I like to think I work with my brain more than my ever-diminishing brawn.  Which has to be true since there is barely any trace of brawn left.  Mind you, finding brain is getting harder, too. Personal resource inventory is getting low.

“So, with no brawn and very little brain, waddya got?”

Not much.  But that’s where Kubby comes in.  Kubby-the-Kubota.  Oooh, the little cutie!

My friend, the contractor has his little front-end-loader (like a bigger BobCat) here at the construction site and his regular operator is off doing other stuff.  “Hey, Dave!  Wanna run the Kubota for a few days?”

So, now I get to wheel Kubby around the sloping terrain in an amateurish effort to clean the site up some.  Which should prove fun.  If there is a problem, (and there is) it is that Kubby is about 7 feet wide and space restrictions all around the property are much the same. Maybe an inch or two to spare.  Down by the pool with the long and fragile glass room extension, there is maybe 7’6″.  And I am going to be carrying pallets of loosely stacked granite stone.

“Unh, you got insurance, right?  Plenty of it?”

“Just be careful, OK?”

Creativity is not about making something from nothing.  It is about making something from nothing while accepting some significant constraints.  For instance, a painting is limited by the medium (acrylics, oils, water colours), the frame size, the material on which the paint is placed and the subject matter at hand. In my example, I am constrained by space, lack of skill, fragile boundaries (the building) and topography (Sal thinks I will end up upside down in the lower tennis court covered in granite blocks).  I have physics and gravity working against me, too.  One way or the other, I will make a spectacle of it.

Think of me as the van Gogh of site clean-up and hope that only my ear is in any kind of danger.

That particular description of government is the one used by China to explain the rather special economic and political freedoms of Hong Kong versus the more totalitarian nature of the mainland.  It’s a common phrase – for China.  One country, two systems.

But it has never been that simple.  Not for China.  Not for Canada.  Hell, we have the French/Anglo dichotomy at the very least.  Then there there is the east/west, north/south, First Nations/everyone else differences and the never-ending list of factions, groups, ethnicities and cultures (at the very least).  We are a big country with a lot of ‘officially recognized’ differences.

We can also construct similar descriptors to explain the different systems of rural life versus the more regimented and limiting structures of the city.  Country folk do not have many of the common urban living systems and we have employed a few uniquely different systems as well. Seriously, dude, country life is way, way different.

And I am not talkin’ just the country-bumpkin stuff this time.   This ain’t about flowers and ravens and oyster gathering vs transit and queuing.  Or trading pies for eggs at the local market.  This is considerably more freedom, real liberation, real life.  Really different.

Let me list a few topic headings that are totally different in small-town or rural Canada vs the big city: traffic, parking, time, ease, friendliness.  Police-state mentality, patience, security, health-care. Rule enforcement, alienation/isolation/loneliness.  How about ambient noise, intrusive noise and simply silence..?  Air.  Water.  Trade.  Mileage. Fashion.  Expenses.  Amount of time worked to pay for life.  Amount of free time.

The categories list is endless and, almost every time, the differences show up in favour of rural or small community living.  Well, for me, anyway.

Then there is the just-plain weird city stuff, the stuff that has no rural correlation.  Like road rage, gang-related violence in public places and even (what!?) Craigslist paranoia.

Someone advertised something the other day, I wrote and asked for the address so that I could go see it.  “I’ll give it to you when you are on your way.  For now, it is just North Delta.  Here’s my number.  Call me when you are in the neighbourhood”.

“OK.  But that’s weird.  Why are you doing that?”

“I can’t just give out my address anymore these days.  People come into my yard and steal what I have advertised.  I want to know when you are on your way and then I can suss out if you are a real customer or not.”

My point is (leaving aside the wacky stuff) that we have two systems, too.  In fact, we have three or more if you count the various forms of the underground economy.  Or the multicultural communities.  Or the 1%-ers.  Or the newly emigrated.  Or First nations.

But back to the visible systems: at the very least there are those who exclusively use money and those who use only plastic.  And there are those of us that mix the two. And there is a lot of ‘off-the-books’ transacting going on all over as well. There are those who shop online and those who have never done it. There are those who trade and barter and those who are knee deep in accounts an record keeping.  And debt.  Even different cultures within our country seem to be able to transact in foreign ways that are outside normal Canadian channels.  We are a mish-mash of systems.

Not counting crime which, I understand is a trillion dollars a year industry in Canada all by itself.

