. They wake up to how the W-2 world imposes a peculiar form of narrowness on us: it narrows our social lives and it hyperspecializes our labor, while at the same time it somehow leaches away many of our domestic and household skills. Perhaps most useful of all: they learn to cultivate intrinsic validation rather than settling for extrinsic validation--especially that phony validation they sprinkle all over you in the corporate world. They figure out once and for all that all those attaboys, "Good job!"s and employee of the month plaques turned out to be both intrinsically and economically worthless.
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As the author travels from denial to acceptance, and from economic fragility to genuine self-sovereignty, she realizes that, yes, domesticity can coexist with feminism. It turns out that women (and men!) need W-2 hell like a fish needs a bicycle.
There are a few weak chapters in this book, but plenty of good horse sense in here as well. A time-constrained reader could get away with just reading the introduction (pages 7-19), which neatly summarizes the vast majority of the book's ideas, and then perhaps studying pages 215-223, which offers quite a few insights--some wonderfully subtle--on how to develop the ability and mindset to self-teach. (You can also just read/skim my notes below of course.)
[Readers, what follows are my notes and quotes from the text: I include them to help me better remember what I read. Feel free to skim them or skip them!]
Notes:
Preface: Tomato-Canning Feminists
1ff The book begins in a sort of in medias res, as the author sits outside of one of her interviewee's homes, agonizing over whether to go through with the planned interview. She writes about receiving some 200 letters from women and men pursuing homemaking as a vocation for various reasons, ranging from saving the planet, to saving their family. The interviewee today is apprehensive, a young woman freshly out of a prestigious college, yet pursuing homemaking and farming. As the interview begins we see this young woman trying to work out what life on the corporate plantation is all about: how work takes up all your time, how you end up sacrificing your health by eating convenience food, how you lose your sense of family because you're never at the dinner table together, how there's no collective "home" as a result. But, as she took the role of caregiver for her mother as she was dying of cancer, this woman actually did experience what it meant to have a home.
5 "Money becomes a marginal chit when family can cultivate self-reliance and community interdependence."
5 Interesting comments here about the paradoxes/tensions of feminism: on whether a feminist woman who wishes to live up to her own identity can also have identity with a family unit or a partner. Can you actually have both of these things? Or is this just rejecting feminist ideals and "just going back to the homemaker role we were taught to think was primitive?" [As in most situations, if you're going to force the answer to be binary--the choice is either "feminist ideals" or "just doing back to the primitive homemaker role" you're basically falling for the original psyop of second wave feminism--in particular the Gloria Steinem "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" era of feminism.]
6 Fascinating quote here as the author agonizes: "How might I advocate for a meaningful and sustainable domestic life without inadvertently condoning the further subjugation of women?" [Over the course of this book she will come to realize that the entire anti-homemaker movement was against a phony enemy that wasn't really there. She will come to realize that it is the exact opposite of subjugation to develop your own household self-sovereignty. The subjugation actually comes from being subject to labor market hyper-specialization in W-2 hell, working for some corporation.]
Introduction: Radical Homemaking--Politics, Ecology and Domestic Arts
7ff The author describes her upbringing as a hard-driving student and career woman, growing up in a small town in the middle of nowhere in Upstate NY. But yet while she was a young student she worked weekends and summers at a local farm where the owners "lived very well on only a few thousand dollars a year."
8ff She and her husband were rudely disappointed as they left home to find work, hoping for salaries that would pay for daycare, etc. The professional world turned out to be ruthless to both of them: she never even gets a job interview; he gets fired literally two weeks after they take out a mortgage on a small cabin on 15 acres. "I had been taught [uh, taught? you mean fooled...] in school to plan for a six-figure income in a dual-earning family. But I learned growing up that there was an arsenal of resources available that could offer a happy alternative lifestyle." [Basically the author does the same figuring that Jacob Lund Fisker does in Early Retirement Extreme, and that Joe Dominguez does in Your Money or Your Life: adding up all the time and money costs of commuting, a new house, professional wardrobes, taxes, buying convenience food, owning two cars, daycare.] After all of these extra costs, their high-powered dual career life--even if it had worked out well!--only put them slightly ahead from where they'd be if they chose a more self-sovereign lifestyle living on their family's farm as homemakers, doing many of these things themselves.
11 "My family has always understood that the key to success as farmers wasn't necessarily how much money we made, but how much money we didn't have to spend. What's good for farming is also good for homemaking." Discussion here of using barter, thrift stores, owning only one car, also not having health insurance [which unfortunately has become a lot more of a problematic strategy since the Obamacare mandates].
12 "Mainstream Americans have lost the simple domestic skills that would enable them to live an ecologically sensible life with a modest or low income." [Of course, from the perspective of the system however, it is working perfectly as it chains us to the plantation and robs us of our self-sovereignty.]
13 The author talks about eating sustainably, local, organic, etc., all being dependent on bringing back the homemaker; also the author notes her own severe struggles with actually uttering that sentence, and learning that it was the elephant in the room that needed to be looked at more closely in order to escape and extractive economy into what the author calls a "life-serving economy." [Note here that the idea that this author struggles to utter something like this gives us a really good example of how our discourse can be influenced by outside forces. Second-wave feminism--using the guise of "equality in the workplace"--was an extremely powerful force, and it got people to limit their reality in very interesting ways.]
14ff A feminism-based discussion of the evolution of the household over the course of the industrial revolution and through the 20th century; the author arrives at Betty Friedan's "problem that has no name" which according to this author "sent women to work in droves," which made the labor force even cheaper for corporate America. [Yep.]. And then, a second family income became a necessity [this is why it is critical to know your monetary history: you understand also why a debt and inflation-based economy naturally leads to this outcome], which led to things like daycare, sending your kids off to school, which led to spending all your resources on sending them to college, etc., which also led to a kind of atomization of the household [although the author doesn't use this word]. Then to top it all off, "homemaking" became seen (and mocked) as part of the realm of the ultra-religious. [Again, this is discourse control, a great example of it. If you mock something, you can't find it and then use it to help you achieve your economic freedom!]
15 "I was looking for a different type of homemaker--someone who wasn't ruled by our consumer culture, who embodied a strong ecological ethic, who held genuine power in the household, who was living a full, creative, challenging and socially contributory life." She posts a notice on her website seeking people to tell their stories who likewise wanted to become homemakers, and then went on a road trip across the country to meet with some 20 families to document their journeys.
17 The author is very careful here to make sure the reader knows that these women aren't some kind of "throwback to the 1950s" or "some form of ultra-conservative religious sect" [It's too bad she feels she has to apologize for this. Once again, this is a good example of how our discourse is externally influenced, and it limits us in what we can do. Imagine what these women could do if they didn't feel like they had to waste bandwidth excusing themselves and apologizing for themselves. Will there come a time when we don't feel a need to apologize? Just be, and do what you set out to do!]
17 Some of the author's subjects are religious, some are not, but they all questioned all the assumptions of consumer culture. [Think of consumer culture as a form of anti-religion perhaps, or a satanic quasi-religion.] "They were fluent at the mental exercise of rethinking the 'givens' of our society..." Note that the subjects had a wide range of skills, although nobody could do everything: their metaskill was interdependence and nurturing relationships with family and community.
18-19 Comments here on the book's organization: Part One critiques the current culture and economic system and is a theoretical discussion on the history of domesticity and feminism. Part Two contains the subjects' interviews themselves, grouped by themes and lessons the author got from them. "My intent is to give a clear picture of the many ways this lifestyle can work, to explore the homemakers' most common decision-making processes and their tactics for thriving." "Essentially, Part One is the theory and Part Two is the practice."
