#014 The New Self Sufficiency-Doing Without

In this episode, I want to share with you how over a 5 year period of time I went from $295K in debt to zero debt. And I want to share with you how you can do the same thing as well as what that all has to do with a simple sustainable lifestyle. Now if you want to hear that story and get the real scoop, then stayed tuned.

When I was growing up on the farm, we spent our time raising animals, working in the garden, hunting, fishing, picking fruits and nuts from the trees on the farm, as well as canning and freezing our surplus foods. While most people these days would think “that sounds like a lot of work” we still had plenty of spare time for play, leisure walks in the woods, or simply sitting on the creek bank under a tree with a fishing line in the water. 

But it was  also a time when no one had a cell phone, a computer, an iPad, or a wall mounted flat screen TV. These amenities were simply not available at that time. In fact, in my early childhood, I remember a time when most people did not even have a phone. If you needed to talk to them, you simply drove to their house. It was also a time when we were able to provide ourselves with much of what we needed to live. In many respects, we were self sufficient. We just never really talked about it because it was simply the way we lived. 

But, we now live in a much different world. Initially self sufficiency was a matter of providing your own food, shelter, tools, and whatever else was needed just to survive. You could not really eliminate anything because all of what you had was exactly what you needed. 

But these days the opposite is true. Much of what we need to “survive” so to speak, in our modern world, such as light bulbs, cell phones, computers, vehicles and the gasoline to run them, is impossible for the individual to make. So instead of depending on ourselves we depend on a vast interconnected infrastructure that we cannot possibly understand or control.  

But, if you simply change your perspective and learn to simply, you will not only improve your quality of life but make your life much more sustainable.  

Always live sustainably because that is how we build a better future. 

Patrick