All this is not that unusual.  I have been to many countries and it is always the same.  One country and a myriad of systems.  There is a Sheriff of Nottingham in every country and more than just a few Robin Hoods countering his system any way they can.   For fifty-five years I played in the official straight and narrow Canadian economy exclusively.  Then I went feral and added the free and natural forest/ocean largess to my unconscious accounting and larder.  Then a bit of favour-trading and the odd bit of barter were integrated into my life.  As my garden grew, so did my trading and barter account.  Then I found that credit card use constituted a ten percent premium on my purchase and so I have been dealing primarily in cash for the last few years.  Recorded and receipted, of course, but cash nevertheless.  But I also indulge in a bit of scavenging/salvaging now and again, too.

The really big change economically speaking has been a return to old hippy, anti-materialistic values (within comfort and reason, of course).  We are simply not keeping up with any Jones’s in any status category whatsoever.  And we avoid debt like the plague. We haven’t changed systems so much as dropped most of them by participating less.

Conclusion: Canada is at the very least two countries, with ten or more systems (that I can see – and that is not counting the ones that I can’t see) and growing.  Big city living is just one of many and, to my mind, it is like high-priced retail shopping compared to a country free-store.

We are at it again.  Salvaging.  Thrift stores.  Maybe even a garage sale or two – we’ll see how that goes into the new year. Definitely Craig’s list.   I’ve already got steel, windows and an old Honda 250 that doesn’t run (not yet, anyway) and I am still looking for more crap to pack in the old utility trailer. Picked up a great heavy-duty hammer drill last week.

This could become a syndrome of sorts.  Pro’bly is already.  I might be ill in some kind of recycling way.  A green hoarder?  Or just succumbing to the lure of excess junk in an over abundant society?

Hard to say.

Of course, I have the perfect rationale: I need this stuff for my projects.  The windows for the green house. The steel for the funicular cart, the Honda 250 for deer hunting (that’s a stretch on so many levels). I need the hammer-drill ’cause my old Hitachi hammer-drill kept blowing up (all the parts at the front – the chuck- just explode and I have to search for little parts, find them, replace them and try again).  The new (old) one is mint.

And I need more such stuff.  More!

The city is rich with such crap.  I confess that the asking prices are a bit higher than I would expect but – to be fair – we never pay them so I have no real complaints.  If I need, say, a welder (which I did last year) and the new price is $600 (plus tax), I go see a used one and the asking price is about half ($300).  If it is in really good nick, I will offer half of that ($150) and usually settle around $200 or so.  Real bargainers grind it down to less but I have a lot of ground to cover, a lot of crap to gather and I kind of get a bit intoxicated with the whole thing.  I feel as if the world is my thrift shop when I am down in the city.

The irony is, of course, that I may not ever use this stuff.  I certainly already have enough stuff for enough projects to last me til the end of days.  But those aren’t the projects I WANT to do.  I want to make an old Honda run again.  I want to have a greenhouse.  I need to make the lower funicular cart.  Some projects have priority.

At least – at this point in time, they do. While I am here in the city and have an abundance of crap to search through, I might find something off-the-agenda so tantalizing that I get it anyway.  Who knows where such whimsy might take me?

And therein lies the lesson………….there is a fine line between supplying for your needs and the madness of goofy acquisition for its own sake.  Worse, I find that it is in my character to cross the line and dabble now and then in dream acquisitions like getting an old bread van to convert into a guerrilla RV.  In fact, I found just such a dream machine a week or so ago and got so close to acquiring it, I had to step away and mull the dream over again. Mulled more than once.  But it wasn’t until I had that bread van in my cross-hairs that I came to my senses and did NOT buy it.  I stepped back over the line.  Sanity prevailed.

I bought a not-running 1976 Honda 250 XL instead.  I am not cured but it is under control.

As most of my half-dozen readers know, I am retired.  So is Sal.  In theory, anyway, I am resting, taking it easy or generally living life to the fullest depending on what retirement myth the reader has bought in to.  The reality of retirement is a smidge different.  And it keeps getting different-er.

Retirement (for me, and Sal, anyway) is generally unpredictable, ever-changing, busy, 90% volunteer or non-remunerative and – this is the only consistent part – tiring.  We get tired now.

