The transition from what we know

It’s hard to make the transition from what we know. Even when you think you’re managing it, old ideas will pop up and trip you.

Let me start by sharing a conversation I was in from a few days ago. The other person is someone who’s spent a lot of time thinking about urban affairs, and about urban sustainability. They’re aware (which most aren’t) just how fragile most of our systems of survival actually are (and how it wouldn’t take much to make them far more robust).

So when I mentioned that we need to undo zoning restrictions to make it possible for people to work where they live — and work in more ways than “I’m a consultant” or “I’m a writer” working from home — he stopped and just blurted out “that’s not possible”.

That’s a bit of old idea popping up to bite you.

Our ideas are formed into a framework, that we seldom notice, but nevertheless limit us.

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger, in his book “Being and Time” (Sein und Zeit), talked about how we perceive things either as being ready to use, or merely present. Most of the time we think about things as they are to be used: we don’t actually notice the hammer we pick up to drive a nail, we don’t notice the razor we pick up to shave with, and we don’t really notice our socks as we put them on.

He also, in his essay “The Question Concerning Technology”, talked about frameworks, and he pointed out that in the technological framework whole suites of other ideas become closed off and simply never thought.

Three centuries ago, people worked all the time. But few had jobs. The word “job”, in fact, meant something very limited in time. Picking apples in the orchard at harvest time was a job — something you left your work to do.

As technology made it possible to organize work at larger scales, the job became the norm, and work faded from view for most of us, at least in the sense of doing something not as an exchange of money for time.

What a community needs is work, and that means it needs work places. If you watch the documentary A Convenient Truth, about Curitiba in Brazil, you’ll see that one of the five initiatives was to build new urban housing with workplaces included. This allowed the inhabitants to make their living while having a place to live.

Try doing that in the typical city here! It just wouldn’t be possible under all our current rules. What’s more, most people wouldn’t understand why you’re proposing it, since, “as everyone knows”, jobs come from someone else, somewhere else — or you need a business plan, capital, and customers (and one day employees) that will earn money as an entrepreneur.

There’s more to work than the entrepreneur-as-job. There’s more to life than money.

This — the idea that if money’s not changing hands it’s not “real” — is what caused my conversation last week to stumble over the hidden framework underlying this.

For those of us that have understood enough of the changes going on around us to recognize that the society we live in is headed toward a reckoning — call it a collapse, call it a deep structural change, call it an economic revolution, it doesn’t matter — and that we’re going to have find new answers to old problems, the challenge of making a new future has to encompass how we live, how we work, how we trade, and how we do all of this without necessarily having all the supports we’re used to.

If, for instance, our money system is destroyed (whether that’s by hyperinflation, so that we just don’t want the stuff any longer, or by having too many people outside of it looking in, as with Europe’s “half the youth and nearly a quarter of the total population not working”, or by having credit seize up so that although money still has value not enough moves through the system to spend it on (a Great Depression type of period), or even some other problem not seen here (perhaps the collapse of the government that underlies James Howard Kunstler’s World Made by Hand?), then we’re going to have to work (because, frankly, we’ll have things that need doing) but we may not have “jobs” as we knew them.

The framework will have to change. Just like other elements of that framework will end up changing.

It will be exceedingly hard (for all of us) to let that go. This morning, for instance, I wrote a post for one of my other blogs, Getting Value from IT. I’m no longer a researcher, nor a consultant, nor certainly employed in IT — nor, looking forward, do I see myself doing that in future. Yet up popped that post in my mind, pressing me to write it, and so I did rather than let it go. A touch from a framework not yet replaced but merely overlaid by my thinking about the future and what it means.

That’s why, for all of us, our journey into a sustainable future will be two steps forward and a step back — and occasionally punctuated by a step forward and two steps back. Everything around you still reinforces the framework you grew up with, internalized as “the way things are”, and makes it easy for you to see the world as ready to use (and be used) within its bounds instead of seeing what’s present before you as it is or will be.

So don’t despair if, for instance, you find yourself “going back” once you start out. It’s all part of the transition — because until the framework changes we’ll continue to be between old and new.

