Where did we go wrong?

[Beekissed]

Brookvalley, I know what you are trying to express. I, too, am puzzled by the way people react when they hear I am doing this or that on my place. The most frequent response? "Why?!" and "Sounds like an awful lot of work to me!"

Now, in an urban area this might not sound out of place, but I live in a very, very rural area of WV! Some people still keep a small garden, but I haven't seen any large ones. A few people in the county keep chickens but not many. Its mostly cattle, a few goats (meat, not milking), commercial poultry and sheep. They have the space, the fences, the buildings and the equipment....but no longer have the desire to do what their ancestors did to be more independent. They yearn for what they see on TV...the cell phones, new cars, nice homes, etc. I'd never seen so many new cars until I moved here....the only place I saw to equal it was New Port, RI!

I think what you are saying is, these people have the land and resources, but no longer see the merits in the self-sustaining lifestyles.

 

[me&thegals]

*People don't need to be self sufficient. So far, most people have plenty of $ or debt tolerance to buy it themselves

*People feel too busy with their careers to try

*Folks don't know the skills any more for being self sufficient and nobody in their social group to teach them

*Americans have so long been reliant on commercial goods, I truly don't think it occurs to people to do otherwise

*America is not structurally set up for people to have cooperative communities to provide things for each other.

The cure for every one of these things is, of course, grad school Clearly everyone needs to spend five years or so as a grad student, with next to no income but living among a buncha OTHER people with ALSO next to no income and thus a culture grows up (which gets transferred to each new generation of grad students) of extreme frugality, walking/biking, growing your own food, making rice and beans an appealing year-round menu, dumpster-diving, etcetera. You learn all sorts of lifelong handy things.

Ha ha But actually it is TRUE


Pat

No kidding I was a total spendthrift in high school. But, when I had to pay my way through college... wow! I didn't spend money on ANYthing! Walked everywhere, ate cheap food, never ate out.

 

[me&thegals]

I must be lucky. Here in WI, people are nuts for local things made by self-sufficient people. We have the best-voted farmer's market in America in Madison, markets in every tiny town, gardens everywhere, farms, cheesemakers, wine makers and beehives everywhere.

And let me tell you, don't mess with other people's wild asparagus, elderberries, ginger or morel mushrooms around here!

Even my GYN last week was asking about my chickens and what breeds I have. I though he was just being polite, but it turns out he has heifers, fainting goats, various other animals and is going to be buying heritage chickens in the fall.

Makes me wonder how many people are doing these things and they just have not come up in conversation. Since I have expanded my own hobbies, I am always having reason for conversations about stuff like this and am amazed at how many people ARE becoming more self sufficient. Around here, those actually doing the self-sufficient practices are mostly from an older generation. All my CSA customers but one, though, are from my age group (30s).

Very interesting topic. Thanks

 

[patandchickens]

Makes me wonder how many people are doing these things and they just have not come up in conversation.

Yeah, exactly. I was FLOORED to discover that our family doctor -- a very very prim and fashionably-dressed woman in her 50s -- raises chickens. (I discovered this when I was in there for major back pain and said that I had to use a cane to get out to the chickens to take care of them each day, and she said "well, would you like some automatic feeders and waterers so you don't have to go out *every* day, I have some extras you could borrow" )

The fancily-dressed (although, if you get to know her, somewhat hippie-ish on the inside) woman in her 30s who runs the local 'early years' program for the province has no tv in her house, cans profusely, and sews most of her own clothes. I keep trying to give her chickens but she lives in town where they're not allowed.

Of the women I talk with most often while our kids our playing, I would say that probably 40% could be described as doing lots of self-sufficiency things -- canning, veg gardening, pro-level garage-sale-ing and thrift-store shopping, sewing kids' clothes, doing major home repairs themselves often from scavenged bits, chopping wood for the woodstove, etc.

