About me

As promised in the comments last week, this week I'll speak a little bit about myself and where these ideas are coming from. This isn't something I like to do, I don't like talking about myself, especially not in this format: people are far too complicated to sum up easily. However, I'll try to say who I am and what sort of life I'm living.

I'm a young Canadian university student. I'm entering into my last year of studies, and have recently turned twenty-one. My family is definitely upper class. My dad is an engineer, my mom is finishing off a PhD, so there is no shortage of education within my family.

I've always had a keen eye for contradictions and hypocrisy. Growing up, I was a pain for the adults around me, since I'd always notice when their words and their actions failed to line up, or more worryingly when they said things that couldn't be true if you believed their earlier statements. It took me a while to suppress the urge to tell people when I saw this, but by the time I started high school I became aware of how pervasive this was.

I was in middle school when the global economy crashed. This barely effected me, since Canada weathered these events better than our neighbor to the south, and I'm from an upper class background anyway. We were protected from the crisis, of course. However, watching it, and observing the quite rapid decline of the US got me interested in why things like this happened.

Of course, the changes that I'm talking about aren't supposed to be possible. They fly in the face of the religion of progress so many people believe in. And yet, the USA today is in worse shape by nearly every metric than it was even ten years ago. I can see this merely be visiting relatives in the country: by returning to the same place for a little every year, I have seen the decline first hand.

Now, making sense of it wasn't easy. There was no way I could think of for how to explain this. I took a step back, and began to try to think of alternative sources of wisdom. History seemed likely to offer an answer. I found information on the fall of past civilizations, and tried to sort through it, to no avail. There didn't seem to be an answer.

I graduated high school, started to study linguistics (with the goal of becoming a speech and language pathologist), and continued my attempt to make sense of the decline of the US, and now, Canada. This was all pushed to the back of my mind with some drama relating to university. In any case, it wasn't until this year that I discovered a core source of what has shaped my ideas, the The Archdruid Report, particularly The Heresy of Technological Choice and Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush.

By this point, I had a cellphone. I'd bought into the hype that you needed one, and got one in grade twelve. I was one of the last people at my high school to get one, most of my friends having one by grade nine. I never really liked it, but I had thought it necessary. After reading that, and the rest of the blog, I began to try to figure out a plan. This made perfect sense to me, in a way nothing had.

So, after a few months of reading, thinking, and planning, I decided to implement the ideas and life that these seemed to imply were possible. I've been working out what will do the best for my personal happiness, and preparing for the future, ever since.

In terms of goals for this week (short as it was), I, or someone in my family, has made all food I've eaten since returning home. The time spent visiting family was fun, but they are incredibly wasteful... 

I think this means I'm in better shape than I thought, as I assume they're closer to the norm than I am. My family is fairly frugal, all things considered, as I've always known, but it was remarkable to look at the lifestyle with new eyes.

This week, all I plan for is to continue with making my own food. I'm quite busy, but I think I can continue this without too much undue effort.