The Dark Mountain Blog
Growing up Dystechnic
posted by Simon Fairlie
1st October, 2012
Farmer Simon Fairlie reflects on the decline in practical skills - and abilities.
I came out of school at the age of 17 highly literate but almost completely dystechnic. Since there is no word for the manual equivalent of illiterate I have had to coin one, and ‘dystechnic’ is the best I can do. The ‘technic’ bit comes from the Greek, meaning to ‘shape’ or ‘fabricate’. The ‘dys’ is Greek, for ‘ill’ ‘diseased’; ‘bad’ — or more colloquially, ‘fucked up’. ‘Dysfunctional’ means one is incapable of doing anything properly – but I wasn’t dysfunctional: just incapable of executing anything but the most elementary manual activity with any dexterity. ‘Cack-handed’ is arguably a more accurate description – and ‘Growing Up Cack-handed’ would probably be a better title for this essay – but cack-handed implies an innate inability to use tools, whereas my problem was that no one had ever taught me.
Actually that’s not entirely true, I was luckier than some. I did have a half hour of carpentry a week for a few years, making toast racks and bookends — and the boy scouts taught me how to light a fire and tie a bowline. But theswere extra-curricular activities in a regime that was focused on an exclusively academic and athletic curriculum. The result was that I emerged from the system able to scan iambic pentameters, recite chunks of Racine, write thousands of words on the military exploits of the Merovingian emperors and bowl a leg break, but unable to use a shovel properly, milk a cow, or recognize a carburettor.
The academic specialisation I was subjected to was, and still is, the hallmark of a middle class education. There was, I suppose, an argument that it made sense for middle class kids to devote all their working life to study of the liberal arts, since there were plenty of kids going to secondary moderns who would become experts in lathework and technical drawing, while Irish labourers were wizard at shovelry. There are of course advantages in being brought up middle class (though being wealthy is not necessarily one of them) and I am not one to deny the benefits of studying Latin scansion or medieval history.
But there is also a sense in which we posh kids occasionally felt deprived. Working class kids had dads who built them soapbox carts out of old prams, while we (if we were lucky) were given Triang pedal cars that puttered around at a quarter of the speed. At the seaside you could tell the working class families because they had massive inflated tractor inner tubes, while we had to make do with poxy little plastic rubber rings. Throughout my childhood I lived under the uneasy suspicion that in order to maintain the English class system, I was being deprived of contact with the more robust aspects of the material world, and on leaving school I realized that my suspicions were entirely correct. I was uttterly ill-equipped to do anything except write academic essays and bowl leg-breaks; the only thing I was qualified to do was to sink back into the academic system from which I had only just emerged.
Fortunately, in 1968, the climate was pretty good for anyone who wanted to deviate from the path that society had mapped out for them. There was plenty of casual work around and Tim Leary was advising us to ‘turn on, tune in and drop out’, which was what anyone with any gumption duly did. I was therefore lucky enough not to waste another three years studying Beowulf and the metaphysical poets, and instead got myself a job as a labourer on a large building site. The foreman set me to work chiselling out the half-bricks on the jambs of a doorway that was scheduled to be bricked in. It should have taken about three hours; it took me three days, because nobody had ever thought to place a cold chisel in my hands before, let alone encouraged me to find the correct angle to hold it in order to splinter brick. The foreman was a model of patience, but at the end of my eight weeks stint on the site he advised me that I would do best to go back to college.
However, my conclusion from this initiation into the wonderful world of work was that it was going to take about ten years to learn the manual skills which I could have acquired in three, had I been taught them from the age of twelve – and so I made a conscious decision to devote ten years to acquiring them. Eventually a bunch of us acquired, for the equivalent of twenty weeks work on Colchester dust carts, five acres of land with a stream and couple of ruins in the South of France. In Spring 1973 we set off in a Ford Trader van crammed with wheelbarrows, generators and all manner of tat to build our New Jerusalem, with a tattered copy of the Whole Earth Catalogue serving as our bible.
I still blush at the memory of some of our early attempts. The first roof I built was all that you would expect from someone who had read the hippy DIY building manuals but hadn’t yet grasped that water runs downhill. My fencing sagged like washing lines, and my walls were as plumb as a pregnant woman, a failing I rationalised through the notion that ‘wiggly is good’. On one occasion I had to completely redo a month-long outside job I had taken on that was well beyond my capabilities. Not that any of this mattered greatly – it is amazing how comfortably you can live even when you are utterly incompetent, provided you have control over your own surroundings and an ample source of red wine.