Sal and I get up and get to doing things before 8:00 AM and we seem to go at a slower but steady pace until about 6:00 PM.  Then we kind of veg out or, maybe socialize (as little as possible) until 9:00PM.  At nine, half my mind conks out (rendering me stupid).  The other half is charged with getting the rest of me horizontal as soon as possible.  Rarely do I stay up past 11:00.  Nine days out of ten, I don’t see or hear many ticks of the clock past 10:00. Sal is a machine – 7:30 to 10:30 with few, if any deviations.

So we each have 15 hours to work with and, well, some of them at least are not spent all that efficiently.  There’s your habituated ablutions, eating, dog-walking and tea and wine drinking to mention the big ones.  There’s time spent on the computer reading lies and news and making some of it up myself for the blog.  And there are the chores, tasks and mini-goals that we set for ourselves all the time (pick up milk, gas the car, get prescriptions, library, Craigslist, etc.).  Basically, our productive time is pretty limited to unproductive things.

But we managed to squeeze in writing a book over the past two or three years so that was good and, if you should ever read that book (unnecessary if you read the blog) you will know that we also build sheds, get in the winter fire-wood, fix boats and generally get up to something creative every year (last year was the BIG solar array – this year may be the guest bathroom.  There is a long to-do list).  We have the garden to tend, the buildings to maintain, the guests to receive and, of course, the boats to mess about in.  We may not be busy but sometimes it feels busy.

And we occasionally travel.  Usually just in the winter, tho.  And travel is the big disrupter in our lives.  Even going to town for a shopping day is disruptive but going to another city like Victoria or Vancouver now feels like all hell has broken loose.  Things are forgotten (“Did you remember to bring…?”), schedules have to be followed.  Names remembered. Social obligations fulfilled. Inevitably little crisis erupt as a result of being out of the normal routine.

If you wonder if you are getting old just measure how much time is now spent trying to keep everything the same and as it should be – and then compare that to when you were young and trying to discover everything new and different out there!  Youth – when surprises and small disasters were interesting.  We have turned the corner on that one, to be sure.  If you don’t count the dirt bike I just bought and need to fix, I think our last ‘let’s give it a shot’ effort was chicken-busing through El Salvadore a couple of years ago.  That was a wake-up call.

No more El Salvadore. Prob’ly no more chicken-buses.

“So, what’s your point, Dave?”

Confession is good for the soul – is all.  And I am confessing.  We are getting a smidge older. We kinda like a bit more routine than we ever have.  We kinda don’t like surprises as much as we used to.  Our energy levels are diminishing and more of that which we do have is spent keeping the basic home and hearth maintained.  Put another way: we are not likely to explore Patagonia on an old motorcycle retracing Che’, anymore.  The bucket list hasn’t run dry but it has been put away.  On a high and distant shelf.  We are not old but we are getting older and now feeling it a bit.

Maybe Joe Cocker’s death has hit me harder than I realized……..?

In the year 2000 the UN set some Millennium Development Goals.  They were and still are pretty good goals. And, even more impressively, a lot of progress has been made.

Since 1990 the global infant mortality rate has halved.  So has the extreme poverty index. In effect, the huge global problem of poverty and infant death has been halved all around the world in just 25 years.  It is also true that global life longevity has also increased by almost three years.  And there has been a huge increase in the world’s children getting at least an elementary education (mostly because more primal, uber-paternalistic cultures are now allowing more girls to attend school).  There is no question that the world is a better place overall and that the improvement has been pretty quick.

How did it happen?  Mostly by way of globalization.  First world countries lost jobs to third world countries.  China exploded as an economic juggernaut and so did India.  They, together, make up over 40% of the world’s population.  The improvement has been the result of the much vaunted trickle-down effect from rich countries to poor ones.

But the trickle came from the middle class segment of the developed world not from the rich folks (exception: Bill gates and a few other biggies).  The rich just got richer and the middle class of Canada and the rest of the G8 simply lost wealth to the third world’s poor.

And it shouldn’t be that way.

Is it so bad?  Is it not OK to lose a $1.25 a day ($1.25 a day was the extreme poverty cut-off in 1990 and now half of those people get almost $3.00) to save a family in Somalia?  Of course it is OK.  But it is not $1.25 a day to a Canadian because there are so few Canadians compared to the so many, many extreme poor.  The G8 middle and lower class actually lose something on the scale of twenty times that in order to raise the level of income for so many of the third world’s poor.  The average Canadian has ‘lost’ more like $500 to $1000 a month in real purchasing power since 1990 and way too much of that went to the rich.

