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+
+# We'll Make It Work
+
+The title of this post comes from my wife. I'd more likely say, *We'll Figure It Out*, but that's very different. Sometimes you do need to figure things out, but more often you have to take them as they are and Make It Work. 
+
+We'll Make It Work. This phrase, her way of thinking about problems essentially, is the only reason we're still out here.
+
+Broken down in the [high desert of California](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/12/terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-week)? We'll make it work. Lost my income right after moving to Mexico? We'll make it work. [Blown a head gasket](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/10/going-down-swinging) in the middle of nowhere Colorado? We'll make it work. [Brakes failing](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/03/more-adventures-travco-brakes)? We'll make it work. [Brand new Jeep dead](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/12/repair-fail)? We'll make it work. World ending in a rain of fire? We'll make it work.
+
+I never really thought much about this attitude until recently when it started to come up a lot as we contemplate some big changes in our lives. I would raise potential objections to plans, and Corrinne would shrug and say "we'll make it work." Other times she would say, "how the #%$& are we going to do that?" And I'd shrug and say "we'll figure it out." It works both ways, we complement each other in this regard. Things I worry about she does not. And things she worries about don't even cross my mind until she asks about them. 
+
+And then we each shrug at the other. *We'll make it work*.
+
+This I realized is what makes us able to do this. We're not rich. We're not all that smart. We're not particularly skilled. But we're willing to do whatever is necessary to make things work. 
+
+Sometimes that means sacrifices are made. Sometimes that means working really hard. Sometimes that means letting go of preconceived ideas. Sometimes it means really accepting that something has happened. You'd be surprised at how far accepting the reality of your situation goes toward getting you out of it. [There is no cavalry](https://luxagraf.net/essay/spirit/the-cavalry-isnt-coming), the sooner you accept where you are, the sooner you'll get going again.
+
+Sometimes making it work might mean coming up with a new plan. It might mean you don't make it out west one year. It might mean you spend some extra time in California. It might mean you camp in a mechanic's driveway from time to time. 
+
+I am very leery of the word compromise. The way most people use this word it seems to me means "mutual defeat by concession." No one gets what they want, no one is happy. That's no way to live. If you're compromising by making concessions, you're doing it wrong. 
+
+A good compromise is when you say yes to everything, even to things you don't necessarily want to do. Sure, we'll go over here to the Biggest Week in America Birding and we'll also go over here to the diamond mines. We'll cross this bridge, but we'll also cross this other one even though I might want to avoid the second one. Doesn't matter what I want. Make it work. Everyone gets what they want. Are there times when that's not possible? Sure, but we'll make it work.
+
+What *We'll Make It Work* always means, more than anything else, is being flexible and fluid in your thinking and actions. It means not clinging to preconceived ideas when it turns out the facts on the ground are different. Making it work might mean you need rethink the path to your goals. 
+
+We'll make it work does not mean it's going to be easy. That's okay, the easy way is rarely [the way](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/01/path). The internet loves to make memes of Bruce Lee's dictum, *be like water*[^1], but few people think this all way through. Sure, water flows, water carves canyons with its patience, but water also doesn't only goes on its path. It never stays where it is and it never takes a route that it is not meant to go. Some routes that it does take mean it smashes into rocks and is pulverized until it becomes mist, barely water at all anymore. Then it slowly falls back, becomes flowing water again, but is different somehow, changed in unaccountable ways. You want to be like water? Be prepared for the world to turn you into mist at times. Make that work.
+
+Above all else, We'll Make It Work means that you have to have faith in yourself and whomever else you're with that you can make it work. You have to know it in your bones. You can (and should!) second guess yourself on the particulars of making things work, but know that you can. Everyone can. It just take faith and discipline. Learn to make your own choices and craft your own life. Commit to making it work and you will find a way to make it work.
+
+[^1]: I could write thousands of words unpacking this simple idea, because there is so much here, but I will spare you.
+
+
+# Simple Machines, Complex Tasks
+
+I picked up my dad's Pentax camera sometime in the 1980s and was hooked from day one. By high school I was committed. I set off to college with the vague idea that I would major in photography, but I dropped out before that ever came to fruition.
+
+Like most photographers I made the jump to digital cameras some time ago. I sold my last film camera right before we left on this trip. It was a sad moment, but I hadn't shot with the camera (a Nikon F3) in years. I knew there were people out there still shooting film, and I wanted the camera to be used, not sit around gathering dust, so I sold it. 
+
+I didn't give film much thought after that. From a technical standpoint 35mm film is massively more expensive, has less resolving power, and it's more difficult to work with, develop, print, etc. 
+
+Then, about six months ago, an editor at Wired reached out and asked if I would put together a guide to film photography. This caught me a little off guard. Film? Did you really say film photography? 
+
+I said I would so long as Wired bought me a new film camera because I didn't think they would do that. Surprisingly, my editor agreed. I went on eBay and bought an old Nikon FE2, which was sort of the less pro version of the F3. It came with a Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 lens. I bought some Tri-X, and some Velvia, and went wandering around the Outer Banks trying to remember how to shoot film. 
+
+Film photography is not like riding a bike. Everything I once knew... I forgot. But the technical hurdles didn't really bother me much after the first (embarrassingly bad) roll I developed. 
+
+I realized pretty quickly that more than nailing complex exposures, what I really needed to do was slow down my whole way of working. I was trying to shoot film as if it were digital. It is most emphatically not digital. It has a very different process. Film has to be shot calmly, carefully, and consciously. 
+
+This I realized is also what elevates something to a craft, doing it calmly, carefully, and consciously. 
+
+Could you do with with a digital camera? Sure, but it's not required. The digital images that aren't quite right can be easily fixed later on your laptop. Film cannot. My experience has been that if something doesn't require me to work at something more like craft, often I do not.
+
+What the Nikon FE2 forced me to do was slow down. You can't just mash the shutter, you have to take everything in first. Look closely at where the light meter is reading on the subject vs the background, which raise the question, what is the subject? Should I recompose? What if I moved so that it was better framed? And so on. Then you have to turn the dials to match the light meter's reading of scene. Then check your composition again. At this slower pace there is more space to reflect on what you're doing, what you're after, and this sharpens your vision. It gives you room to think. You can wander through your memory even, remember other images you've seen or made, and use those reflections to steer your hand now. It's almost like the process becomes similar to reading a book, you generally don't rush through a book, the world of the book just unfolds at the pace of your reading. 
+
+Why would a 40-year-old camera enable all that? I'm not entirely sure, but I think it has something to do with the simplicity of the machine and the complexity of the task. There must be a balance here, but I think on the whole what humans really need are simple machines that enable complex tasks.
+
+The FE2 is very simple. It lets me make the complex decisions. I am in charge of focusing the lens. I am in charge of figuring out the correct exposure. The camera gives me a light reading of the scene in front of me, but it's an average, and doesn't take into account the characteristics of the film I'm shooting, the range of light and dark in the scene, where the subject is, or any other of a dozen things I am expected to take into account. The machine is very simple, the task is very complex.
+
+Digital cameras are the opposite. They are very complex machines that can do 80 percent of what I have to do myself with the FE2, all I really have to do is press the shutter button. The machine is very complex, the task is very simple. While the result may be equal, or even better, the satisfaction in the task is less.
+
+We often focus on the results without giving much thought to the process. I think taking the opposite view, that the process is what matters, is the beginning of entering into a craft. Not this is a *thing* I am making, but this is the *process* that makes this thing. In many (most?) cases this approach also leads to better outcomes.
+
+It's tempting to think that it is a luxury to have the time to fully engage the process like this. It's easy to say, well, sometimes I just want to get the shot of my kids blowing out the candles or perhaps dinner needs to be ready before the kids are off to juijitsu or baseball or what have you. I don't have time to make this a process, it just needs to get done. But if I'm honest with myself, these are cop-outs. If I'm short on time it's because I didn't allot enough time for what I needed to do. Okay, start sooner. You have to give yourself the time to slow down by carving it out. Calm, careful, *conscious*.
+
+And sure, not everything needs to be a craft. Not everything needs to be raised to that level. I had a friend who would get all zen about doing the dishes. Maybe you do that too. That's not me. I just want the damn dishes clean. But if there's something you do a lot, I find that my enjoyment of it goes way up when I slow down and really, carefully sweat over the details. The results are usually better too.
+
+I made an offhand comment in a post about [Pensacola's Navy museum](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2024/02/fly-navy) that I think is related. I was wondering aloud really, but I wrote: what if hard is good, struggle is good, and that’s why the past is so appealing?
+
+What if that's what makes something a craft rather than a task that must be done? What if it's supposed to be, if not hard, then at least laborious, done carefully rather than rushed? Isn't that the whole point -- to do things well? And doesn't that usually mean doing them slowly, carefully? I think that's what film is trying to tell me: it's the complexity of the task, the difficulty of the task that makes it enjoyable, and more broadly, that the more I slow down, the more I can do carefully and consciously, the better life will be.
+
+
+
+# Do It Yourself
+
+It’s probably cheaper and easier to buy most things, but when I can I’d rather make things myself. What else are you going to do with your life if you aren’t making stuff? Watch TV? Stop buying stuff and hiring people for everything. Give yourself a chance to solve the problem first. Contrary to what it says on the label, professionals and experts aren’t necessary. They’ll do it faster and better than you will, but you’ll learn and improve every time you do it yourself.
+
+
+# Safety Third
+
+
+It seems axiomatic that fear of death is a natural outcome of materialist beliefs. If life is all there is, that is the material world is all there is, then death is the end. And no one likes endings. For our institutions and their leaders, death is the worst possible thing because it is the end. It is, from their point of view, the ultimate failure of man.
+
+But why?
+
+As history's many brave atheists attest it does not require belief in the supernatural to make even the ultimate sacrifice of one's life, which would imply that even if death is the end there are many circumstances where it is still preferable to life, for example the preservation of others lives.
+
+Philosopher and writer [Charles Eisenstein](https://charleseisenstein.org/) astutely [points out](https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/pandemania-part-5), "safety mania and death phobia are signs of a **disconnection from purpose and passion**. If you have nothing more important than your own life, then preserving life is left as the only purpose." (emphasis mine)
+
+In other words death phobia is a result of not knowing how to live. 
+
+When you are disconnected from purpose and passion this begins to pile up because the death phobia drives the obsession with safety, which in turn makes us incredibly risk adverse, which in turn keeps us from exploring, potentially from finding our purpose and passion. On and on in a viscous cycle. 
+
+How do you get out? If you're reading this, chances are you aren't in that cycle, but I have an idea of how we get out at a cultural level: By playing without our helmets.
+
+If you're constantly worried about safety you can't play. If you can't play, you can't be free. Play is freedom and play does not wear a helmet. A helmet means supervision. We who play are unsuperviseable.
+
+To play amidst a world full of rules is perhaps the most subversive act.
+
+
+outside "ordinary" life as being "not serious," but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means.
+
+
+
+
+This I believe is how we remake the world: by playing.
+
+I know, that's not a Very Serious Solution that [Very Serious People]() can go out and implement, but that's the point isn't it? To remake the world any other way would end up right back here eventually.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+safetyism has largely displaced other moral sensibilities that might offer some resistance. At the level of sentiment, there appears to be a feedback loop wherein the safer we become, the more intolerable any remaining risk appears.
+
+
+
+
+Huizinga begins by making it clear that animals played before humans. One of the most significant (human and cultural) aspects of play is that it is fun.[8]
+
+Huizinga identifies 5 characteristics that play must have:[9]
+
+Play is free, is in fact freedom.
+Play is not "ordinary" or "real" life.
+Play is distinct from "ordinary" life both as to locality and duration.
+
+
+
+
+Every culture passes through a materialist phase and every culture has its own form of fear or death while in that phase. You and I did not invent this, but we find ourselves living during this cultural phase, and I think it helps tremedously to remain conscious of that fact when trying to decide how risky any one thing is *to you*. 
+
+
+This is why blanket rules are ridiculous and ignored. The sign that says danger, no lifeguard on duty means little if you know how to read the water to avoid rip currents and are a strong swimmer. If you aren't a strong swimmer and don't even know what a rip current is, then the message of the sign might be important, but in the world littered with such signs that one is just so much more noise. You ignore it.
+
+
+
+
+I think this goes to the heart of our existence... why are we here? Are we here, as the technomedia landscape would have it, to be passively entertained and coddled from birth to death? Or are we here for something more? I don't know about you, but I don't think we're just along for the ride. We’re here to stand at the helm, trim the sails and steer the ship.
+
+I think rejecting the world of passivity, of getting off our butts and taking matters into our own hands, of asking our neighbors and like-minded strangers how to fix things, how to build things, what's working and what isn't. All of this is on the path to rebuilding a life of value and meaning. 
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+While I am not a fan of dualisms, I have only ever managed to come up with two solutions to the fear of death: deny death (very popular) or accept death (formerly very popular).
+
+
+
+don't forget evolution doesn't have a goal, it's simply a process of fitting the current environment. 
+
+
+https://twitter.com/ItsGoneAwry/status/1623675932899700736?s=20&t=oo4ys3gRccV2b9mhU-2Dfw
+
+If you're constantly worried about safety you can't play and if you can't play you can't be free. Play is freedom and play does not wear a helmet. Play I could go on at some length about how play is actually the most threatening thing you can do these days, maybe I will eventually, but 
+
+
+
+safetyism has largely displaced other moral sensibilities that might offer some resistance. At the level of sentiment, there appears to be a feedback loop wherein the safer we become, the more intolerable any remaining risk appears.
+
+
+
+
+Huizinga begins by making it clear that animals played before humans. One of the most significant (human and cultural) aspects of play is that it is fun.[8]
+
+Huizinga identifies 5 characteristics that play must have:[9]
+
+Play is free, is in fact freedom.
+Play is not "ordinary" or "real" life.
+Play is distinct from "ordinary" life both as to locality and duration.
+Play creates order, is order. Play demands order absolute and supreme.
+Play is connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained from it.[10]
+
+
+
+
+Safety is largely illusory anyway.
+
+Oscar Wilde once said “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation”
+
+
+for what it really is and it has made me afraid.
+
+
+
+I should probably make it part of [my code](/code).
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I think the safety first obession is the reason we had a worldwide panic over Covid, it's the reason so many young adults are meek and unable to handle the world, it's the reason our leaders are failing us, and it's a big part of the reason so many people are dissatisfied with their lives. 
+
+It's also a big part of the reason we gave up our independence to ["experts."](https://luxagraf.net/essay/the-cavalry-isnt-coming). Much of the reason we are told we must rely on "experts" is for our safety. 
+
+
+From that initial reaction it's been further revealed that the rules we get handed when entering public spaces like parks are insufficient. 
+
+
+Clearly, since people like us have been ignoring them.
+
+social relations and that the human being is not the center of a web of loyalties and commitments but is rather a physical fact needing technical management. Nothing, it was revealed to us, is worth risking life for—nothing. If other occasions for risk remain, this is evidently only because administration has not yet found the means to quash them. It was revealed that no danger is greater than death. It was revealed that life is sheer matter and not something else, for example, the capacity for love.
+https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2022/06/atoms-and-the-void-review-of-interventions-2020/
+The obsession with safety is bound up in a fear of death.
+
+
+
+Whatever one’s opinion of the response to the disease, what is undeniable is that so many people of influence took for granted that safety must always trump social relations and that the human being is not the center of a web of loyalties and commitments but is rather a physical fact needing technical management. Nothing, it was revealed to us, is worth risking life for—nothing. If other occasions for risk remain, this is evidently only because administration has not yet found the means to quash them. It was revealed that no danger is greater than death. It was revealed that life is sheer matter and not something else, for example, the capacity for love.
+https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2022/06/atoms-and-the-void-review-of-interventions-2020/
+The obsession with safety is bound up in a fear of death.
+
+The true warrior is not the one who is willing to kill. That doesn’t make a warrior. The true warrior is the one who is willing, if need be, to die - Charles Eisenstien
+
+
+
+
+Because our civilizational answer to “Why are we here?” has unraveled, many of us individually have trouble answering that question too, for the individual story draws from the collective.
+
+OK, I realize I may have risen to too high an altitude for the practical purpose of preventing the next bout of pandemania. So I will end with this: We can reduce our general susceptibility to fear-mongering by reducing the levels of fear current in society. A society ridden with fear will acquiesce to any policy that promises them safety. How do we reduce ambient levels of fear? There is no single answer. Besides, each one of us already knows how.
