It’s the little things that count

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I always get a little excited when I see the concept of self-reliance brought up in unexpected places or referring to aspects outside the usual “prepper” mindset. After all, my philosophy of self-reliance is much broader, and should be more applicable to everyday life by everyday people. So it caught my attention when I found “7 Tips for Increasing Self-Reliance” on The Law of Attraction.com.

Some of their seven points are somewhat familiar, such as “Accept Responsibility” and “Make Your Own Decisions,” but others are are a little less obvious–or at least less practiced these days.

Take Point #3: Learn More Practical Skills:

The more practical skills you have in your toolkit, the fewer chances there will be for you to feel helpless or need other people to come to your rescue. While you should feel free to call out experts to help you with complicated household problems and mechanical difficulties, it’s great if you can at least do the basics for yourself. Get some books or join some classes.

Try to get a better grasp of everything from plumbing to IT, electronics and cooking.

A few (dozen) years ago I spent two years in Australia as a missionary for my church. Before we travel to our assigned locations we spend anywhere from three to eight weeks learning teaching skills and, where necessary, a new language. From the beginning we are paired up with another missionary, who we will be with 24/7.

My companion was a really pleasant fellow from solid farm stock (Central Utah turkey farmers), but I was soon quite surprised to find he had no idea how to do his own laundry! Nor did he know what to do when he spilled dinner on his tie. Now, I won’t claim to have been anything but a burden on my mother up until that point in time, but she had at least taught me how to do laundry, how to cook, how to sew on buttons and mend pants. I gladly dispensed my wisdom to my companion, and I have definitive proof he was able to survive the entire two years.

A few years later while I was in college I went to an activity with a bunch of other college students. We decided to go get some ice cream or something afterward at a place several blocks away. While I was driving through campus I realized my tire had gone flat. I pulled over into a parking lot and started pulling out my equipment to change it for my spare.

Before long about a handful of young women from our group had pulled over to see if everything was okay. When I explained what the problem was and that I’d be okay, they all insisted on staying to watch. No one had taught them how to change a tire! I was only too happy to demonstrate for them, of course.

Whether it’s hanging a picture, or strengthening a wobbly chair, or reattaching things that come loose, there are a lot of simple tasks in life we can easily take for granted and forget to either learn or pass on. There’s no reason we should be helpless when it comes to using basic tools to perform simple maintenance tasks. Fixing a leaky faucet–or outright replacing one–isn’t difficult, but if you have no idea how to go about it you might be tempted to spend a decent chunk of money on something that shouldn’t take very long.

Learning some basic skills will pay off in spades sooner or later. And it might just help you get the girls! (Okay, not really. They were all impressed, but that’s about as far as it went.)

Who do we trust our lives to?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Garden planning from Mother Earth News

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Mother Earth News has an article and a video about planning your garden before the growing year begins. They pack a fair amount information into a 4-minute video, and it’s worth a look. They also plug their garden planning software, which got me all nostalgic for the old Sim Farm game. Supposedly it helps you map out your garden area, plan around shade, ensure proper crop rotation, and helps you know how many plants each area can support. It looks pretty cool, and comes with a 7-day free trial. After that it’s a subscription, cheapest if you sign up for two years.

Have any of you used this or similar software? If so, leave a comment below and let me know what you think of it.

And now, the video:

Work is essential

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Mike Rowe has become something of a hero of mine. The man observes, thinks deeply, and explains himself very well. People try to impose a political agenda on him, but by and large his thoughts don’t lay with any particular ideology.

Recently he was interviewed by Dave Rubin, but don’t let that worry you. Their discussion transcends politics, at least in my view, and explores what I would consider the bedrock of humanity and a major pillar of self-reliance: the value of work.