So globalization is a boon to the super-rich, the world’s poor and an unfair burden to the first worlds’ middle class.

Given that that great unwashed will never be rich anyway, it’s probably not so bad.  So we eventually can’t afford as much crap from Walmart, so what?  Maybe this is as good a way as any to help the desperately poor.  Mind you, the unfair apportionment is also the root cause of our suffering medical care, education and other social institutions. Essentially we are being driven down at an accelerated rate so that the world’s poor can get a bit of a leg up.

But what of the other goals?  There were 8 in total.  1.  Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger.  2. Achieve universal primary education.  3. Promote gender equality and empower women.  4. Reduce infant mortality.  5. Improve maternal health.  6. Wage war on communicable diseases (Aids, Malaria, etc.) 7. Ensure environmental sustainability. 8. Global partnership for development (read: more free trade).

It is arguable that – in some significant ways – all but one of those goals is being met or at least addressed.  The notable exception is the Achilles heal for the other 7.  An exploitation of the planet’s resources that is at a rate of non-sustainabilty will eventually undermine any progress in the other seven and will, in the extreme, undermine life on the planet. We are progressing in ways that ultimately won’t count if we don’t address the most important item, #7 on the list.

And what about the felt (but still unconscious) unfairness being inflicted on the developed world’s middle class?  Won’t they get annoyed?  Might they not revolt?  Could they get out of hand?  Well, the answer to that it seems is increased security, more rules and controls, rise of the police state.

The math? The price for the 7 improvements (as managed by the super-rich) is the creation of two really big problems.  How will that play out in the end?  Maybe if the super-rich got in the game and played fair, we could achieve the same benefits with fewer costs?

Just sayin’……………. 

Like Rebecca of Sunnybrook farm, I think it is true that good things happen to those who think and speak and act in a good fashion.  Like tends to beget like.  Call it Karma if you want.  And, I know that it is true that grouchy, negative whiny crap just begets more crappy stuff to whine about.  We can (and do) create our own hell.  So, it is with growing reluctance that I write about what is wrong with everything when I know that such activity only makes it worse.  We really should be writing about how to make it better.

First, we kill all the lawyers.  Then the politicians.  Then we take Manhattan.  Then we take Berlin.  (Leonard Cohen’s plan with more details)

But, after that visceral response, how to actually make it better?  And that is the challenge facing the Green Party. The Green party has, for most of it’s existence, simply cried ‘foul’. They point out what is wrong and even take steps to stop the evil-doers doing their evil but don’t really have a platform of alternative actions to propose so as to do the good work instead of the bad. Admittedly, the Greens propose alternative energy instead of oil but that single plank notwithstanding, the overall plan to do right by the planet is not clear.  The plank to do right by human survival needs (like food) is missing altogether.

And, NO, clamoring to reduce Carbon emissions is NOT constructive.  It is, essentially, just more complaints.  HOW to reduce Carbon emissions is what is needed and charging a carbon tax to permit emitting is NOT a solution.

We (the Greens) don’t have enough solutions.  In effect, we are stuck in the same box as ‘they’ are.  Stepping outside the BIG IDEA that is our modern world to fashion a new one is not all that hard but transitioning that NEW GREAT IDEA is next to impossible.  The days of single game-changers like Marx and Mao are over.  We don’t have BIG thinkers. Nor BIG doers.   Not in economics to be sure.

The closest BIG NEW thinkers in modern economics is Amory Lovins, Hunter Lovins and Paul Hawken. They co-wrote Natural Capitalism.  NatCap basically takes the human condition (greed, ambition, fear, need to trade, etc) and channels it into a planet-friendly business model.   And their subject hero was Ray Anderson of Interface Corporation.   He did good. They then dubbed that model one of SUSTAINABILTY.  The word has caught on.  The practice has not.

But it will.  Sustainabilty is achievable.  It is realistic.  It blends or transitions from what has come to be known as normal Capitalism to something better and we are already underway on a micro-nano-scale.  But it is piecemeal.  People who live off the grid are examples, albeit not great ones.  The 100-mile diet is an example.  Buying local is an example.  Our general trend to reject the biggest of institutions and their spokes-models is an example. And we can do so much more.

Bottom line: I am Rebecca-ish.  I am optimistic.  And I am attempting to be the change I want to see (while I still do the things I want changed out of convenience more often than I should).  And I can see improvements all the time.  But I do not see leadership.  All the so-called leaders are on the dark side, Luke.