Now, mind you, because I am presently a stay-at-home mom I do not hang out with the young professional set (or the middle-aged professional set either for that matter ) so there is some bias there at the moment. But everywhere else I've lived, where I *did* run into a much broader cross-section of society, there have always been considerable numbers of people doing these things, too. It's just that you don't have a label painted on your forehead when you're walking around town, and how often is 'my cabbage isn't growing right' or 'I use a clothesline' or 'it has been three years since I bought a frozen pizza' going to come up in conversation

There is always going to be the temptation to slide back into lazier/easier and more-heavily-advertised ways, though. I have to say that my mother, who is Pennsylvania Dutch and when I was growing up dried clothes on the line all summer and canned lots of tomatoes and pickles and relishes and strawberry preserves, and almost always cooked from scratch, and the only NON handsewn clothes I had til highschool were a very small number of handmedowns from relatives, and was always big on using the fans not the a/c... she (and my father) are now in their 80s and pretty much LIVE on a/c, packaged prepared food (or takeout), the clothes dryer, all the lights and tvs on in the house at once, etc. I think it's like 50% being tired and stiff and old, and 50% that Madison Avenue has finally run them down. Bizarrely, she thinks I'm nuts to dry clothes on the line and cook from scratch and fix things myself

Things move in odd cycles.

Pat

 

[FarmerChick]

Bizarrely, she thinks I'm nuts to dry clothes on the line and cook from scratch and fix things myself

*************YOU had me laughing here.......I noticed older people saying the same thing.....what we find "green" and to save money and such like line drying, to them it is like, what, use the convenience we didn't have..HA HA

My parents grew up without alot cause, heck, it wasn't invented yet...HA HA...and alot of things when older is for tired and for health....Mom wouldn't give up AC for anything. She said it is important for her health which down here in NC is so true...hot here.

My parents use whatever is necessary to live good and easy, but, they don't consciously ever buy just to buy either. They don't buy just junk...they buy what they use. So they are smart consumers and I think most older sets are....

 

[Rosalind]

WRT needing a second income: Hey! I represent that remark!

I'm at the point in my career where my time really is more valuable than the more humble uses to which it could be put. That is to say, I can grow food as a hobby, but I do calculate how much time I'll have to spend vs. whether that time would be more economically spent at work. Where I work, I am salaried, but I get sizeable bonuses for patents and publications, so sometimes it's really more profitable to spend 2 hours/day on a patentable project. Chickens don't take much time and provide quite a savings on eggs, plus help me make friends and influence people (thus getting me promoted this year, yay), so chickens are an economical use of my time. Heating oil has only very recently become spendy enough to be a good use of my time, although it's still more economical for me to hire someone else to cut up the selected trees into woodstove-sized chunks.

Home-cooked meals are only economical if they can be cooked in under 30 minutes, preferably by a rice cooker or crock-pot. After that, not so much. I need sleep to think well, I'm not sacrificing sleep to do chores.

We have subsidized public transit passes at work, so I don't spend a lot on that. Don't have kids, for various reasons (including economics), so don't spend money on daycare. Work is casual according to the value of your brain, so as a confirmed research geek in a science-based company I get to wear jeans and khakis, don't spend much on clothes. My costs of working are vanishingly small compared to how much money I earn.

However, I still have a vested interest in frugality and self-sufficiency because Massachusetts is bloody expensive to live in! Let me put it this way: we live 5 miles from DH's work, since his workplace does not subsidize train passes. Across the street, they are proposing to build "low income" 40b housing, which by state law must be "affordable" to someone who makes 80% of the town's median income. The pricing quoted by the developer yesterday: $350,000-375,000. My own house, which is about average for pricing in this area, cost about $0.5mil. And it was a bit of a fixer-upper.

I lived in low income housing for 13 years, including grad school. I learned the hard way that it's academically risky to work in a lab that has minimal funding and a lunatic for a PI--if you have your own money, you can find a new lab easily. Ultimately DH and I decided that the cost of living in high crime areas was one we were not willing to pay by living on one income alone. And we also decided that it is economically risky for one person to rely entirely on another's income in case of death or disability. So we both work also because in The Olden Days when one spouse stayed home, being a widow meant being impoverished.

I guess my point is, you don't know for sure what someone's actual salary is unless you work in their HR department, and unless you work for the bank you don't know what other costs and debts they have. Nor can you predict every eventuality and disaster. I'm sure my family looks at my income and figures I'm independently wealthy, but even when I show them the actual costs of living here, they think I'm exaggerating or making it up.