+
+https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/pandemania-part-5
+
+
+I think this goes to the heart of our existence... why are we here? Are we here, as the technomedia landscape would have it, to be passively entertained and coddled from birth to death? Or are we here for something more? I don't know about you, but I don't think we're just along for the ride. We’re here to stand at the helm, trim the sails and steer the ship.
+
+I think rejecting the world of passivity, of getting off our butts and taking matters into our own hands, of asking our neighbors and like-minded strangers how to fix things, how to build things, what's working and what isn't. All of this is on the path to rebuilding a life of value and meaning. 
+
+
+Greek Proverb which says, “A society grows great when the old people plant trees, even when they know they will never get to enjoy their shade.”
+
+
+---
+
+# Everything is a Practice
+
+There is no finish line. There is no winning, no losing.
+
+**Everything is a Practice.**
+
+A practice is the disciplined repetition of what you know with enough experimentation in that repetition to unlock those things you don't yet know. It is ever-accumulating, and never-ending. It is sometimes painful, but that is the way.
+
+Individual projects may come to an end, but the practices that made them possible do not. You may finish writing a book, or reach the end of a run, or understand how to fix an engine, but there is no point where you've written enough, you've worked out enough, you've learned enough. The practices never end, which means you get to keep improving.
+
+The practice leaves a path behind you to show you how far you have come and carves out a path ahead of you to show you where you can go.
+
+The practices of your life *are* your life. They form the path you follow, they are how you become what you want to become, they make you who you are and who the world wants you to be. You are not solely in charge of your practices or the path they form. The world gets a vote too. In the end that's part of the practice too—adjusting to feedback from the world, your body, your life, your family, your friends. All of these things are part of the practice, all of them inform it.
+
+The practice also informs the experimentation that expands it.
+
+The trick is to follow your curiosity. That often forgotten part of you that society tries to get you to repress. That voice that says, what would happen if... This is the way. Follow it. Follow it knowing you will likely fail, knowing that you're probably doing it the wrong way, but you're going to try it anyway... you'd be surprised what works. I've fixed loose battery wires with a bit of nail, held hoses on with zip ties, and countless other things that should not have worked, but did, at least for a little while. There's plenty of failures along the way of course. Those people always telling you it can't be done—whatever it might be -- are sometimes right, but wouldn't it be better to find out for yourself? 
+
+Now there are reasonable limits to this... I wouldn't go trying to repair a $4,000 lens on your first attempt at lens repair. I wouldn't pick a rare, difficult to replace engine for your first rebuild. Learn to manage risk. When you know you're headed off the map to experiment, pick things to experiment on and situations to experiment in where you can keep the risk level low. Whether that means using something cheap, or doing it at low speed, or making sure the water is deep enough before you jump. Whatever the case, learn to manage risk so that your lessons learned aren't so painful—financially, emotionally, physically --- that you forget what you learned and remember only the trauma of the learning.
+
+In this process though you will become a better human being. You will get better at living. You will have less pain down the road. Your path will be smoother. You are building real world skills that you can use over and over. Every skill that you pick up transfers to other things too. Your practice will expand and keep growing.
+
+The experience you gain using a multimeter to untangle the rats nest of wires under the dash will come in handy when you need to figure out why the fridge suddenly stopped. That method of troubleshooting, following wires, testing voltages, making sure resisters are working, and so on, that method of inquiry you learned working under that dash transfers to other things. It's the same method of inquiry needed to figure out what's happening with anything electrical. There will be some differences between the fridge and the dash and the dishwasher and the vacuum, but the basic method is the same. From one small repair you gain an insight that makes countless future repairs that much easier. But only if you do it yourself.
+
+In this way everything you do is always building your skill set. You're always expanding your practice. This makes the path that much easier. You are that much more proficient at being human. The journey become easier, you are less reliant on others and you free up resources to focus on life's more interesting things. That way when the fridge dies at anchor in the San Blas, two days sail from the nearest repair shop, you don't worry. You fix the issues and get on with the dive you were planning to do that day. 
+
+Skills transfer in unexpected ways too. It isn't all just troubleshooting methods that transfer. The experience you gain struggling at terrible sketches of birds will come in handy when you start staring at the engine, trying to make sense of what's gone wrong—you've trained your mind to pay attention to the little details of feathers, which is not so different than paying attention to the little details of how a machine is running or how the wind and weather are changing. It is all connected.
+
+I should probably stop here and point out that I am a miserable hack with very few skills. I am not a repair expert or wunderkind of any sort. I can barely fix my way out of a paper bag. I am writing this not because I have mastered it on some long journey of experience, but because I have lived a couple of these examples and when thinking about it later, realized, oh, I made that connection because of this other things that I didn't see as related at the time, but then it turned out it was. 
+
+I am writing this because I have seen other people who can do this at a level I know I'll never get close to. I am writing this because you may be younger than me, you may have more time to learn. By the time you get to my age, you might be where I wish I was. Where I would be if I'd been paying more attention earlier on in life.
+
+I write not as an expert, but as a cautionary tale. Learn more than I did. Experiment more than I did. Expose yourself to more adversity than I did so that you learn to overcome it, not in theory, not by reading on the comfort of your couch, but in practice, at the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere, when it really counts.
+
+And now a little practice I wish I'd run across when I was much younger.
+
+---
+
+How do you find *your* practice? I don't know what you need to do or where you ought to go, but I can offer some places to start, some questions to think about. 
+
+The Webster's 1913 dictionary definition of practice includes as examples, "the practice of rising early; the practice of making regular entries of accounts; the practice of daily exercise." That's not a bad place to start: get up, get moving, and keep track of where your money is going. That can take you far. None of that is revolutionary. Ben Franklin is famous for saying roughly the same thing. You can find similar quotes going back to the very edges of written history, but it's still a solid place to start. Get up and get going. 
+
+What I think gets lost in our time—[the time of The Experts](https://luxagraf.net/essay/the-cavalry-isnt-coming) -- is that there's not a single path, not a set of practices that work for everyone. We've been conditioned to look for prescriptions that fit everyone and that's just not how life works. You and I are different. You have to experiment and find what works for you. It might be nearly the same as what works for me, but it also might be totally different. I know people who are very much on their path who are vegans and do their best work late at night. You have to find your own way.
+
+That said, I do have a suggestion on where to start: start with touching your nose.
+
+I know, that sounds stupid. If you're into making some kind of huge change in your life the last thing you want to hear is that you should start by touching your nose. What the hell is that going to do? The answer is: it's going to train your will.
+
+If you were out of shape, unable to do a single push up, but desiring to be able to knock out 100 push ups in two minutes you wouldn't start with 50, you'd start with one. But even then, there is a high risk of failure because the effort it takes to get from zero push ups to ten is more than it takes to get from ten to 100. There's a very good chance that you're going to give up before you get to ten—not because it's too hard, but because you aren't accustomed to forcing yourself to do things. You are not in control of your will.
+
+It's not your fault. Unless you happen to have enlisted in the armed forces, practice a martial art, or have monastic religious training, you have very likely never even been taught that you can train your will, let alone how to do it. That's okay. 
+
+The good news is that, unlike the hypothetical arms in the push up example, the will is not weak. Your will is as strong as it was when you were a baby starting to crawl and you willed your entire body to do something it had never done before. If your will feels weak it is because it's divided against itself. The power of the will comes from disciplined focus. When you can focus your will on a single thing, and only that thing, you can do remarkable things. 
+
+Getting to that point is the hard part. That is the practice of the will. This is where all practices start. This is the metapractice that enables all the other practices to come into being. The will, directed, is the thing that enable you to turn words into ideas, ideas into action, action into skills. The will is what opens up the path in front of you and enables you to move forward. 
+
+When you say "will" though most people think of some miserable thing where you grit your teeth and bear some suffering. That's not the will, that's you fighting your will. When your will is focused following it is effortless, in fact you can't not follow it, you are directing it after all.
+
+The problem is that most of your life you've been told to do things you didn't want to do. School is the primary culprit here for most of us, though there maybe other things in your life. Schooling in the United States is almost universally designed to damage the will and leave you unable to do much of anything save serve the will of others. This is why most of us leave school and get a job. We literally go out to serve another's will. Our will has been so damaged we think that the thing we fight against when we "grit our teeth" or "just do it" is our will. 
+
+That's not your will, that's your will divided. Our wills know a bad deal when they see one, even if we don't. And so they fight it—they fight school, they fight our pointless jobs, they fight our uninspired cities and all the rest. And we fight our will. And we become convinced that this struggle against ourselves is what it means to direct our will. We become convinced that we're weak. 
+
+That makes for a ton of emotional baggage wrapped up in our divided will. That why every New Year's when we vow to hit the gym and do those push ups, we fail. We spiral downward, further convinced we are weak.
+
+This is compounded by the fact that your will is the source of most of your emotions—when your will succeeds in the world, you are happy, when it fails you are miserable. If you have a lot of miserably emotions locked up in your will and you try to focus it... it doesn't work. By the end of February it's been two months since you went to the gym.
+
+That's why you start with touching your nose. This is a variation on what every religious training manual (and some of the better secular ones) I've read advices doing. Something silly. Something that doesn't matter. Something that you have no emotional attachment to. Something you will not fail to do because of years of damage to your will. Touching your nose is easy and has no emotional baggage for most people. 
+
+So do it. Right now. Wherever you are sitting, reading this. Use your left hand and touch your nose ten times, returning your hand to your side or lap each time. Do it now before you read any further.
+
+Congratulations, you unified your will and succeeded. This is the beginning. This is how you train yourself to use your will deliberately. 
+
+Now you need to do that every day. Write "touch your nose!" on a piece of note paper and put it somewhere you will see it every day, ideally multiple times a day, ideally somewhere other people won't bother you about it. Then every time you see it, touch your nose ten times with your left hand.
+
+Congratulations. You have a new practice in your life. No, not touching your hose. The habit of doing something because you chose to do it. Not because some authority told you to or some unnoticed compulsion drove you to—you chose to do this. You do it. You direct your will. 
+
+That is the beginning of the practice.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+*Note: Some might object that I have told you to do this and therefore it is yet another example of you yielding your will to another. This isn't true. It doesn't have to be your idea to do something, you just have to choose to do it. That's your will, you are choosing what to do.*
+We are all in the process of maturation. Both as individuals and as a species. None of knows where this all goes, but I think we all know that the current stories don’t wash and it’s time for something new. I don’t know what that looks like for you, but for myself, for us out here, it looks like this. It looks like walks through primordial forests, long afternoons on windswept beaches, evenings around the fire.
+
+I believe that you’ll know when you are on the right path. You’ll feel it. Life will begin to feel like what it is, a gift, an adventure, a joy. You’ll feel connection, fulfillment, that deep sense of satisfaction at the end of the day that comes from knowing there is nothing else you would rather have done that day. That is the path. And if you manage to find it, don’t stray. Do the work. It isn’t always easy. It isn’t always beaches and campfires. Sometimes it’s engine repair and frustration and despair. But these moments are fleeting, they are the necessary growth, the twists and turns that reveal. Stay disciplined, stay focused, stay on the path. Let go of control and just walk the path. It will reveal itself slowly, only as much as you need to see, just keep on it, and see where it leads you. That’s adventure. That’s living.
+
+
+
+
+
+What do you care about?
+
+Who do you want to be?
+
+What matters most to you?
+
+
+
+What are the most important things in your life?
+
+
+
+Who are the most important people in your life and what do they need from you?
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Your higher self is the part of you that continues from one incarnation to the next, that was around long before you were born and will still be aroung long after your current body dies. While you’re alive, unless you’re engaged in very intensive spiritual practices, your higher self is basically asleep and dreaming, and your life is its dream. The great secret of the higher self is that it’s you — the real you — and the personality you think you are right now is like the personalities you sometimes have in your dreams at night. When your current body dies, you’ll wake up out of the dream and say, “Wow, that was interesting,” and then go on to other things.
+
+David BTL, nope. The mess that is your psyche is exactly what it should be: the raw materials you have to work with, the pieces of the kit you need to assemble. It just looks screwed up because you’re beginning to glimpse what it can become once you fit all the pieces together where they belong.
+
+[^1]: The world in this case consisting of both material and other realities.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The One True Dictionary defines practice as:
+
+    > Frequently repeated or customary action; habitual
+      performance; a succession of acts of a similar kind;
+      usage; habit; custom; as, 
+
+
+The three examples happen to all be practices I pursue
+
+Not in human terms anyway. Individual projects may come to an end, but the practices that made them possible do not. Most things worth doing do not have a stopping point. There is no point where you've written enough, you've worked out enough. Everything is a practice. Embrace it. The practice is never done, which means you get to keep improving.
+
+[^1]: This would be a good example of 
+
+# No Cavalry—what to do?
+
+
+
+
+Once you accept that there is no cavalry coming, or perhaps more conservatively, that you don't need a cavalry to come, or, at the very least make the decision that you want to life your life in such a way that you don't *want* to need a cavalry, the question arises: what then do I do? How do I get from where I am, to that state of mental, physical, and spiritual security? 
+
+Another way to put this would be: How do I begin to take responsibility for and become accountable for myself, my family, my world?
+
+I have no idea. Which is to say that I know what I am doing for those things, but I don't know what you should do—that's for you to figure out. If I told you what to do you'd just be dependant on me, no better off than being dependant on the cavalry. 
+
+No one can tell you how to get on the path to self-dependency because no one other than you knows what your path to self-dependency looks like. You have to find it. And you'll know when you have. Find it is the fun part. Don't worry if it takes a while. It took me the better part of two decades. But I know people who figured it out much quicker.
+
+So I am not going to prescribe some recipe for how you can take responsibility for your world, but I am going to tell you something that might help you figure out your own path: you first have to reclaim your time. One of the things that keeps us dependant on the cavalry is our perceived lack of time to do anything about it. How are you going to learn how to rebuild your leaf blower motor when you work 9-5 and spend an hour on each side of that commuting? From 8-6 you have no time for leaf blowers. Throw in breakfast and dinner and suddenly from 7-7 you have no time for anything else.
+
+
+
+How do you find time to build relationships with your neighbors when you spend 12 hours (or more) of your waking day working?  
+
+
+In the first essay on this subject I suggested that you stop using money to meet all your needs. That is, begin to build relationships with people such that you can begin to meet some of your needs by offering something of yourself to others. I don't know what that might look like for you, but here's a quick example: when we lived out in woods in South Carolina much of the land surrounding our house was leased to a hunt club. In exchange for keeping an eye on the area, we were free to hunt. Actually we were offered other people's deer, though we had to decline for lack of freezer space. 
+
+If you live in Manhattan this scenario isn't going to come up. But if you start trying to meet people, to listen to them, you will build relationships that lead to things like this. Perhaps not free food, perhaps it will end up being chess lessons or tk, but it will be something and your life will be richer, and slightly, ever so slightly less dependant on the system of The Machine.
+
+This will also give you agency. You are the one with the connection to others, nothing is mediating that. This is agency. Agency reduces stress. It helps you to see bad things, bad situations for what they are: bad situations. When you have agency and the self-confidence that it, along with experience, give you, you begins to see that with sufficient resources—time, effort, knowledge, money, etc -- any problem can be solved.
+
+
+
+# The Cavalry Isn't Coming
+
+The Cavalry isn't coming. This is the lesson 21st century America is trying to teach us. We are going to have to re-learn how to depend on ourselves and on each other. There is no one else. That's okay. We don't need anyone else.
+
+Self-reliance backed up by tight community bonds used to be the norm. You depended on yourself, your family, your community, because who else was there? So far as I can tell from reading history this was most people's outlook until roughly the middle of the 20th century. That's when a number of things happened that changed how people saw themselves and their communities.
+
+Around then things began to centralize and as they did the solutions people had always relied on weren't suddenly found wanting. Self-appointed experts stepped in to tell us how things should be done. How we should eat. How we should live. How we should love. Sometimes the experts had good ideas. But often they did not. And even when their ideas were good, there was an unintended consequence to listening to the experts: communal bonds were weakened, people were deprived of skills, people questioned their instincts. Soon people believed they needed experts for everything.
+
+The world according to experts is a world that depends on those experts, the cavalry. The people we mean when we say "they'll think of something."
+
+Except that as we've all witnessed in the last twenty years, they won't think of something. They're out of ideas. Worse, the old ideas don't work anymore. The world of the expert is collapsing all around us. The cavalry isn't coming because the cavalry doesn't know how to ride anymore.
+
+For four years we've been driving around the United States, passing through all its unique regions (except New England and the Pacific Northwest) and I've noticed not only the experts are failing us, but that there are some places where that has had little to no effect on life.