Clue in, turn off, restart

One after another we go through the process. Some are fortunate enough to get far enough along before the moment of truth happens that at least they have a fat enough bank and brokerage account to fall back on (assuming, that is, that the endless frauds in the financial system don’t impoverish you as happened to so many others in the past few years).

Others have reality slap them hard around the face with a wet fish or two before they reach their comfort zone — and for a large number of newly minted graduates facing the transition from school days to work-a-day world that slap comes with the message “you’re just plain surplus to requirements”, otherwise known as “not wanted”.

This has been coming for a long time. People in Britain for years have known that if they were let go after fifty the odds were poor that they’d ever replace their place on the organizational ladder with anything other than self-underemployment or an entry-level permanent part-time position. That’s becoming the North American norm now, too, and it’s why so many people are contractors, or consultants, or trying to get someone, anyone, to allow them to establish a second career.

So the first step is cluing in and really seeing the world around us for what it is, not what we want it to be.

This is hard. My wife has acute myalgic encephalomyelitis. Working is out of the question — whole weeks go by where she does not even leave the house.

Our children are university age: our daughter is taking a gap year to restock her bank account before her assault on graduate school (she’s studied internationally at full fees and paid cash, so at least there’s no debt to act as a millstone around her neck for later) and our son leaves high school this year (he’s planning a working year as well). As any parent would do, my wife wonders aloud — often — what kinds of security they will have, and what kind of job they might hold (a “real” job, not the sort of “take anything just for the cash” types they’ve had to date).

When I tell her that they may never have “a job” in the sense she’s talking about, it scares her. (It’s frightening to me, too, but then I’ve been wrestling with this for over a decade now, researching, writing, and experiencing the endless shifts one makes to stay afloat without the traditional anchors, so at least it’s not a complete unknown.)

I think my daughter gets this world as it is, more or less. My son, less so: he’s more willing to spend, figuring that there’ll be more tomorrow to cover his needs.

The cluing in comes in two parts: understanding how the world and its opportunities has and is changing, and understanding what that means personally, especially when it comes to creating anchors that hold you back.

If you’re going to dance, you have to be free.

That means not living as others around you do. I choose not to own a car, for instance. It’s an unnecessary expense: why should I pay to park it, insure it, maintain it, watch it rust, when it will not be in motion over 90 per cent of the time.

I work from home. It’s less than ten minutes to the subway. All our needs — multiple grocery stores, banks, barbers, cleaners, etc. — are within walking distance. Sure, on the day I bring kitty litter home it would be nice to have a trunk to handle it. That’s why there are taxis. $13.00 once every two months for bulk purchasing beats the monthly expense of a “just in case” vehicle all to the devil.

Of course, this, in turn, is a limitation. I think twice about taking meetings in the suburbs. There’s work opportunities I don’t even consider because I don’t want to spend four hours/day getting there and back. But living well doesn’t require a lot of money — just a thick enough skin to deal with the people for whom having it all and slapping down a credit card to pay for it someday is the definition of the good life.

That’s the turn off part: turning off the unnecessary bits. Along with no car, we have no television — and hence, no cable bill. We have no options on our phone service (my in-laws will phone back, and no one else leaves a message I care to hear anyway). We eat better bread because I learned how to make it from scratch — and early Sunday morning bread-making time is a free luxury.

Turning off the consumer society is a battle especially if you walk a lot, like me, and keep seeing lattés and gelatos and other good things on every block. Don’t carry cash, never carry plastic: you can live without it.

But this is not a call to drop out completely. A future for each of us requires that, after having shed old skins and habits, we undertake a restart of our lives. We figure out how to earn enough, securely enough, to live well (if not “large”, at least well sheltered, fed, happily and healthily getting from one year to the next).

“Enough” means something different to everyone, but to me it means no debt, all bills paid, a little tucked away for emergencies, a pantry with months worth of staples stored, the ability to acquire a new skill now and then. For us, it does not mean a winter and summer vacation, the latest car, two restaurants and another night out every week. (I like to cook: it relaxes me.)