 

[Cassandra]

I guess my point is, you don't know for sure what someone's actual salary is unless you work in their HR department, and unless you work for the bank you don't know what other costs and debts they have. Nor can you predict every eventuality and disaster. I'm sure my family looks at my income and figures I'm independently wealthy, but even when I show them the actual costs of living here, they think I'm exaggerating or making it up.

Rosalind, I can't say for sure what everyone was thinking, but I don't think anyone meant to imply that all couples should be single income couples. I thought the point was more along the lines of people thinking they needed two incomes to provide themselves and their children with a lavish life when, in reality they and their children might be just as well served by living a more modest life, with one of their parents at home teaching them how to be more self-sufficient.

Everyone is entitled to have a career! (whether they have children or not) But you must admit you are not forced to. Which is, if I understand correctly, another point that was made. The cost of living in your area seems shocking to me. You could, quite easily, pack up and move to Mississippi (near me!) and live extravagantly on $60,000 a year.

Personally, I want to be a housewife. My husband & I are working toward that goal. In about a year, I plan to start working part time and within three years, I want to stop working altogether. My husband is more attached to material things that I am. He's an I.T. guy and addicted to electronics. In the event of his untimely death, he's got enough life insurance to pay off all our debts, and allow me to sell the house and go live in a mud hut or something (actually, I would build a small concrete house) on my family land and muck about with chickens and a cow like me ol' granny had.

So... I guess technically, I'd be impoverished. But that's what I'd want to do. Hopefully, he'll hang with me for a while. He's agreed that we will do this anyway, when our son is grown, as long as he can still have high-speed internet. LOL

Cassandra

 

[Beekissed]

Cassandra, I would try cob! Check out the cute houses they can make out of cob and straw bale construction on one of my other posts.

You're right, we weren't putting down folks for two incomes, only the ones who put themselves in a position(needlessly) to require two incomes. If all they are working for is status and new gadgets, its sad really. We came in naked and will go out naked...not even a pocket for that fancy new cell phone!

I realize not everyone can, nor wants, to live in the country, but its hard to understand when folks complaining about where they DO live and how bad the conditions are. It just seems funny to live in Manhattan and maintain that lifestyle, and then explain about the high cost and how one needs two incomes to afford it! Everyone has their tradeoffs, I suppose. Sometimes people like to complain about the high cost of where they are living in order to brag about their status. If I were over paying for anything I certainly wouldn't brag about it...I would be kind of ashamed of being duped into paying it!

I don't mean to criticize anyone and I'm sorry if that sounded harsh but its always puzzled me. There is a lady I used to work with who would come to work and complain (nearly every day) that she had an $800 car payment. We all knew it was a subtle brag about her limited edition SUV and it was getting real old. One day, when she was doing it again, I whispered to her, "I wouldn't tell anyone I was stupid enough to pay that amount each month for a car, if I were you!" She looked astounded and asked me whatever did I mean. I said, "Well, I paid cash for mine and its ten years old....but it gets me to work every day, the same as yours... for free!" She never bragged again...

 

[enjoy the ride]

Reading back on these posts I don't think there is a criticism of dual income couples- what was being said was that it is not needed for a resonable life to have two incomes- that one can economize and have a very satisfactoy life without so many of things that people spend their lives accumulating.
Considering the nature of this site, that is a reasonable idea- to need less and still have a good life.

 

[BrookValley]

There's definitely a difference between wanting a career and creating a situation by which you need the career to live a "lifestyle", where lifestyle = gross wastefullness. I by no means am trying to judge anyone who A) desires a career (I've been there!) B) has said career and is doing well for themselves financially or C) for whatever reason needs two incomes to live (I sure am in no position to judge anyone's financial situation). I sure do hope no one has taken this topic that way, as I don't intend to be judgemental about anyone's choices. I was just musing on why, how, and where we got to be so wasteful and disconnected from the basic necessities of life, where food comes from the grocery store shelf and every comfort only takes the flip of a switch...

ETA: My family as two incomes, though mine is pretty small these days (I telecommute, but only get part-time hours), but my husband and I both have careers. I could have left my job behind when I had my child, and we could have made it on one income , but I like my job and was fortunate enough to find a way where I didn't have to give it up. My career is important too, and I think that that's OK!