I agree with Mike. It’s dangerous to our long-term survival as a country and culture, and perhaps even as human beings, to place too high a value on education and too low a value on work. I say this as a person who has an MBA and works a white-collar technology job. I can’t say I’m enamored with physical labor. But I’m not afraid of it. I’ve built a shed from scratch at each of the three houses I’ve owned. I’m used to doing most of the physical labor required for maintaining my property, be it fixing sprinklers, landscaping, laying flooring, or basic plumbing. And I do find shoveling snow to be oddly therapeutic. I only hire others when I need it done quickly, am concerned for my safety, or the skill-set is not something I can acquire quickly (or can afford to do wrong).

And I’ll tell you what, I’ve felt as much satisfaction from the physical things I’ve accomplished as from the “knowledge-worker” jobs from which I support my family. I’ve been involved in projects that save companies millions of dollars. I’ve saved people’s jobs with my recommendations. I’ve uncovered the causes some of the most daunting system errors. I get as much long-term pleasure from a bookshelf I’ve built.

That’s not to say I get no satisfaction from my education. I’ve also been a partner in building up a successful brick-n-mortar business using the tools I acquired in my MBA program, and that little venture has been one of the high points of my life. But this idea of education being the be-all, end-all of existence is ridiculous. My first degree was in Music. I enjoyed every minute of it. But ultimately that degree left me unemployed in Pocatello, Idaho (possibly worse than Greeeeenlaaaaand) and depressed out of my skull. And what got me out of it and into my career wasn’t my education, but my ability to learn. The two are not synonymous.

But whatever we do, I would certainly hope we derive more from it than a paycheck. There ought to be some satisfaction from the work itself. I would hope those who serve me in some capacity derive pleasure and satisfaction from their work. Sooner or later I’m going to need heart surgery, and I would feel much better knowing my surgeon is passionate about heart surgery, and not just viewing it all as just another transaction. I’d want him actively concerned about whether I live or die, and not just whether I’ll be able to pay him or not.

I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with this, except perhaps for this: it is foolish to denigrate physical labor, perhaps even dangerous. The point of our lives should not be avoiding work, or working only so we can play, or even working only so we can retire. Most of us will spend the majority of our adult lives working in some way. Hopefully we can derive a little satisfaction, a little pride in our work, along the way. And hopefully our society will learn to value that work, regardless of what it is.

Is college headed online?

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Scott Galloway, a Silicon Valley prognosticator with a respectable track record is predicting the Cornavirus and resulting stop-gap measures of moving education online is going to become the disruption that changes the university system forever, with tech companies partnering with colleges to become hybrid, virtual campuses. In an interview with James D. Walsh of New York Magazine he had this to say:

Colleges and universities are scrambling to figure out what to do next year if students can’t come back to campus. Half the schools have pushed back their May 1 deadlines for accepting seats. What do you expect to happen over the next month?

There’s a recognition that education — the value, the price, the product — has fundamentally shifted. The value of education has been substantially degraded. There’s the education certification and then there’s the experience part of college. The experience part of it is down to zero, and the education part has been dramatically reduced. You get a degree that, over time, will be reduced in value as we realize it’s not the same to be a graduate of a liberal-arts college if you never went to campus. You can see already how students and their parents are responding.

At universities, we’re having constant meetings, and we’ve all adopted this narrative of “This is unprecedented, and we’re in this together,” which is Latin for “We’re not lowering our prices, bitches.” Universities are still in a period of consensual hallucination with each saying, “We’re going to maintain these prices for what has become, overnight, a dramatically less compelling product offering.”

In fact, the coronavirus is forcing people to take a hard look at that $51,000 tuition they’re spending. Even wealthy people just can’t swallow the jagged pill of tuition if it doesn’t involve getting to send their kids away for four years. It’s like, “Wait, my kid’s going to be home most of the year? Staring at a computer screen?” There’s this horrific awakening being delivered via Zoom of just how substandard and overpriced education is at every level. I can’t tell you the number of people who have asked me, “Should my kid consider taking a gap year?”