That, in turn, lets me explore a portfolio of things to do, some of which pay (assuming people do pay: I am sick and tired of corporate clients letting my invoice age for two to three months, then coming to negotiate a partial payment because “we have problems”, even while announcing record earnings) and some of which are volunteer or self-expression. Life is richer now than when I had a job with a fancy title that sent me around the world constantly and I made ten times what I do today.

Yes, these are tough times. They don’t have to be bad ones. Clue in to reality, turn off what you don’t really need, and restart on tomorrow’s track. Your life is to be lived, not fitted into a mould designed by others.

Austerity, balance, commonweal

Austerity, says Mark Blyth, is a dangerous idea.

When I first went to hear Blyth, a Scots-born professor of political economy from Brown University give his lecture “Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea” last month at the University of Toronto, I went in prepared to hear ideas I disagreed with. I’d gone because I’d recently heard a podcast featuring Steve Keen, an economist from the University of Western Sydney, talk about the ease with which societies forced into austerity slip into authoritarian, then totalitarian responses as populism sweeps civil order away. That had disturbed me. So I thought, even though I am on the record (see “Why a Deficit is Immoral” here on It’s Just a Jump to the Left, then a Step to the Right) as favouring balanced budgets — which, when you’ve been spending more than you take in, requires austerity to rebalance them — I’d better hear more arguments for spending your way out of trouble.

Well, I’m convinced of one thing: we are definitely on the horns of a dilemma, and, much like Bugs Bunny in “Bully for Bugs” when Toro comes up behind him, we’re all feeling the heat and thinking “stop steaming up my tail”.

When it comes to our politics, we can A-B-C or D. Let me explain.

A is for austerity. This is the path currently being run in most of the western world: programmes are cut back, means tests are imposed where they didn’t exist before, infrastructure maintenance is further deferred, and zero régimes are imposed on public sector wages and benefits, all in a desperate attempt to wrestle deficits into some degree of order. Call it governance by the bankers (since, in many cases, central bankers and international institutions run by bank-related processes are used to set policy rather than the elected representatives of citizens, who are, in turn, whipped into shape by their party leaders to “ork, ork” on command as trained seals), of the bankers (all other issues are subordinated to the debt, the debt rating, the deficit, and the sanctity of the world’s banking industry), for the bankers (who received the bailouts after creating a colossal mountain of interlocking agreements and debt blowing repeated bubbles masquerading as growth and allowing the tower of cards to collapse rather than letting the institutions die). Individuals, their lives, and their needs, are held hostage to the few.

B is for balance. It’s what’s been missing, is generally missing, and is likely to often be missing into the near future, in our affairs. A balanced society would recognize, for instance, that infrastructure maintenance is not deferrable; that untoward unfunded pension and programme obligations are a danger; that new infrastructure still needs to be built for its knock-on effects; that the poor, the unemployed, etc. do not just “go away” or disappear because you define them out of existence, or tell them “get a job”, or cut off their benefits. It’s that if you want to be a Keynesian, pumping debt into the economy during recessions to “stimulate” a restart, you have to also be a Keynesian, withdrawing money from the economy during the resulting boom, and trimming programmes back not when times are hard, but when they’re good. (Not much of that around in the past half century, now, is there?)

C is for commonweal. Politics is supposed to be about the morality of “we” (just as ethics is about the morality of “I”, or “what should I do?”). We have bodies that call themselves commonwealths; we have the notion (as John Ralston Saul cogently argued in his book A Fair Country: Telling Truths about Canada) in this country of bien-être or commonweal as one of our founding principles, yet we, in Canada and abroad, generally fail to live up to this. Instead we become NIMBYs (not in my backyard), BANANAs (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone) and other forms of selfishly-interested loudmouths posing as concerned citizens (but really far more interested in tonight’s hockey game, their next raise, and gunning the motor of their SUV or pickup truck).

If B and C, when practised, actually go together, then A as practised is just waiting for its partner: D, for debt. Debt has been the core of our financial system — it is, in fact, what our money is — and it is the driver of our need for endless growth at whatever cost. Our response to the stumble of the 1970s was to fake everything, and this, at the end of the day, is debt’s role, as Karl Denninger ably pointed out in Leverage: How Cheap Money will Destroy the World.