+
+It took me a long time to figure this out because this shift, from the local community as the hub of life, to there being no hub, happened long before I was born. That is to say, the disconnected lives we all lead, depending on experts to tell us everything from what to eat to how to fix our cars, was normal to me. It was the water I lived in and I never noticed it. What I did notice pretty early on was that some places were decidedly different. Northern Wisconsin. Okracoke. Parts of the Florida Panhandle.
+
+We were drawn to these places and continue to return to them in part I think because they resisted the shift to expert authority that happened everywhere else. Self-reliance, independent businesses, and close knit communities still thrive in these places. These places somehow escaped the chain-storification of the world. It was refreshing. It was different. These places felt like what I wanted the future to be.
+
+I have read enough books of the American road to know that everywhere used to be like this, but I never gave much thought to how or why that changed. I assumed that chain stores took over. And they did. But I think there's considerably more underlying that simple observation, and I think understanding how it happened, how we got into this mess, is going to help us get out of it.
+
+I think it happened because not enough people resisted it. We were swept along and did not stand up to it. It's hard to avoid shopping at Walmart. So we did. And so on, until the old ways were swept aside. We prized newer bigger better because we lost sight of what life is really about. 
+
+Singular cause and effect cannot explain how an entire culture shifts, that's a subtle and multifaceted process, but it begins and ends with the choices of individuals. Millions of individuals, all of whom have different beliefs, different desires, different wills. It's important to keep this in mind because the kind of thinking that says "here's the problem, here's how to fix it" is the kind of thinking that made the problem.
+
+And now here we are, waiting for the other shoe to drop. We're a bit like Wile E. Coyote when he's run off the edge of the cliff but doesn't realize it yet. Ignorance of his true situation keeps him from plunging down right away, but there's always that moment when it starts to sink in. The cartoonists let his ears droop just before he confronts his situation and falls. That's about where I see modern America just now. Our ears are drooping and we know what's coming, but no one knows how high we are or how hard we'll fall. 
+
+That is a pretty dismal place to be. But I believe we can still exercise some control over that descent. We have to fall, but there are branches we can grab onto, things that can slow us down. Not as a culture, but as individuals. We can descent gradually and with some degree of grace perhaps. 
+
+Everywhere will be different, and the solutions will be different for everyone. That's what five years living on the road has taught me. There is no collective anything. There is just you and me and the rain. When I say we have to figure this out without the cavalry, don't mistake me for some alternate cavalry. I don't know what you need to do. I know some of what I need to do, but you are different. You have your own path. We need to work together, help each other, but work together and help each other down our own paths. The balance between individualism and community that has been lost, we have to restore it one person at a time. The good news is that I think we still have a chance to land at the bottom of that descent without too much damage. To understand what I mean, let me tell you a little story about an engine.
+
+---
+
+At the end of 2017, after we'd been traveling in the bus for about nine months we were [climbing up Tehachapi Pass](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/12/terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-week) to get out of California's central valley. About halfway up the incline there was a loud bang from the engine and the smell of burning oil. The leaking head gasket we didn't know about had leaked enough that one piston shattered and we were dead in the water. I didn't know that at the time. All I knew was that something was very, very wrong. 
+
+I called a tow truck and we were towed over the pass down to Mojave, CA, where we spent three weeks and over $6,000 replacing that piston and head gasket. We had no choice. While I knew how to fix some things, I was a long way from knowing how to take apart an entire engine. But, when I was signing that credit card receipt for six grand, I decided, never again. Whatever happens from here on out, I am going to fix it or we're going to sell it and find some other way to travel. 
+
+The bus has never been to a mechanic since. This is not meant as a slight of those mechanics who have worked on it over the years. Some did good work. Some did not. But none of them love this engine the way I do. Why should they? It's not their engine. If you love something you learn how to take care of it yourself. 
+
+So I set about trying to educate myself on how to repair a Chrysler 318 LA engine. This was not easy. The aspirated 318 with LA heads hasn't been in a production vehicle since the late 1970s. Even mechanics in their mid 50s might never have actually worked on one. Slowly though I began to stumble across people working on them. The [Mopar A-body forums](https://www.forabodiesonly.com/mopar/) have been helpful, and several YouTube channels have taught me a ton, especially [Uncle Tony's Garage](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9SzQNYLqsPQGY_nbHogDDw). 
+
+But while strangers could provide some framework and theory, which it comes to figuring out what's wrong I've mainly turned to my uncle Ron who has an uncanny knack for being able to diagnose problems over the phone with very little to go on. Without him I would not know half of what I know today (which is still disappointingly little, but enough to get by). 
+
+Somewhere along the way I started to wonder what was driving me. It was partly curiosity, partly necessity, but also partly something more. Matthew Crawford's *Shop Class as Soul Craft* articulates this something more far more eloquently than I've been able to. Crawford sees the need to be capable of repair as more than just a desire to fix things. He sees it as a desire to escape the feeling of dependence on stuff. The more I began to work on the bus the more I understood what Crawford meant. There is empowerment in knowing how things work. Your stuff will never again fail you because if it does break, you can repair it. Empowerment in this case means removing the expert between you and your stuff. Your stuff is more yours, you are more in control of your stuff.
+
+Crawford calls the person who wants to fix their own stuff, the Spirited Man. In his book this figure becomes the antidote to passive consumption. Passive consumption displaces agency, argues Crawford. One is no longer master of one's stuff because one does not truly understand how stuff works. "Spiritedness, then," writes Crawford, "may be allied with a spirit of inquiry, through a desire to be master of one’s own stuff. It is the prideful basis of self-reliance."
+
+Crawford writes that the spirited man "hates the feeling of dependence, especially when it is a direct result of his not understanding something. So he goes home and starts taking the valve covers off his engine to investigate for himself. Maybe he has no idea what he is doing, but he trusts that whatever the problem is, he ought to be able to figure it out by his own efforts. Then again, maybe not—he may never get his valve train back together again. But he intends to go down swinging." 
+
+In the time since I read that I have literally done exactly that. I have decided I'd rather go down swinging, taking apart my valve train, rather than seeking the help of a professional. It’s not just me. YouTube and other sharing sites are littered with people teaching each other how to fix stuff. Then there are the thousands people without social media who are quietly working in their yards, in their garages, at the side of the road. Shade tree mechanics. Tinkerers. Spirited men and women who want first and foremost to understand, to expand their understanding of the world around them, to know how to use the tools we toolmakers have created for ourselves.
+
+I think this goes to the heart of our existence... why are we here? Are we here, as the technomedia landscape would have it, to be passively entertained and coddled from birth to death? Or are we here for something more? I don't know about you, but I don't think we're just along for the ride. We’re here to stand at the helm, trim the sails and steer the ship.
+
+I think rejecting the world of passivity, of getting off our butts and taking matters into our own hands, of asking our neighbors and like-minded strangers how to fix things, how to build things, what's working and what isn't. All of this is on the path to rebuilding a life of value and meaning. 
+
+---
+
+We eliminate our dependence on the cavalry by becoming the cavalry for ourselves, for our families, and for our neighbors. *Être fort pour être utile* *. Be strong to be useful.  
+
+Eliminate the central conceit of modernism—that there is a group of people you need to save you from... the world, yourself, your shortcomings, your neighbors, your neighbors' shortcomings and on down the line—by taking responsibility for yourself and the expanding that responsibility outward to your family, to your community. 
+
+The message of modernism is that you're helpless and you need saving. If you want to dig deep into the psychology of this I'd say it's about what you'd expect to get when a culture takes the gods out of its religion and replaces those gods with administrative systems. We're not the first. The Romans went down this path, so did the Chinese. Read Oswald Spengler or Arthur Toynbee if the history interests you. All you really need to know though is that there's a long history showing it doesn't work. Look around you, is stuff working? No, no, it is not.
+
+Everything requires high specialized skills and knowledge. This is a choice. Things don't have to be built this way. Culture doesn't have to be arranged this way. It didn't use to be this way. Even 100 years ago there were very few "experts" telling you how to live. Now even lightbulbs have to include instructions on how to change them. 
+
+Once you needed to be able to do a bit of everything yourself—help your neighbors build their homes, raise and butcher animals, preserve your food, fight fires, fix stuff, pull a tooth, deliver a child. All the things Robert A. Heinlein famously suggested a human being out to be able to do: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
+
+Prior to the coming of the machine age, we were able to do this stuff. It was no factor.
+
+But I know, I know, industrialization relies on specialization. Specialization means highly trained workers. Professionals are better than self-taught amateurs. Their skills can develop everything to increasing levels of complexity. And look, there are aspects of this that are good. It would take me years to learn how to machine a camshaft. I'm happy to let an expert do that because their expertise has allowed them to develop better tools and using those tools requires skills that only those experts have. Not everyone had a mill at their house. Not everyone could forge a great blade. There has always been specialization. It's the degree of specialization that's the problem. Our problems are the problems of overspecialization.
+
+The problem with the specialization model isn't so much the specialization as the exclusion. As Christopher McDougall so eloquently puts it in *Natural Born Heros*, over time, "a subtle cancer spread: where you have more experts, you create more bystanders. Professionals did all the fighting and fixing we used to handle ourselves; they even took over our fun, playing our sports while we sat back and watched."
+
+When was the last time you played baseball? When was the last time you watched it? I know I listened to a game last week. The last time I played was in the previous century. That's sad really. I like playing. Life is playing. Not watching. What are we here for? To play or to watch? I think that will become central question of our age, at least for those that haven't found their gods. 
+
+I believe the disconnection that comes from watching life instead of participating in it is responsible for just about all our problems. Our mental health problems, our physical health problems, our cultural problems. All these things stem from being disconnected from life, from each other, from ourselves.
+
+How did we get here? We got here because we allowed other people to tell us what was good for us. And they were wrong. From diet and health to design and visions of the future, they were wrong.
+
+It's time we stopped listening to them and went back to fixing stuff ourselves, taking care of each other, taking care of ourselves.
+
+---
+
+The question becomes, how do we get back to where our grandfather's were?
+
+There isn't one answer to this. I am not here on high telling you how to find your path because that top-down model is what caused the problem. I'm not even going to tell you what I am doing because even in that I think there's a tendency to see it as a recipe.
+
+I would suggest that the first and most important thing is the realize that no one else is going to figure it out for you. The top-down, expert provides a solution system *is* the problem. 
+
+I would suggest that reclaiming control of your life, your community, your world is actually easier than you think. You are already more skilled than you think. And you are surrounded by skilled people. Find something that interests you and get better at it. Connect with other people who share your interests. 
+
+Early drafts of this had a few suggestions on specific things you could do, but again, I don't want to give you a recipe. That said, there is one thing that I think isn't intuitive, but will really open doors for you: **stop using money to meet all your needs**. 
+
+Find one problem, one thing, that you pay for now that you can either make/do yourself, or, even better can be borrowed or done with help from friends and family. The goal is to find something that puts you in a debt of gratitude to someone else. This is the basis of community—gratitude. When you are grateful to the world, you become more helpful to the world. Gratitude is a powerful motivator. It subverts one of the most powerful outside, centralized structures that we're eventually going to have to do without: currency.
+
+Your great grandparents fixed things for people, made things for people, and were grateful to receive the same from others. This formed much of the basis of community that held life together before the coming of centralization. It isn't the only thing, but it's a place to start and that's what we need to do. Start. Remember, we don't want to change the world, that's the top down thinking that got us in the mess. The goal here is to change the only part of the world you can: you.
+
+
+etc etc. suggestions
+
+Trust yourself.
+
+Get outside
+
+Talk to your neighbors
+
+Start walking
+
+Find religion
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The solutions being proposed by the people who champion this idea are the same as they've always been: more technology, more bureaucracy, more centralized control (and not coincidentally more jobs for more experts).
+
+We know where these ideas get us and we're done.
+
+It's popular these days to say that politics is downstream from culture, which is to say we get the politics of our culture. But as John Michael Greer often says, "it needs to be remembered in turn that culture is downstream from imagination." We have the power here because we are limited only by our imaginations and our bodies' ability to make our imaginings true.
+
+
+https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2019/11/land
+
+
+---
+
+Virtues require cultivation, but our culture has left us with somewhat untended gardens. We have undisciplined minds, undisciplined debates, and undisciplined media consumption habits. 
+
+
+---
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+I'll be honest, I don't have a lot to add that you can't find in the writings of Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, Lewis Mumford, Neil Postman, Wendell Berry and others who've been trying to warn us for over a century now (I also think Tolkein's Lord of the Rings is an overloked, very subtle critique of technological society that's well worth reading from that angle). If I do nothing else than inspire you to read them, I will call that success. However, I think that I'm in a somewhat unique position to observe things in a variety of places and make connections that others might not be able to see, and so here we are.
+
+
+
+
+
+People in the United States ignore such proposals because we tried that experiment and found out just how badly it worked. In 1961, the new presidential administration of John F. Kennedy set out to improve US foreign policy by staffing the State Department with “the best and the brightest,” which meant in the context of the time a bevy of intellectuals fresh out of Ivy League universities, full of the latest fashionable ideas in international relations. Those experts promptly led America straight into the quagmire of the Vietnam War, while loading the military with a flurry of contradictory demands that made victory impossible and withdrawal unacceptable.
+
+One of the precepts of the last couple of centuries is that there is one answer to every problem and it is the right answer and it is the answer you are going to choose like it or not. This is more or less the central premise of what is generally called liberalism or later, when people tried to distance themselves from the failures of liberalism, neo-liberalism.
+
+
+I want to connect the story of taking apart the bus to the individualism and closed community of the west to the idea that we have to depend on ourselves and each other, not outside help coming from on high. The old order is collapsing and those of us farthest from its center are going to lose it first. The new world starts out here on the edges, the fringes the forgotten corners of the country where the old order has never held much sway.
+
+I recently told a story about my decision to replace the bus engine's head gasket. It was a small thing really, when you consider the realm of human possibilities, but for me it was a big thing. Still, I didn't really want to do it. 
+
+In that piece I made a somewhat flippant comment about no one ever stopping to help us when we're at the side of the road out west. That's been true, but it doesn't mean no one has helped us. It helps to remember that the west was built on deceit. The original inhabitants were decieved with treats that have not been honored, the people who came after them were decieved by the government and the railroads who needed them to farm in a country both knew well would never support farming. They recruited people from all over the world, people to whome the notion of living alone in a vast landscape was appealing and then, when those people turned out to want to do their own thing, not what the government wanted them to do (shocking that these independant spirits who surviced out here didn't want to do anyone's bidding) they were deceived again. And again. Perhaps the most eloquent recounting of these desceptions is the book Bad Land. I think it is important to remember these things when you are out here.
+
+That is I think, why no stops to help us. First and foremost, we are outsiders and in the current west there is more distrust of outsiders than anywhere else we've been. Justifiably I'd say. 
+
+
+# Rules for Screens, Part One
+
+I have a strange page about [technology](/technology) buried on this site. Still, people find it. Something must link to it? I'm not sure how or why, but it seems to get a lot of traffic. Or at least it generates a fair bit of email. About a dozen people a year take the time to email me about the first line of that article:
+
+**The less technology your life requires the better your life will be.**
+
+I get a mix of responses to this ranging from the occasional "who are you to judge me, how dare you tell me not to play video games" (which I don't usually respond to), to the more frequent, and thoughtful, "hey, I feel the same way but I can't seem to get technology out of my life". 
+
+In crafting a response to the most recent person who wrote some variation of that comment, I accidentally wrote a massively long post I am breaking into a three-part series, retracing how I came to use screens so little, despite editing photos, writing for this site, and working for an online publication, all of which do in fact require a screen. I use screens when it makes sense to do so, but the rest of the time I avoid them.
+
+We're going to start with the basic stuff. I did most of the steps in this part back in 2016 when we were getting ready to move into the bus. This is actually all the hardest things to do, because these will free up enough time that you'll find yourself staring into the void for the first time since you were a kid. Don't worry, it's good for you. Anyway, on with it.
+
+**Luxagraf's rules for screens, part one.**
+
+---
+
+## **Rule One: Throw Your Television in the Nearest Dumpster**
+
+Yup, we're going to start with the hardest one. You'll notice that I am more sympathetic to not going cold turkey with other things below. Not this one. This is the absolute requirement. Kill your television. Now. Tough love people.
+
+But... but. Look. Here's the thing. You have this gift of life for, on average, around 73 years. 73 YEARS. You won't even last as long as the average hardwood tree. And you're going to spend that precious time watching television? No. No you're not. Not anymore. You're going to live. Find a dumpster. Put your TV in it. 
+
+Okay, you don't want to put your $1,200 TV in the dumpster. Then find an old sheet or blanket and cover it up. Put some low-tack painters tape on there, make it hard to take off. That'll work for now. But get ready to eBay that thing. Or find a dumpster.