Part One: Why
Chapter 1: A Woman's Place
23ff On perspectives on homemaking: either the homemaker is a "subservient loser" living under the thumb of a man, or she struggles for autonomy, self-fulfillment and economic independence when society needs nurturers. The author questions both of these framings, borrowing ideas from David Korten's concept of the "Empire" model, "a system of dominator power and elite competition." The author then idealizes [and I mean idealizes] human history, assuming egalitarian cultures were the norm, that men and women worked together in these early cultures as "partners." [The author is likely way outside her circle of competence here with her idyllic worldview of prehistoric human civilization; but I think what she may feel she needs to do here is illustrate her feminist bona fides before she gets into the meat of her arguments for dropping out of W-2 hell and getting back to homemaking.]
26ff Shifting gears here to Darwin and a sort of feminist interpretation of him and his work: 1) that he didn't think very highly of women, and 2) that the public's interpretation of his work "played a major role in our emerging cultural disdain for matters of the home," etc. [Note that the former is the genetic fallacy and the latter isn't Darwin's fault.]
28ff Reiterating the points from the introduction here, talking about how Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique "shattered" the image of the housewife; comments here on the fact that middle class American housewife life had become "meaningless." [I have to interject here: meaning is what you make of it, and it ensues--just like happiness--from a life properly lived according to your values. Meaning and happiness can emerge from any kind of life, including that of the middle class American housewife! Note also that believing or disbelieving this statement is self-fulfilling.] Also interesting comments here where Friedan met with an advertising researcher who explained to her how American housewives were given a sense of identity, purpose and self-realization by buying things by the consumer marketplace: essentially we were training women to use consumerism as their avenue to finding meaning. [Pretty sad to get duped into that, but it sure seemed to work--on everybody!]
31 Note this striking quote, again from The Feminine Mystique: "A woman whose husband was making $6,000 a few years ago and is making $10,000 now needs to learn a whole new set of symbols. Department stores are her best teachers of this subject." The author then states: "It was no small wonder that Betty Friedan's book sparked the revolution that sent American women into the workforce in droves, seeking opportunities to challenge themselves, fulfill their creative potential, and have a meaningful impact on society." Even the author is willing to concede that corporate America snagged an even greater opportunity from this trend: a cheaper labor force. [In other words the system suckered women into W-2 hell too, just like the men... "Here, enjoy your 'equality,' suckers!"]
32ff Various examples here how, according to the author, corporate America took advantage of the new dual-income household: industrializing our food supply, selling us all sorts of labor-saving devices and entertainment, etc.
34 As women wanted to enter the labor force to establish equality with men, it happened to be also during their childbearing years, thus they were "handicapped in the workday world from the moment they enter it." The author quotes one of her interview subjects: "you broke the glass ceiling or whatever it was [but] that was something sold; that was a bill of goods." [Of course I understand and agree with the author's underlying primary thesis (which is the corporate world is not at all what it's cracked up to be and is a sucker's game), but we should be continent with our logic here: It just doesn't make sense to argue that you were sold a bill of goods, but then still be angry you didn't get as much access to that bill of goods... that you ended up not wanting anyway.]
36 Discussion of how women are underpaid as the author cites various statistics that women earn 78c, 73c or 60c for every dollar a man makes. [Once again, if it's such a scam why are women participating in it? Also I've always struggled with this number on some level: wouldn't you think corporations would hire only women if they could get away with paying them all 70-ish cents on the dollar?]
36ff Great point here from the author: when someone pursues radical homemaking and as a result forgoes conventional employment, this is likely to be a one-way decision because the workplace won't want you back. The author follows up saying "once one steps out of this dysfunctional relationship, she or he won't want to go back." Further comments describing how the corporate economy compels us to behave as codependents in a dysfunctional relationship [she's speaking about women here but this is true for men too]. The author even likens it to having an abusive boyfriend. [Again it's a great question, why would you fight to get more "access" to an "abusive boyfriend?" Exit the system, and recognize the scam for what it is.]
39ff Discussions from some of the authors interview subjects about things like the various attaboys you get from work; praise from your supervisor saying, "good job!"; you have an answer to tell people when they ask you what you do; you have convenient labels for yourself; whereas being a homemaker is somehow not as respected, it doesn't contain "the traditional trappings of success."
41ff More examples here of women struggling with the idea that paid work is somehow more credible, that if you don't earn money you're not as valuable, etc. [Most people would struggle less with this problem if they used their own compass to measure themselves rather than depending on social proof, the approbation of others, or the approbation of "society," whatever that is. Those are traps! These are ideas that Harry Browne delves into to great effect in his book How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World.]
42 "Friedan and many feminist scholars before and after her have maintained that equality, security and human dignity are impossible to achieve without earning one's own money." [You could easily date this further back to Virginia Woolf and her 1929 work A Room of One's Own.]
43ff Various useful arguments here: that you become less vulnerable if you are less and less dependent on a paycheck; that even if you're married to a wage earning spouse you are subject to his employment risks, that a double income family admittedly has some diversification; comments here on the "Radical Homemakers" the author interviewed who were happily married, did not feel trapped or unhappy in their relationships, and had been able to prioritize egalitarianism in their domestic lives. [Once again, being just another sucker permanently stuck in W-2 hell is not a source of egalitarianism.] "...they have surrendered a false sense of independence to embrace genuine interdependence. In place of conventional employment, these men and women build security through frugal living, domestic skills and reduced material needs." Still more useful points here: if both partners work outside the house then the domestic work is just transferred to someone else--"someone lower on the social ladder" as the author phrases it. Discussion of one interviewee's angst about a neighbor who employs a nanny from Mexico; the author argues that this idea was not lost on early feminists, nor was it lost on Marx and Engels, both of whom believed that women could only achieve equality "through full involvement in industrial production" and these other, less meaningful domestic responsibilities--including child care--could be "socialized." [This should have been a cue long ago that this was a psyop all along: this entire process just makes you vastly more dependent on the state and its captured corporate agents! See Sheldon Wolin and his concept of "inverted totalitarianism" in his book Democracy, Inc.]
46 The author isolates another ironic flaw in Friedan's argument: Friedan argues basically there's no self-actualization to be found in housewife life, which isn't true at all; and yet there isn't necessarily any actualization in most of the work world either.
47ff The author describes a three-stage path traveled by most of her interviewees: first a "renouncing" stage, where they renounce corporate life and consumer society and consumerism; then a "reclaiming" stage, where they reclaim many skills that allow them to gain self-reliance and live better without a conventional income; followed finally by a "rebuilding" phase, where the women take on genuine creative challenges. The author argues that if the interviewees remained in the "reclaiming" phase they could be subject to the Betty Friedan "housewife syndrome."
Chapter 2: Home Economics
49ff [This is a weak and informationally predictable chapter illustrating various catechisms against corporate greed, it actually weakens the overall thrust of the book and would be better cut.] Comments here on corporate greed and on the empowerment that comes "when we live opposite to the corporate-centered world." Also an out-of-place and unnecessary discussion of the history of corporations here.
52-3 Note this comment where the author paraphrases thoughts from author David Korten on how companies are designed only to generate financial returns for shareholders and have no other legal or ethical obligations: "the publicly traded limited-liability corporation is now presumed to be prohibited from exercising the same more responsibilities legal expected in any sane adult in our country." [There's yet another layer of irony: the corporations in the banking, investing and retirement sector also don't care... they are perfectly happy selling "greenwashed" and "ethics-washed" investment products to us to make still more money off of us. The rabbit hole goes way deeper than either of these authors understands!]
