I'm Obsessed with Self Sufficiency
I can't even begin to explain the level of satisfaction that I get from doing things on my own — from being a self-sufficient woman.
The other night I learned how to sharpen my knives using a whetstone, in a knife skills class I've been taking. Whetstone/Knife Sharpener: https://amzn.to/4bKScvk
It is hands down the most satisfying thing I've learned in that class so far.
My obsession with self sufficiency was learned in childhood. I developed it from watching and later participating in all of my parents' many DIY projects.
My parents didn't come from families with money, so they learned that if they wanted something that they couldn't afford, then they had to make it themselves.
Their financial situation, which wasn't great to begin with, got a whole lot worse, right before I was born. My dad lost his job about three months before I entered the world, and my mom was laid off a couple of months after. They were both able to find some means of income, but they were pretty poor for the first few years of my life.
Little Kristen and then little Adam (my brother) grew up watching our parents figure out how to do absolutely everything by themselves.
As we got older, our parents started involving us in the DIY projects. I typically had an attitude about it. None of my friends had to help install and tape drywall. I don't think any of my friends even knew what drywall was. But the older I got, the more I began to actually apreciate learning these skills.
For my high school senior project, I redid my bathroom, but I dodn't just redo the pain tnad the decorations, I retiled the floor and the counter tops too. I guarantee I was the only girl in my high school who had ever used a tile saw.
I've continued throughout my life to build and fix and repair things all on my own, and I've extended this self-sufficiency to many other areas of my life, and I get so much satisfaction from doing so.
The way our society operates nowadays, where the majority of people simply pay others to do things for them is a pretty new concept when you review all of our known human history. People used to be doers and creators rather than simple consumers.
Being able to pay others to meet every single one of our needs sounds really great at first, but I think it's actually stripping away two really important things from humanity: creativity, and using ingenuity to solve problems. It's making our brains lazy and it's making us very dependent. I've talked a little about this before, in relation to food production and I'll link that right up here.
My brain was programmed in such a way that when I have a problem, I immediately think "how can I solve this on my own" and I do everything I can to solve it, to a fault, sometimes -- I can be a little too independent, but that's for another video.
When we don't have any practice using ingenuity or creativity, it feels overwhelming when things change in life. And it makes adapting really difficult. Right now, as we're experiencing so many changes in our world, it makes me more grateful than ever that I was trained, since I was really little, not only in how to fix certain things, but in how to problem solve, and have the confidence to try new things and develop new skills.
I have so many ideas of how I want my future to look, and how I want humanity's future to look — and it's not at all in alignment with all the dystopian books and movies out there. I believe that if we all start exercising our creative and ingenuitous muscles, when it comes time for us to make changes, we'll be ready to do so.
Hi, I’m Kristen!
I envision a world where you and I rediscover what it is to be human, through connection with ourselves, each other and the natural world around us.