+
+Now cancel Netflix, Hulu, or whatever other subscriptions you had. If you subscribe to two streaming services, that's just under $30 a month. That's $360 a year. That's $1,800 every five years. That's crazy. But now you have about $30 a month you can either save or spend on something you want. Something tangible. I mean, reward yourself if you really do this. At least buy some ice cream. 
+
+---
+
+## **Rule Two: Make Something**
+
+If you watched television for 3 hours in the evenings, congrats you were already watching less than most people—and you stop doing that you have just reclaimed 15 hours a week. FIFTEEN HOURS! That's enough to get a part time job somewhere. It's enough time to do, lord, there's no limit to what you could do really. Start a business, write a book, read the entire canon of Russian literature. The paradox of choice can get you here and you'll end up watching YouTube for hours on your laptop. I know, I've done it. 
+
+You have to start creating something. I strongly suggest you create something real and tangible. Something you can hold in your hands. Cook yourself a fancy dessert if you like. Yeah you can even look up a recipe on a screen, don't worry about it. The internet is incredibly helpful for learning things. That's another idea. Find something you really love and learn more about it. Read everything you can about agates if that's your bag (it's my wife's bag). But do it by checking books out from the library, not by reading on your phone.
+
+Do what you want, but do something. Deliberately carve out some time to make something. And I know everyone says, I'm not a creative person, I don't know what to make. Start small. Write a card to your closest relative. Write a postcard if a card is too much. Make dessert for your family, your significant other, yourself, whatever. Just make something. Except maybe don't make a fancy dessert every night. That won't end well. If all else fails, just go for a walk. 
+
+---
+
+## **Rule Three: Delete Social Media Apps**
+
+Yeah, now we're getting real. I know it's going to be hard. But you know what, take easy, start small. You probably have Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, a bunch of stuff in other words, on your phone. Just pick one and delete it for one week. You can always reinstall it so it's not like there's too much to lose here.
+
+But we're not done.
+
+Get a piece of paper and a pen. Fold the paper up so it's small enough to fit in your pocket. Put it in your pocket, or otherwise keep it on you. Now, every time you feel like checking whichever social network you deleted, instead of checking it, pull out your paper and pen and write down why you wanted to check it. It doesn't need to be an essay, just write like "wanted to see what Mark was up to" or whatever the source of the urge was. 
+
+Do that for one week. At the end of the week look back over what you wrote down and decide for yourself if those things you were planning to do are worth your time. If they are then re-install that app and be on your merry way. If they aren't, or more likely, if you aren't sure, do the experiment for another week.
+
+If you decide that this wasn't the best use of your limited time on earth, repeat this process with the next social app on your phone. When you've deleted all the unnecessary apps from your phone you're done with this step. 
+
+Oh, and the ones you keep, don't feel bad about those. If you're feeling a sense of guilt about them still it might be worth repeating this experience, but if you really do enjoy them then don't feel guilty about them.
+
+## **Rule Four: Track What You Do When You Use a Screen**
+
+Far to much of our lives are lived in a kind of automated mode. Think back over everything you did in the last five minutes before you started reading this. If you're like me, you probably struggle to remember what it was you were doing or how you ended up precisely here at this moment. Some of this autopilot living is a good thing, especially, I've found, morning routines, but I do it far too much.
+
+So I started keeping closer track of what I was doing and why. I'm not suggesting you do that. That's actually advanced level stuff, what I am suggesting is very simple: every time you use a screen, remember to do it consciously. Don't judge yourself for it, just note that hey, I am using a screen. That's all. Now if you're somewhat obsessive like I am you might want to write down whatever notes you can, about why you're using a screen. 
+
+Unlike the steps above, this is not really a rule. It's a process. It's an ongoing process that will probably never end, at least in my case. I like to be conscious of when I use a screen, so although I started this years ago, I still do it today.
+
+That brings me to the final point I will leave you with: everything is a process. To paraphrase Alan Watts, you are not a thing, you are a happening. Which is to say, all of life is a never ending process, there may be goals, there maybe markers along the way, but it's not like you get to place where you never have to do anything again. The goal, at least at this very basic level of using less screens, is to build systems and processes that will help you do things other than stare at a screen. 
+
+Now go kill your television.
+
+
+
+# Rules for Screens, Part Two
+
+Last time we hurled our televisions out the window into a dumpster. If you actually did that, like I did once in college, you know that the sound of that crunch and exploding screen was awesome. Well maybe not, CRT screens aren't around anymore. Anyway, if you didn't actually hurl it out a window, well, hopefully you at least sold or gave away your TV. Remember, you can have a television or you can have a life.
+
+Televisions are not the screen everyone wrings their hands over these days though. That's a little odd to me because according to statistics on screen time, that's where most us spend our time. But the evil de jour is phones. You phone is doing all kinds of things to you and will probably eventually be a direct contributor to the collapse of western culture if you believe everything you read. Which is sign you're using your phone too much.
+
+I don't love phones, and I do think we should all use them less. If you've feel addicted to your phone, well, um, you're right. You are. Everything about the design of the apps on your phone is engineered to create dopamine pathways that make sure you experience physical withdrawal when you go without them. That's addiction pure and simple.
+
+But. Did you know that culturally we've been wringing our hands over the distractions in our lives for centuries? Meister Eckhart, writing around 1307, calls "distraction" the second most powerful thing preventing communion with God. In 1550s Swiss scientist Conrad Gessner worries that the printing press will worsen the problem of distraction with a "confusing and harmful" amount of data "unleashed on the unsuspecting." To pick a more recent, and revealing, example consider writer Italo Calvino's 1983 account of [his daily newspaper habit](https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2027/the-art-of-fiction-no-130-italo-calvino):
+
+> Each morning I already know I will be able to waste the whole day. There is always something to do: go to the bank, the post office, pay some bills... always some bureaucratic tangle I have to deal with. While I am out I also do errands such as the daily shopping: buying bread, meat, or fruit. First thing, I buy newspapers. Once one has bought them, one starts reading as soon as one is back home—or at least looking at the headlines to persuade oneself that there is nothing worth reading. Every day I tell myself that reading newspapers is a waste of time, but then... I cannot do without them. They are like a drug.
+
+Note the use of the phrase, "like a drug," which we're still using today to describe our latest and most powerful distraction, phones. 
+
+I point this out not to downplay the addictive, attention-steal nature of screens, but to remind you that being distracted is not new. Think of it slightly differently, the desire for distraction is not new. All that's happened over the last century is we've created ever more engrossing mediums to distract ourselves with. This strongly suggests that if we just reduce our exposure to the current symptom without addressing the underlying desire for distraction we're just switching one thing for another, like alcoholics chugging coffee and chain smoking at AA meetings[^1].
+
+And I bring up AA in part because I think that phones are a problem partly for the same reason alcohol is a problem: they're culturally acceptable. No one pulls our a syringe in the middle of four star restaurant and shoots up heroin, but no one bats an eye when someone orders a bottle of wine in the same situation. Both are addictive, destructive drugs (arguably alcohol is much worse on your body), but one is culturally acceptable and one is not. This makes a world of difference when it comes time to stop. You don't have to work hard to avoid heroin, but you'll run into alcohol, and screens, at every turn.
+
+Our phones aren't just addictive, they're also completely culturally acceptable in the west. No one cares if you pull one out in the middle of dinner. Well, I will. You might. But the cultural message seems to be that it's okay. In some places and some situations the cultural message might even be that you're an oddball if you're *not* staring at a screen.
+
+Let's assume though, that, like people who email me, you want to use your phone less. Here are some tricks to help with that, most of which I used to cut back on my own screen use. 
+
+**Luxagraf's Rules for Screens, part deux.**
+
+## Rule Five: Know Yourself
+
+If you want to use your phone less, you need to know how much you use it. There are some tools to figure this out built-in to both iOS and Android, but I never bothered to figure those out because I had already downloaded and used Your Hour ([Android App Store](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mindefy.phoneaddiction.mobilepe)). Space appears to offer similar features and [works on iOS too](https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/space-break-phone-addiction/id916126783). The app isn't really important, just get something that records how much time you spend and how often you unlock your phone.
+
+That will give you a baseline and let you know how much you use your phone. Personally I disabled tracking for maps and music/podcasts because although I'm using my phone, I'm not really staring at the screen. There's an element of gamification to these apps that's easy to get sucked into. I had Your Hour on my phone for about a week before I got pretty obsessed with how little I could use my phone in a day. 
+
+## Rule Six: Adapt to Yourself
+
+If, like me, you discover that you use your phone to check the time throughout the day, consider getting a watch. Or, if you hate wearing a watch, and live in a small bus with your family like I do, just encourage everyone else to wear a watch and ask them what time it is.
+
+The point is, most likely Rule Five will reveal some habits that you can break, but are too idiosyncratic to you for me to solve for you. My general advice is, if you have some behavior that involves the phone that could involve some analog thing, like a watch for instance, replace those screen checks with a watch. Not a smart watch or fitness tracker, just a watch.
+
+A few things I have heard of people doing include, putting your phone in a bag to make it more of a pain to pull out and use, using it as a coaster so you can't pick it up, and using a pen and paper to make notes rather than using your phone. 
+
+## Rule Seven: Turn Off All Notifications
+
+I think the reason we are bothered by how much we use our phones has to do with agency. We like to think we are the rulers of our days and are conscious of all our decisions and actions and phones are stark reminder that we are not that guy/gal. The best way to grant yourself back some agency is to get rid of all notifications. 
+
+Notifications are really just little serotonin agitators. Check your email when you feel like it, not when a notification badge agitates your serotonin level past the point of resistance. Turn them off, all of them.
+
+## Rule Eight: Practice Doing Nothing
+
+This does not mean meditating. It means doing nothing. Or at least do nothing productive. When you were a child you were probably happy to lie in the grass all afternoon doing nothing. At most you might pick out shapes in the clouds, but you were fine doing nothing. Or at least if you're over 35 and actually had a childhood then you might remember doing nothing. If not. Well, learn. Practice.
+
+Of all the rules in this list, this is the hardest for me. I have this need to always be making something. I am ill at ease doing nothing. I read a good bit, I also practice discursive meditation, but neither of those qualify. The only time I really do nothing, is lying in a hammock, so I make sure to get some time in the hammock at least a couple times a week.
+
+It might take some time to figure out the way you do nothing the best. If you do get stuck on this one, I highly recommend a hammock.
+
+## Rule Nine: Record Your Practice
+
+Write down when you do nothing. Write down when you don't do nothing. Write down how you miss notifications if you do. Write how you overcome your strange screen habits and most of all, write down when you still use screens. Don't judge yourself for it, step back, detach and just record what happened, what you did, and for how long. Try to be a disinterested observer of yourself, this will be much more helpful than berating or congratulating. 
+
+## Rule Ten: Get After It
+
+
+
+
+[^1]: This is not meant to disparage AA or anyone struggling with alcoholism. Most AA members I know are fully aware of the irony of swapping one addiction for another, but when alcohol has taken over your life to that point, it's not a bad trade to make.
+
+## Rules for Screens, Part Three
+
+Did you know there's a Reddit for people who want quit staring at screens so much? Also a true story. 
+
+
+
+# Buying Used
+
+I can't recall the last time I bought something new. We almost always buy electronics used, mostly off eBay. We also rarely buy new books. We generally pick up books at used bookstores around the country, but when we can't find what we want we use Thriftbooks.
+
+Buying used has several advantages over buying new. The obvious one is that it's almost always cheaper. But beyond that there are other appealing aspects. Buying used means you're not contributing as much to the waste stream of modern economies, and you're (potentially) removing things from that waste stream by finding a use for them. Used items, especially electronics, tend to be functionally superior to new ones[^1] both because they are farther back on the curve of [diminishing returns](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/law%20of%20diminishing%20returns) and because they have stood the test of time. There are exceptions of course, but buy and large last year's model is as good, and sometimes better, than this year's model. 
+
+Buying used also enables you to take advantage of little curiosities of time. For example all the really good low-noise sound recording devices seem to have been made between 2007-2016. Why? No idea. But everyone who needs low noise recording seems to agree, and high end recorders from that era sell for more than they did when they were new. Which is to say that buying used isn't always cheaper, but when it's not it generally means you're getting something superior. And not something that the manufacturer thinks is superior, but something the people using it the most think is superior.
+
+This is why the only affiliate links on luxagraf.net lead to either eBay or Thriftbooks, my two preferred marketplaces for buying used stuff. 
+
+Anyone using affiliate links is trying to sell you something—that includes me—and you should always be suspicious about that. I know my motives are simple, to make some money to pay for this website and maybe some tea for myself, but you have every right to skeptical. Really though, I don't want you to buy anything you don't need. But if you do need something, please buy it used. And if you're going to buy something I've recommended based on my experiences with it, then the affiliate links will help support this website.
+
+[^1]: The odd mixture of capitalism and our culture's worship of "progress" means that new things must constantly be released, but the law of diminishing returns suggests that newer/bigger/better/faster eventually fails to deliver any meaningfully improvement. This is most obvious in software, where the most feared phrase in any software user's heart is "please restart to update", but this lack of improvement over previous versions is increasingly painfully obvious in hardware as well.
+# Essay on Will
+
+If you want control over what you consume, you're going to have to strengthen your will. So long as you are surrounded by signals that are trying to get you to spend money on crap, it is going to be an uphill battle. If you can I strongly suggest removing yourself from the signals—think about where your attention is going and how you can redirect it to craft rather than stuff. 
+
+but there are things more powerful. The most important of those is your will. 
+
+
+If, like most people, you can't pick and move to foreign country for a month then you're going to have to try to change in the midst of the battle so to speak. While possible, this is much much harder. And again, while I like to think I have mastered this, my spreadsheet says otherwise, so take this advice with a grain of salt. Chances are good that this actually much harder than you or I think and you're going to need to put in more effort than I'm suggesting.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+The most important thing is to develop your will. I am serious. Start doing exercises to develop your will. For example, force your self up out of the chair right now, turn away from the computer and walk to the nearest wall. Touch it. Come back and sit down. Repeat this at random during the day. Is it pointless? Absolutely. So is lifting weights. The principle is the same. So choose a deliberately pointless thing to do, and do it. Then do another one. Then do the same thing every morning for a week. 
+
+One will-building exercise I do periodically is what I call, for lack of a better phrase, micro travel. It works like this: pick a place at random in the city you live, somewhere you've never been. Choose a time and make an appointment with yourself. Now go work out all the details of getting there, if possible use public transit or walk. Then meet yourself there and make sure you're there on time. Now enjoy a few minutes exploring the area and head home.
+
+I'll leave thinking up other exercises to you, but the point is to develop your will, to have control over your life. It takes a little time to see and feel the effects of this, it's quite subtle, but it will cascade throughout your life in a number of interesting ways, I promise. One will be better control over your impulses. When you walk into, say Target, to buy a new toothbrush your newly developed will will make it easier to walk past everything else and only buy the toothbrush. 
+
+Eventually your will may help you recognize that stores that have everything are too much for your will. It would be cleverer to buy that toothbrush at a smaller store with fewer things, because it's easier to remove temptation than resist it. Think of it like dieting. If you're trying to eat less ice cream it's much easier to not walk down the ice cream aisle at all than it is to walk down it and without buying anything.
+
+This also leads into my second suggestion for buying less stuff: change your habits. It's convenient to go to Target and get everything you need in one place, but chances are you're going to spend more than you intended without realizing it. In fact the entire experience of being in Target has been engineered to increase the chance you'll spend more than you intended. Every time you enter a store you are entering a hostile environment designed to extract your life energy from you. 
+
+Oh sure it's all abstracted so you don't have think of it that way. Still, strip the abstraction and relationship is pretty clear, you trade hours of your life for shit you buy at Target. You get up the morning and go to work. That's a day of your life you just traded for paper tickets. Why do you need those tickets? To put a roof over your head and food in your stomach. Pretty much everything after that is not strictly necessary. So once those basics are met you're in th realm of swapping your existence on earth for stuff. 
+
+The less stuff you buy, the less you need to work. By extension, the less time you spend in places designed to extract money from you, the less of your life you'll have to trade for stuff.
+
+That's a habit you can break—going to all-in-one-place stores—but there are other habits you can build that will help immensely as well. 
+
+
+
+One of the things I've been at pains to avoid is making it sound like we don't like the United States. In fact we do very much, it's one of the most beautiful places in the world and has some of the wildest and safest wilderness you're ever going to enter. 
+
+Unfortunately, the United States is not the best travel value for us. Without an income we'd have to dip heavily into savings to travel the states in the bus. 