Nonetheless I did learn through bitter experience, and at the end of ten years, aged over 30, I had acquired most of the practical skills that you might reasonably expect of a 17 year old who had been taught by his dad. Once I had acquired the ability to build plumb and straight I discarded the principle that wiggly is good, having discovered that wiggly is difficult to build onto or fit things to and attracts dust, moisture and vermin. By the end of the 1980s, I was competent enough to pass myself off as professional stonemason in one of the few sectors of the building industry that wasn’t affected by the economic downturn. Yet I have never entirely dispelled the feeling that I am an impostor in the world of manual work – that the basic skills and understanding of materials are not as ingrained in me as they would be if I had picked them up younger, in the same way that anyone who learns a new language later in life inevitably speaks with an accent.
The fact that millions of British middle class kids in the 1960s were growing up dystechnic didn’t really matter, in the greater scheme of things, because millions of working class kids (and the luckier middle class ones who had practically minded mums or dad) weren’t. But now, fifty years later, economic trends are conspiring to make dystechnia so prevalent that it is becoming dominant. The outsourcing of manufacturing, the replacement of hand tools by machines, the decline in the number of farmworkers, the proliferation of disposable and solid state machinery – all these, amongst other developments, have marginalised manual labour and made it economically obsolete. It is an exaggeration to claim that ‘we are all middle class now’, but increasingly those who are not middle class, or aspiring to be so, are depicted as a disaffected lumpen proletariat – ‘chavs’ – rather than a skilled workforce. Soapbox carts and tractor tyres have been replaced by mobile phones and Xboxes. School education has given us a 99 per cent literacy rate, but at the price that in every successive generation there are an increasing proportion of people who have never been taught how to use their hands.
Happily, while dystechnia is promulgated in the mainstream, there is resistance at the margins, resistance that can be seen in the rising amateur interest in allotments, smallholdings, woodland management, forest schools, wwoofing, green gyms, conservation volunteering and so on. Unfortunately the enthusiasm for these activities is not always matched by a parallel level of competence. By no means all, but a worrying proportion of, volunteers I meet in the course of my work are at the same level of manual competence as I when I left school — they have never been taught how to wield a hammer, how to dig a trench, how to sharpen a knife, how to use a file or how to tie a knot. But then that is often why they are volunteering: they too, whether early or late in their adult life, have come to the realization that they have grown up dystechnic, and want to do something about it.
This article was first published (on real, actual, paper) in The Land magazine.
Posted by Simon Fairlie on 1 October, 12
Posted in: Blog, Featured, Uncategorized
Comments: 33 comments - Read them and respond
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Design and code by Laurence Lord © 2012.
Simon,
What a great blog. How refreshing to read something that gets to the heart of our dilemma. So much more powerful than the usual ‘eco navel gazing’. We undoutedly do have a crisis of ‘nature’ but more than that we have a human crisis. We can’t fix the nature crisis but we can / could fix ourselves. We fill our lives with compensatory crap (which of course trashes the planet) simply because we have lost the ability to find fulfillment in simple things such as making and fixing things, or growing and cooking food.
Of course simple stuff like that doesn’t suit the ‘progress’ narrative of our contemporary economic system. More worryingly though it doesn’t seem to fit in with the big ‘saving the planet’ narrative of our environmental organisations.
At heart we are simple beings, fulfilled by simple things. Now what’s wrong with that ?
Cheers
Andy
Thank you for this article/I would like to put a copy of it in to each of my 3 son’s Christmas cards.they arelong since grown,but my lifellon sadness is that their father did not do these things with them.Nor their stepfather after that.It is essential life skill training.Sexist I know but my mohter taught me to sew and cook and make do and mend and nothing in the educational system gave me what she did,this inherent knowledge.
With fathering minimsed in these broken home days I fear that this is what is missing for today’s youth,both male and female.Most single mum’s are required by law to leave their 7 yr old children un attended while they work.
If I had my time over I would join the commune in Devon and learn to turn wood on a lathe made with two poles and string.
They are quite right about who will survive the new world.I spoke publicly in Carmarthen in 2004 about this.
“The hippies in the hills will be the new lords of the manor as they are the only ones who have the skills to survive”
I painted the picture ,with black abandoned cars and a full supermarket trolly by the way side.