…

Ultimately, universities are going to partner with companies to help them expand. I think that partnership will look something like MIT and Google partnering. Microsoft and Berkeley. Big-tech companies are about to enter education and health care in a big way, not because they want to but because they have to.

Let’s look at Apple. It does something like $250 billion a year in revenue. Apple has to convince its stockholders that its stock price will double in five years, otherwise its stockholders will go buy Salesforce or Zoom or some other stock. Apple doesn’t need to double revenue to double its stock price, but it needs to increase it by 60 or 80 percent. That means, in the next five years, Apple probably needs to increase its revenue base by $150 billion. To do this, you have to go big-game hunting. You can’t feed a city raising squirrels. Those big-tech companies have to turn their eyes to new prey, the list of which gets pretty short pretty fast if you look at how big these industries need to be in that weight class. Things like automobiles. They’ll be in the brains of automobiles, but they don’t want to be in the business of manufacturing automobiles because it’s a shitty, low-margin business. The rest of the list is government, defense, education, and health care. People ask if big tech wants to get into education and health care, and I say no, they have to get into education and health care. They have no choice.

There’s a certain amount of sense in what he’s telling us. American universities have begun to lose sight of their original purpose: to dispense knowledge. They’ve become factories for wholesale social change, and in the process have added so much overhead to their cost structures that the price of their knowledge-offering has increased exponentially while the actual value grows increasingly questionable. And now the Coronavirus has shown students that not only is the knowledge product not worth the cost, but the online experience has diminished it even further. It seems doubtful that universities will be able to continue charging $50,000+ a year for Zoom classes. Where they once derided online universities such as University of Phoenix (my MBA alma mater) they may find themselves studying their models, perhaps even purchasing them outright.

However, if such a model is to work there will first come a major upheaval. Today’s teachers are ill-prepared for the online classroom. I’ve been watching as my sons have struggled with on-line school from their local high school. The quality and intensity of the assignments have diminished, while the teachers largely have retreated to a consulting role, not even attempting to teach the subject matter in even a virtual classroom setting (with the interesting exception of their release-time religious studies teacher). One son is struggling mightily to complete the two classes most critical to his future career plans because the teacher had largely left them on their own.

I don’t doubt there are teachers who can adapt, improvise and overcome, and perhaps even thrive in this new model, especially at the college level. As I mentioned above, I earned my post-graduate degree in a hybrid setting, long before video conferencing software became cheap and ubiquitous, and we were able to make it work. But we were all working professionals who had outgrown the need for classroom learning. We knew how to learn. This model may not work so well for K-12 education, and I suspect it won’t be applied any time soon.

The university system, however, is ripe for it. The real question is whether universities will be willing to give up their role as engines of social change and retreat back to mere education. Or will the corporate partners assist them in policing the minds of their students more efficiently than ever before? We may be on the verge of a fundamental ground-shift, and only time will tell if it was for better or worse.

Trailblazers and Trail Maintainers

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I discovered the website “The Art of Manliness” several years ago and enjoy dropping by now and then to see what they have to say. While much of it, obviously, is aimed at men, there’s a lot of it that is applicable to anyone, like a recent post in their “Sunday Fireside” series, titled “Blessed Are the Trail Maintainers.” It’s short, but here’s the most relevant section:

It is easier and sexier to start things, because novelty generates a neurochemical bloom of involuntary motivation. It is harder to sustain things when this cognitive cocktail dissipates — when the thrill of pursuit dulls into the mundanity of upkeep.

But the difficulty, the rarity – the chosen intentionality – of perpetuation makes the task all the more worthy, and valuable.

Ever seeking the not-yet-possessed, without caring for the already-obtained, is like drilling a mine that never breaks the earth’s surface; building a skyscraper that never rises above the ground floor; writing a story that never progresses beyond the introduction.