We need some good leaders.

….I am NOT in support of any kind of political or religious terrorists.  I fear and loathe them like everyone else.  Who doesn’t fear the zealot and the fanatic?  Or the really, really, truly, stupid? 

The difference is that I do not see them in every shadow, every nook and every cranny of every day life.  They are NOT everywhere.  It was NOT a terrorist who recently went berserk at the parliament buildings. Or in New Brunswick.  Or even at any of the myriad ‘nut-shoots-co-workers-wife-and-self’ scenes that we seem to read about every day. Those people are just plain nuts and it sometimes turns out violently for them and those around them.  But they are motivated by something other than religion or politics.

I suppose there are a few real crazies who also latch on to something, like religion or misogyny or political fervor but nuttiness came first. Nuttiness came second and third, too.

In Sidney, Australia, the black ISIL flag was likely more of a symbol, not a cause.

Concept:   There is a difference between a causal relationship and a co-relationship. Stealing shopping carts is not the cause of homelessness. One causes something to happen and the other is just along for the ride. 

The cause of such horrible scenes as Ottawa, Sidney and Boston (just to name a few) 99.99999% of the time is isolation, marginalization, rejection and your basic brain chemical imbalances. The flag or the name of Allah is just along for the ride.  Put another way: if a murderer has ‘Mom’ or ‘Harley Davidson’ tattooed on his arm, was his mom or his motorcycle the motivating cause for the murder?

The actual ISIL members are a different kettle of stinky, rotten fish.  I admit that. They are clearly motivated by something quite primal – probably the aforementioned fanatical interpretation of right and wrong generated by their society combined with ambition, brainwashing, misogyny, testosterone, money and politics as well as a healthy dollop of overall nuttiness but the poor, dirty, lonely dickhead living at a Toronto shelter and mumbling to himself is in a different league of madness altogether.

And some of those sad, crazy people live in Sidney, Australia.

Let us not confuse the two.  More importantly: let not our government and media purposefully and manipulatively confuse us!

Things cost.  We all know that.  Used, surplus or scratched and dented things cost considerably less – we all know that, too.  And, as the world accumulates more and more ‘stuff’, that which is actually free-for-the-taking also seems to increase.  In fact, there is a category for free stuff on Craigslist.  We advertise free stuff!

It is a surprisingly large category when you think about it.

I remember a time when there was retail, discount, wholesale, liquidation and second-hand.  There was no ‘free’.  If anything was deemed of lower value than second hand, it was a hand-me-down or a donation to a charity.  Admittedly hand-me-downs and ‘donations’ are free (even if the Salvation Army added a small price tag to it in their shops). So free has been with us for a long time.

But not like today.

Today we have free stores, garage sales, dumpsters, and ‘curbside’ spring cleaning offerings to add to the thrift stores, Sally Anne’s, flea markets and rummage sales. Today ‘free’ is a big enough component in the world of STUFF to warrant a big box store if not a mall. If you step back and look at the free or almost-free stuff out there, it is a wonder why anyone buys anything at all!

OK.  I buy stuff.  I admit that.  And I do so because I WANT that stuff.  Just like everyone who buys.  But I have to admit that, if one was simply to ‘watch’  and ‘wait’, just about everything comes up for free.

Exception: land.  REAL estate is real and is never free (nor, because of taxes, is it ever truly owned except by government).

I have seen running vehicles for free on Craigslist.  I was just offered (and took) a free motorcycle.  It needs work, of course.  It is not pretty.  And, because it had new tires and a lot of new stuff, I gave the guy some money ($150) anyway, but, if I had wanted to, I could have rolled it away as a free (that was his offer) motorcycle.  This bike was a newer, better bike than I saved up for for months when I was 16!!

But the biggest ‘bargain’ in free stuff is building supplies.  OMG, there are literally tons of free windows, doors, bricks, steel, wood, working appliances and other ‘valuable’ stuff (when you need it) out there.

I have no idea, really, what all this means.  Maybe it is just a recognition that ‘stuff’ is cheaper or doesn’t last or that people can’t affect simple repairs so a lot of valuable stuff is simply chucked when a pair of pliers and a fuse would have put it right.  Maybe the cost of storage is what is doing it (storage requires land).  I honestly don’t know.

But I do know this: if I had known all this when I was younger, I would have collected good junk over enough years to be able to build my own good-looking cabin without having to pay much at all.  I am convinced that, even at my advanced years, I could gather enough ‘stuff’ over the next year to build a small cabin for free including furniture and appliances.