Those who CAN make do and mend and grow their own are the people of tomorrow.
Potato chips won’t come out of bag in the freezer then,will they?
They will starve OR have to learn very fast.
For anyone wanting to delve deeper into this you should read:
‘Shop Class as Soul Craft’
An excellent (American) book by an ex political think tank wonk turned motorcycle mechanic. I say this as an ex motor industry product strategist turned cycle shop owner !
Another book recommendation would be “THE CASE FOR WORKING WITH YOUR HANDS: Or why office work is bad for us and fixing things feels good.” by Mathew Crawford (Penguin 2009)
Gill Barron has written a great review of this book in the latest issue of The Land (thelandmagazine.org.uk) in which she emphasises the importance of tacit knowledge. Of course the main problem with developing this to any degree is the same as that for that of developing the physique and technique necessary for manual production… i.e. time. Maybe it’s time for mountaineers to develop dedicated (and more importantly, regular…) ‘Building Clubs’?
These could be a drop-in workshops, fab-labs and tool lending libraries housed in a single storey load-bearing straw-bale building… which just happens to be the first project of the Building Club!
I know a competent bale-builder and chippy (got to get the roof right) if anyone has the necessary land, willpower and volunteers ;-)
Warren,
Thanks. It was Matthew Crawford that wrote Shop Class as Soul Craft as well. Suspect we may be talking about the same book as ‘Shop Class’ is an American term.
Cheers
Andy
Cheers Andy, it’s a snappier title in American isn’t it :-)
I am so relieved to read this. I am so Dystechnic and my sister and father. I feel totally inadequate around anything practical and that includes making as well as building or shaping. I do feel it’s a real disability. I was fortunate to do a very expressive degree in performing arts and then became a theatre director and it fulfills my creative needs but I work with teams of people who do all the building and the making! I decided to leave the black box theatre world and now run a participatory arts company working to bring people together across divides to explore our ecological identities and share stories about what it’s like to live now but I still can’t make anything! I don’t think it’s as simple as getting a DIY book or just having a go. I can’t understand most instructions and it panics me. What we need is a dystechnic course. Please will someone set one up. We’d need very basic tool handling, support in reading DIY books and gentle understanding. I’d sign up for a dystechnic support group too!
Hi Ruth, this is exactly what I meant by a ‘building club’ – my suggestion of actually building a dedicated facility from scratch is the ideal, but all it would really take to start something like you’re suggesting is a workshop space and tools. Tools can be collected via Freecycle and local donations, but there’s also scope to develop a viable small-scale manufacturing business where the same tools can be used for training and manufacturing purposes (indeed trainees can even help with manufacturing).
This is model which I’ve actually been helping to develop over the last couple of months (which even includes a container-based tool-kit for starting a farm from scratch), but which makes a lot more sense in the light of Simon coining the term dystechnia.
We have the skills to make this happen and have identified a number of existing projects which help prove the viability of each aspect of the project we have in mind, but we live in an area which is notoriously backwards when it comes to low-impact solutions to anything. If anyone lives in a more responsive area – with good potential uptake – we’d be happy to help set something up or pass on our ideas.
Hi Warren
Money can also be something of an issue…..
I have recently been studying online sites for selling handmade goods worldwide, and people are managing to sell all kinds of extraordinary things often from recycled sources.
It totally frees up the creativity not to have the middleman (or even the taxman) jacking up the price whilst dwindling the income. One ingenious product that catches on can bring a non profit company some good funding…..
The big one is etsy.com and in england you have folksy.com.
It takes a bit of networking to get a ‘shop’ known but it is easy and dirt cheap to set up and run.
It is potentialy very enabling for the small artisan.
Hi Ruth
If you want immediate results, then try something, simple and accessible.
You might really want to do something more glamorous, but you could get a hold of some wool and a couple of needles and someone close to you will know the basics enough to show you how, and then you can knit something and believe me you will get the whole deal. Hand/eye coordination, nimbler fingers, a good personal buzz plus a scarf as long as you want to make it.
Whittling spoons and pocket sculpture is also a great practice where you get a lot of mileage with minimal tool requirement and easily found materials but you do need a bit of basic supervising to sharpen knives and avoid bad moves.
Plus of course if you can join a Building Club…go for it.
Thanks Simon for the fascinating article and the very telling terminology.