Brett & Kate McKay

It definitely feels satisfying to accomplish something new. It’s much less so when it’s something you finished some time ago–and still have to keep looking after it. It’s satisfying having 72-hour kits prepared for our entire family. It’s…less fun going through them every year to make sure the food hasn’t expired, the spare clothing still fits, nothing has leaked, etc. It’s nice having a well-tended yard, but not so fun keeping it that way.

And yet maintaining what you have is the essence of self-reliance. It’s keeping the tools sharp. It’s re-balancing your 401K. It’s rotating your food storage. It’s cleaning the garage. It’s identifying the things you no longer use and getting them to someone who will use them or getting rid of them. It’s not just noticing that the stopper that shunts the water from your bathtub faucet to the shower head is getting old, but actually making a to-do item to replace it… (Speaking of which… one moment, please! Okay, done!) …and then following through (Oh.).

Self-reliance can be sexy. I’m still rather proud of my nice new water storage stack. But that will fade. And when it comes time to check it and replace it it probably won’t be so fun. Becoming self-reliant may be sexy, but remaining self-reliant will likely become work. But it’s the maintaining that matters. What good is having food storage if, when you really need it, the flour is full of weevil, or you find moisture has gotten to your cans and rusted some of them through? What good is learning how to change your own oil if you never do? Or building a new fence and letting it fall into disrepair?

Everyone loves a trailblazer. But it’s the trail maintainers who keep the trail worth taking.

COVID Confusion

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I found this in our local monthly/marketing newspaper in a humor piece of things the author learned from social media during the COVID-19 quarantine:

In effort not to get sick we should eat well, but we should not go out to get healthy fresh food when we run out and eat whatever pre-packaged food we have on hand instead. However, we should order out at our local restaurants to help keep them in business. Then it’s okay to go out to pick up the food. Your food might be prepared by someone sick that doesn’t know they are sick, but that’s okay if you pay by credit card and take the food out of the container. However, you should avoid going to the grocery store at all costs because you might get sick.

Joani Taylor, “The Social Media Scandal – What I Learned During Quarantine”, Sandy City Journal

If there is anyone left out there who still believes there’s a perfect response to a pandemic, especially one where the details about the virus aren’t really known…well, they’re probably on social media telling the rest of us what we should be doing. I’ve been fortunate enough to live in a state that took a somewhat moderate approach, while managing to keep the death rate fairly low, but the nags and scolds have been everywhere all the same.

Sure, I get it. People are scared, and fear makes people thrash about desperately in search of some way to feel in control. For many people that means lecturing everyone else. But the rest of us, when faced with conflicting information, reach a point where we just have to decide for ourselves which advice we can keep and what risks we are willing to take. Here are a few of the things I’ve learned (or re-learned) from all of this:

