This post may wander a bit. It’s not really ready formed in my mind but is coming out as I think about it. When you open a textbook of economics it will talk about people specializing in what they’re good at. I doubt there’s anything new in this since you have family names like Weaver, Smith and Carpenter, but nowadays the problem with specialization is that for most people there’s so, so many things that we don’t have a clue about. Specialization has narrowed our skillset and horizons to such a degree that outside our own little envelope we’re basically helpless. Helpless in the most fundamental sense of being able to provide ourselves with our minimum physical needs; food, drinking water, shelter, warmth and clothing.
I have to wonder if this a good idea. We place so much trust in those who provide these services to us but most of us no next to nothing about how they do it and what the consequences of their processes might be. I have written before in my post about building a better crapper that most of us have no idea where our bowel movements go and no particular desire to learn; that’s one consequence of specialization – it’s someone else’s problem. The other consequence of specialization is that you place yourself directly into the cash economy with no fall back position. The problem with that is that as markets (I call them Magoos) become increasingly interlinked you could through no fault of your own find yourself too costly, badly placed geographically or simply surplus to requirements. In that case what do you do?
This has been on my mind recently. It came to me while I was reading about rammed earth construction and how ordinary people like you and me could build a really good house mostly with our own hands and at very little cost. One house was built by a Australian comedian with no building experience. It also came to me when I learned about permaculture; a lot of which concerns designing carefully then watching your land grow into productivity without needing the hand of man. A laymen like myself could do that. The more I read the more I come across age old methods and new ideas that are lowering the skill threshold to becoming more secure in our lives. What could I do with a maintenance free, fully paid up house and a maintenance free forest garden? What would this do for cashflow?
The flip side of the coin, specialization wise, is boredom and cost. Our bodies were made for work and walk past any gym complex and you’ll see specialists in shorts and sweatbands running on their little hamster wheels. At such times I am reminded of the Talking Heads song “Road to Nowhere”. It’s amazing to me that an industry was born out people who wish to run without moving, work without producing, staring into space, listening to their I-pods so that they are mentally separated from where they are and what they are doing. Having become brain specialists we’ve let our bodies atrophy, our waistlines expand and our lifespans contract. Then of course when you want to do something outside of your specialization you have to pay out hand over fist, because let’s face it, hiring specialists doesn’t come cheap.
So I find myself wondering about all the things I could do in my leisure time that would be fun and interesting but also pile up enduring benefits. I’m a big fan of designing hard in the early stages of doing things since it doesn’t matter what you do, doing something on the fly is pretty much guaranteed to give you a bad result.
If you’re reading this and you think you could be a member of a multidisciplinary team to build a self-sufficient world within a world which is definitely not so, then please drop me a line. I believe everything good in life comes from two wellsprings, the first one is thought and the second one is working with other people.