I agree entirely with Andy. “We can / could fix ourselves”… if only we are able to muster the passion. This is not a big deal where it’s necessary to motivate everyone in the same direction to make a difference and its not some spiritual subtltey with an ambiguous handle. it is well within our own personal sphere to recognise a relationship between the hand and eye that has been developing for as long as the human has been a part of it all. Granted it is somehow stifled in the modern world, but nevertheless it is there in a myriad of routine actions that are maybe taken for granted but regularly performed daily. Tying shoe laces, doing up buttons, putting a key in a lock, rolling a cigarette, using a knife and fork, washing the dishes….
I rarely get anyone who, given the opportunity and is ‘willing’, cannot get their hands around first stage practical tasks enough to surprise, enjoy, and encourage themselves to progress.
Of course it is necessary to start in first gear and it takes attention and some sense of ‘over-control’ not to crash the car. It takes time to famlliarise with tools and materials, the requisite motion, the right pressure. Practice takes you through the gears until momentum makes for a relaxation of control and you cruise.
And then, it is not essentially about achievement. Even though you might end up building a house you might still miss the point.
It is actually that same ‘thinking mind’ that tends to find it all too difficult, and will wear away confidence, that is ultimately relinquished, when nervous energy becomes successfully channelled into practical activity. That i think is the real bonus and is what Khalil Gibran meant when he said that “to love life through labour is to be intimate with lifes inmost secret”
Thanks for the post, Simon. That’s the same path and realisations that drew me from office work and to working with my hands (it felt good, and yes, they are the same, excellent book).
Several years down this deliberate route of erradicating the dsytechnia and I can now share skills and knowledge with my very practical father. Not that he has fully come around to valuing it above all the things that I could have done… like sit in an office feeling bad. The working classes often want greener looking, middle class, premasticated grass for their kids too. The manual arts are under attack from all angles.
In my favour, I’d not believed that I couldn’t do practical things, just that they were somewhat beneath what was expected of me. What I see as a hinderance to many is never having seen someone they know do these tasks, and this seems to introduce a fear of trying. When asked to do a task by friends/customers which they could probably do themselves, I instead often offer to teach them; put a drill in their hands, tell them that they can do it and how they are going to do it. The joy of manipulating the world shines through as simple accomplishments build confidence and act as a counter measure to the learned uselessness of numb consumers. It also means that I get to spend my time doing the more interesting, more demanding work, such as making wiggly things that are both stable and functional if they’d be more interesting or suited than geometry would.
Warren’s idea of Buiding Clubs sounds great, we recently set up a group that uses community focussed practical tasks as a focus for building relationships between the group members, from which we’ll delve deeper into other areas. The more egalitarian dynamics working as part of a crew (rather than as a team – Matthew Crawford’s book looks into this) suit practical tasks well and foster respect and trust in one another as well as in the self. I’d be really interested in chattting about Building Clubs with Warren in November. It seems fertile ground.
Look forward to it! :-D
This has sparked a very interesting, and very important debate. However it is rarely mentioned in the press or within environmental circles; bizarrely given that it was core to the teachings and beliefs of people such as Gandhi and Schumacher (not to mention Ruskin and Morris).
Handworking is at the very core of what it means to be human.I am almost always at my happiest when getting on with some manual work, be it digging, chopping veg or fiddling with bikes.
We do however have an economy which treats us entirely as ‘consumers’ (not makers) and this is at the root of our problem. It is why we are so badly served by Government, the Media, big business and the financial sector. None of these groups even understands the concept of manual production. We are not consumers but we have had a system imposed upon us that has effectivley shut down most avenues to the fulfillment associated with making, and replaced them with the blind alley of consumption. To be a human is to be a maker……….for proof look at what young children enjoy doing most at school.
It really isn’t surpirsing that given this disconnect we have such a dysfunctional society with such high levels of alienation and depression.
We don’t need mass movements to resist the utterly destructive economic system we have had foisted upon us. Every minute spent making (what you actually need) can replace a minute spent consuming. Looked at in that way changing the system doesn’t seem so hard.
Cheers
Andy
Just thinking about this a bit more and reflecting on Jim’s comment about making being ‘a bit stifled in the modern world’. The system does undoubtedly stifle it…………but it hasn’t stopped it. Now that says something pretty important. The first point is the system can only stifle it, it can’t stop it because the act of making is simple……..it requires no huge investment…..and only requires a modicum of skill to begin the process. It is also accessible to all at some level.Whether that’s whittling a piece of wood or hand building a steel bike frame, or growing some courgettes. Making should and could be the ultimate means of defying the economic system……….and creating a better one !