  • Preparation buys time. We were not as prepared as we wish we’d been, but we still had at least several weeks worth of all essential items. Even though we weren’t sure how long our toilet paper supply would last, we had enough to hang in there until more started appearing. We didn’t need to panic, spend exorbitant amounts of money to secure the essentials, and could put off even shopping for groceries until things calmed down.
  • People don’t want or can’t handle fresh. When we did go shopping we had no trouble finding fresh fruits and vegetables. Do people just not buy the more perishable items in an emergency? It’s not like we were without power. Veggies keep for weeks in the fridge. Or do people just not know how to prepare fruits and vegetables anymore? Not that I’m complaining. We’ve been able to eat healthy while everyone else, from the look of the store shelves, are existing on flour, pasta and beans.
  • Savings are essential. I am one of the fortunate people who can work from home, even if it’s not my preferred way to work. But even I had been furloughed or laid off we would have had savings to get through this.
  • Flexibility and resilience help. When things like this happen we can sit back and complain over every inconvenience or difficulty, or we can relax, take a deep breath (or two or three), and deal with everything one step at a time. This is easier to do if you’re not worried about basic survival.
  • Cut everyone some slack, including yourself. I’ve had to continually remind myself that people are experiencing widely varying levels of stress right now. On the other hand, if there were people whose stress was causing me stress, I’m not obligated to keep absorbing their stress. There are some where I hit the “social media snooze button” so I wouldn’t have to deal with them until things calm down again. For the most part people have been keeping things on an even keel, and when they aren’t I would try to be kind and remember where they’re coming from.
  • Even introverts need people. While introverts across the world have been cheering about this being the moment they were born for, the truth is, introversion does not mean we don’t need anyone else. Introversion/Extroversion is more a matter of where we get our energy from. Extroverts get their energy from being with others. Introverts get theirs from being somewhat isolated and quiet. We can enjoy social interactions, and even get some energy from particularly enjoyable ones, but most drain energy from us, and sooner or later we need to get away and recharge. Being shut up at home hasn’t been particularly difficult for me, but after a couple weeks I found myself reaching out to people much more than I usually do. I miss the depth, breadth and variety of my normal interactions.
  • Focus on what you can do. This crisis quickly revealed where our family is not as prepared as we should be. The problem is that some of that just can’t–and perhaps shouldn’t–be fixed right now. We found we were least prepared in our supplies of paper products, baking supplies, and a few other food categories. And yet if we’ve learned anything about shortages, it’s that running out and stocking up just make things worse for everyone, so we’ve had to resist that urge. Instead, we identified some things we can procure right now, and we’ve focused on that. We have a much better water storage now, and we’re better prepared for the next power outage (and in our area, there will be one). I feel satisfaction and accomplishment at having done something useful, even if I can’t solve all of the problem just yet.
  • Have a plan for the rest. As I said above, there are some preparedness deficiencies we can’t fix yet. But I’ve learned from sad experience that if I don’t have a plan in place for when we get back to normal-enough I’ll likely forget to do anything at all. I can take this time now to at least come up with a plan so that I know the next steps to take once we can take them.
  • It’s difficult to be prepared for everything. I’ve been a homeowner for over twenty years. In this part of the world we have to be on guard against mice. Right before our state went into quarantine we discovered something entirely new: rats. Mice we could have dealt with. Nothing we had worked on rats. And even after some online research and a curbside pickup purchase it took a long time to figure out what would work.

I could probably go on, but I’m hearing too many heads hitting keyboards already, so I’l spare you. This quarantine experience has certainly given us a lot to think about, and a lot of time in which to think about it. Right now the biggest question we should all ask is, “What do I do about it?” What are we going to change as a result of our experiences? Set a goal, make a plan, and get it done.

Unexpected surprises – Follow-up to a product review

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Last week I wrote a review of the Saratoga Farms 5-gallon water containers we purchased recently. One of the things that bothered me about our purchase was that when I’d first started researching water containers there was an option to buy just the containers, and another to get a starter kit with them that included a wrench to tighten the caps. And oddly enough, they were the same price either way.

Unfortunately, when I went to order, the site claimed the “with kit” option was sold out. The price was so good on the containers I ordered them anyway, figuring I might pick up a smaller set with the kit another time–you can’t have too much water, right? But those were sold out, too. Then I checked back the following week after I received the initial order, and found that someone else was selling the containers with their own version of the kit. This one included a friction-band wrench, which looked like it could be pretty handy, so I ordered it.

That arrived this week, and when I filled these containers I got the chance to try out the friction-band wrench. Eh. It works, and it was certainly more effective than tightening the lids by hand, but the band slipped loose at high torque. But it appeared to do the job. The containers didn’t leak.

Today I took the dog outside to play just as the UPS driver was pulling away. She’d left a small package, which was odd. I didn’t remember having ordered anything. When I opened it I found a plastic lid wrench for the water containers, from the same company I’d ordered the original set from. We had…a mystery on our hands! Did they read my review and decide to help me out?

I keep everything (not always a good habit), so when I got back indoors I checked the packing slip from the previous shipment to confirm the order date. To my surprised, I found that the wrench was listed on the original packing slip, quantity 0. Evidently they considered my purchase part of some package deal, and the wrench had been back-ordered.