So this is our conundrum. We have a debt-fuelled society, one that cannot prosper without jacking debt even higher — but, as Blyth points out, you need the right kind of debt to get an effect. Absorbing banks’ debts to pretend they’re solvent (when they’re not) adds to the pile, but unproductively. Yet, at the same time, if we’re to restore balance — and in a no/slow growth world we can’t afford to simply hope that somehow growth from outside magically lifts up individuals enough to make up for simply slamming more taxes and fees down and keeping the rest of the game running as is — we’re going to have to cut something, somewhere.

Let’s call that targeted austerity, to assume and establish a balance, for the purposes of commonweal.

Only then can we move to remove the role of debt — which requires endless growth simply to cover the interest involved — from the core of our world. For only that way can balance be maintained and the commonweal (as much as anything can be in, given uncertainty) be assured.

If this sounds like the polar opposite of the choices the politics of your locale puts in front of you, you’re no doubt right. But fixing that requires that we do more than fan the flames of, and respond to, populist rhetoric.

We must engage, with each other, or surely we will fall separately.

Breaking Points

All over the world, people are giving up.

Think about it. Where they get to vote, often nowadays, a majority can’t be bothered. When asked, they simply say “it makes no difference”.

More and more are going beyond that. You see people refusing promotions now, refusing to go higher on the career ladder where there are fewer spots to compete for.

If there are 120 spots for a senior clerk or technician, but only 10 supervisor’s roles, in your community, which slot gives you more security? Are the extra few dollars worth it, especially if next year the company your work for is downsizing, offshoring, outsourcing or is acquired? (That the senior staff position may well be one that pays overtime and the management position doesn’t could actually see your take home pay drop when you’re promoted, too — in a time when every bit of income matters.)

Along Europe’s Mediterranean coast, it’s now the norm that your 35 year old son has never left home, never married, never started a family of his own — and maybe never held a job. If that’s the case, why expect that today will bring something different?

These, and many many more, are showing up in our society as breaking points, fracture lines in the body politic.

The world is changing, and rapidly, and in ways that don’t necessarily make tomorrow better than today (that is, if you measure better as “more”, or in terms of advancements).

I live in a neighbourhood where nearly half the shops are shuttered, either formally out of business or where they may still be being rented but nobody blows the dust off from one month to the next (the office used by the former MP, defeated in the election of 2011, is still apparently rented by her, although I’ve never seen any signs of life for two years now).

Yet the street is not dead: the neighbourhood comes together to paint and refurbish empty storefronts, and they’re used for pop-up shops to test new business ideas regularly. Some have even rented digs and set up shop permanently.

When you see a former corporate high-flyer with their goods at “Artisans-at-Work”, you’re seeing another sort of breaking point unfolding.

The neighbourhood, too, is filled with people who work from home. But then, this city is filled with people who don’t have jobs as we used to know them. Over half the urban area of 6.5 million people is self-employed (or -underemployed), a contract worker, permanent part-time, or some other profile that doesn’t fit the traditional 9-5, 37.5 hour week.

Just as well, too, because the transit system is groaning under the commuting that’s going on now in rush hour, and the roads are in gridlock.

I recall meeting a start up CEO two years ago. She was adamant that during working hours she simply would not meet with anyone outside a certain set of streets. The reason was simple: no amount of potential business was worth the lost time struggling to get around, and what that did to her quality of life.

She’d rather, she said, have a much smaller business and a happier existence, than lose the reason she went on her own in the quest for more.

Less is more. That’s a breaking point, in spades, for a society that’s built around endless growth and the consumer as the heart of the economy.

We are coming to an inflection point. We are not ready for it.

Almost all our government programs for things will be useless. They’re geared to doing one of two jobs: funnelling money into established organizations, or providing transitional support to get individuals back into the mainstream.

No micro-business, something that provides a life for its owner but not much more, can afford to deal with the bureaucracy. No one walking the artist’s way is an organization, and thus they’ll remain outside the mainstream.