Confidence is a big issue here too. There’s two elements to that as far as I can see. The first is to say actually it’s not demeaning to make your own furniture or grow your own veg. Contemporary society would have us believe that handmaking is somehow beneath our true potential as humans. But that’s bollocks. Turner prize winning art (much beloved of the Prosecco swilling, mega bonus, metropolitan classes) is still hand produced.
The other issue around confidence is that, in a world that seems to only value ‘prefection’ (whatever that is), anything other than that should not be contemplated. This ignores the fact that producing a wobbly chair is probably as satisfying as producing a perfect one. And of course the more you do it, the better they get.
Time is also an issue. It could be argued that it is more effective from a time point of view to go and buy something rather than make it. Yes. But only to a certain extent. To buy means to need money. To need money means to have to go and do paid work to get it (which actually takes a bit of time……). Then you have the time required to get to where you need to go to actually buy the thing. Then the time to find what it is that you want………etc, etc.
As a final point I’d argue that when you’ve actually made something, you feel better about yourself and thus less likely to need the ‘fix’ of consuming to fill the yawning gap in your self esteem. Also when you realise what goes into actually making something, you begin to appreciate more what you already have.
Again Andy i agree point for point.
The confidence problem is certainly tied up with expectations, both of ones own and of others. One wants to be proud of ones work, stand behind it whilst others appraise it….But all that needs to be peripheral, at least whilst one learns. It is all somewhat experimental and one needs courage and PASSION.
Ruth mentioned the problem of not being able to follow the DIY books. Herein lies the trick…..Pick something simple and small scale, attempt something you can at least recognise and does not involve potential injury or disaster. Read it through a couple of times then go and mix it, scrape it, bash it, fold it, whatever, and then you study the results. The chances are you have made a mess, but never mind its a small mess. Then you go back to the instructions and low and behold they make more sense. Its about building a body of intelligence on the subject. Its more a discovery than a training. Finding out is fun.
And then you need to know that you are allowed.
Picasso, Brancusi, Giaccometti, Gaudi etc. they all said fuck it to convention and followed their instincts into a revolutionary freedom of expression. And they won.
You can do whatever you like in your own space. Make your own furniture, make your own clothes, mosaic your bathroom. Every project you undertake makes you more adept.
You can delete it all and start over.
Time is something of an illusion and can be come by.
Turn off the t.v and suddenly you have time. But reluctance says you only have an hour and anyway you are tired. This time the trick is that ‘attention brings energy’ You pick up your thread and three hours later you say “Wow, how time flies when you are enjoying yourself” You sleep a bit less,but secure in your self esteem
Kahlil Gibran again: “When you work you are a flute through whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music”
I do not want to sound too knowing here but actually this is a subject i do know very well, and modesty aside, i believe that this is a very important but unfortunately neglected subject which has connotations for all who seek a practical alternative.
we have pop up restaurants
we’ve had a huge resurgence in interest in street food (largely because the theiving banks have created a property system that has meant that landlords have now priced out most new start restaurants)
this shows what’s possible
why not pop up workshops ?
why not ‘productive squatting’ – set up a workshop in a disused building ?
why not have a ‘come along and make something’ gathering in a public space ?
Just a thought !
“Just a thought !”
Just a bloomin’ brilliant thought! :-)
And it’s still legal to squat the kind of commercial buildings which would be perfect for such an endeavour.
D.I.Why? Because we gotta! ;-)
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Judging by the response to this (excellent) blog, I think it says much about the perception of ‘making’ in the UK, that only 6 people have actually responded with comments. Of course I don’t know how many have actually read it and not responded. Sorry to sound a bit school master’ish about this but I’d have thought this was actually at the very heart of the narrative DM was seeking to create. I was in the process of writing a blog for DM myself but I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it sufficiently esoteric enough to garner comments :)
Hi Andy i was thinking the same thing, wondering if maybe my perhaps overly enthusiastic comments were scaring people away.
Or maybe the idea of having been educated to be dystechnic makes it seem like one is the victim of an irrevocable disease.