+
+
+
diff --git a/scratch.txt b/scratch.txt
index 4acd138..8f8701a 100644
--- a/scratch.txt
+++ b/scratch.txt
@@ -4248,774 +4248,6 @@ The right to repair the need to repair the desire to repair is fundamentally a c
 
 
 
-# essays
-
-## We'll Make It Work
-
-The title of this post comes from my wife. I'd more likely say, *We'll Figure It Out*, but that's very different. Sometimes you do need to figure things out, but more often you have to take them as they are and Make It Work. 
-
-We'll Make It Work. This phrase, her way of thinking about problems essentially, is the only reason we're still out here.
-
-Broken down in the [high desert of California](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/12/terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-week)? We'll make it work. Lost my income right after moving to Mexico? We'll make it work. [Blown a head gasket](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/10/going-down-swinging) in the middle of nowhere Colorado? We'll make it work. [Brakes failing](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/03/more-adventures-travco-brakes)? We'll make it work. [Brand new Jeep dead](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/12/repair-fail)? We'll make it work. World ending in a rain of fire? We'll make it work.
-
-I never really thought much about this attitude until recently when it started to come up a lot as we contemplate some big changes in our lives. I would raise potential objections to plans, and Corrinne would shrug and say "we'll make it work." Other times she would say, "how the #%$& are we going to do that?" And I'd shrug and say "we'll figure it out." It works both ways, we complement each other in this regard. Things I worry about she does not. And things she worries about don't even cross my mind until she asks about them. 
-
-And then we each shrug at the other. *We'll make it work*.
-
-This I realized is what makes us able to do this. We're not rich. We're not all that smart. We're not particularly skilled. But we're willing to do whatever is necessary to make things work. 
-
-Sometimes that means sacrifices are made. Sometimes that means working really hard. Sometimes that means letting go of preconceived ideas. Sometimes it means really accepting that something has happened. You'd be surprised at how far accepting the reality of your situation goes toward getting you out of it. [There is no cavalry](https://luxagraf.net/essay/spirit/the-cavalry-isnt-coming), the sooner you accept where you are, the sooner you'll get going again.
-
-Sometimes making it work might mean coming up with a new plan. It might mean you don't make it out west one year. It might mean you spend some extra time in California. It might mean you camp in a mechanic's driveway from time to time. 
-
-I am very leery of the word compromise. The way most people use this word it seems to me means "mutual defeat by concession." No one gets what they want, no one is happy. That's no way to live. If you're compromising by making concessions, you're doing it wrong. 
-
-A good compromise is when you say yes to everything, even to things you don't necessarily want to do. Sure, we'll go over here to the Biggest Week in America Birding and we'll also go over here to the diamond mines. We'll cross this bridge, but we'll also cross this other one even though I might want to avoid the second one. Doesn't matter what I want. Make it work. Everyone gets what they want. Are there times when that's not possible? Sure, but we'll make it work.
-
-What *We'll Make It Work* always means, more than anything else, is being flexible and fluid in your thinking and actions. It means not clinging to preconceived ideas when it turns out the facts on the ground are different. Making it work might mean you need rethink the path to your goals. 
-
-We'll make it work does not mean it's going to be easy. That's okay, the easy way is rarely [the way](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/01/path). The internet loves to make memes of Bruce Lee's dictum, *be like water*[^1], but few people think this all way through. Sure, water flows, water carves canyons with its patience, but water also doesn't only goes on its path. It never stays where it is and it never takes a route that it is not meant to go. Some routes that it does take mean it smashes into rocks and is pulverized until it becomes mist, barely water at all anymore. Then it slowly falls back, becomes flowing water again, but is different somehow, changed in unaccountable ways. You want to be like water? Be prepared for the world to turn you into mist at times. Make that work.
-
-Above all else, We'll Make It Work means that you have to have faith in yourself and whomever else you're with that you can make it work. You have to know it in your bones. You can (and should!) second guess yourself on the particulars of making things work, but know that you can. Everyone can. It just take faith and discipline. Learn to make your own choices and craft your own life. Commit to making it work and you will find a way to make it work.
-
-[^1]: I could write thousands of words unpacking this simple idea, because there is so much here, but I will spare you.
-
-
-## Simple Machines, Complex Tasks
-
-I picked up my dad's Pentax camera sometime in the 1980s and was hooked from day one. By high school I was committed. I set off to college with the vague idea that I would major in photography, but I dropped out before that ever came to fruition.
-
-Like most photographers I made the jump to digital cameras some time ago. I sold my last film camera right before we left on this trip. It was a sad moment, but I hadn't shot with the camera (a Nikon F3) in years. I knew there were people out there still shooting film, and I wanted the camera to be used, not sit around gathering dust, so I sold it. 
-
-I didn't give film much thought after that. From a technical standpoint 35mm film is massively more expensive, has less resolving power, and it's more difficult to work with, develop, print, etc. 
-
-Then, about six months ago, an editor at Wired reached out and asked if I would put together a guide to film photography. This caught me a little off guard. Film? Did you really say film photography? 
-
-I said I would so long as Wired bought me a new film camera because I didn't think they would do that. Surprisingly, my editor agreed. I went on eBay and bought an old Nikon FE2, which was sort of the less pro version of the F3. It came with a Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 lens. I bought some Tri-X, and some Velvia, and went wandering around the Outer Banks trying to remember how to shoot film. 
-
-Film photography is not like riding a bike. Everything I once knew... I forgot. But the technical hurdles didn't really bother me much after the first (embarrassingly bad) roll I developed. 
-
-I realized pretty quickly that more than nailing complex exposures, what I really needed to do was slow down my whole way of working. I was trying to shoot film as if it were digital. It is most emphatically not digital. It has a very different process. Film has to be shot calmly, carefully, and consciously. 
-
-This I realized is also what elevates something to a craft, doing it calmly, carefully, and consciously. 
-
-Could you do with with a digital camera? Sure, but it's not required. The digital images that aren't quite right can be easily fixed later on your laptop. Film cannot. My experience has been that if something doesn't require me to work at something more like craft, often I do not.
-
-What the Nikon FE2 forced me to do was slow down. You can't just mash the shutter, you have to take everything in first. Look closely at where the light meter is reading on the subject vs the background, which raise the question, what is the subject? Should I recompose? What if I moved so that it was better framed? And so on. Then you have to turn the dials to match the light meter's reading of scene. Then check your composition again. At this slower pace there is more space to reflect on what you're doing, what you're after, and this sharpens your vision. It gives you room to think. You can wander through your memory even, remember other images you've seen or made, and use those reflections to steer your hand now. It's almost like the process becomes similar to reading a book, you generally don't rush through a book, the world of the book just unfolds at the pace of your reading. 
-
-Why would a 40-year-old camera enable all that? I'm not entirely sure, but I think it has something to do with the simplicity of the machine and the complexity of the task. There must be a balance here, but I think on the whole what humans really need are simple machines that enable complex tasks.
-
-The FE2 is very simple. It lets me make the complex decisions. I am in charge of focusing the lens. I am in charge of figuring out the correct exposure. The camera gives me a light reading of the scene in front of me, but it's an average, and doesn't take into account the characteristics of the film I'm shooting, the range of light and dark in the scene, where the subject is, or any other of a dozen things I am expected to take into account. The machine is very simple, the task is very complex.
-
-Digital cameras are the opposite. They are very complex machines that can do 80 percent of what I have to do myself with the FE2, all I really have to do is press the shutter button. The machine is very complex, the task is very simple. While the result may be equal, or even better, the satisfaction in the task is less.
-
-We often focus on the results without giving much thought to the process. I think taking the opposite view, that the process is what matters, is the beginning of entering into a craft. Not this is a *thing* I am making, but this is the *process* that makes this thing. In many (most?) cases this approach also leads to better outcomes.
-
-It's tempting to think that it is a luxury to have the time to fully engage the process like this. It's easy to say, well, sometimes I just want to get the shot of my kids blowing out the candles or perhaps dinner needs to be ready before the kids are off to juijitsu or baseball or what have you. I don't have time to make this a process, it just needs to get done. But if I'm honest with myself, these are cop-outs. If I'm short on time it's because I didn't allot enough time for what I needed to do. Okay, start sooner. You have to give yourself the time to slow down by carving it out. Calm, careful, *conscious*.
-
-And sure, not everything needs to be a craft. Not everything needs to be raised to that level. I had a friend who would get all zen about doing the dishes. Maybe you do that too. That's not me. I just want the damn dishes clean. But if there's something you do a lot, I find that my enjoyment of it goes way up when I slow down and really, carefully sweat over the details. The results are usually better too.
-
-I made an offhand comment in a post about [Pensacola's Navy museum](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2024/02/fly-navy) that I think is related. I was wondering aloud really, but I wrote: what if hard is good, struggle is good, and that’s why the past is so appealing?
-
-What if that's what makes something a craft rather than a task that must be done? What if it's supposed to be, if not hard, then at least laborious, done carefully rather than rushed? Isn't that the whole point -- to do things well? And doesn't that usually mean doing them slowly, carefully? I think that's what film is trying to tell me: it's the complexity of the task, the difficulty of the task that makes it enjoyable, and more broadly, that the more I slow down, the more I can do carefully and consciously, the better life will be.
-
-
-
-## Do It Yourself
-
-It’s probably cheaper and easier to buy most things, but when I can I’d rather make things myself. What else are you going to do with your life if you aren’t making stuff? Watch TV? Stop buying stuff and hiring people for everything. Give yourself a chance to solve the problem first. Contrary to what it says on the label, professionals and experts aren’t necessary. They’ll do it faster and better than you will, but you’ll learn and improve every time you do it yourself.
-
-
-## Safety Third
-
-
-It seems axiomatic that fear of death is a natural outcome of materialist beliefs. If life is all there is, that is the material world is all there is, then death is the end. And no one likes endings. For our institutions and their leaders, death is the worst possible thing because it is the end. It is, from their point of view, the ultimate failure of man.
-
-But why?
-
-As history's many brave atheists attest it does not require belief in the supernatural to make even the ultimate sacrifice of one's life, which would imply that even if death is the end there are many circumstances where it is still preferable to life, for example the preservation of others lives.
-
-Philosopher and writer [Charles Eisenstein](https://charleseisenstein.org/) astutely [points out](https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/pandemania-part-5), "safety mania and death phobia are signs of a **disconnection from purpose and passion**. If you have nothing more important than your own life, then preserving life is left as the only purpose." (emphasis mine)
-
-In other words death phobia is a result of not knowing how to live. 
-
-When you are disconnected from purpose and passion this begins to pile up because the death phobia drives the obsession with safety, which in turn makes us incredibly risk adverse, which in turn keeps us from exploring, potentially from finding our purpose and passion. On and on in a viscous cycle. 
-
-How do you get out? If you're reading this, chances are you aren't in that cycle, but I have an idea of how we get out at a cultural level: By playing without our helmets.
-
-If you're constantly worried about safety you can't play. If you can't play, you can't be free. Play is freedom and play does not wear a helmet. A helmet means supervision. We who play are unsuperviseable.
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-To play amidst a world full of rules is perhaps the most subversive act.
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-
-outside "ordinary" life as being "not serious," but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means.
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-This I believe is how we remake the world: by playing.
-
-I know, that's not a Very Serious Solution that [Very Serious People]() can go out and implement, but that's the point isn't it? To remake the world any other way would end up right back here eventually.
-
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-
-
-safetyism has largely displaced other moral sensibilities that might offer some resistance. At the level of sentiment, there appears to be a feedback loop wherein the safer we become, the more intolerable any remaining risk appears.
-
-
-
-
-Huizinga begins by making it clear that animals played before humans. One of the most significant (human and cultural) aspects of play is that it is fun.[8]
-
-Huizinga identifies 5 characteristics that play must have:[9]
-
-Play is free, is in fact freedom.
-Play is not "ordinary" or "real" life.
-Play is distinct from "ordinary" life both as to locality and duration.
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-
-Every culture passes through a materialist phase and every culture has its own form of fear or death while in that phase. You and I did not invent this, but we find ourselves living during this cultural phase, and I think it helps tremedously to remain conscious of that fact when trying to decide how risky any one thing is *to you*. 
-
-
-This is why blanket rules are ridiculous and ignored. The sign that says danger, no lifeguard on duty means little if you know how to read the water to avoid rip currents and are a strong swimmer. If you aren't a strong swimmer and don't even know what a rip current is, then the message of the sign might be important, but in the world littered with such signs that one is just so much more noise. You ignore it.
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-
-
-
-I think this goes to the heart of our existence... why are we here? Are we here, as the technomedia landscape would have it, to be passively entertained and coddled from birth to death? Or are we here for something more? I don't know about you, but I don't think we're just along for the ride. We’re here to stand at the helm, trim the sails and steer the ship.
-
-I think rejecting the world of passivity, of getting off our butts and taking matters into our own hands, of asking our neighbors and like-minded strangers how to fix things, how to build things, what's working and what isn't. All of this is on the path to rebuilding a life of value and meaning. 
-
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-
-While I am not a fan of dualisms, I have only ever managed to come up with two solutions to the fear of death: deny death (very popular) or accept death (formerly very popular).
-
-
-
-don't forget evolution doesn't have a goal, it's simply a process of fitting the current environment. 
-
-
-https://twitter.com/ItsGoneAwry/status/1623675932899700736?s=20&t=oo4ys3gRccV2b9mhU-2Dfw
-
-If you're constantly worried about safety you can't play and if you can't play you can't be free. Play is freedom and play does not wear a helmet. Play I could go on at some length about how play is actually the most threatening thing you can do these days, maybe I will eventually, but 
-
-
-
-safetyism has largely displaced other moral sensibilities that might offer some resistance. At the level of sentiment, there appears to be a feedback loop wherein the safer we become, the more intolerable any remaining risk appears.
-
-
-
-
-Huizinga begins by making it clear that animals played before humans. One of the most significant (human and cultural) aspects of play is that it is fun.[8]
-
-Huizinga identifies 5 characteristics that play must have:[9]
-
-Play is free, is in fact freedom.
-Play is not "ordinary" or "real" life.
-Play is distinct from "ordinary" life both as to locality and duration.
-Play creates order, is order. Play demands order absolute and supreme.
-Play is connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained from it.[10]
-
-
-
-
-Safety is largely illusory anyway.
-
-Oscar Wilde once said “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation”
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-for what it really is and it has made me afraid.
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-
-
-I should probably make it part of [my code](/code).
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-
-I think the safety first obession is the reason we had a worldwide panic over Covid, it's the reason so many young adults are meek and unable to handle the world, it's the reason our leaders are failing us, and it's a big part of the reason so many people are dissatisfied with their lives. 
-
-It's also a big part of the reason we gave up our independence to ["experts."](https://luxagraf.net/essay/the-cavalry-isnt-coming). Much of the reason we are told we must rely on "experts" is for our safety. 
-
-
-From that initial reaction it's been further revealed that the rules we get handed when entering public spaces like parks are insufficient. 
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-Clearly, since people like us have been ignoring them.
-
-social relations and that the human being is not the center of a web of loyalties and commitments but is rather a physical fact needing technical management. Nothing, it was revealed to us, is worth risking life for—nothing. If other occasions for risk remain, this is evidently only because administration has not yet found the means to quash them. It was revealed that no danger is greater than death. It was revealed that life is sheer matter and not something else, for example, the capacity for love.
-https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2022/06/atoms-and-the-void-review-of-interventions-2020/
-The obsession with safety is bound up in a fear of death.
-
-
-
-Whatever one’s opinion of the response to the disease, what is undeniable is that so many people of influence took for granted that safety must always trump social relations and that the human being is not the center of a web of loyalties and commitments but is rather a physical fact needing technical management. Nothing, it was revealed to us, is worth risking life for—nothing. If other occasions for risk remain, this is evidently only because administration has not yet found the means to quash them. It was revealed that no danger is greater than death. It was revealed that life is sheer matter and not something else, for example, the capacity for love.
-https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2022/06/atoms-and-the-void-review-of-interventions-2020/
-The obsession with safety is bound up in a fear of death.
-
-The true warrior is not the one who is willing to kill. That doesn’t make a warrior. The true warrior is the one who is willing, if need be, to die - Charles Eisenstien
-
-
-
-
-Because our civilizational answer to “Why are we here?” has unraveled, many of us individually have trouble answering that question too, for the individual story draws from the collective.
-
-OK, I realize I may have risen to too high an altitude for the practical purpose of preventing the next bout of pandemania. So I will end with this: We can reduce our general susceptibility to fear-mongering by reducing the levels of fear current in society. A society ridden with fear will acquiesce to any policy that promises them safety. How do we reduce ambient levels of fear? There is no single answer. Besides, each one of us already knows how.