Meanwhile, many of our best and brightest won’t be running things — by choice. They’ll have stayed on the front desk at the community centre, in a low role in the kitchen, or at a small desk in cubicleland rather than move up and take on more risk for little reward.

More and more people are eschewing possessions — they’re not owning cars, they’re living in postage stamp-sized spaces, they’re people who rent when needed rather than cluttering up their lives with “stuff” — with disastrous effects if your only measure of success is the GDP.

It’s a problem of scale. Things are getting smaller. But we’re left with an infrastructure and institutional landscape — public sector and private — that’s behemoth in size.

For a while, yet, at least. When your breaking points are reached, how will you deal with them?

Twenty-first century educational imperatives

If you were redesigning the public school system for the twenty-first century, what imperatives would need to go into the curriculum and teaching methods to make the change worthwhile?

We’re not talking “fad of the month” or “social engineering experiment” here, but a real top-to-bottom rethinking of how long we go to school, why we’re going, and what we should get out of it.

Learning to Think Clearly

Thinking clearly is a function of teaching reasoning. To do that, you have to also teach the elements of grammar (because that’s how you get to categories and the calculus of statements).

Fallacies, deductive and inductive logic, analysis of propaganda, all of these belong with an analysis of general concepts and concept-linkage (e.g. chair > dining suite > furnishings > living arrangements).

Having students learn how to debate as well as write — from the earlier days, when self-consciousness about “being out front” isn’t as great — would allow for evaluation via oral and written forms (some people do well in one format and lousy in the other routinely).

Learning to Challenge Information

With the tools of thinking under development, students can be taught how to find information, and challenge it.

If it hadn’t been, for instance, a routine part of a PhD level economics course at the University of Massachusetts to take recently published papers and recreate the findings, no one would have discovered the flaws in Reinhart and Rogoff’s paper on debt and austerity that has influenced so much public policy.

Teaching students to recreate findings in doing research, or to challenge and look for alternative sources and explanations, helps inculcate scientific method and research practices without making a big deal of it. It’s just “how we proceed”.

Learning to Think Historically, Economically, etc.

The same situation can be looked at multiple ways. More importantly, it should be, so that the habit of looking at the situation in different ways becomes ingrained as a habit.

If we looked at Detroit, for instance, as it is today, it could be looked at geographically (what makes this site a likely place for a city), historically (how did it grow and decay), economically (what can be done here, especially what can be done here that can sustain the community), sociologically, etc.

If all these different views are taken in parallel throughout a term, the act of doing them at the same time helps bring about the awareness that problems are not unidimensional. At the same time, the different subject areas are opened up for further exploration.

Numeracy

Here’s a funny thing about mathematics: one type of math doesn’t actually depend all that much on other types. Calculus — the mathematics of change — really doesn’t need algebra to get started. Trigonometry doesn’t need geometry. Algebra doesn’t need geometry.

They do all need arithmetic, and a knowledge of how to manipulate and calculate — but that’s all. Order of operations, that sort of thing.

If you use words, you can actually explain very complex mathematics (e.g. calculus) at much younger ages than we’re used to.

The more problems are laid out as things that need doing (laying out a frame, for instance, rather than as an abstract problem), the more likely it is words can augment symbols to get the concepts driven home.

Organization

We can teach how to organize things in a number of ways. Studying and writing stories helps in organizing thoughts. Studying history and civics helps in the principles of groups and getting them to cohere. Studying rocks (geology), weather, and living things (biology) helps in categorization and grouping. Projects to build things help with the principles of creating solutions.

By teaching these things, we make the notion of forming taxonomies, ordering work, group dynamics, etc. second nature.

Great Stories

We need to help students form bigger and bigger pictures.

So we use great stories (as a Montessorian would call them): large master narratives that help provide early order that can be expanded over time.

The deep history of the universe. The story of mankind. The morphology of civilizations (rises and falls, parallel periods, that sort of thing). The great chain of being from quarks to conscious beings as a set of emergences. That all things interrelate (ecology).

What these awaken is the sense that there is always more to learn, more to augment these with. Coupled with the starting point of learn it yourself, test it yourself, know for yourself, the students are also inoculated against accepting anything “just because”.