In any case, I now have two wrenches! So I guess I’ll review those, now.

My two wrenches

Actually, there’s not much to discuss. I prefer the one on the right. It’s made for these particular lids, and now that I’ve seen one in person I can tell it’s made of fairly high-grade plastic and won’t be breaking soon. The belt wrench works okay, but you have to re-adjust the belt after every turn, and the design of the containers only realistically about a 90-degree arc where the wrench will fit around the cap and you can turn it freely. It also puts your fingers right in line with the edge of the container when the belt slips. The plastic wrench handle is off-set so it rides above the container edges and can turn 360 degrees. It fits the cap more snugly.

Mind you, I’ll keep them both. And the belt wrench can be used for other size lids–which I have. It may come in handy in other ways.

Controlling your money? or just monitoring it

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I’m a budgeting fanatic. Or at least I have been before, and I am once again. For the previous several years I’ve been more of a monetary monitor until I finally realized what I was doing and decided I had to stop it. I’ll get to that in more detail later. But let’s start from the beginning.

I love to organize things. Not everything, mind you. My desk is a mess, and I’m pretty sure my poor mother despaired of my room ever being clean. But some things were worth organizing and tracking. Like Halloween candy. I always found Halloween to be something of a letdown. It’s fun getting the candy, and it’s fun glutting yourself on all that candy, but then it’s gone, and you realize you never really appreciated what you had.

One year, probably around the time I was eight, I decided to change that. Rather than eat all my Halloween candy I instead ate some, and saved the rest. I actually inventoried my candy, and found places in my room where I could hide small stashes of it–partly because I didn’t want my older brother to find out and eat it, but also because I wasn’t sure if my mom would approve. The goal was to eat only one piece of candy a day, and I mostly stuck to that plan. I’m pretty sure there were some days when I allowed myself “just one more” a time or two, just as I’m also sure there were days I forgot. In any case, I stretched my Halloween haul out past Valentine’s Day.

I wasn’t as good with money. Around that same time period I got a newspaper route–with my mother as a partner, since I wasn’t actually old enough. We’d split the monthly take, and according to our deal, I’d set some aside for tithing and for savings, but the rest was mine to do whatever with. Sometimes I’d see something I wanted to save up for and do so, but most of the time I could have it all spent by the next payday.

Though I changed jobs and increased my income, I continued that pattern pretty much through college. I always made sure I set aside enough for tuition, but I wasn’t overly great at saving for a rainy day.

Then I graduated, got a real job, and moved in with my older brother for a few months. Consciously or not, my brother became my financial mentor. He and his wife were making good money, and were in firm control of it (much to my surprise; my brother could spend money even faster than me when we were younger). He’s the one who taught me to budget.

Then I got married, and to borrow a colloquialism, “excrement became concrete.” I married a gem of a wife who had lived in the former Soviet Union, which is the more recent equivalent of having lived through the Great Depression. Twenty years, three kids, and several pets later we are still amazed we were able to live on what we had then. I’m pretty sure we spend more on groceries in a week now than we spent in a month back then.

As time passed our income increased, but we managed to keep our expenses from increasing to meet it. Then I lost my job in the Great Recession of 2009-2011. We tightened our belts and cut back on the budget, and were able to make it for two years before I found another job that came close to matching our previous income. We had to relocate to another state, but everything looked fine once again.

But about that point something went wrong–or perhaps a number of things all went wrong. The area we moved to was more expensive than we thought. The house we bought needed some work. Part of my income (residuals from a business venture I had to leave behind) was unpredictable. The kids started getting expensively older. I had grown weary during my prolonged unemployment of worrying about money. I don’t know; one or all of these played a hand it it. The bottom line is I stopped paying close attention to money.