-
-https://charleseisenstein.substack.com/p/pandemania-part-5
-
-
-I think this goes to the heart of our existence... why are we here? Are we here, as the technomedia landscape would have it, to be passively entertained and coddled from birth to death? Or are we here for something more? I don't know about you, but I don't think we're just along for the ride. We’re here to stand at the helm, trim the sails and steer the ship.
-
-I think rejecting the world of passivity, of getting off our butts and taking matters into our own hands, of asking our neighbors and like-minded strangers how to fix things, how to build things, what's working and what isn't. All of this is on the path to rebuilding a life of value and meaning. 
-
-
-Greek Proverb which says, “A society grows great when the old people plant trees, even when they know they will never get to enjoy their shade.”
-
-
----
-
-## Everything is a Practice
-
-There is no finish line. There is no winning, no losing.
-
-**Everything is a Practice.**
-
-A practice is the disciplined repetition of what you know with enough experimentation in that repetition to unlock those things you don't yet know. It is ever-accumulating, and never-ending. It is sometimes painful, but that is the way.
-
-Individual projects may come to an end, but the practices that made them possible do not. You may finish writing a book, or reach the end of a run, or understand how to fix an engine, but there is no point where you've written enough, you've worked out enough, you've learned enough. The practices never end, which means you get to keep improving.
-
-The practice leaves a path behind you to show you how far you have come and carves out a path ahead of you to show you where you can go.
-
-The practices of your life *are* your life. They form the path you follow, they are how you become what you want to become, they make you who you are and who the world wants you to be. You are not solely in charge of your practices or the path they form. The world gets a vote too. In the end that's part of the practice too—adjusting to feedback from the world, your body, your life, your family, your friends. All of these things are part of the practice, all of them inform it.
-
-The practice also informs the experimentation that expands it.
-
-The trick is to follow your curiosity. That often forgotten part of you that society tries to get you to repress. That voice that says, what would happen if... This is the way. Follow it. Follow it knowing you will likely fail, knowing that you're probably doing it the wrong way, but you're going to try it anyway... you'd be surprised what works. I've fixed loose battery wires with a bit of nail, held hoses on with zip ties, and countless other things that should not have worked, but did, at least for a little while. There's plenty of failures along the way of course. Those people always telling you it can't be done—whatever it might be -- are sometimes right, but wouldn't it be better to find out for yourself? 
-
-Now there are reasonable limits to this... I wouldn't go trying to repair a $4,000 lens on your first attempt at lens repair. I wouldn't pick a rare, difficult to replace engine for your first rebuild. Learn to manage risk. When you know you're headed off the map to experiment, pick things to experiment on and situations to experiment in where you can keep the risk level low. Whether that means using something cheap, or doing it at low speed, or making sure the water is deep enough before you jump. Whatever the case, learn to manage risk so that your lessons learned aren't so painful—financially, emotionally, physically --- that you forget what you learned and remember only the trauma of the learning.
-
-In this process though you will become a better human being. You will get better at living. You will have less pain down the road. Your path will be smoother. You are building real world skills that you can use over and over. Every skill that you pick up transfers to other things too. Your practice will expand and keep growing.
-
-The experience you gain using a multimeter to untangle the rats nest of wires under the dash will come in handy when you need to figure out why the fridge suddenly stopped. That method of troubleshooting, following wires, testing voltages, making sure resisters are working, and so on, that method of inquiry you learned working under that dash transfers to other things. It's the same method of inquiry needed to figure out what's happening with anything electrical. There will be some differences between the fridge and the dash and the dishwasher and the vacuum, but the basic method is the same. From one small repair you gain an insight that makes countless future repairs that much easier. But only if you do it yourself.
-
-In this way everything you do is always building your skill set. You're always expanding your practice. This makes the path that much easier. You are that much more proficient at being human. The journey become easier, you are less reliant on others and you free up resources to focus on life's more interesting things. That way when the fridge dies at anchor in the San Blas, two days sail from the nearest repair shop, you don't worry. You fix the issues and get on with the dive you were planning to do that day. 
-
-Skills transfer in unexpected ways too. It isn't all just troubleshooting methods that transfer. The experience you gain struggling at terrible sketches of birds will come in handy when you start staring at the engine, trying to make sense of what's gone wrong—you've trained your mind to pay attention to the little details of feathers, which is not so different than paying attention to the little details of how a machine is running or how the wind and weather are changing. It is all connected.
-
-I should probably stop here and point out that I am a miserable hack with very few skills. I am not a repair expert or wunderkind of any sort. I can barely fix my way out of a paper bag. I am writing this not because I have mastered it on some long journey of experience, but because I have lived a couple of these examples and when thinking about it later, realized, oh, I made that connection because of this other things that I didn't see as related at the time, but then it turned out it was. 
-
-I am writing this because I have seen other people who can do this at a level I know I'll never get close to. I am writing this because you may be younger than me, you may have more time to learn. By the time you get to my age, you might be where I wish I was. Where I would be if I'd been paying more attention earlier on in life.
-
-I write not as an expert, but as a cautionary tale. Learn more than I did. Experiment more than I did. Expose yourself to more adversity than I did so that you learn to overcome it, not in theory, not by reading on the comfort of your couch, but in practice, at the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere, when it really counts.
-
-And now a little practice I wish I'd run across when I was much younger.
-
----
-
-How do you find *your* practice? I don't know what you need to do or where you ought to go, but I can offer some places to start, some questions to think about. 
-
-The Webster's 1913 dictionary definition of practice includes as examples, "the practice of rising early; the practice of making regular entries of accounts; the practice of daily exercise." That's not a bad place to start: get up, get moving, and keep track of where your money is going. That can take you far. None of that is revolutionary. Ben Franklin is famous for saying roughly the same thing. You can find similar quotes going back to the very edges of written history, but it's still a solid place to start. Get up and get going. 
-
-What I think gets lost in our time—[the time of The Experts](https://luxagraf.net/essay/the-cavalry-isnt-coming) -- is that there's not a single path, not a set of practices that work for everyone. We've been conditioned to look for prescriptions that fit everyone and that's just not how life works. You and I are different. You have to experiment and find what works for you. It might be nearly the same as what works for me, but it also might be totally different. I know people who are very much on their path who are vegans and do their best work late at night. You have to find your own way.
-
-That said, I do have a suggestion on where to start: start with touching your nose.
-
-I know, that sounds stupid. If you're into making some kind of huge change in your life the last thing you want to hear is that you should start by touching your nose. What the hell is that going to do? The answer is: it's going to train your will.
-
-If you were out of shape, unable to do a single push up, but desiring to be able to knock out 100 push ups in two minutes you wouldn't start with 50, you'd start with one. But even then, there is a high risk of failure because the effort it takes to get from zero push ups to ten is more than it takes to get from ten to 100. There's a very good chance that you're going to give up before you get to ten—not because it's too hard, but because you aren't accustomed to forcing yourself to do things. You are not in control of your will.
-
-It's not your fault. Unless you happen to have enlisted in the armed forces, practice a martial art, or have monastic religious training, you have very likely never even been taught that you can train your will, let alone how to do it. That's okay. 
-
-The good news is that, unlike the hypothetical arms in the push up example, the will is not weak. Your will is as strong as it was when you were a baby starting to crawl and you willed your entire body to do something it had never done before. If your will feels weak it is because it's divided against itself. The power of the will comes from disciplined focus. When you can focus your will on a single thing, and only that thing, you can do remarkable things. 
-
-Getting to that point is the hard part. That is the practice of the will. This is where all practices start. This is the metapractice that enables all the other practices to come into being. The will, directed, is the thing that enable you to turn words into ideas, ideas into action, action into skills. The will is what opens up the path in front of you and enables you to move forward. 
-
-When you say "will" though most people think of some miserable thing where you grit your teeth and bear some suffering. That's not the will, that's you fighting your will. When your will is focused following it is effortless, in fact you can't not follow it, you are directing it after all.
-
-The problem is that most of your life you've been told to do things you didn't want to do. School is the primary culprit here for most of us, though there maybe other things in your life. Schooling in the United States is almost universally designed to damage the will and leave you unable to do much of anything save serve the will of others. This is why most of us leave school and get a job. We literally go out to serve another's will. Our will has been so damaged we think that the thing we fight against when we "grit our teeth" or "just do it" is our will. 
-
-That's not your will, that's your will divided. Our wills know a bad deal when they see one, even if we don't. And so they fight it—they fight school, they fight our pointless jobs, they fight our uninspired cities and all the rest. And we fight our will. And we become convinced that this struggle against ourselves is what it means to direct our will. We become convinced that we're weak. 
-
-That makes for a ton of emotional baggage wrapped up in our divided will. That why every New Year's when we vow to hit the gym and do those push ups, we fail. We spiral downward, further convinced we are weak.
-
-This is compounded by the fact that your will is the source of most of your emotions—when your will succeeds in the world, you are happy, when it fails you are miserable. If you have a lot of miserably emotions locked up in your will and you try to focus it... it doesn't work. By the end of February it's been two months since you went to the gym.
-
-That's why you start with touching your nose. This is a variation on what every religious training manual (and some of the better secular ones) I've read advices doing. Something silly. Something that doesn't matter. Something that you have no emotional attachment to. Something you will not fail to do because of years of damage to your will. Touching your nose is easy and has no emotional baggage for most people. 
-
-So do it. Right now. Wherever you are sitting, reading this. Use your left hand and touch your nose ten times, returning your hand to your side or lap each time. Do it now before you read any further.
-
-Congratulations, you unified your will and succeeded. This is the beginning. This is how you train yourself to use your will deliberately. 
-
-Now you need to do that every day. Write "touch your nose!" on a piece of note paper and put it somewhere you will see it every day, ideally multiple times a day, ideally somewhere other people won't bother you about it. Then every time you see it, touch your nose ten times with your left hand.
-
-Congratulations. You have a new practice in your life. No, not touching your hose. The habit of doing something because you chose to do it. Not because some authority told you to or some unnoticed compulsion drove you to—you chose to do this. You do it. You direct your will. 
-
-That is the beginning of the practice.
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-
-
-
-
-
-*Note: Some might object that I have told you to do this and therefore it is yet another example of you yielding your will to another. This isn't true. It doesn't have to be your idea to do something, you just have to choose to do it. That's your will, you are choosing what to do.*
-We are all in the process of maturation. Both as individuals and as a species. None of knows where this all goes, but I think we all know that the current stories don’t wash and it’s time for something new. I don’t know what that looks like for you, but for myself, for us out here, it looks like this. It looks like walks through primordial forests, long afternoons on windswept beaches, evenings around the fire.
-
-I believe that you’ll know when you are on the right path. You’ll feel it. Life will begin to feel like what it is, a gift, an adventure, a joy. You’ll feel connection, fulfillment, that deep sense of satisfaction at the end of the day that comes from knowing there is nothing else you would rather have done that day. That is the path. And if you manage to find it, don’t stray. Do the work. It isn’t always easy. It isn’t always beaches and campfires. Sometimes it’s engine repair and frustration and despair. But these moments are fleeting, they are the necessary growth, the twists and turns that reveal. Stay disciplined, stay focused, stay on the path. Let go of control and just walk the path. It will reveal itself slowly, only as much as you need to see, just keep on it, and see where it leads you. That’s adventure. That’s living.
-
-
-
-
-
-What do you care about?
-
-Who do you want to be?
-
-What matters most to you?
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-What are the most important things in your life?
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-Who are the most important people in your life and what do they need from you?
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-
-
-Your higher self is the part of you that continues from one incarnation to the next, that was around long before you were born and will still be aroung long after your current body dies. While you’re alive, unless you’re engaged in very intensive spiritual practices, your higher self is basically asleep and dreaming, and your life is its dream. The great secret of the higher self is that it’s you — the real you — and the personality you think you are right now is like the personalities you sometimes have in your dreams at night. When your current body dies, you’ll wake up out of the dream and say, “Wow, that was interesting,” and then go on to other things.
-
-David BTL, nope. The mess that is your psyche is exactly what it should be: the raw materials you have to work with, the pieces of the kit you need to assemble. It just looks screwed up because you’re beginning to glimpse what it can become once you fit all the pieces together where they belong.
-
-[^1]: The world in this case consisting of both material and other realities.
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-
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-
-
-
-
-The One True Dictionary defines practice as:
-
-    > Frequently repeated or customary action; habitual
-      performance; a succession of acts of a similar kind;
-      usage; habit; custom; as, 
-
-
-The three examples happen to all be practices I pursue
-
-Not in human terms anyway. Individual projects may come to an end, but the practices that made them possible do not. Most things worth doing do not have a stopping point. There is no point where you've written enough, you've worked out enough. Everything is a practice. Embrace it. The practice is never done, which means you get to keep improving.
-
-[^1]: This would be a good example of 
-
-## No Cavalry—what to do?
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-
-
-
-Once you accept that there is no cavalry coming, or perhaps more conservatively, that you don't need a cavalry to come, or, at the very least make the decision that you want to life your life in such a way that you don't *want* to need a cavalry, the question arises: what then do I do? How do I get from where I am, to that state of mental, physical, and spiritual security? 
-
-Another way to put this would be: How do I begin to take responsibility for and become accountable for myself, my family, my world?
-
-I have no idea. Which is to say that I know what I am doing for those things, but I don't know what you should do—that's for you to figure out. If I told you what to do you'd just be dependant on me, no better off than being dependant on the cavalry. 
-
-No one can tell you how to get on the path to self-dependency because no one other than you knows what your path to self-dependency looks like. You have to find it. And you'll know when you have. Find it is the fun part. Don't worry if it takes a while. It took me the better part of two decades. But I know people who figured it out much quicker.
-
-So I am not going to prescribe some recipe for how you can take responsibility for your world, but I am going to tell you something that might help you figure out your own path: you first have to reclaim your time. One of the things that keeps us dependant on the cavalry is our perceived lack of time to do anything about it. How are you going to learn how to rebuild your leaf blower motor when you work 9-5 and spend an hour on each side of that commuting? From 8-6 you have no time for leaf blowers. Throw in breakfast and dinner and suddenly from 7-7 you have no time for anything else.
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-
-
-How do you find time to build relationships with your neighbors when you spend 12 hours (or more) of your waking day working?  
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-
-In the first essay on this subject I suggested that you stop using money to meet all your needs. That is, begin to build relationships with people such that you can begin to meet some of your needs by offering something of yourself to others. I don't know what that might look like for you, but here's a quick example: when we lived out in woods in South Carolina much of the land surrounding our house was leased to a hunt club. In exchange for keeping an eye on the area, we were free to hunt. Actually we were offered other people's deer, though we had to decline for lack of freezer space. 
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-If you live in Manhattan this scenario isn't going to come up. But if you start trying to meet people, to listen to them, you will build relationships that lead to things like this. Perhaps not free food, perhaps it will end up being chess lessons or tk, but it will be something and your life will be richer, and slightly, ever so slightly less dependant on the system of The Machine.
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-This will also give you agency. You are the one with the connection to others, nothing is mediating that. This is agency. Agency reduces stress. It helps you to see bad things, bad situations for what they are: bad situations. When you have agency and the self-confidence that it, along with experience, give you, you begins to see that with sufficient resources—time, effort, knowledge, money, etc -- any problem can be solved.
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-
-
-## The Cavalry Isn't Coming
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-The Cavalry isn't coming. This is the lesson 21st century America is trying to teach us. We are going to have to re-learn how to depend on ourselves and on each other. There is no one else. That's okay. We don't need anyone else.
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-Self-reliance backed up by tight community bonds used to be the norm. You depended on yourself, your family, your community, because who else was there? So far as I can tell from reading history this was most people's outlook until roughly the middle of the 20th century. That's when a number of things happened that changed how people saw themselves and their communities.
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-Around then things began to centralize and as they did the solutions people had always relied on weren't suddenly found wanting. Self-appointed experts stepped in to tell us how things should be done. How we should eat. How we should live. How we should love. Sometimes the experts had good ideas. But often they did not. And even when their ideas were good, there was an unintended consequence to listening to the experts: communal bonds were weakened, people were deprived of skills, people questioned their instincts. Soon people believed they needed experts for everything.
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-The world according to experts is a world that depends on those experts, the cavalry. The people we mean when we say "they'll think of something."
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-Except that as we've all witnessed in the last twenty years, they won't think of something. They're out of ideas. Worse, the old ideas don't work anymore. The world of the expert is collapsing all around us. The cavalry isn't coming because the cavalry doesn't know how to ride anymore.