54 Various other criticisms of the extractive economy: we have to sacrifice our time, we sacrifice "the vitality of our local communities," etc. [The author is 100% correct that corporate W-2 hell atomizes communities, moves around workers, moves around production, causes us to hyper-specialize, and enforces dependence on the market economy for many things we could and should be doing ourselves.]
56 Intriguing piece of rhetoric here commenting on Bentonville, Arkansas, and quoting another author, Bill McKibben: "despite the $90 billion fortune shared by the three heirs [of Walmart], the city of Bentonville runs at a deficit and is unable to afford a needed sewage treatment plant." [This is great rhetoric, but yet it sort of disintegrates once you unpack it a little bit: do you really want "the three heirs" of Bentonville to tell your town what to do? Isn't it the democratically elected city council and mayor who decides and budgets for these things?]
59ff On Radical Homemakers building a bridge from the old extractive economy to the new life-serving economy, where husbands and wives "invest their efforts into their mutual home." Also note this quote:
"Multigenerational families may discover that complete financial independence from one another is costly, or perhaps that shared homes, property or resources reduce the costs of housing, elder care, child care or even food and maintenance costs. Young families find that humility enables them to accept help from willing parents without stigma, or vice versa, reducing their duplicative demands on an extractive economy."
Chapter 3: From Self-Reliance to Commodification
61 Good introductory quote at the head of this chapter:
"We started leaving the home to go to work in order to support the home. We have been doing this for so long that we have forgotten the purpose for which we sold ourselves in the first place."
- William Coperthwaite [from the book A Handmade Life]
61 What a housewife used to be, this again is repeating what was in the introduction: an idea from (the author claims) 13th century Europe, the first signs of the middle class, stewards of the land around their home, and with their economic security the result of the couple's "combined efforts." The author moves on to the colonists of the New World where they had to produce much of what they needed: the author frames this as a form of teamwork while admitting that women did not share the same status as men.
64ff Then on the colonists in the early American household making what they needed via domesticity as part of a rebellion from British imports. "As citizens from the new republic discovered that the affairs of the household were integral to their freedom from colonial rule, the home became the center of the culture for a period of time that historians now refer to as the 'cult of domesticity.' Women assumed the status of society's moral authorities, novels appeared that celebrated the role of the housewife, and more cookbooks appeared on the market, offering a greater variety of advice and cuisine. The home was seen as the vanguard for producing patriotic and virtuous citizens, and women, raising their children, wielded responsibility for the civic education of our population." [This picture the author paints here seems rosy-eyed and idealized to a point of severe implausibility.]
66ff Per the author this [highly idealized] past was all ruined as the industrial revolution spread to the Americas. The author gives some rather odd examples of how people lost various skills over the course of the industrialization process: her example of the upgrade cycle from wood stoves to coal stoves is a particularly weird example that she uses to show how people lose the ability to source and split firewood. [I get what she's trying to show here, but she'd be far more persuasive if she chose more logically continent examples.]
69ff On how "marketing" took over to liberate the middle class house from the "drudgery" of domesticity, how many functions of the home became "sellable." The author offers various examples here, some not particularly well-suited to her overall argument: she leaps way ahead to the 1920s and 30s where Clarence Birdseye patented food freezing techniques; on nursing becoming a profession, on healthcare being done in hospitals instead of at home; on tasks like preparing the dead being taken over by morticians; and then machinery inside the home replacing craft traditions. "With each of these developments, the American home lost its grip on production and slipped more and more into the realm of consumption." On all this happening alongside a booming advertising industry "convincing [the housewife] to buy what she didn't need... In the process, the American home is left empty, cared for by a woman whose labors had been descaled to the point where her obligation to society was to function as a consumer, buying those services and goods for her family that she and her husband, just two or three generations prior, would have worked together to provide." [I see what the author intends to do here, and she's not wrong, but if you have to imagine the housewife as that much of a lifeless, volitionless character in order to complete your argument, your argument loses quite a lot of life too.]
72ff Next, on to the greatest tool of fragmentation and disconnection of the family and community, the automobile. On the spread of suburban communities, how the car made it "difficult to imagine raising a family without logging thousands of miles in an automobile." Also interesting point here about the idea of factories facing labor unrest and corporations believed they would face fewer strikes if workers no longer lived close to the cities.
74ff On the creation of "home economics" by a group of educators in 1899; they believed they were making room for women in the American education system, but in reality according to the author "they were actually pigeon-holing them."
75ff The author singles out Christine Frederick who wrote for the Ladies Home Journal for contributing to the growing culture of consumption, as well as seeing housewives "as an empty-headed lot." On Frederick's 1929 book Selling Mrs. Consumer, which put forth the idea that "Mrs. Average Consumer" was the "gatekeeper" for family expenditure but at the same time, according to this author, "rather dim-witted." [The author frames this book as somehow appallingly offensive, and I'll admit I've only scanned some of her quotes in the original text to see to what extent they've been taken out of context. I actually do think the author is being unfair to Frederick here as the quote is taken from a discussion of the "average" consumer--everybody knows the "average American" is wayyyy below average! From a cursory look so far, this book does not seem to give the impression of condescension that the author offers here. In fact I think Selling Mrs. Consumer might be an extremely useful read to understand consumerism from the standpoint of producers and advertisers.]
77ff In any event, the author again claims that this process of marketing to the housewife continue to undo the skillset of craft traditions, ultimately leading--to as the author phrases it--"the destruction of the American palate and the rise of the industrialized food system." And this made us "easy targets for an industrialized food system intent on destroying our local food culture."
79ff Discussion here of toxins, chemical additives, hormones, antibiotics, herbicides, heavy metals, etc., in food; also comments on various ironies that happened as a result of an industrialized food system; New York City gets 75% of its apples from the West Coast or overseas despite the fact that upstate New York produces enough for ten times the NYC's needs, but in order to ship apples from far away growers cultivate varieties that transport better. Alarmist-style statistics here that 75% of the world's food comes from only twelve plants and five animal species [this certainly could just be another example of the extremely common 80/20 rule, and thus this may always be true]; also comments here on consolidation of seed sales, meat slaughtering, milk sales.
81ff "With our palates destroyed and our homemakers now divorced from the food production process, Americans know nothing about their food. Three generations of us have managed to walk this Earth without understanding the fundamentals of food production--when to plant seeds, when certain foods are locally in season, how to put up garden produce, what cows, pigs, sheep and chickens eat, how they are slaughtered and processed, or the labor that food production entails." Further comments here on food waste, how we got fat on high fructose corn syrup, etc. [Note the author's unintentionally hilarious comment here about how "Americans gained an average of ten pounds just during the 1990s, enough to boost airline fuel costs by $275 million per year." I love "statistics" like these.]
82ff "How strange and sad--that so many parents invest small fortunes in tutors and extra-curricular activities in order to enrich their children's education, when what most kids really need is time around the kitchen table with parents and a home-cooked meal." Final comments here in the chapter on how each daily need that we relearn strengthens our independence from a parasitic economy.
Chapter 4: Home Wreckers
84ff On the paradox that despite great GDP numbers, affluence and greater incomes we have less life satisfaction. [Note an unintended reference to the dilution of the monetary base here: the author quotes psychologists Ed Diener and Martin Seligman that there's no correlation between increased income and well-being above a moderate level of income, which they cite as "about $10,000 per person per year." This is in a book written in 2010, quoting a book written in 2004. $10,000 a year!]
86ff Quoting other authors on the anesthetization of Americans: our suicide rate, our depression rate, our escapism into television, video games and pornography, even playing the stock market and overeating, on the birth of the self-storage industry to store all our stuff, on declining health metrics in the United States.