A nice touch of sarcasm there with your prospective blog ….. I personally do get off on the esoterics but they are generally in the realm of disorientation and we do need to get on a road of re-orientation before too long. So if it turns out to be a practical matter then all well and good because it is definitely learnable. We can learn to enjoy efficient use of a shovel when necessary and move on to reclaim our lives, wherever we are able. It is all very well to talk of the coming collapse and how one will deal with it, but the idea that one can be empowered in ways that one would like to be through practical action should really spark the grounds for possibilities, purpose and adventure.
Hey there folks,
I feel this article. As an electrician of ten years, I still feel that I was deprived of the opportunity to aquire essential skills while still a youth. I still sometimes catch myself thinking that I still havent arrived yet, that I’m pretending to be something I’m not. Anyways….Hello to all the BC.
Jim,
Thanks. I did hesitate (slightly) before my last comment :)
There seems to me to be two ways of thinking about how we prepare for society’s trajectory over the coming decades. The first is to consider how we create a transition from today’s phenomenally complex and wasteful approach. The second is to use the tremendous weight of historical knowledge of how we used to live. What worked, etc; then start to re-create your existence based on stuff like hand working. It’s not a simple approach by any means but your objectives are far clearer to see (food, shelter, security, community).
The first approach however strikes me as a nightmare of complexity. However if all you enjoy is the esoteric bullshit that goes with trying to re-orient something that is fundamentally wrong then it’s fertile ground (an example of this is to see how bonkers the musings of people like Mark Lynas and Stewart Brand have become as they have discovered that their approach has been wrong all along)………they now seem to love the thing they used to hate (big tech, etc).
We can make the future as simple or as complex as we want. I think most of the environmental movement has opted for the latter unfortunately. Plenty of good examples of the former thankfully (Lammas, Paul and his scythe, American dudes in small workshops handbuilding cycle frames, etc). Most of all plenty of written and some (diminsihing) oral history of how we used to live more sustainably, sociably and happily.
We are now at a point where we have the opportunity to remember the good bits of our contemporary society and economy and ditch the worst excesses. Put that together with our usable / useful history and we can start to create a society from the ground up. The important role for groups like DM is to inspire as much of this practical action as possible and to provide a forum that allows these small steps to connect with other small steps.
Cheers
Andy
I don’t know of those people you mention as having gone bonkers, but as i suspect that most everyone involved in mainstream society is living somewhat off the rails i will take your word for it. To be honest i am not much up on the whys and wherefores of the environmental movement.
But i have long held similar views on the importance of people embracing practical skills for a variety of reasons; grounding, empowerment and personal fulfilment, at base, up to the possibilities of a more independent life style through self employment and I can personally vouch for these values as tried and trusted.
These reasons become more important when one considers the people who are disenchanted and would welcome change in their lives, and i agree that there are good solid reasons for society to be encouraged in that direction.
For me the bottom line is that despite the weaknesses of human nature, we have, over a vast period of time, built up a physical dexterity and low tech knowledge of, and involvement with, our natural environment that is a shame to blow out over a few generations of superficial distraction.
I for one am not prepared to degenerate, so i do my best to keep it alive and kicking.
Really enjoyed this article and the comments that followed it. I actually think that lots of middle class people do learn how to do things with their hands but it is generally a spare time or hobby activity. For example; knitting, gardening, woodwork, bike maintenance, DIY, cooking, baking, even keeping chickens! Just look at the TV schedules or the shelves of any book shop to see how these activties are thriving.
Bizzarely, these activties are now seen as leisure activities, not economically productive ones. I think that is the thing that needs challenging/developing; how to combine paid work with self-provisioning work. But of course that is challenging to a capitalist system which is based on commodification of individual labour, i.e. selling your labour (and skills) to an employer, not using your labour (and skills) to provide for yourself directly. Most of us would probably be a lot happier if we did a bit less paid work in the office and a bit more self-provisioning work in our own homes. Personally, I spend three days a week doing paid work and two days doing self-provisioning, including a lot of time with my kids (self-provisioning child-care if you like!) and in the vegetable garden.
Chris…. i am sure there must be many who would be envious of your lifestyle. …..It can be amazing to realise just how much ones life is governed by the work routine and how much we take it for granted.
Part time employment is a model that can be developed in various ways to bring in income but include time harvesting as an important focus.
One is that as so many jobs are simply routine they could easily be shared, as in, an employer takes on a team of two people to do the same job. The job then falls into good context as a benign and productive means of income rather than a bind on one particular persons life. Two competent job sharers might extend the system to flexi-time which could even include the occasional three months on, three months off…..whatever.