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-For four years we've been driving around the United States, passing through all its unique regions (except New England and the Pacific Northwest) and I've noticed not only the experts are failing us, but that there are some places where that has had little to no effect on life.
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-It took me a long time to figure this out because this shift, from the local community as the hub of life, to there being no hub, happened long before I was born. That is to say, the disconnected lives we all lead, depending on experts to tell us everything from what to eat to how to fix our cars, was normal to me. It was the water I lived in and I never noticed it. What I did notice pretty early on was that some places were decidedly different. Northern Wisconsin. Okracoke. Parts of the Florida Panhandle.
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-We were drawn to these places and continue to return to them in part I think because they resisted the shift to expert authority that happened everywhere else. Self-reliance, independent businesses, and close knit communities still thrive in these places. These places somehow escaped the chain-storification of the world. It was refreshing. It was different. These places felt like what I wanted the future to be.
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-I have read enough books of the American road to know that everywhere used to be like this, but I never gave much thought to how or why that changed. I assumed that chain stores took over. And they did. But I think there's considerably more underlying that simple observation, and I think understanding how it happened, how we got into this mess, is going to help us get out of it.
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-I think it happened because not enough people resisted it. We were swept along and did not stand up to it. It's hard to avoid shopping at Walmart. So we did. And so on, until the old ways were swept aside. We prized newer bigger better because we lost sight of what life is really about. 
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-Singular cause and effect cannot explain how an entire culture shifts, that's a subtle and multifaceted process, but it begins and ends with the choices of individuals. Millions of individuals, all of whom have different beliefs, different desires, different wills. It's important to keep this in mind because the kind of thinking that says "here's the problem, here's how to fix it" is the kind of thinking that made the problem.
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-And now here we are, waiting for the other shoe to drop. We're a bit like Wile E. Coyote when he's run off the edge of the cliff but doesn't realize it yet. Ignorance of his true situation keeps him from plunging down right away, but there's always that moment when it starts to sink in. The cartoonists let his ears droop just before he confronts his situation and falls. That's about where I see modern America just now. Our ears are drooping and we know what's coming, but no one knows how high we are or how hard we'll fall. 
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-That is a pretty dismal place to be. But I believe we can still exercise some control over that descent. We have to fall, but there are branches we can grab onto, things that can slow us down. Not as a culture, but as individuals. We can descent gradually and with some degree of grace perhaps. 
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-Everywhere will be different, and the solutions will be different for everyone. That's what five years living on the road has taught me. There is no collective anything. There is just you and me and the rain. When I say we have to figure this out without the cavalry, don't mistake me for some alternate cavalry. I don't know what you need to do. I know some of what I need to do, but you are different. You have your own path. We need to work together, help each other, but work together and help each other down our own paths. The balance between individualism and community that has been lost, we have to restore it one person at a time. The good news is that I think we still have a chance to land at the bottom of that descent without too much damage. To understand what I mean, let me tell you a little story about an engine.
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----
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-At the end of 2017, after we'd been traveling in the bus for about nine months we were [climbing up Tehachapi Pass](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2017/12/terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-week) to get out of California's central valley. About halfway up the incline there was a loud bang from the engine and the smell of burning oil. The leaking head gasket we didn't know about had leaked enough that one piston shattered and we were dead in the water. I didn't know that at the time. All I knew was that something was very, very wrong. 
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-I called a tow truck and we were towed over the pass down to Mojave, CA, where we spent three weeks and over $6,000 replacing that piston and head gasket. We had no choice. While I knew how to fix some things, I was a long way from knowing how to take apart an entire engine. But, when I was signing that credit card receipt for six grand, I decided, never again. Whatever happens from here on out, I am going to fix it or we're going to sell it and find some other way to travel. 
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-The bus has never been to a mechanic since. This is not meant as a slight of those mechanics who have worked on it over the years. Some did good work. Some did not. But none of them love this engine the way I do. Why should they? It's not their engine. If you love something you learn how to take care of it yourself. 
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-So I set about trying to educate myself on how to repair a Chrysler 318 LA engine. This was not easy. The aspirated 318 with LA heads hasn't been in a production vehicle since the late 1970s. Even mechanics in their mid 50s might never have actually worked on one. Slowly though I began to stumble across people working on them. The [Mopar A-body forums](https://www.forabodiesonly.com/mopar/) have been helpful, and several YouTube channels have taught me a ton, especially [Uncle Tony's Garage](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9SzQNYLqsPQGY_nbHogDDw). 
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-But while strangers could provide some framework and theory, which it comes to figuring out what's wrong I've mainly turned to my uncle Ron who has an uncanny knack for being able to diagnose problems over the phone with very little to go on. Without him I would not know half of what I know today (which is still disappointingly little, but enough to get by). 
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-Somewhere along the way I started to wonder what was driving me. It was partly curiosity, partly necessity, but also partly something more. Matthew Crawford's *Shop Class as Soul Craft* articulates this something more far more eloquently than I've been able to. Crawford sees the need to be capable of repair as more than just a desire to fix things. He sees it as a desire to escape the feeling of dependence on stuff. The more I began to work on the bus the more I understood what Crawford meant. There is empowerment in knowing how things work. Your stuff will never again fail you because if it does break, you can repair it. Empowerment in this case means removing the expert between you and your stuff. Your stuff is more yours, you are more in control of your stuff.
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-Crawford calls the person who wants to fix their own stuff, the Spirited Man. In his book this figure becomes the antidote to passive consumption. Passive consumption displaces agency, argues Crawford. One is no longer master of one's stuff because one does not truly understand how stuff works. "Spiritedness, then," writes Crawford, "may be allied with a spirit of inquiry, through a desire to be master of one’s own stuff. It is the prideful basis of self-reliance."
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-Crawford writes that the spirited man "hates the feeling of dependence, especially when it is a direct result of his not understanding something. So he goes home and starts taking the valve covers off his engine to investigate for himself. Maybe he has no idea what he is doing, but he trusts that whatever the problem is, he ought to be able to figure it out by his own efforts. Then again, maybe not—he may never get his valve train back together again. But he intends to go down swinging." 
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-In the time since I read that I have literally done exactly that. I have decided I'd rather go down swinging, taking apart my valve train, rather than seeking the help of a professional. It’s not just me. YouTube and other sharing sites are littered with people teaching each other how to fix stuff. Then there are the thousands people without social media who are quietly working in their yards, in their garages, at the side of the road. Shade tree mechanics. Tinkerers. Spirited men and women who want first and foremost to understand, to expand their understanding of the world around them, to know how to use the tools we toolmakers have created for ourselves.
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-I think this goes to the heart of our existence... why are we here? Are we here, as the technomedia landscape would have it, to be passively entertained and coddled from birth to death? Or are we here for something more? I don't know about you, but I don't think we're just along for the ride. We’re here to stand at the helm, trim the sails and steer the ship.
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-I think rejecting the world of passivity, of getting off our butts and taking matters into our own hands, of asking our neighbors and like-minded strangers how to fix things, how to build things, what's working and what isn't. All of this is on the path to rebuilding a life of value and meaning. 
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----
-
-We eliminate our dependence on the cavalry by becoming the cavalry for ourselves, for our families, and for our neighbors. *Être fort pour être utile* *. Be strong to be useful.  
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-Eliminate the central conceit of modernism—that there is a group of people you need to save you from... the world, yourself, your shortcomings, your neighbors, your neighbors' shortcomings and on down the line—by taking responsibility for yourself and the expanding that responsibility outward to your family, to your community. 
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-The message of modernism is that you're helpless and you need saving. If you want to dig deep into the psychology of this I'd say it's about what you'd expect to get when a culture takes the gods out of its religion and replaces those gods with administrative systems. We're not the first. The Romans went down this path, so did the Chinese. Read Oswald Spengler or Arthur Toynbee if the history interests you. All you really need to know though is that there's a long history showing it doesn't work. Look around you, is stuff working? No, no, it is not.
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-Everything requires high specialized skills and knowledge. This is a choice. Things don't have to be built this way. Culture doesn't have to be arranged this way. It didn't use to be this way. Even 100 years ago there were very few "experts" telling you how to live. Now even lightbulbs have to include instructions on how to change them. 
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-Once you needed to be able to do a bit of everything yourself—help your neighbors build their homes, raise and butcher animals, preserve your food, fight fires, fix stuff, pull a tooth, deliver a child. All the things Robert A. Heinlein famously suggested a human being out to be able to do: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
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-Prior to the coming of the machine age, we were able to do this stuff. It was no factor.
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-But I know, I know, industrialization relies on specialization. Specialization means highly trained workers. Professionals are better than self-taught amateurs. Their skills can develop everything to increasing levels of complexity. And look, there are aspects of this that are good. It would take me years to learn how to machine a camshaft. I'm happy to let an expert do that because their expertise has allowed them to develop better tools and using those tools requires skills that only those experts have. Not everyone had a mill at their house. Not everyone could forge a great blade. There has always been specialization. It's the degree of specialization that's the problem. Our problems are the problems of overspecialization.
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-The problem with the specialization model isn't so much the specialization as the exclusion. As Christopher McDougall so eloquently puts it in *Natural Born Heros*, over time, "a subtle cancer spread: where you have more experts, you create more bystanders. Professionals did all the fighting and fixing we used to handle ourselves; they even took over our fun, playing our sports while we sat back and watched."
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-When was the last time you played baseball? When was the last time you watched it? I know I listened to a game last week. The last time I played was in the previous century. That's sad really. I like playing. Life is playing. Not watching. What are we here for? To play or to watch? I think that will become central question of our age, at least for those that haven't found their gods. 
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-I believe the disconnection that comes from watching life instead of participating in it is responsible for just about all our problems. Our mental health problems, our physical health problems, our cultural problems. All these things stem from being disconnected from life, from each other, from ourselves.
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-How did we get here? We got here because we allowed other people to tell us what was good for us. And they were wrong. From diet and health to design and visions of the future, they were wrong.
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-It's time we stopped listening to them and went back to fixing stuff ourselves, taking care of each other, taking care of ourselves.
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----
-
-The question becomes, how do we get back to where our grandfather's were?
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-There isn't one answer to this. I am not here on high telling you how to find your path because that top-down model is what caused the problem. I'm not even going to tell you what I am doing because even in that I think there's a tendency to see it as a recipe.
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-I would suggest that the first and most important thing is the realize that no one else is going to figure it out for you. The top-down, expert provides a solution system *is* the problem. 
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-I would suggest that reclaiming control of your life, your community, your world is actually easier than you think. You are already more skilled than you think. And you are surrounded by skilled people. Find something that interests you and get better at it. Connect with other people who share your interests. 
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-Early drafts of this had a few suggestions on specific things you could do, but again, I don't want to give you a recipe. That said, there is one thing that I think isn't intuitive, but will really open doors for you: **stop using money to meet all your needs**. 
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-Find one problem, one thing, that you pay for now that you can either make/do yourself, or, even better can be borrowed or done with help from friends and family. The goal is to find something that puts you in a debt of gratitude to someone else. This is the basis of community—gratitude. When you are grateful to the world, you become more helpful to the world. Gratitude is a powerful motivator. It subverts one of the most powerful outside, centralized structures that we're eventually going to have to do without: currency.
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-Your great grandparents fixed things for people, made things for people, and were grateful to receive the same from others. This formed much of the basis of community that held life together before the coming of centralization. It isn't the only thing, but it's a place to start and that's what we need to do. Start. Remember, we don't want to change the world, that's the top down thinking that got us in the mess. The goal here is to change the only part of the world you can: you.
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-etc etc. suggestions
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-Trust yourself.
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-Get outside
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-Talk to your neighbors
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-Start walking
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-Find religion
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-The solutions being proposed by the people who champion this idea are the same as they've always been: more technology, more bureaucracy, more centralized control (and not coincidentally more jobs for more experts).
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-We know where these ideas get us and we're done.
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-It's popular these days to say that politics is downstream from culture, which is to say we get the politics of our culture. But as John Michael Greer often says, "it needs to be remembered in turn that culture is downstream from imagination." We have the power here because we are limited only by our imaginations and our bodies' ability to make our imaginings true.
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-https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2019/11/land
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----
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-Virtues require cultivation, but our culture has left us with somewhat untended gardens. We have undisciplined minds, undisciplined debates, and undisciplined media consumption habits. 
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-I'll be honest, I don't have a lot to add that you can't find in the writings of Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, Lewis Mumford, Neil Postman, Wendell Berry and others who've been trying to warn us for over a century now (I also think Tolkein's Lord of the Rings is an overloked, very subtle critique of technological society that's well worth reading from that angle). If I do nothing else than inspire you to read them, I will call that success. However, I think that I'm in a somewhat unique position to observe things in a variety of places and make connections that others might not be able to see, and so here we are.
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-People in the United States ignore such proposals because we tried that experiment and found out just how badly it worked. In 1961, the new presidential administration of John F. Kennedy set out to improve US foreign policy by staffing the State Department with “the best and the brightest,” which meant in the context of the time a bevy of intellectuals fresh out of Ivy League universities, full of the latest fashionable ideas in international relations. Those experts promptly led America straight into the quagmire of the Vietnam War, while loading the military with a flurry of contradictory demands that made victory impossible and withdrawal unacceptable.
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-One of the precepts of the last couple of centuries is that there is one answer to every problem and it is the right answer and it is the answer you are going to choose like it or not. This is more or less the central premise of what is generally called liberalism or later, when people tried to distance themselves from the failures of liberalism, neo-liberalism.
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-I want to connect the story of taking apart the bus to the individualism and closed community of the west to the idea that we have to depend on ourselves and each other, not outside help coming from on high. The old order is collapsing and those of us farthest from its center are going to lose it first. The new world starts out here on the edges, the fringes the forgotten corners of the country where the old order has never held much sway.
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-I recently told a story about my decision to replace the bus engine's head gasket. It was a small thing really, when you consider the realm of human possibilities, but for me it was a big thing. Still, I didn't really want to do it. 
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-In that piece I made a somewhat flippant comment about no one ever stopping to help us when we're at the side of the road out west. That's been true, but it doesn't mean no one has helped us. It helps to remember that the west was built on deceit. The original inhabitants were decieved with treats that have not been honored, the people who came after them were decieved by the government and the railroads who needed them to farm in a country both knew well would never support farming. They recruited people from all over the world, people to whome the notion of living alone in a vast landscape was appealing and then, when those people turned out to want to do their own thing, not what the government wanted them to do (shocking that these independant spirits who surviced out here didn't want to do anyone's bidding) they were deceived again. And again. Perhaps the most eloquent recounting of these desceptions is the book Bad Land. I think it is important to remember these things when you are out here.
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-That is I think, why no stops to help us. First and foremost, we are outsiders and in the current west there is more distrust of outsiders than anywhere else we've been. Justifiably I'd say. 
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-
-## Rules for Screens, Part One
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-I have a strange page about [technology](/technology) buried on this site. Still, people find it. Something must link to it? I'm not sure how or why, but it seems to get a lot of traffic. Or at least it generates a fair bit of email. About a dozen people a year take the time to email me about the first line of that article:
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-**The less technology your life requires the better your life will be.**
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-I get a mix of responses to this ranging from the occasional "who are you to judge me, how dare you tell me not to play video games" (which I don't usually respond to), to the more frequent, and thoughtful, "hey, I feel the same way but I can't seem to get technology out of my life". 
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-In crafting a response to the most recent person who wrote some variation of that comment, I accidentally wrote a massively long post I am breaking into a three-part series, retracing how I came to use screens so little, despite editing photos, writing for this site, and working for an online publication, all of which do in fact require a screen. I use screens when it makes sense to do so, but the rest of the time I avoid them.
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-We're going to start with the basic stuff. I did most of the steps in this part back in 2016 when we were getting ready to move into the bus. This is actually all the hardest things to do, because these will free up enough time that you'll find yourself staring into the void for the first time since you were a kid. Don't worry, it's good for you. Anyway, on with it.
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-**Luxagraf's rules for screens, part one.**
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----
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-### **Rule One: Throw Your Television in the Nearest Dumpster**
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-Yup, we're going to start with the hardest one. You'll notice that I am more sympathetic to not going cold turkey with other things below. Not this one. This is the absolute requirement. Kill your television. Now. Tough love people.
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-But... but. Look. Here's the thing. You have this gift of life for, on average, around 73 years. 73 YEARS. You won't even last as long as the average hardwood tree. And you're going to spend that precious time watching television? No. No you're not. Not anymore. You're going to live. Find a dumpster. Put your TV in it. 
