the manual for self governance at 18 (or sooner?)

Can you imagine how different your life might have been if you had a book, a manual on how to be a productive, self reliant citizen of the planet at 18 instead of getting a letter from the government about paying taxes and how your world would now totally change now you were no longer in your teenager years (obv, I’m talking from a uk perspective here)

Just recently I’ve been considering a lot about what it takes to be a self governed, self reliant entity on planet earth. Like, forget crypto for a moment, let’s talk about the basics, the day to day, food, shelter, power, technology — shit that you can build on top of, that’s a baseline from where you can start from and wherever you put in the extra the work then the worlds your oyster.

Yet, often times, it doesn’t start out like that, we don’t have the manual for our adult years to know about all these things that start flooding in at us, we have crazy shit like buying the car we like because we wanna have freedom on the open road, then we realise we have to insure, tax, feed it petrol - we add damage to the environment for the things we want because nobody wrote the ethics manual for the things we buy.

We are just these little consumer bolt holes for which the system builds and data maps what kinda of person we grew up and out to be, trying to piece it all together, feeding the system more data as we make more choices of the the life you think we need.

Crypto is a wonderful thing but get’s incredible bad press.

Those that never dealt with paper cheques, bullshit excuses and letters from banks “asking you to go in” will never know the time and hours lost to systems that instilled fear into owning and utilisation of money, from grandparents tales of storing it under the bed to the rations of chocolate in the war times, money was this scarcity thing to probably avoid because of the drama attached to it.

What’s my point to writing this you might ask (if you got this far) well, I’ve been really focused on reliance in recent months. The pandemic like most people really kinda came off the back of potentially going into WW3 with Iran. You might have forgotten that little 2020 tidbit but I didn’t. When I saw that I thought of all the things I had not done yet, all the things that my daughter might not see in the world — my partner thousands of miles away.

I wanted to get up and out, I wanted to experience more, I wanted to sprint into the things I had not done yet but always wanted to do. Then boom, lock down, locked into place exposing the self reliance holes in the supply chains. Finally, the shelves empty signalled that I had not prepared enough, we had it tight for a few months, we made it work but not having those food stores in action, really brought it home.

Which then on the back off makes me think of how we adapt as people for the times now and to come, rising sea levels, climate change, pandemics, the whole nine yards, it’s impossible to be ready and to adapt to everything that the world throws at us but you can build in resilience and levels of redundancy.

One company that I’m always watching is goal-zero — I love their equipment, potentially a little over priced but hey, new mouldings, design and R&D cost money so until they get to that place it’s gonna cost us right now, I’d say alongside companies like Anker, they are doing some great kit — baseline stuff, power, tools to keep us connected to the drip feed digital money grid.

I’ve always had this idea of a little guide, little notebook, little a-z of where you should be putting your young man or woman energy in those early adult years — I think it would be hella useful, almost like a self governance guide to the world of today, an almanac for the ownership of your character, soul, identity in a world in flux.

Goal Goal is one of those companies that get my blood pumping again over that idea because just even their lower end power unit could keep your phone charged many times over in the case of a brown out, living in your car or van, offgrid, in the city.. .

I always wished that I had experienced these things earlier on in life because then I could learn to integrate them into the way I lived my life, not reliant on the grid to give me power, to understand the process of solar panels and converting that energy into stored power I can use later on when the sun goes down — to work through the night, to be aware of my time here and how I use it, when I’m wasteful, how to keep those energy bills down, giving me more resources for the things that matter instead of just being a programmed consumer.

Cheers for Reading,
Humble x