Another is the loose community or clan running a business together, eco landscaping, for instance, that would utilise various talents and could provide part time, flexi-time, contributions from members.
Reclaimed time can be self provisioning in many ways plus could add to income through barter of personal products or services and can transform ones home into a more vibrant and fulfilling environment.
Full self employment can be a hard master and one often ends up doing two or three jobs simultaneously to keep it all going. This can often includ tasks that must be learned from the ground up or that one might not be up to doing: A would be craftsman needs to market, keep books and balance cash flows. Ones life and time is fully ones own but may just be full time work.
I like the idea of work sharing…….
I really enjoyed reading this, though it made me reflect on another person’s story I remember reading about in a book on the progress of women’s education in this country.
A working class girl recounted her frustrations with the education system as it was in 1950s Britain; she was being taught typing, home economics and other such skills thought appropriate to her gender and class.
But she yearned for what she recognised as being a real education: she wanted to learn French and German, read literature and immerse herself in politics, world history and all the wonders of the liberal arts.
She quite naturally felt frustrated indeed that her latent intellect was being denied stimulation because she was both a girl and working class and thus being quiet and baking cakes was all that society really expected of her at the time.
As someone who can both read Latin poetry and bake bread; write academic essays and knit (though admittedly, my building skills aren’t up to much) I can vouch for the value of literacy, numeracy and what I shall counter-term: technacy.
Eliza…..If you can bake bread you could mix mortar and if you can count knitting rows you could manage to lay tiles, bricks etc as well as the next man if not better given that all us boys tend towards the dystechnic.
Plus, your academic leaning would make for good workaday conversation and the fact that you are female would reassure me that you would help keep a tidy workplace. In my experience of volunteers, women are a good deal more dependable and especially show far more initiative .
Wherever there are imbalances and one has the passion they can be redressed- and its no good waiting for any one like ‘society’ to do it for us.
One of the definite benefits of part-time work is that one then has blocks of time to devote to the study of whatever…….
I would like to go out and dig swales for the National Environmental Service, three days a week and spend my free time studying dentistry, perhaps with a dentist who also spends three days a week digging swales…..Swales of course are just a beginning as it is quite staggering how much work will need to be done by the National Environmental Service, whoever they might be.
Excellent article, definitely rings true for me. I graduated with degrees in Bioengineering and Philosophy and could barely touch my thumb to my index finger when I got out.
Now I live on an acre of land I own in a greenhouse which I built that also contains all my food which I grow/cook/preserve. My 10-gallon brewery is also inside the greenhouse. I have two vehicles which I do all the maintenance on. I build all my structures. I also work online as an engineering manager part-time for a start-up company. Yes, my greenhouse has high speed internet.
What my story has in common with Simon’s article is that we both went out of our way to put ourselves in a position where being “dystechnic” was simply not an option. Confidence and energy and time and ingenuity are all very, very easy to come by when you’re living in a tent without water or power and winter is approaching fast. You will only sit around cold and hungry for so long before you imagine simple solutions to radically improve your life.
But that is a kind of negative approach, you could call it “reactionary” or even “activism” of a sort. That isn’t really the point, but I think it takes a lot of cold and hungry nights to figure that out. That is definitely one way to become technical in a hurry though!
To me it is simply a matter of, as Wendell Berry calls it, “affection”. We have an economy that hinges upon profit but a world that hinges upon affection. Time is not money, but it is a type of affection. What we put our time into is what we hold as our intention–every second of every day. What do you want your intention to be in this world? This is simply a matter of what you devote your time to. If you watch TV, that is your intention. If you work 60 hours a week in a cubicle, that is your intention. If you examine modern society, almost everyone is spending almost all their time either making or spending money–which is to say that, by and large, our lived-experience intention is profit. This is what we put our affection towards. To me, the act of building/fixing/growing is a space for affection in and of itself. It is the only real way to create a reality freed from the demands of profit motive. I have taken my life to the extreme in the pursuit of maintaining that space for as much of my daily time as possible.
I’d have a hard time recommending my lifestyle to anyone though. It is a non-stop juggling act that is entirely unpredictable except for the 12-16 hours a day of work I do to maintain my family every single day. It is one of those sad ironies of life that in the pursuit of owning all my time for myself that I have no time for myself.