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-Okay, you don't want to put your $1,200 TV in the dumpster. Then find an old sheet or blanket and cover it up. Put some low-tack painters tape on there, make it hard to take off. That'll work for now. But get ready to eBay that thing. Or find a dumpster.
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-Now cancel Netflix, Hulu, or whatever other subscriptions you had. If you subscribe to two streaming services, that's just under $30 a month. That's $360 a year. That's $1,800 every five years. That's crazy. But now you have about $30 a month you can either save or spend on something you want. Something tangible. I mean, reward yourself if you really do this. At least buy some ice cream. 
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----
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-### **Rule Two: Make Something**
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-If you watched television for 3 hours in the evenings, congrats you were already watching less than most people—and you stop doing that you have just reclaimed 15 hours a week. FIFTEEN HOURS! That's enough to get a part time job somewhere. It's enough time to do, lord, there's no limit to what you could do really. Start a business, write a book, read the entire canon of Russian literature. The paradox of choice can get you here and you'll end up watching YouTube for hours on your laptop. I know, I've done it. 
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-You have to start creating something. I strongly suggest you create something real and tangible. Something you can hold in your hands. Cook yourself a fancy dessert if you like. Yeah you can even look up a recipe on a screen, don't worry about it. The internet is incredibly helpful for learning things. That's another idea. Find something you really love and learn more about it. Read everything you can about agates if that's your bag (it's my wife's bag). But do it by checking books out from the library, not by reading on your phone.
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-Do what you want, but do something. Deliberately carve out some time to make something. And I know everyone says, I'm not a creative person, I don't know what to make. Start small. Write a card to your closest relative. Write a postcard if a card is too much. Make dessert for your family, your significant other, yourself, whatever. Just make something. Except maybe don't make a fancy dessert every night. That won't end well. If all else fails, just go for a walk. 
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----
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-### **Rule Three: Delete Social Media Apps**
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-Yeah, now we're getting real. I know it's going to be hard. But you know what, take easy, start small. You probably have Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, a bunch of stuff in other words, on your phone. Just pick one and delete it for one week. You can always reinstall it so it's not like there's too much to lose here.
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-But we're not done.
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-Get a piece of paper and a pen. Fold the paper up so it's small enough to fit in your pocket. Put it in your pocket, or otherwise keep it on you. Now, every time you feel like checking whichever social network you deleted, instead of checking it, pull out your paper and pen and write down why you wanted to check it. It doesn't need to be an essay, just write like "wanted to see what Mark was up to" or whatever the source of the urge was. 
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-Do that for one week. At the end of the week look back over what you wrote down and decide for yourself if those things you were planning to do are worth your time. If they are then re-install that app and be on your merry way. If they aren't, or more likely, if you aren't sure, do the experiment for another week.
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-If you decide that this wasn't the best use of your limited time on earth, repeat this process with the next social app on your phone. When you've deleted all the unnecessary apps from your phone you're done with this step. 
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-Oh, and the ones you keep, don't feel bad about those. If you're feeling a sense of guilt about them still it might be worth repeating this experience, but if you really do enjoy them then don't feel guilty about them.
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-### **Rule Four: Track What You Do When You Use a Screen**
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-Far to much of our lives are lived in a kind of automated mode. Think back over everything you did in the last five minutes before you started reading this. If you're like me, you probably struggle to remember what it was you were doing or how you ended up precisely here at this moment. Some of this autopilot living is a good thing, especially, I've found, morning routines, but I do it far too much.
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-So I started keeping closer track of what I was doing and why. I'm not suggesting you do that. That's actually advanced level stuff, what I am suggesting is very simple: every time you use a screen, remember to do it consciously. Don't judge yourself for it, just note that hey, I am using a screen. That's all. Now if you're somewhat obsessive like I am you might want to write down whatever notes you can, about why you're using a screen. 
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-Unlike the steps above, this is not really a rule. It's a process. It's an ongoing process that will probably never end, at least in my case. I like to be conscious of when I use a screen, so although I started this years ago, I still do it today.
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-That brings me to the final point I will leave you with: everything is a process. To paraphrase Alan Watts, you are not a thing, you are a happening. Which is to say, all of life is a never ending process, there may be goals, there maybe markers along the way, but it's not like you get to place where you never have to do anything again. The goal, at least at this very basic level of using less screens, is to build systems and processes that will help you do things other than stare at a screen. 
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-Now go kill your television.
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-## Rules for Screens, Part Two
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-Last time we hurled our televisions out the window into a dumpster. If you actually did that, like I did once in college, you know that the sound of that crunch and exploding screen was awesome. Well maybe not, CRT screens aren't around anymore. Anyway, if you didn't actually hurl it out a window, well, hopefully you at least sold or gave away your TV. Remember, you can have a television or you can have a life.
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-Televisions are not the screen everyone wrings their hands over these days though. That's a little odd to me because according to statistics on screen time, that's where most us spend our time. But the evil de jour is phones. You phone is doing all kinds of things to you and will probably eventually be a direct contributor to the collapse of western culture if you believe everything you read. Which is sign you're using your phone too much.
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-I don't love phones, and I do think we should all use them less. If you've feel addicted to your phone, well, um, you're right. You are. Everything about the design of the apps on your phone is engineered to create dopamine pathways that make sure you experience physical withdrawal when you go without them. That's addiction pure and simple.
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-But. Did you know that culturally we've been wringing our hands over the distractions in our lives for centuries? Meister Eckhart, writing around 1307, calls "distraction" the second most powerful thing preventing communion with God. In 1550s Swiss scientist Conrad Gessner worries that the printing press will worsen the problem of distraction with a "confusing and harmful" amount of data "unleashed on the unsuspecting." To pick a more recent, and revealing, example consider writer Italo Calvino's 1983 account of [his daily newspaper habit](https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2027/the-art-of-fiction-no-130-italo-calvino):
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-> Each morning I already know I will be able to waste the whole day. There is always something to do: go to the bank, the post office, pay some bills... always some bureaucratic tangle I have to deal with. While I am out I also do errands such as the daily shopping: buying bread, meat, or fruit. First thing, I buy newspapers. Once one has bought them, one starts reading as soon as one is back home—or at least looking at the headlines to persuade oneself that there is nothing worth reading. Every day I tell myself that reading newspapers is a waste of time, but then... I cannot do without them. They are like a drug.
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-Note the use of the phrase, "like a drug," which we're still using today to describe our latest and most powerful distraction, phones. 
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-I point this out not to downplay the addictive, attention-steal nature of screens, but to remind you that being distracted is not new. Think of it slightly differently, the desire for distraction is not new. All that's happened over the last century is we've created ever more engrossing mediums to distract ourselves with. This strongly suggests that if we just reduce our exposure to the current symptom without addressing the underlying desire for distraction we're just switching one thing for another, like alcoholics chugging coffee and chain smoking at AA meetings[^1].
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-And I bring up AA in part because I think that phones are a problem partly for the same reason alcohol is a problem: they're culturally acceptable. No one pulls our a syringe in the middle of four star restaurant and shoots up heroin, but no one bats an eye when someone orders a bottle of wine in the same situation. Both are addictive, destructive drugs (arguably alcohol is much worse on your body), but one is culturally acceptable and one is not. This makes a world of difference when it comes time to stop. You don't have to work hard to avoid heroin, but you'll run into alcohol, and screens, at every turn.
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-Our phones aren't just addictive, they're also completely culturally acceptable in the west. No one cares if you pull one out in the middle of dinner. Well, I will. You might. But the cultural message seems to be that it's okay. In some places and some situations the cultural message might even be that you're an oddball if you're *not* staring at a screen.
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-Let's assume though, that, like people who email me, you want to use your phone less. Here are some tricks to help with that, most of which I used to cut back on my own screen use. 
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-**Luxagraf's Rules for Screens, part deux.**
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-### Rule Five: Know Yourself
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-If you want to use your phone less, you need to know how much you use it. There are some tools to figure this out built-in to both iOS and Android, but I never bothered to figure those out because I had already downloaded and used Your Hour ([Android App Store](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mindefy.phoneaddiction.mobilepe)). Space appears to offer similar features and [works on iOS too](https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/space-break-phone-addiction/id916126783). The app isn't really important, just get something that records how much time you spend and how often you unlock your phone.
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-That will give you a baseline and let you know how much you use your phone. Personally I disabled tracking for maps and music/podcasts because although I'm using my phone, I'm not really staring at the screen. There's an element of gamification to these apps that's easy to get sucked into. I had Your Hour on my phone for about a week before I got pretty obsessed with how little I could use my phone in a day. 
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-### Rule Six: Adapt to Yourself
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-If, like me, you discover that you use your phone to check the time throughout the day, consider getting a watch. Or, if you hate wearing a watch, and live in a small bus with your family like I do, just encourage everyone else to wear a watch and ask them what time it is.
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-The point is, most likely Rule Five will reveal some habits that you can break, but are too idiosyncratic to you for me to solve for you. My general advice is, if you have some behavior that involves the phone that could involve some analog thing, like a watch for instance, replace those screen checks with a watch. Not a smart watch or fitness tracker, just a watch.
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-A few things I have heard of people doing include, putting your phone in a bag to make it more of a pain to pull out and use, using it as a coaster so you can't pick it up, and using a pen and paper to make notes rather than using your phone. 
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-### Rule Seven: Turn Off All Notifications
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-I think the reason we are bothered by how much we use our phones has to do with agency. We like to think we are the rulers of our days and are conscious of all our decisions and actions and phones are stark reminder that we are not that guy/gal. The best way to grant yourself back some agency is to get rid of all notifications. 
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-Notifications are really just little serotonin agitators. Check your email when you feel like it, not when a notification badge agitates your serotonin level past the point of resistance. Turn them off, all of them.
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-### Rule Eight: Practice Doing Nothing
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-This does not mean meditating. It means doing nothing. Or at least do nothing productive. When you were a child you were probably happy to lie in the grass all afternoon doing nothing. At most you might pick out shapes in the clouds, but you were fine doing nothing. Or at least if you're over 35 and actually had a childhood then you might remember doing nothing. If not. Well, learn. Practice.
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-Of all the rules in this list, this is the hardest for me. I have this need to always be making something. I am ill at ease doing nothing. I read a good bit, I also practice discursive meditation, but neither of those qualify. The only time I really do nothing, is lying in a hammock, so I make sure to get some time in the hammock at least a couple times a week.
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-It might take some time to figure out the way you do nothing the best. If you do get stuck on this one, I highly recommend a hammock.
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-### Rule Nine: Record Your Practice
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-Write down when you do nothing. Write down when you don't do nothing. Write down how you miss notifications if you do. Write how you overcome your strange screen habits and most of all, write down when you still use screens. Don't judge yourself for it, step back, detach and just record what happened, what you did, and for how long. Try to be a disinterested observer of yourself, this will be much more helpful than berating or congratulating. 
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-### Rule Ten: Get After It
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-[^1]: This is not meant to disparage AA or anyone struggling with alcoholism. Most AA members I know are fully aware of the irony of swapping one addiction for another, but when alcohol has taken over your life to that point, it's not a bad trade to make.
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-### Rules for Screens, Part Three
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-Did you know there's a Reddit for people who want quit staring at screens so much? Also a true story. 
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-## Buying Used
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-I can't recall the last time I bought something new. We almost always buy electronics used, mostly off eBay. We also rarely buy new books. We generally pick up books at used bookstores around the country, but when we can't find what we want we use Thriftbooks.
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-Buying used has several advantages over buying new. The obvious one is that it's almost always cheaper. But beyond that there are other appealing aspects. Buying used means you're not contributing as much to the waste stream of modern economies, and you're (potentially) removing things from that waste stream by finding a use for them. Used items, especially electronics, tend to be functionally superior to new ones[^1] both because they are farther back on the curve of [diminishing returns](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/law%20of%20diminishing%20returns) and because they have stood the test of time. There are exceptions of course, but buy and large last year's model is as good, and sometimes better, than this year's model. 
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-Buying used also enables you to take advantage of little curiosities of time. For example all the really good low-noise sound recording devices seem to have been made between 2007-2016. Why? No idea. But everyone who needs low noise recording seems to agree, and high end recorders from that era sell for more than they did when they were new. Which is to say that buying used isn't always cheaper, but when it's not it generally means you're getting something superior. And not something that the manufacturer thinks is superior, but something the people using it the most think is superior.
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-This is why the only affiliate links on luxagraf.net lead to either eBay or Thriftbooks, my two preferred marketplaces for buying used stuff. 
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-Anyone using affiliate links is trying to sell you something—that includes me—and you should always be suspicious about that. I know my motives are simple, to make some money to pay for this website and maybe some tea for myself, but you have every right to skeptical. Really though, I don't want you to buy anything you don't need. But if you do need something, please buy it used. And if you're going to buy something I've recommended based on my experiences with it, then the affiliate links will help support this website.
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-[^1]: The odd mixture of capitalism and our culture's worship of "progress" means that new things must constantly be released, but the law of diminishing returns suggests that newer/bigger/better/faster eventually fails to deliver any meaningfully improvement. This is most obvious in software, where the most feared phrase in any software user's heart is "please restart to update", but this lack of improvement over previous versions is increasingly painfully obvious in hardware as well.
-## Essay on Will
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-If you want control over what you consume, you're going to have to strengthen your will. So long as you are surrounded by signals that are trying to get you to spend money on crap, it is going to be an uphill battle. If you can I strongly suggest removing yourself from the signals—think about where your attention is going and how you can redirect it to craft rather than stuff. 
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-but there are things more powerful. The most important of those is your will. 
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-If, like most people, you can't pick and move to foreign country for a month then you're going to have to try to change in the midst of the battle so to speak. While possible, this is much much harder. And again, while I like to think I have mastered this, my spreadsheet says otherwise, so take this advice with a grain of salt. Chances are good that this actually much harder than you or I think and you're going to need to put in more effort than I'm suggesting.
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-The most important thing is to develop your will. I am serious. Start doing exercises to develop your will. For example, force your self up out of the chair right now, turn away from the computer and walk to the nearest wall. Touch it. Come back and sit down. Repeat this at random during the day. Is it pointless? Absolutely. So is lifting weights. The principle is the same. So choose a deliberately pointless thing to do, and do it. Then do another one. Then do the same thing every morning for a week. 
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-One will-building exercise I do periodically is what I call, for lack of a better phrase, micro travel. It works like this: pick a place at random in the city you live, somewhere you've never been. Choose a time and make an appointment with yourself. Now go work out all the details of getting there, if possible use public transit or walk. Then meet yourself there and make sure you're there on time. Now enjoy a few minutes exploring the area and head home.
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-I'll leave thinking up other exercises to you, but the point is to develop your will, to have control over your life. It takes a little time to see and feel the effects of this, it's quite subtle, but it will cascade throughout your life in a number of interesting ways, I promise. One will be better control over your impulses. When you walk into, say Target, to buy a new toothbrush your newly developed will will make it easier to walk past everything else and only buy the toothbrush. 
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-Eventually your will may help you recognize that stores that have everything are too much for your will. It would be cleverer to buy that toothbrush at a smaller store with fewer things, because it's easier to remove temptation than resist it. Think of it like dieting. If you're trying to eat less ice cream it's much easier to not walk down the ice cream aisle at all than it is to walk down it and without buying anything.
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-This also leads into my second suggestion for buying less stuff: change your habits. It's convenient to go to Target and get everything you need in one place, but chances are you're going to spend more than you intended without realizing it. In fact the entire experience of being in Target has been engineered to increase the chance you'll spend more than you intended. Every time you enter a store you are entering a hostile environment designed to extract your life energy from you. 
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-Oh sure it's all abstracted so you don't have think of it that way. Still, strip the abstraction and relationship is pretty clear, you trade hours of your life for shit you buy at Target. You get up the morning and go to work. That's a day of your life you just traded for paper tickets. Why do you need those tickets? To put a roof over your head and food in your stomach. Pretty much everything after that is not strictly necessary. So once those basics are met you're in th realm of swapping your existence on earth for stuff. 
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-The less stuff you buy, the less you need to work. By extension, the less time you spend in places designed to extract money from you, the less of your life you'll have to trade for stuff.
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-That's a habit you can break—going to all-in-one-place stores—but there are other habits you can build that will help immensely as well. 
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-One of the things I've been at pains to avoid is making it sound like we don't like the United States. In fact we do very much, it's one of the most beautiful places in the world and has some of the wildest and safest wilderness you're ever going to enter. 
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-Unfortunately, the United States is not the best travel value for us. Without an income we'd have to dip heavily into savings to travel the states in the bus. 
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 # Birds
 
 ## Carolina Wren