And therein lies the ironic point.  Most people work for twenty years or more to pay off a mortgage for a home that, not counting the land (which they can never own), could have been done for free in less time.

I know that is an over-simplification (you still need to have the skills and a bit of money to fill in the small gaps) but you know what I mean.   Advice to young people: go buy a small acreage in a beautiful country setting for a song, throw on a storage shed or two and accumulate free building materials.  When you are 40-50, start building with them. 

This is not a put-down.  Not of the people involved, anyway.  They are are victims, really. They are victims of over-regulated behaviour and victims of their own mindset.

Dateline: Yesterday on the west coast.  The story: rain, rain and more rain.  The personalized stories to get our attention featured people who were deemed really hard hit and victimized by the weather. Tragedy was inferred.  Disaster implied.  Helplessness featured.  First case on the news: a woman in San Francisco suffered a power blackout and so her garage door wouldn’t open and she was trapped.  Couldn’t go shopping.  Oh, dear!

Case#2: In Lions bay on the Sea to Sky highway, the village water system was destroyed by a mudslide.  Everyone’s water system was shut down.  It went dry.  Clean water poured down the middle of the village along the man-made stream bed but, of course, no one could possibly get water from the stream!  The news showed a resident with boxes of bottled water.  “Bought all I could carry in my SUV!”  Best news for the residents: “We do not plan on evacuating people from their homes just yet!”

Courtenay was flooded and a street of stores was closed off.  Really big puddles.  The biggest disaster for the store owners was that the stores were not allowed to re-open because the ‘authorities’ did not deem the road safe anymore even when the waters had receded.  A dozen or so firemen and RCMP patrolled the puddles for the better part of an extra day. Big, burly armed and uniformed guys guarded the really big puddles from foolish waders. Store owners fumed.

You know what I am saying, right?  This is tort law used as a cudgel.  This is ignorance and helplessness in the general population.  This is stupid stuff.

And, since when have the authorities had carte blanche decision-making over a person residing in their own home?  Or their store? That kind of thing has gotten way out of hand. Remember that town in Alberta, High River?  Residents were evacuated and the police went into their homes and confiscated any guns they found?

I remember when Mt. St Helen’s erupted and some people chose to stay in harm’s way and they were allowed to do so.  That turned out ot be a bad decision for some of them but it was (or should be) the right of a sane person in a free country.  No?

I have also read of people surviving drought and dehydration by (gasp) drinking from rivers and streams.  Hell, we do that everyday!  So, why can’t people use water from rivers anymore?  Maybe you drink bottled water to be safe but a lot of water doesn’t have to be proven potable before being put to good use.

My point is simple: too many people are so dependent on the ‘grid’ systems, directions from authorities and their ‘conveniences’, they are paralyzed when there’s a glitch. Of course a system going down is inconvenient and, maybe for a few, a disaster but the vast majority of the people should not be rendered helpless because their garage door doesn’t work!

For the record: Sal would get out her tools and dismantle the door.

Worse, of course, is that we put ourselves in position to be made helpless even if we are generally capable.  Those trapped on Skytrain when the system went down last year pried open the doors and jumped down on to reportedly ‘live’ tracks.  No one was hurt but those folks were literally trapped between a stopped rock and a shocking place.  The same seems to hold for me whenever I get trapped in traffic.  Waddya gonna do?  Walk away from your car?  In other words, our systems – when we rely on them with total faith – inevitably fail and thus put us in vulnerable places.  The more systems you are reliant on, the more vulnerable you are.

And airports are major delays just waiting to happen.  And happen they do.  Putting your self in harm’s way is the very definition of going through an airport and getting on an airplane.  Must be – look at the security!  I refuse to fly anymore – for many reasons – but the main one is that I have no control over anything.  I feel like just one of many cattle being led to an abattoir under the direction of those %$#!*& authorities.

Living OTG is not just about getting out from the boring and unfulfilling, it is not just about learning and growing and wonder.  It is really about more independence and freedom in a world increasingly invading your private space and personal actions.  Living OTG is unquestionably freer and freeing of the body, the soul and the mind.  Part of that is the nature of the lifestyle but the biggest part these days is the difference between living OTG and existing in the city.

Living OTG is feeling increasingly like being an outlaw in a land chock-full of stupid laws.