However, the quality of my time overall is incredibly high. Because I am constantly busy I am never “busy”–not like people in a city are busy. I will never get all the things done that need done today so I always have time for spontaneous conversation, to watch bugs that strike my interest crawl around on my veggies, to slowly thread on a damaged bolt. Which is to say that I have the time, in everything I do, for that most important thing we transmit as a human species: affection.
I’ll put my hand up as a dystechnic 80′s girl as well. Not to show off but I am very clever, and I love my academic education, however I have found it doesn’t do you much good in preparation for a lot of tasks in the real world. As the oldest child I got co-opted to help Dad with minor DIY jobs but not much beyond that.
There’s a second issue in here because in this virtual, digital society there’s not a lot you can get hands-on with (possibly why they left it out of our education)but some of us actually think better in manual gear. I’m an illustrator, but I find I cannot draw directly into a computer. The physical act of putting pen to paper and carving a shape out of it helps me ‘see’ the physical object I’m drawing. I’m quicker, I’m more imaginative, I can solve problems more effectively and it’s just… better. By denying people manual skills you’re cutting off sections of the brain that specifically deal with shape, co-ordination, relative space, and those that ‘think better’ in 3D.
Things I can’t do/have had to figure out on my own.
1. Cook
2. Gardening – next spring will be my first ever attempt to grow something edible.
3. Sew (my sewing is now sturdy but still a bit ugly, and I can’t do much beyond basic repairs. I also can’t use a sewing machine)
4. Drilling masonry
5. Changing a tyre. Turns out it’s quite simple once you’ve seen someone do it.
6. Knit – I’ve still not learned this
7. Assembling furniture
8. De-pressurising the boiler. This was brought on by necessity. Ours broke late Saturday night in midwinter, the landlord was away and no plumber would come out on a Sunday. It was either stick out the cold or figure it out on my own.
Very good article. I can identify with dystechnia, but I can also say that learning these skills is not as hard as many of us think!
As an older student (30 yrs old) studying a BA in design, I can see a trend with the younger students having more interest in crafts and making than in those my age. Even though they have embraced technology more than those my age, I think they still realise the pleasure and pride of real skills.
I come from a working class family where I was NOT taught useful skills. I think sadly even the working class are losing these skills – my family spent most of their time watching tv and movies, owning very cheap items and simply replacing them more often than fixing them. Because I was female my dad never taught me any fixing skills – how I wish he had, but I was too young to realise I would need and want them later.
When I decided to finally get a degree, I was very frustrated at my lack of skill. some students 10 years younger and from middle class families had more experience, because they had gone to good schools and done foundation courses. I was intimidated that I was the oldest one, and yet was less competent than most in the workshops. However, I have been so pleased at how quickly you can get over those feelings. I am still not the most skilled or expert, but I now have the confidence that I can learn or even teach myself a lot. I was scared of some tools, but now I know all the safety and know I won’t hurt myself. Never allow yourself to be intimidated. Start small, or take an intro course. Everything takes practice and there is no shame in being a beginner. The more comfortable you become making things the easier it is to add new skills onto your set.
I would also like share that in London, UK there is a Hackspace with a sliding scale membership where members have access to a shared workshop. I haven’t gone yet, it sounds like they lean more towards electronic diy but you can do any projects you want there, and they have skill sharing events.
Also, in Brixton, they are starting a shared workshop called the Remakery with a more hands on approach, that will focus on finding waste materials in the area and making things out of them, skill swapping and tool sharing, etc. Right now they have volunteer nights every thursday to help create the space so that it can be up and running by spring.
There are also lots of craft skill swapping clubs/groups springing up these days if you want to start learning knitting and mending and such. Look for one in your area.
In case you’re interested:
http://remakery.posterous.com/
https://london.hackspace.org.uk/
First-rate blog post! It addresses many of the themes I have been mulling over lately. I am a graphic designer with a four year degree, I was freelancing full time following graduation until I was sidetracked with a cancer diagnoses. I have been through hell and back, and the experience has left me with an entirely new perspective, to say the least. One of those being coming to terms with the fact that I can’t stand sitting in an office chair for hours, and also that I don’t possess any practical skills to steer me through the upcoming collapse. I really like the idea of embarking on an education in these skills, like the author did for that ten year period. Also, I am also toying with the idea of artisan-style handmade design, and selling in a shop like etsy, rather than chasing down clients and staring at code. Of course, this also could be frivolous in a collapse situation, or not… It may still have a place… But one thing’s for sure, it would give me great satisfaction to go analog from here on out. Still debating but it feels good to think about.
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