What we don’t need to teach

We don’t need to teach job skills. Full stop.

Everything we have been teaching are the foundations for working.

We don’t need to teach social skills or social behaviour.

We get that through the activities undertaken in learning. It doesn’t need a separate program.

We don’t need to teach career planning, self and society, or any of the other “be a good citizen” programs forced on our schools today.

That, too, comes out of having created critical thinkers who can research for themselves and learn all lifetime long.

How long to be in school?

Classical Russian education was eight grades long to do what we do in thirteen years. It also was a mix of oral and written examination, recognizing that different students “freeze up” under different testing and observation conditions.

If you coupled the notion of doing what has been laid out here across, say, ten to twelve years, then there would also be time throughout to work on manual skills. How to hammer a nail, cut a board, other useful abilities.

We are more than intellects, after all.

There would even still be room for making art, playing music, and other forms of expression. Also lots of time for playing and running around. Even to maintain a school garden (nothing teaches biology and ecology more than caring for living things — and you can eat the output).

…and what would it cost?

Oddly enough, what’s been described here would probably cost less than what we do today.

Mind you, we’d have to be open to using more than professional teachers to deliver it. The retiring neighbourhood carpenter, for instance, might come in one afternoon a week to teach his craft.

Yes, yes, I know. He’s not trained. Too bad. Get over yourselves.

All this matters because as we go forward, we’ll have less for education, just as we’ll have less for all the other “services” of society. (That’s what happens when you lack growth due to peak everything and have spent the next three generations’ taxes before they start.)

What I’ve laid out here is something that could be done as a home school — as a small neighbourhood school put on by a few parents — as a community school — or even as a school district. It uses the texts that are available, it doesn’t require a lot of equipment, it draws upon community resources.

In other words, it’s effective — and cheap to deliver. Exactly what’s needed for a century reinventing our civilization from the ground up.

Spike, the story of your life

You were born near its tip.

You know nothing other than this. The endless growing choices, abundance, opportunities that came as the spike burst out of the plain and rocketed skyward, breaking into space from the surface of the earth below.

That sounds a bit like science fiction or fantasy, doesn’t it? Yet it’s very real.

It’s what happened with the fossil fuel explosion.

First coal. Then oil. Then gas.

Each has powered (pun intended) that spike higher and higher.

With the spike climbing higher, everything else skyrocketed, too.

Population. I was born in 1954. There are 257% more people alive now, in 2013, than existed on the planet when I came into it.

Money. A hundred years ago, we were all on the gold standard. Then we moved to a gold exchange standard, because, frankly, there wasn’t enough gold to handle the growing numbers of people and enterprises needing it. Then to a pure fiat currency standard. Finally to a pure credit standard, reaching its end now with the last throws of the quantitative easing dice.

All logical effects of the attempt to keep up with the spike.

Figuring out how to use coal to power machines led to the industrial revolution, which further increased the demand for coal … a set of positive feedback loops underwritten by geologic hectomegayears’ worth of time laying down stored sunpower in the form of fossilized or (in the case of oils and gases) cooked plant matter.

Everything you know about the world is the end result of that.

And everything you’re going to learn about the world that’s emerging from the spike derives from the ending of that story.

For end it has — and just as the spike shot vertically at great speed, so, too, the trip back down the other side will be fast, furious, and a very steep drop.

You didn’t want to hear that. Technology is supposed to save us from that!

Technology can help — but it can’t save us. We can use techniques to ameliorate the trip down, and to make the plateau out of which the spike shot a little better. We can’t keep the spike growing ever upward on the back of it.

Why? Well, you see, there’s this little thing called low-hanging fruit.

You’re in an orchard. The apples are ripe. So you reach your hand up and pluck one. Yum! Juicy!

That’s a low-hanging fruit. It’s the equivalent of drilling a hole at Spindletop, Texas, and watching the oil plume high into the sky under its own pressure.

Shales and oil sands? That’s like getting a power truck into the orchard, going up in the bucket, and grabbing the last few apples off the very top branches of the tallest trees. The ones, in other words, that ordinary technology like a ladder couldn’t reach.