I was still tracking it. I still had my budgeting tools. But so long as we had money left over at the end of the month I was okay with it. I didn’t worry too much beyond that.

A few years ago that began to change. I think my kids were the main catalyst. My oldest, a daughter, was about to graduate from high school and wanted to go to an art school in Canada. I didn’t want to be the one to crush her dreams, so I told her if she would focus on getting good enough at art to get accepted, I would worry about paying for it. I had another son who took tennis lessons, and another who discovered competitive mountain biking. We were covering it all, but I could see the time was rapidly approaching when we wouldn’t be able to keep up.

It was about then I realized that tracking our expenses wasn’t cutting it. It was about the same as standing on the corner of a busy intersection counting how many car crashes occurred. I knew where our money was going, but I was doing nothing to determine whether that was the best use of it, let alone trying to slow the spending. Something had to change.

First step was to start paring down our budget. Little extravagances had been creeping in year after year, along with quiet increases in the cost of living. I got as brutal as I could be and found a couple hundred dollars a month that we didn’t need to spend. We made the kids start getting jobs to cover some of their fun on their own.

But I still wasn’t using my budget correctly. I was still only keeping track of where the money was going. Finally, around six months ago, I decided my tools weren’t cutting it any more. I started looking around for something better.

Enter my older brother, again.

He told me about an online tool he used, one that he paid a small monthly fee for. Double red flag! In spite of my career in IT (or perhaps because of it) I don’t really trust “the cloud”, and definitely didn’t like trusting my financial information to it. And I didn’t like the idea of paying a monthly fee, however small, for something I could do for myself for free. But my brother recommended it, the first month was free, and Quicken was going to force me to a subscription plan as well soon. I decided to try it.

The tool was called You Need a Budget, or YNAB. And I didn’t really “get” it. Yeah, it was similar in approach to an old spreadsheet I’d built once, but as the end of the free trial rolled around I didn’t really see the benefit, other than it was easy to use. And about that same time I learned my job of eight years was going away at the end of the year. Subscription software? No way.

But I gave it one more month, partly because my brother would get a free month if I did (and I was already sponging off him for several streaming services), and because something told me that, even if I wasn’t “getting” YNAB, there was still something there to be gotten. I kept going. The monthly fee wasn’t that big, and even cheaper if you signed up a year at a time. And I could still cancel it.

The year and my job ended, and then suddenly I had landed a new job–with a nice jump in salary. And over those two months I’d learned some more things about YNAB that made a huge difference. I changed my way of thinking about money, and found that YNAB along with some other strategies (also from my brother, come to think of it), was giving me what I had been missing before: control. I was no longer a passive observer, dutifully noting the flow of money toward bills. I was making conscious decisions about each and every dollar, and was finding that more and more of them were going into savings and into investing.

When we first moved and I got started in my new job I swore to myself that I would carefully control my budget so that the residual I was making from my former business would always be “extra money.” Everything I needed to be spend would be paid for from my regular income. In hindsight I’m not sure I ever achieved that goal, except perhaps a month here and there during the subsequent eight years.

I’m pleased and relieved to say I’ve finally accomplished that goal. And just in time, too, as my business is in budgetary freeze right now because of the Coronavirus. It’s getting by, staying afloat, but there are no residuals coming right now, and there probably won’t be for several more months yet. I realize I’ve been quite fortunate that my new job hasn’t been impacted, and I’m very grateful for that. But I’m also very glad to have my budget back under control again.

It really feels good.

I’ll be reviewing YNAB at some later date, but if you’re already interested and would like to check it out, use this link. If you like it and sign up, I get a free month (worth $7), but don’t do it for that reason. Also, check out their videos on their YouTube channel, so hopefully you’ll “get it” quicker than I did.

Diogenes and self-reliance

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The story is told of Alexander the Great visiting Diogenes and finding the philosopher laying in the sun. Alexander approached him and asked him if he could anything for him. Diogenes replied, “Yes, stand a little out of my sun.”