87 Quotes from the author here essentially on her central thesis: "Apparently, dedicating our lives to garnering increasing material wealth from the marketplace has not brought the enduring rewards we expected." "...our psychic health, nutrition, and relationship stability could all improve when we redirect our energy toward our homes and the people with whom we share them." The author argues that many families are falling apart due to three "home wreckers": the compulsion to overwork, the reckless pursuit of affluence, and the credo of individualism. Each of these three "home wrecker" sources gets its own multi-page discussion to follow.
88ff Home wrecker #1: the compulsion to overwork: despite labor regulations, we toil more today than medieval peasants had to during the feudal era; how overwork is highly valued in American culture; on downsizing and how Americans engage in "defensive overworking" to protect themselves from losing their jobs; on how we take our Blackberries, cellphones and laptops on vacation; on how we have a dearth of time--the author gives the pet-sitting industry as an [excellent!] example here; "All of this overwork has not increased our collective bottom line one whit." The author cites the declining American personal savings rate [this is an evergreen statistic that gets used in every era, American savings rates never, ever look good, ever no matter what era we look at]; on the work/spend cycle citing author Juliet Schor. [Note that way back in the day on this book review site I reviewed another of Schor's books: The Overspent American. It actually was kind of fun re-reading that review--from 2008--to see how my "book review writing style" has changed over the years.]
94 The author offers her own suggestion for reclaiming our time: "I have learned that simply removing my wrist watch can return some of this temporal wealth." Doing this causes her to stop worrying about how productive she is, how efficiently or quickly she's working, and stops her from worrying about how much gets done in a day. "Temporal abundance buys far more daily pleasures than a paycheck can provide." [This is a great insight and great advice. Reminiscent of Thomas Sterner's wonderful short book The Practicing Mind where he works "slow" and experiences a time dilation effect (see Chapter 6).]
94ff Home wrecker #2: The reckless pursuit of affluence: description of the term "affluenza" from John de Graaf's book, "...a socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more." The author asks what drives us to live like this; she answers her own question with "advertising"; on the passive cultural acceptance of commercials; on televisions outnumbering people in the American home; on the fact that we watch TV more than four hours a day, etc. [It is true that one of the fastest ways to beat the game and survive this culture is to not have television in your home and to generally avoid mass media.] On how the media pushes us to acquire more, raising our standards of comparison; on how we as Americans seem "to identify increased income as the only solution" to allay our fears and improve our quality of life; also on the fact that we've grown no happier and worse have various negative side-effects and dependencies because of our material affluence; comments here on how we quickly habituate to new products or new circumstances [the "hedonic treadmill idea" although although the author doesn't use this term]; the author talks about the new stealth, viral and guerilla marketing techniques, also marketing aimed at children so they will then use their "pester power" to drive parent purchasing decisions; on how all this screws up children's self-esteem and causes higher rates of depression and anxiety. [The "pester power" idea--which I certainly used when I was a kid!--is fascinating to consider from the standpoint of parents' volition. Why would you blame advertisers advertising to children when the parents have two--actually three--avenues to escape this phenomenon? 1) don't let their kids be relentlessly advertised to, 2) don't permit your kids to pester you and 3) don't enable the entire process by giving in to your kids' pestering! It's a lot easier to blame a faceless industry I guess.]
100ff Now on to home wrecker #3: individualism. The author quotes Margaret Thatcher out of context here, using her "There is no such thing as society" as an indication of the atomizing of society. [I could write a few hundred words on the ironies of the author's misuse of this quote: in reality Thatcher is literally anticipating this author's arguments, it's just that Thatcher is articulating how the modern nation-state atomizes us by using the illusory concept of "society" as cover to do so; this author is arguing that the corporate marketplace is what is atomizing us. They are both right, and ironically they are in agreement!] While the author doesn't use the term "atomizing," this section discusses various atomizing forces that happen in modernity. She cites everything from the design of modern homes (with a separate playroom for each kid), multiple TVs being watched separately, enabling family members to avoid each other; also on how we have a "myth of the rugged individualist" but we confuse that form of independence with the illusory independence of "having the ability to purchase things whenever we want" when this just makes us more reliant on our employers for money and on the marketplace to produce things for us to buy. The author contrasts this with the much more desirable interdependence and communal self-reliance that produces genuine personal freedom.
104 Kind of a funny but sad example here where the author cites two radical homemakers living in Los Angeles who wanted to have a garden in their urban backyard, but when they looked for information on how to go about it, all they could find were book written by authors in temperate climates! Thus it took them a lot of trial and error before they learned they needed to plant in October. "A simple connection with a gardening neighbor, or a simple cultural understanding that it is okay to knock on a door to ask for help, might have spared Kelly and Erik years of frustration."
105 "But thwarting the home wreckers will take more than sitting down to a meal with a family or meeting the neighbors. It means letting go of our attachment to employment, releasing ourselves from the pressure of the status race, and allowing ourselves to become reacquainted with the landscapes, both natural and social, that support us. It means spending more time thinking about what we can do, rather than what we can acquire." On the fact that economists will "wave their arms in alarm" because GDP will go lower. The author says the role of first half of this book is to debunk the idea that anyone who foregoes a conventional career track is squandering their life, and that committing their lives to an employer has not liberated women, and that a homemakers is not a consumer but self-reliant. The rest of the book will "visit the people who have peacefully and quietly rejected these mainstream mythologies."
Part Two: How
Meet the Radical Homemakers
109 The author describes how the rest of the book is thematically organized around lessons and observations she herself gleaned from the 20 interviews she conducted. But first she offers a who's who of the interviewees in alphabetical order: the author offers brief two-sentence introductions to each of them here, but note that there are full biographies of each interviewee in the "Profiles" chapter beginning on page 256.
Chapter 5: Housekeeping
115ff On the aspirations of American consumers; how they don't realize that more money does not equal more happiness; on the fear of not having a paycheck, or health insurance, or means to send children to good schools, these are all [the wrong] benchmarks for success that we fixate on.
117ff On redefining wealth and poverty in terms of time rather than money; the interviewees in this book all had relatively low incomes, but all had extra time with family.
120ff Different examples here from the author's various interviews: one interviewee couple mentions a brother-in-law who earns significantly more money, but his job contributed to his divorce; another woman says she works together with her husband, and as a result "I can't hang out with women and bitch about my husband." [Lollllll holy cow!] The author offers these as examples of solid marriages, family cohesion and stable peaceful home lives for parents and children.
122 Unexpected pivot here to organic/sustainable/local food: A rather unpersuasive quote from one interviewee who raises organic chickens... but doesn't make any money off of it. Basically the feed that they have to buy pays for the "free" organic eggs. Not exactly a good example of increasing your independence from the market economy!
123 On making do with less money: [interesting that the author quotes an interviewee citing Your Money or Your Life and the book's [incredibly valuable] discussion of when you buy something you're paying for it with life energy... but then the author quite erroneously writes her own conclusion that "genuine, enduring wealth is not found in a stock portfolio (as recent events have shown [note that this book was published in 2010, thus she's clearly referring to the great financial crisis]) or in gold bullion." It's actually borderline disturbing that the author of such a book as this clearly did not carefully read Your Money of Your Life, nor does she understand the book's discussions of "Capital, Cushion and Cash" and how they can be used to achieve financial independence. I think if she read this book carefully and did the steps, she'd find many, many answers.]