This blog is silly-Dave, psuedo-academic and will take a paragraph or two to get to the point.  Sorry.

They say that Psychology is the study of human behaviour by looking from the inside of the subject and Economics is the same study by looking from the outside.  Frankly, I think they have it all wrong (is that a surprise?).

Firstly, neither Psychology nor Economics is a science.  They are, to quote someone-whose-name-I-forgot, just big conversations that use jargon and construct words to make it complicated.  Reason: there are no real metrics, it is mostly guesswork and those involved in the guessing want to get paid.

Economists seem to think that money is a metric but it ain’t.  It is a partial metric at best. Money, as a way to measure, is like trying to do geography armed only with inches as your measuring device.  It can only go so far.  And when you corrupt money (or inches) by inflating it (see quantitative easing) then even the metrics change relationship to the things they are measuring.  A dollar is no longer a dollar and a dime, nickel and penny have ceased to mean anything much these days.  Money is really the NON metric. Maybe more fairly: it is the ever-changing metric that others keep changing behind your back.

Bluntly speaking: the rules of the game (economics) keep changing.   Economists know this but what are they going to do?  Admit that they know nothing and thus terminate their employment?

Basically human behaviour changes anyway.  It is natural.  It is what we do.  When a geneticist looks at it, he/she calls it evolution.  When an archaeologist comments they call it adaptation. Spiritualists call it growth.  Sociologists call it trends and popularists call it fashion.  The only real commonality they all share is observation and most of that is in hindsight.  The so-called science of human behaviour is always derived from looking at the past.  Only futurists seem to orient to the future and they have always been perceived as the fringe weirdos and not worthy of the title of scientist.

Economists?  They are focused on only a few concepts that they can’t even define.  Not even at the simplest of levels like supply and demand and inflation.  By the time the crooks invented credit default swaps even the economists admitted they didn’t understand them. And, seriously?  Economists are blinded by their own metrics.  They measure gross domestic product, of all things.  They do not even measure what environmentalists call the ‘externalities’ – what the rest of us call the ‘planet’.

Bhutan, at least, measures gross domestic happiness.

Orwell might have been the lone exception.  But only in a general sense.  And let us be clear: Orwell was a journalist, not an economist.  He was a watcher.  He was one of us. And he wrote in simple metaphors not ‘industry’ jargon.  One of the most useful commentators of the human condition had little to no formal education forcing him to first learn restrictive and obfuscating language. He was plain spoken.  Orwell had the potential to write the truth and, it seems lately, he came damn close.

And here comes the point: the experts are usually wrong.  Basic rule of thumb: the more complicated the language they use the more wrong they are.  Even when they are right, they are right after the fact. To evolve and grow and advance and survive as a human being, almost by definition, you can’t rely on what the experts have to say.  If they are not confused, they are lying.  If they are not lying, they are simply reporting on what has already happened.

You have to do it yourself.  You have to see the world as it is and you have to try to see where it is heading. Even though history is a good predictor of the future, it is not the metrics of history that is of any use, it is the general human and cultural behaviours that may give you a few hints.  And you can see those as well as anyone.

“Like what?”

I dunno.  I am no Orwell.  And I am no longer hip.  But, if I had to guess, I would guess that the monetary system is verging on radical change.  So is politics.  And I am quasi predicting that simply because they are systems that don’t seem to be working very well. They are broken.  We have lost faith in them.  And, again, make no mistake: all our systems are simply large social agreements that require our faith, our confidence, our full participation and our acceptance to work at all. When people ‘check out’ of those agreements, the systems fail and radical change fills the void.

And – here’s the second point – I think I observe people checking out of systems.  Many no longer vote.  Education is increasingly exclusive and worse, increasingly irrelevant. The economy is even more divided into the rich and poor.  We don’t trust the police or the justice system to do the right thing.  And the justice system is priced out of reach for most people.  Health care is also too expensive for many and alternative medicine is gaining popularity.  The list just goes on and on.

Throw in climate change, the radical jihadists, the rogue states, the third world, the marginalized, the alienated, the unemployed and the hugely unhappy and you have all the ingredients for a massive cauldron of change.

“So, why hasn’t it happened already?”

I don’t know.  Three answers come to mind: 1.  It is happening and, except for climate change, I can’t see it. 2. It is not happening now but will soon. 3. What we consider the status quo is, in fact, a constant state of change.  Most people will opt for #3.  But that may be denial.  I think it is #1 and so I am watching closely.