Kyle Eschenroeder examines this exchange in more detail and analyzes what Diogenes tells us about self-reliance in his article, “A Man’s Guide to Self-Reliance” from The Art of Manliness website.

Diogenes’ simple, ascetic lifestyle may seem to exemplify self-reliance, but these externals are not its essence.

Rather, self-reliance is a mindset, an approach to life that can be adopted whether you live in a wilderness cabin or a “little box” in the suburbs. Self-reliance is about living a life in which you make decisions and opinions with primary respect to your own experience of the world. You trust yourself. You’re true to yourself.

This doesn’t mean living in a void, it just means that we’re conscious about our relationship to the world and other people. It’s not rejecting external advice outright, but trusting ourselves enough to sift through which advice is worthy. We’re aware of the agendas of others, and don’t let them sway us from our self-determined path. Self-reliance doesn’t necessarily mean rejecting all established customs and values, it just means experimenting with them so we know if they work for us. It’s putting stock in our inner wisdom.

There’s a lot to unpack in this, but the last paragraph is especially of interest to me, especially these two lines: “It’s not rejecting external advice outright, but trusting ourselves enough to sift through which advice is worthy. We’re aware of the agendas of others, and don’t let them sway us from our self-determined path.” Put simply, we need to think for ourselves.

Far too often these days we are expected to buy into an ideology and follow it to the exclusion of all else. If we relate with an identity group we must think a certain way to remain in step with our fellows. Our news media, where once they would simply report the facts and let us decide what those facts mean, increasingly tells us what to think of those facts as well. Anyone who disagrees needs to be beaten down. We get our information from headlines and proceed as if we know and understand not just the details, but the nuance.

But how can we? Why should we? Why should we blindly accept another person’s “truth?”

The short answer is, “We shouldn’t.” We need to question, to seek to see as broad a perspective as we can, to measure what we’re being told against what we have learned through our own experience. We need to seek to verify, not just accept. We have far too many examples of history where terrible wrongs were committed under the cover of “I was just following orders,” or “It didn’t want to go against the crowd.” If we are to be judged and sentenced we should at least be so for our own beliefs, not for someone else’s.

Intellectual self-reliance is not an easy path. The world is a complex place, and it takes time and effort to sort through that complexity. But while we need to question, we can’t afford to continually question everything. We need some solid ground to stand on before we can move forward. We should be willing to adjust as we discover new information and encounter new perspectives, but be prepared to stand firm on our own foundation when a choice must be made.

Perhaps most importantly, even when we come to reject a particular philosophy or ideology, we need to resist the easy temptation of “that which we cannot believe we must despise, must hate.” We can oppose, but even when our own thinking in solid we can still learn much about ourselves and our beliefs through associations with those with whom we disagree. Someone with whom we can disagree, yet still respect and listen to, is invaluable in this world. It’s far too easy these days to dismiss anyone who thinks differently, but such intellectual reactionism is as wrong and dangerous as those who follow the herd. From Eschenroeder again:

In fact, there may never have been a time when developing this type of self-reliance has been more important. We’re over-politicized and polarized. Advertisements are creeping further and further into our content, making them less obvious. The Internet has given us two or two-thousand sides to every story. Social media feeds allow our peers to weigh in on our every decision. The comment section of a blog post allows us to see what other people thought of an article before we’ve formed our own opinion. It’s increasingly difficult to live a life that is inner-directed rather than other-directed.

In order to operate effectively in this kind of autonomy-sapping environment, developing a strong sense of self-reliance is crucial.

To be truly self-reliant may mean we not only stand firm, but that we stand apart. To follow the crowd too closely, however well-intentioned, is to invite disaster. As anyone in a mob or riot or Black-Friday frenzy understands, if you stand in the middle of any crowd it can be extremely difficult to escape before they run headlong off the cliff. Keep an intellectual distance, and trust in yourself to decide what is best for you.