125 Citing Elizabeth Warren's book The Two Income Trap, where families [supposedly] bring in 75% more money but are financially worse off; one would expect that the extra income would increase the family standard of living but in reality you end up sourcing more of your products and services from the marketplace, and become still more fragile to W-2 wage earning. [Note that various aspects of Warren's book are fallacious, starting with the idea that there's no rule out there that says you have to take your cost structure higher, especially when there are wonderful scale effects that happen as you scale a second incremental income over a fixed household cost base. Thus it's downright weird to say that a two-job household would be worse off than a one job household--only the most non-volitional households would conceivably fall for this "trap," spend away all their incremental take-home pay and actually end up worse off.]
126 The author cites six impossible things, borrowing the idea from Alice in Wonderland:
* Nobody cares what you drive or if you drive
* Housing doesn't have to cost more than a single moderate income
* Health can be achieved without making monthly payments to an insurance company
* Childcare is not a fixed cost
* Education can be acquired and not bought [nowadays, it seems like paid-for education often looks more like anti-education--or worse, indoctrination camp]
* Retirement is possible regardless of income
What follows here are extended discussions of each of these "six impossible things."
126ff Nobody cares what (or if) you drive: comments on the average operating costs of an American vehicle, basically a grand a year [this is of course the 2010-era cost, today it could be almost double that] plus miles, parking, accidents, congestion; on marketing efforts to persuade us that we should have these "costly hunks of plastic and metal" [I've always enjoyed Mr. Money Mustache's condescending nicknames for cars, like "rolling sofa" or "gas-powered wheelchair"]; the author shares her frustrations on not being able to live car-free and notes that only one of her interviewees has actually been able to do so: the one who lives in downtown LA, although the irony is his wife doesn't even agree with him on this and thus their household still owns a car! Examples here of interviewees who can make do with only one car; on how we feel we need a second car in case of emergencies as "we shudder at the idea of asking a neighbor or friend for a lift."
128-9 Comments here from Chris Balish and his book How to Live Well Without Owning a Car, suggesting to take the cash purchase price of a car and double it: that's what five years of ownership of the vehicle will cost; and if you finance a new car every five years for the rest of your life you can expect a shell out $500,000 in interest in payments over your lifetime [again, these are 2010 numbers, the numbers today are likely much higher. One heuristic to think about here is the cost of financing cars over and over again over the course of your life will roughly add up to the value of two median homes. Two homes!]; comments here on how the interviewees rarely purchase new vehicles and never incur debt for them; insights on how some of the interviewees develop car maintenance skills to keep their car cost lower.
130ff Housing does not have to cost more than a single moderate income can afford (and can even cost less): on how the interviewees intuitively understood Thoreau's conception of housing from his work Walden; on creative solutions like sharing housing or buying rundown fixer-uppers; also note that the interviewees' homes were certainly not opulent, but also not run down or austere at all, in fact they actually gave the author feelings of genuine warmth: "some of the most beautiful homes I have ever entered." The author says "Only time and love could create them; [these homes] could not be bought." Discussion here of various examples where people did their own home repairs, worked out elaborate trades with plumbers or electricians to fix up a house; examples of people building a home gradually, funding it in creative ways, etc. [I will also cite Charles Long's wonderful book How to Survive Without a Salary here for people looking for more ideas along these lines.]
134 Amusing comment here on an interior decorating tip: "lose the ridiculous crap."
134ff Other creative examples here: one woman has people live in her home in exchange for helping her work on things; another person actually squatted in a building and saved all of her money to buy a home [note how Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders in her book Reckless: My Life as a Pretender talked openly about how when she was young and making her way in the UK in the 1970s, she and her friends routinely squatted in homes in London]; also comments on keeping money within a family to find a house rather than going to banks to borrow for them: "...it is far better to retain that wealth within the family and community than to turn it over to lending institutions that profit from one's debt." [Michael Hudson would be pleased to see yet another person escaping the rake of the financial sector!] Also comments on questioning whether independent home ownership is even necessary, with various substitute solutions like cooperative living, and thus saving on property taxes and other headaches; also interesting comments about how high rates of mental problems are found among people living alone; also the idea of the myth of generational independence which is reinforced by media. [Although the author doesn't phrase it this way, I'd say the central idea with this last point is to look for creative opportunities to "scale" or make home ownership financially much more efficient than the way it's normally done: where individuals or couples have their own separate housing, that they live in alone, that is paid for all by themselves only.]
139 Health can be achieved without making monthly payments to an insurance company: [with this section, the author has no real choice but to try and address it as best she can; healthcare and health insurance are big obstacles to her various arguments, and this is the one of the weaker parts of this entire section of the book. Worst of all, with the imposition of health insurance mandates under Obamacare--and with the rampant and ridiculous insurance price hikes in the past several years, this problem becomes an almost insurmountable obstacle for most people, particularly those people doing "well enough" to place out of health insurance subsidies.]
139ff Seven of the 20 survey participants had health insurance provided by an employer of one of the spouses; a few had high-deductible or private insurance plans; the others "adopted views that may seem difficult for many Americans to accept" which is the idea of not having health insurance at all; some of the families qualified for Medicaid although some struggled with the idea of "accepting a handout." [I'm not sure what I think about this last solution here, but one way to (re)consider it is to recognize that we have corrupt elites and cantillon insiders who pillage our economy in every sense of the word, thus is deliberately earning less so that you qualify for healthcare assistance really so bad when thought of in this light?] However, note the comments here on certain liabilities of taking government assistance: like you lose your privacy, they practically audit you; one of the interviewees found the process so stressful they dropped out of it.
143ff On interviewees who became "conscientious objectors to the conventional health care industry" and simply decided to refuse to participate in the system at all. [Unfortunately this option was promptly thrown out the window by the Obamacare mandates.] Comments here from interviewees who consider themselves skeptics of modern medicine; comments on a cheap food system or stressful jobs that cause us to be unhealthy. [Of course these things can be factors but they aren't relevant to the central problem of grappling with the high cost of health insurance that your government forces you to pay for.]
149ff On the value of living a self-,determined harmonious, consequential and joyous life as opposed to working a stressful job in order to have conventional health insurance; also an interesting point here from psychologist Bruce Levine from his book Surviving America's Depression Epidemic (paraphrased from this author) that "the American ethos and its misplaced reverence for work sets the stage for people to actually require an illness in order to gain culturally acceptable respite from the unrelenting drive for productivity."
153ff Now we get down to the meat of it as we hear about the author's situation herself: she makes the decision to forgo health insurance. "As our costs rose 18 to 25 percent annually, my husband and I had to forfeit either our way of life or our health insurance. For all of the reasons above and more, we chose to forfeit the health insurance (except for our children)." [Recall that this book was published in 2010, and note that the price increases for health insurance have compounded preposterously since them, more than anybody could have ever imagined, it's absolutely appalling how much you have to pay and how little you get for modern health insurance today]. The reader is struck here at how evasive this section seems: she just says it, carves out the "except for our children" part, and then just drops the subject in favor of sloganeering: "Equitable access to healthcare is a universal need, and the lack of it can be a major stumbling block for enterprising Americans seeking to lead a more helpful, simple, ecologically and socially responsible life. But universal health coverage is not an option for Americans yet. And to surrender a fulfilling, joyous and, most likely, a healthful life in the interim seems a shameful and a perverse sacrifice." [Holy cow this is some serious word salad here to close out a very disappointing section of the book without real solutions and without even a clear discussion of the author's own choices and her outcomes. This section offers very little beyond an acknowledgment of the central problem. I would be extremely interested to see what the author is doing about health insurance now that she is in her 50s, her children are likely in their mid to late 20s, and now that we all live in a world of Obamacare-mandated and increasingly expensive health insurance.]