You need a lot more capital, and a lot more energy for the technology, to get oil out of non-conventional sources. Or coal. Or gas.

And the non-conventional sources, in turn, don’t produce as well, or as long, as the low-hanging fruit did.

For coal, we’ve burnt just about all the really good hard coal, full of energy in each lump. Now we’re digging out poor coals because that’s what’s left. More pollution, more energy used to transport them, and more tonnes of coal being used because you don’t get as much from each lump.

For oil, we’re well into the end game on cheap conventional products. All that’s left is stuff that, up to now, wasn’t worth going after — which ought to tell you something about how good it really is (and why the spike isn’t growing, carrying us all upward into ever greater prosperity).

For gas, the shale gas “revolution” is making up for declining conventional gas, but only up to a point — and where a conventional gas well might have produced for forty years, a shale gas well produces for four, and cost four to ten times as much to establish.

Can you say “uneconomic”? Can you say “not worth it”?

Get to know the story of the spike. It controls everything — the economy, the climate, the food supply, you name it.

To survive and thrive, you need to get this into your head. Everything you’ve known is wrong. We’re now on the downslope — and that’s a brand new world.

Going without money

Money. It seems to be the core of our society.

Everything has its price. Everything is for sale. Without money, who are you?

Increasingly, as this decade winds on, more and more of us will find ourselves outside the money economy as we’ve known it. If we’re lucky, a minimum wage job or barely turning over “business” will take the place of a position in an organization with a title and a decent salary.

Governments may choose not to call people who’ve exhausted their (un)employment insurance benefits unemployed, but when the end comes, they still are. That puts them on the road out of the money economy.

Yet you can live on surprisingly little cash flow.

What it requires is that you put time into things, rather than simply purchase them. Never mind restaurant nights out, you stop buying ready-to-eat or ready-to-heat foods. Pizza isn’t ordered, it’s made from dough you make yourself. What goes on it came mostly from your garden (even if that garden is in a few pots on a balcony).

Going without (much) money requires that you choose where you live carefully. It needs to be somewhere you can walk to just about everything you need. Some will choose small town life for this; others will choose to be in an urban area, near a retail street.

That town, in turn, is chosen because it has the shops in a traditional “main street” configuration that caters to you on foot, rather than on the highway surrounded by acres of parking. Without much money, you won’t be a driver, at least, not regularly. The same with transit systems (if you live in a city): yes, they allow you to go without a car, but without money you’re not going to be a regular user of them.

The tax credit (in Canada) for a monthly pass, in other words, won’t be being used. It’s outside your budget.

Your residence will be chosen for (or brought up to spec through hard work) energy efficiency, so that you simply use less electricity, less natural gas, less heating oil, etc. Moreover, unlike your neighbours, you’ll deal with some temperature fluctuations the old fashioned way: wear another layer, or take it off. (My neighbours — I live in an urban infill townhouse complex — responded to a string of 22° days this past week differently: some opened the windows, others flipped their air conditioners on. Guess which uses less cash?)

You’ll become someone who deals mostly in cash, even forgoing the use of your debit card (because you’re going without much money, you’ve probably switched any banking you do to the bare minimum set of fees you can find — which would mean paying for every convenient swipe of that card). Cash is a funny thing, especially when you don’t have much of it. It becomes a brake saying “do I really need this?”

That’s how you can go from living (in the same place) on 1/3 the money overnight (as I did last year). Just pay cash for everything.

Along the way, you’ll learn how to make your own breads — I can buy enough flour to make 20 artisanal loaves and more for the same price as two loaves of artisanal bread at the bakery or grocery store — a raft of other hodge-podge recipes to “use things up” that expand your family’s food intakes — and you’ll learn how to make soups and stews galore (that provide meals for days when made).

You’ll also lose weight, drop your blood pressure, restore your blood sugar balance, get rid of that cholesterol problem … and there goes spending money on medications for most of us.

In other words, going without money in a money economy isn’t the end of the world.

It may, in fact, be the beginning of it.