Life 2.0

Last night over a few microbrews at the Mountain Sun, I had an interesting conversation with Jason, my friend and co-worker. Naturally the topic of modern life vs. a simpler, low-tech life came up. Jason is about my age and he's a brilliant engineer who models electrical systems with computers and does extensive testing on prototype batteries produced by major auto manufacturers. He was the perfect person to bounce ideas off of.

It doesn't take much, so I soon jumped up on my soapbox and let 'er rip. My beer fueled outpouring revealed a new aspect of my deep thoughts on the subject. It seems that one of my major frustrations with modern techno life is how rapidly everything changes. As I explained to Jason, one of the things I hate about technology is that by the time I start getting proficient with the current standard, it's outdated. Enough is never enough. We always have to have more, bigger, better. I once taught myself HTML and was decent at creating web pages from scratch. But then I didn't touch it for a while. When I looked into it again, everything had changed so much that I scarcely recognized it. It was like starting from scratch. In my daily working life, I don't have time to keep up with the latest buzz on this or that because I'm too busy trying to get my pile of work done. There's little time for innovation. You might think these innovations would be a natural part of doing the work on a daily basis, and to a degree that is true. But there's still just too much. I don't know, maybe I'm an anomaly. Maybe I just can't hack it. Or more likely it has something to do with my aversion to it.

The thing is, all this is just to keep pace with a "virtual" world, a state of existence that isn't even real. That is, it's all conceptual in my opinion. None of it means anything in the wider world. It only means something because we say it does. You can't eat a computer program. I suppose you could choke down the disk it comes on, but the program itself is just photons. It's all just so silly and artificial. I realize that computer programs can be used to directly affect the real world, such as with computer guided missiles. Even my own work influences decisions by those who make them. But my point is that in the end none of this feels like genuine, honest living to me. I'm just sick of the middle man.

None of this is so with traditional skills. Let's take hunting for example. Ten thousand years ago, if you wanted to eat you walked into the woods, killed something, and ate it. That process involves tracking, stalking, waiting for the right moment, making the kill itself, then transporting and processing the kill before it finally becomes food. Today, if I go hunting, the basic process is exactly the same. Some of the tools have changed, but even a modern gun is the same basic concept as the ancient atl atl - a human launches a projectile which strikes and kills the target. If a father were to take his son into the forest today to teach him how to hunt, it wouldn't be very different from what a father would have taught his son before the advent of agriculture. There is no Hunting 2.0, no expensive upgrades to buy, no starting over with a new flowchart to redesign the whole process. That's not to say hunting or any other ancient skills are brainless or easy. With hunting or hide tanning or building a log cabin or farming, one can spend a lifetime learning and honing skills. There's always something new to learn, some technique to perfect, but the thing is that the major rules of the game never change. Information and skills can be passed down from one generation to the next. No grandfather today is ever going to teach his grandson how he programmed a computer back in his day. The very notion is laughable.

There have been frightening attempts to rewrite the rules of ancient skills. Farming 2.0 is here in the form of the modern factory farm. We've taken the humans and much of nature out of farming, and now grow millions of acres of monocrops with machines and toxic synthetic chemicals. We're growing animals by the millions in deplorable conditions. The price we're paying is a highly polluted environment, tainted food, obesity and a ticking time bomb in the form of a greatly reduced agricultural gene pool - one serious wheat virus and the world's major calorie source could go extinct overnight.

I've said it before, I hate the departmentalization of human beings. I hate being treated like a machine which must perform one task flawlessly while not knowing jack about anything else. Not so long ago, it was common for one person to know how to hunt, farm, build a house, churn butter, butcher a hog, ride a horse, darn socks, hitch a team, dig a well, etc. People had lots of skills that directly contributed not only to their survival, but to making life pleasant. What do people know how to do today? Everyone knows how to use a computer, drive a car and watch tv. We all know how to use money to get food, clothing and a house. But what do we know how to do. What can we make. How can we literally make a living, not just earn money and then buy a living. All we know to do is give money to the middleman who makes them appear as if by magic. These days horse skills or gardening or making clothing is considered a hobby. A hobby? Something we do for fun to distract us from the monotony of our "real" jobs? I fail to see how our modern lives are so much better if the necessary survival skills of our ancestors are considered to be fun distractions. Why not make practical use of these fun distractions? You know, like people have for thousands of years? Instead of knitting stacks of useless doilies, why not expand your skill set and make clothes for your family? There will still be time for doilies. There are people at the Boulder community garden who grow big gardens full of tomatoes and other vegetables and then - and this still makes me seethe with angry disbelief - compost them or let them rot in the garden at the end of the season! They garden for the pleasure of it, but in the end they just buy processed food from the grocery store! I know this because I've had conversations with these people. Where's the disconnect here? People still have this desire to do something constructive, but have a hard time making a practical application of it.

Maybe I'm seeing something that most people can't or won't. Or maybe my brain is just wired differently and I have an unusual aversion to the so-called "natural progression" of our species. (I tend to believe it's the former, but that too could just be a symptom of the latter.)

All I know is that at this moment, it's a gorgeous autumn day. I've got a big pot of apple butter simmering in the kitchen. The whole place is decked out with autumn leaves, all kinds of pumpkins, squashes and Indian corn, and big crates of fresh apples. In this moment I can almost imagine being in my own little mountain homestead, a world away from the technological slavery of the city. Here I am not a robot. I may work hard, but I am not a slave because I serve myself. I choose a deliberate life.