154ff Child care is not a fixed cost: One of her interviewee couples works out what the full costs will be to have their child in daycare--not just the actual cost of the daycare itself but also needing a second car, how much they would have to earn before taxes to have enough money left over after taxes to pay all these bills, and then they discover it would be financially smarter and they'd be way ahead of the game to take care of the child themselves. [You often are ahead of the game if you don't play the game at all. Note how in J Is for Junk Economics, Michael Hudson talks about various forms of "rakes" like this that occur in the labor market to trap people with cost structures such that they have to work all the more.]
154ff Comments here on what's better for the child; the author scratches at aspects of another problem here: "there has arisen a troubling trend whereby the nurturing home is ritually supplanted by the child-care industry, on the rationale that parents are thus able to bring more money home." [I think the process here is possibly far more nefarious: it's to interpose the state and the commercial marketplace between parents and children, to force parents to outsource more and more family activities, and thus have the system gradually absorb more and more of what would have been considered "normal family life" just a generation or two ago. It's entirely possible that feminism itself has been co-opted itself as a mechanism to soften up the household for these types of "absorption/co-opting" mechanisms.] Comments here on using daycare in creative ways: periodically/occasionally, or restructuring your vocation in order to be able to do more of this yourself; also on some of the drawbacks of having your child doing a hyperabundance of early enrichment activities; perhaps it's better to having them grow to find their own entertainment and enrichment at their own pace rather than doing constant prearranged activities; on the value of old fashioned play, etc.
159ff Other creative/collective solutions that fit the Radical Homemaker's philosophy, like reciprocal child care instead of paying for babysitting.
160ff Education can be acquired and not bought: Various comments here from interviewees who consider the education system to have financially burdened them, that it interfered with their children's development, that it offered only an incomplete education. Comments on the various costs that come with education: like living in a community with "good public schools"; paying extra for tutoring or private school; the game never ends and the costs never end. Further, the benefits of "more education" often aren't even that good, as it seems to produce children who don't even know anything. [!!] Also note these somewhat disturbing examples here from interviewees who found that their children became detached, anxious and non-communicative after school, but during summers and after a weekend they would go back to their normal behavior. [Outsourcing your children's education is yet another example of how the state subtly interposes itself between you and your children, it's another psyop on some level.]
163ff Fascinating discussion here with one of the interview subjects who has a daughter with Down syndrome: after having her involved in a special needs system, she found it to be a very sophisticated form of brainwashing, where all of these special therapists therapies were interposed between her and her daughter; the woman eventually decided to opt out of the "disability-industrial complex" and found an alternative network of people raising children with Down syndrome, and her daughter did far better.
165ff Comments here on how the education system squelches individuality; how it "normalizes" children; the author mentions the book The Organization Man by William H. Whyte; how a system of enforcing normalcy creates productive society members but actually produces neurotic people--and worse, with skills that are increasingly irrelevant. [Once again if you instead visualize this as a feature not a bug, it transparently explains the interests of the system: how the system wants its people educated with conformist views, it wants them set up with skills such that they remain underpaid cogs in a system, etc... And a separate thought: It's also interesting to think about the US model for education, which is now pseudo-decentralized: you have different communities funding their own schools, but increasingly they are brought under centralized control of the state education system via controls on textbooks, curricula, testing etc. And this centralized control has become still more centralized thanks to national programs, federal funding with strings attached, required national testing protocols, etc. As such, the education system really is de facto centralized on a massive scale even though on a superficial level it appears to be decentralized.]
167 Another interesting comment here from Bruce Levine's Surviving America's Depression Epidemic on some of the metalessons that children learn from schooling in general: "the belief that surviving depends on motivating oneself with fear so as to succeed at tasks that are meaningless." [!!!!] The author then seconds this calling it "arguably a blueprint to support the existing power structure that keeps an extractive economy in place." [No "arguably" needed in that sentence! Once again, if you think of these things are "features not bugs" you have a leg up on understanding the overall system.]
168ff Interviewees here talking about having their education include understanding nature, on learning to tell a birch tree from an oak tree; or to raise self-sufficient children who live in opposition to consumer culture; also on the idea of producing children who can self-educate, who have the ability to resist media, who can think independently. Also comments from some of the interviewees about their own education: some of whom went to prestigious schools and found how little prepared they were afterward despite having gone to the "best" schools. In some cases interviewees talked about how they were basically "manufactured" to go work for someone for a salary. And then comments here on the cost of college degrees and questioning their value for their own children; also on children being pressured to go to college but not knowing at all what they want to do. And then various vanilla tactics for affording a secondary education, like choosing state schools or a land grant college; etc.
176ff Retirement is possible, regardless of income: "The final impossible thing to consider is that a family on a reduced income can save money for the future." Comments here on the indebtedness of the average American family; the fact that people aren't even getting ahead on two incomes; on the strange paradox that many of the Radical Homemakers found that the more money they bring in the more money goes out [note that this only happens if you are genuinely mindless about your spending; thus you have to permit it to happen. Thus this is yet again a question of acting volitionally]; on extra consumerism peer pressure that you are exposed to when you go to a job every day [again, not if you're volitional!]; also the idea of a readily disposable income causing you to become less resourceful: interesting quote hear from one of the interviews who would come home tired from work, so then he he'd go out more often because he wanted to blow off steam by going out with friends; these are good examples of how--if you permit it--your income spirals up your costs while taking away your time.
178ff Some of the discussions here, while not entirely untrue, sound somewhat justificatory: see for example one of the interviewees who describes how working on his family ranch is a source of joy, so we'll never stop working. [Self-evidently this not retiring!] Other justifying comments here from interviewees, including "I have absolutely no desire to be rich" or "I have no interest in piling money up for my future." [A few things I'd like to add here: when you earn less money, all else equal, there is less to save; of course this is a separate problem entirely from earning more money and being unable to stop yourself from spending more still. These are not the same problems. Therefore literally it's misleading to conflate these things and argue basically "Oh, what's the point of retiring, I will never stop working/I have no desire to be rich." No. The goal--at least the author's ostensible subject under discussion here--is to save such that you can eventually live off your capital. Finally, for those readers who might get discouraged if they confuse "being rich" with "having the ability to retire," it's worth noting what Jacob Lund Fisker was able to do on a piddling PhD postdoc salary. Aggressive savings can happen at a very wide range of incomes, it just requires more creativity at the lower income end.]
179 Other examples here of a couple that received an early inheritance but maintained their lifestyle unchanged, and just invested this money to produce income for them.
180 More justificatory comments here which are deeply disturbing: one couple argued that had they saved more they would have just lost it in the economic meltdown of 2008. [No, no, no! A prudent Radical Homemaker would make sure to have enough of a financial margin that she didn't need to sell anything during the downturn, plus she would have a significant cash buffer that she could put to work during that economic meltdown, enabling her to own investments at great prices that would provide economic security in the years to come! That is how a prudent person survives during and thrives after a financial crisis. Granted, the author's point here, and it is well-taken, is that you can't always buy security with just money. But the idea that it wasn't worth saving money because "we would have just lost it in 2008" is pathetic and anti-volitional.]
181ff The author's central point here is that money doesn't solve all your problems, but having relationships and a community can produce just as much security as money. [Again she's right, money does not necessarily equal security, and many things can take the place of money. This section, while it scratches at certain important ideas, could go a lot deeper and be much more insightful.]
Chapter 6: Reclaiming Domestic Skills
184ff On the long-term process of developing and cultivating skills to become a Radical Homemaker: the author does not intend here to explain "how tos" or catalog all the things you can do (e.g., building a chicken coop, repairing equipment, etc.). Instead, she's trying to understand the deeper skills that the interviewees possessed, basically what metaskills they had [although she doesn't use this word]: things that would not be in a technical manual, but would be underlying skills used to develop the "skill of skill-building." [Much of the discussion in Tyler Disney's incredible book Deep Response addresses this metaproblem.] Interesting comments here on how sometimes her interviewees were not able to actually articulate--or weren't consciously aware--of these underlying metaskills; they went unacknowledged or just become an organic part of the homemaker's life.
185ff The author arrives at seven skills, three of them are sort of pre-industrial type skills:
1) nurturing relationships,
2) working with the life-serving economy, and
3) cultivating an ability to self-teach.
...and then she names four additional skills that she calls "new skills":
1) setting realistic expectations and limits,
2) redefining pleasure in our lives,
3) rediscovering the taste of real food, and
4) adopting a fearless attitude in withstanding contrary cultural expectations.
The author describes these as skills that change our assumptions and get us to "unlearn much of what our modern extractive economy has ingrained." [All very interesting!]
186ff Comments here on skill #1: nurturing relationships: contrasting it from modern consumer culture, which is transaction-based and focused on making and using money, and instead getting back to interdependence and living in a socially healthy environment of cooperative alliances with people; the author notes that this helps avoid the condition of "housewife syndrome"; how it's more than just calling in favors, it's about giving support; on the modern lie of "independence." "The extractive economy benefits greatly when people can't learn to get along together. People, however, do not." Comments here on Betty Friedan commenting about the isolation of housewives in their suburban homes. [Again these are features not bugs of a system that wants us lonely, weak, atomized, etc.] The author talks about various nuances of building self-reliance but not becoming totally self-sufficient, quoting one of the interviewees saying there is no such thing as self-sufficiency, rather it's about interdependence.
188ff On nurturing family relationships like with in-laws; using family relationships "to share, rather than replicate assets." Comments from interviewees about how "It's not a bad thing to have parents help you." Also on how learning to accept help makes it easier to give help; also when you have the presence of family around it actually makes your marriage more likely to survive intact.
191ff Obligatory comments here about "men not sharing enough of the housework" but then arguing that Radical Homemaker relationships involve more contributions from husbands than you'd get in a "normal" 2xW-2 household.
194ff Comments here on building friends and community relationships, on community-building as an essential skill; how modernity causes us to lose this skill; the couple that lived in LA experienced an obvious example of the value of community as somebody showed them how to grow food in Southern California; also how community fosters barter and trade of skills and items.
201ff On skill #2: working with the life-serving economy: the author spills some ink here idealizing a system not quite so reliant on money; yet another mention here of the book Your Money or Your Life, which the author argues is a "must-read" for anyone pursuing the Radical Homemaker path. [So maybe the author did actually read it? But she sure missed certain important insights from it, see p. 123 above.] Comments here on "the elemental practices of thrift, frugality and debt avoidance." Tactical behaviors, like including everyone in the economic picture, minimizing waste, becoming net producers rather than consumers, bartering, spending money where it matters most, and understanding the concept of enough. [One thing about barter is while it may have inefficient on some level, it sure gives you an escape from the constantly depleting/debasing monetary system where we all earn W-2 money that just debases like a melting ice cube over time. A dozen eggs will always be worth a dozen eggs, a ride somewhere will always be worth a ride somewhere.]
213ff Comments here on understanding "enough": interesting how the author mentions the idea of "a harried leisure class," quoting John de Graaf's Affluenza quoting Swedish economist Staffan Linder theorizing that as we buy my more and more consumption goods the care and maintenance of these goods also increases, we need bigger houses to manage and hold these things, etc. Thus the more aspirations we have, the more time and effort we have to spend acquiring, maintaining and replacing them. [Heck yes. Not to mention the opportunity cost of all the other things you've displaced by directing your money, time and effort into the wrong things!] [Also, a quick comment on scholarship here: I'll note that this author at times fails to go to original texts: she instead "quotes others quoting." Sure you can do this, but it can be extremely dangerous: it twice-decontextualizes the thought, and thus massively increases your risk of misconstrual. See for example the note for p. 75 above as the author (likely) misconstrues Christine Frederick's 1929 book Selling Mrs. Consumer; likewise, see how the author repeatedly cites Your Money or Your Life, but appears to rely more on her interviewees' construals of it than her own.]
215ff Skill #3: on cultivating the ability to self-teach; [it is a genuine master-master skill to be an autodidact: it works in any environment.] The author cites people who taught themselves to grow, can and dehydrate food, to ferment food, to make wine, beer and pressed juices, to keep chickens, make toys, grow fruit trees, etc. The author cites the self-reported aspects of autodidact behavior among her Radical Homemaker subjects: they all were able to think independently, embrace general knowledge, work with what they had, make mistakes, find their own teachers, and "muster the courage to start from wherever they were." Comments here on the difference between schooling and thinking; comments also on asking why you're doing the thing that you're doing. [That last insight is often underappreciated: to often we do stuff because "that's what you do." You don't have to do these things!]
218ff The author cites the amount of books and reading radical homemakers do, consistently, and on a wide range of subjects. [I think another deeply satisfying thing about Radical Homemaking and Early Retirement Extreme-type cultures--and for that matter in investing culture too--is that these cultures all celebrate a wide range of interlocking, generalized knowledge, and this aggregated knowledge has a great degree of "tensegrity." This is radically different from the the kind of knowledge the professional labor market--or worse, academia--celebrates, which is hyperspecialized, siloed knowledge, useless outside of its narrow space. If you're curious about the concept of tensegrity--which means basically instances where you find synergies and direct relationships across domains, where those domains literally support/undergird each other in interesting ways--it is explained very helpfully in Early Retirement Extreme (see Chapter 5) and in Tyler Disney's book Deep Response.] Another noteworthy comment here is one of the interviewees says "we're most happy when we're teaching ourselves new things," [This is another tremendously underappreciated benefit of being an autodidact!]
219 Discussion of working with what's there: the author cites examples of homemakers who don't own land, who live in urban areas, but even with tiny yards can produce significant amounts of their own food; another example from one of the interviewees: they decided instead of concluding that growing food in their backyard was impossible, they learned to work with their conditions. [This illustrates another subtle nuance: you have to believe that something is "possible" to then go and do it... the belief becomes self-fulfilling in either direction! I'd add a second nuance, which is to not solve problems by a default solution of throwing money at them in fact to try not to solve problems with money at all. This tends to unleash much more resourcefulness. A lot of this of course has to do with just having a good attitude.]
220ff On making mistakes: a really good anecdote here from one of the couples as they took their entire tomato crop and sun-dried it into one big jar--which happened to be contaminated. They lost the entire crop basically, and the woman almost cried because of all the work that went up in smoke. [Lots of times when you grow things you end up feeding the local fauna, not yourself!] On needing "fortitude and a high tolerance for failure." "People who are not do-it-yourselfers have a low tolerance... They screw up once, and they're like, 'See? I told you I can't grow anything!' Or 'I told you I can't cook!' The real do-it-yourselfer is like, 'Huh. Why did that go wrong?'" On calling a failure a how-to in reverse. [These basically are insights on mindset and attitude, which of course can be chosen in advance.] Also on "gleaning your community to find a teacher" who can show you what you need to learn. Also a subtle insight here on not confusing "finishing a workshop" as proof of expertise: you have to go back and apply it to your own situation and adapt it before you can say you've "learned something"; also a useful comment here on avoiding growing addicted to external instruction, because the most important thing here is applying and using it yourself. [All very good insights.]
222ff Insights here on just getting started: you can start with your first pot of tomatoes on a balcony, or cooking your first home cooked meal... the whole point is to continue the momentum;
223ff On setting proper expectations and limits: the author talks about having a deeply flawed mental image of a garden devoid of weeds, with chickens wandering peacefully outside, where the dishes are always washed and there's a pristine landscape, etc. The author says that "no house looks like this": rather it is "contained chaos"; the idea here is that you can have just as much overwork in this world as in the corporate world if you're not able to set proper boundaries. You have to not have undue concern about appearances; the author even jokes about how many of her interviews were conducted in spotless homes, but she came to learn that her interviewees confessed to cleaned their homes for days before bringing her in.
228ff Comments here on how it can be wasteful to run a perfect home; examples given here of an over-sterilized or deodorized home, the ecological cost of a manicured lawn that's mowed and sprayed too frequently. [There are clear scale benefits to letting certain chores go for a while: recall the joke about dusting: why dust every week when you can wait 3 months and use a snowblower?]
229ff On respecting your need for rest and the cycles of energy you have and letting them happen. The author quotes the authors of Affluenza, talking about wealth in the form of the ability to take an afternoon nap; also note the quote here from interviewee who would fall into a trap overworking herself on her own farm to the point where it wasn't fun anymore; she was managing an injury, then didn't have time and energy to go biking or hiking or other things she loved; she discovered the quality of life had fallen way off.
231ff On redefining pleasure: borrowing Emerson's idea of being "a master of living well," and defining this as not being passively entertained by media or shopping, but rather someone who takes joy in daily living, from intentional experiences. Note the interesting quote from an interviewee here that people listen to music but don't create it, or they go to a restaurant but don't cook meals themselves. [These are textbook examples of using the consumer marketplace to purchase something better done by your own hands.] Another interviewee distinguishes between a citizen and being a consumer, someone who is self-actualized versus someone who just buys a thing.
236ff On rediscovering the taste of real food: comments here from one Radical Homemaker on "how far from the national palate her own family's tastes have deviated." On how mainstream culture trains you on how things are "supposed" to taste, we get conditioned for super-sweet or salty chemical flavorings; various interviewees comment here about being offended by grocery stores on various levels as they think about the packaging, the waste, the labor conditions, etc.
238ff Comments here on missing the structure, rewards and "attaboys" you get from the corporate world; one interview talks about how in the corporate world sometimes things seemed clearer: like having a list of things to do and getting them done with clarity: or someone would give you a piece of paper saying "this is how you're doing." "At a job you always have some supervisor saying 'Good job!'... Well, you don't get that at home." [I think the problem here is the confusion between pseudovalidation (in the form of extrinsic validation) and actual intrinsic validation. You can't eat an attaboy!] Comments onhow the decision to quit is "often irreversible": it is difficult to return to the workforce after being out of it for a long time, you may no longer know people in the workforce who could help you get your next job. Also comments on "professional shunning" in different forms: how our culture "shames anyone who appears to be non productive or inefficient." On pushback from neighbors, colleagues, friends and family on your choices. [I have come to realize that that pushback is a positive sign, you want to see it: it signals you are doing the right thing.] Note one interview who talked about being viewed as "the hippie mama": "People worked out their demons on my person."
244ff On the idea that you're missing something by your kids not going to public school, or that you're giving some kind of strange impression with your lifestyle choices [once again, see the pushback as a sign you're doing it right]; On feeling embarrassed about your old car or about the "meager" handmade gifts you give family and relatives compared to what they buy in stores; one of the interviewees talks about an epiphany she had, that it's all a joke: "the system is making me do this because this is how we've decided our economy should be... And I don't buy into that."
246 I couldn't help but laugh out loud at this example of one of the interviewees grabbing her chainsaw in Chicago to clean up downed branches in Chicago city parks: she just acts confidently, like she belongs there, and is left alone--and in the process gets free firewood! Other examples here of having outlaw chickens inside the city limits or planting a "guerrilla" vegetable garden somewhere in a vacant lot.
Chapter 7: Toward a Homegrown Culture
249ff The author warns of the risk of Betty Friedan's "housewife's syndrome", she cites this as a risk for Radical Homemakers after the initial "exuberant rush"; a review here of the three-stage path, where you 1) discover the illusory happiness of consumer society and reject it, then 2) where you enter a period of recovering many lost domestic skills to survive outside of consumerist society. The second phase can take years or even a lifetime per the author, who says this is the most exciting and fulfilling stage, but it can be followed by a sense of aimlessness, cynicism and lack of fulfillment. And then the author talks about phase 3), rebuilding, where you expand your creative energies and bring your community and society along with you.
251ff Good example here as one interviewee talks about the fact that as an individual he has no impact on national politics, but he can influence his neighborhood or his community. Other examples of people finding personal satisfaction and creative achievements.
254ff Finally here the author does a callback to her initial interview at the beginning of the book with Susan Colter, who shared anguished questions about being torn, experiencing a sort of guilt/survivor's guilt, asking if this process mean foregoing feminist ideals to go back to the homemaker role and just be satisfied with that, etc. [The author is scratching here at various underlying problems of both second- and third-wave feminism, how they led us all into a psyop and how to escape that psyop, along with escaping the programming that came with that psyop.]
Profiles: Study Participants
256ff The last 20 pages of the book are extended biographies of each of the interviewees. Some interesting parallels to note here: the first two subjects grew up in wealthy white families, with parents chasing upper middle class professional careers--which they as children rejected. Note also the book mention here: The Urban Homestead written by two of the interviewee subjects Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen which could be worth looking at; also note Julie and David Hewitt, who went corporate first, had enough stock options to have a nest egg, but then lost a considerable amount of it in bad investments, making them conservative with their finances. This couple built and renovated a fixer-upper, using the proceeds from it to move to an isolated community in the Pacific Northwest where they bought another fixer-upper to live in. This particular couple lives on $48,000 a year [in 2010]; other couples live on $32,000 to $40,000. Several of these interviewees basically were burned out of corporate life or the public education system and simply gave up their careers.
269 Note that there are a couple of different interviewees who lost money in the 2008 financial crisis, and as a result were burned out of investing forever unfortunately. Note this quote: "We'd done it [saving for retirement] in a very traditional way... The IRA type thing, and you know, we've watched our money go... We were told this is the way to do it, and I've learned not to believe that anymore!" [This is highly unfortunate, especially looking back 15-20 years later.]
272-3 Another interesting couple, Holly and Brian, who moved back to their family's 400-acre ranch with two of her siblings, along with their spouses and children, while and a fourth sibling plans to join them and a fifth sibling lives in the area. The family subunits operate different business enterprises while sharing the same land base, as the land was no longer economic to use for ranching. [Interesting to find different types of scale and different types of opportunity on acreage that, admittedly, may no longer be economic for one purpose, but might become economic for others.]
274ff At least two of the interviewee subjects, one couple and one single woman, were heavily influenced by Your Money or Your Life. [Well done guys!]
To Read:
David C. Korten: When Corporations Rule the World
John de Graaf, ed.: Take Back Your Time: Fighting Overwork and Time Poverty in America
John de Graaf, et al: Affluenza
Julia M. Wright: The Complete Home: An Encyclopædia of Domestic Life and Affairs [free in the public domain]
William Coperthwaite: A Handmade Life
Dolores Hayden: The Grand Domestic Revolution
***Christine Frederick: Selling Mrs. Consumer [public domain copy here]
Glenna Matthews: "Just a Housewife": The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America
Bruce Levine: Surviving America's Depression Epidemic
Robert Putnam: Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
Chris Balish: How to Live Well Without Owning a Car
Kelly Coyne and Eric Knutzen: The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City