Overview
This is the more practical sub-course — to complement the Thought Course . It is aimed at sustainable farming, building our own tiny house, and in general acquiring a future-proof skill-set. The Skills Course helps you to bring evermore basic aspects of life under your own command and in particular the basic physiological needs of Maslow’s pyramid: homeostasis, health, food, water, restoration, clothes, and shelter.
Typically we need others — our authorities — to help us satisfy even the most mundane daily needs and to set-up and protect the conditions in which we can function. The Skills Course helps you to become more independent on external authorities and hence to become authoritative in evermore aspects of daily life.
Take food. At the lowest skill-level you eat meals prepared by others (such as food ordered online), at an intermediate skill-level you cook meals from (super)market ingredients, and at the highest skill-level you grow most of your ingredients yourself and create meals from that. This corresponds to diminishing levels of control you grant others — your de facto authorities — over key aspects of your life.
- At the lowest skill level you fully relinquish control over where you feed yourself with and how it is produced and with that you lost control over basic physiological needs such as your own homeostasis and health
- At the second skill level you take partial control, especially if you impose more strict demands on what you eat and how it should be produced (e.g., organic, local, unprocessed).
- At the third level you are in command of this aspect of your life: you have become your own food-authority and you can make this serviceable to others. And directly associated is enhanced control over homeostasis and health.
In general, living beings remain alive through the selection and execution of behaviors that keep them alive: they are themselves responsible for their own continued existence. They are responsible for their health and future opportunities. As a defining requirement of life, this also holds for humans.
But humanity has created comfortable (urban) environments in which need satisfaction seems nearly effortless: just order a pizza. While ordering a pizza satisfies your need for food, you make and keep yourself dependent on a huge, complex, and obscure food system. Hence it is the shallowest and least secure way of taking responsibility for continued existence. So while the lowest skill level can be comfortable — you do not have to cook so you can watch a Netflix series — it is not nearly as satisfying and connecting to deeper drives than being in command of your own food, health, home, garden, and destiny.
It is easy to identify these three skill levels in all kind of aspects of daily life.
Why farming and building as basic skills?
Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.
— Albert Einstein
In the skills course you learn, among many other basic skills, to grow your own food. Not to help you to become a farmer (although it helps), but to expose you to one of the defining skills of modern humanity and to provide you with a myriad of experiences associated with life & dead, survival & thriving, controlled & self-organizing systems. But most of all to expose you to the rule and complexity of the "real world".
You can interact with Nature, but unlike social interactions, you cannot argue with Nature and it cannot be fooled or cheated. It is simply not listening. Nature is unforgiving and unreasonable: if you screw-up, nature will not help or give a price for participation. Nature has no social security, no helpdesk, no money-back guarantee. To work with Nature, you have to work within the restrictions it imposes on you and the complexity it confronts you with. And to understand these you have to observe, interact, and learn. Only then you become skillful in using the rules of Nature to create beneficial opportunities.
The social world is generally much more forgiving. If half of the population has one opinion about the state of reality and the other half a conflicting opinion, at least one half must be wrong. But many people just think that "every one has the right to have an opinion". Perhaps everyone has that right, but Nature doesn’t care: it just shows you the consequences of your actions: for better or worse. And whomever has unrealistic expectations will at some point be confronted with them: painfully perhaps.
And that is the case for farming as well as for building. If you act foolishly your plants will not produce a harvest and your building will fail. But if you act wisely, prudently, and skilled you have an abundant harvest and what you build provides lasting comfort with a minimum of effort and waste. That is deeply satisfying and it is a great basis to future-proof yourself.
Projects and theory
Apart from the farming, which continues throughout the year, the activities are centered around projects that are in part self selected and in part necessary school-of-thought infrastructure to be build. Often many different solutions exists and we can within bounds determine what to build and how to build it.
Typically theory precedes practice and movies, chapters, or podcasts can be part of a weeks preparation.
Skills
This section is not finalized!
Vegetable farming.
The course is planned along the growing season from the end of Februari to November.
| Month | Activities |
|---|---|
| February | Year planning. Pruning, cleaning, (re)structuring, fertilizing, adding chalk |
| March | Protected seeding, nursing |
| April | Preparing growing beds, allowing weeds to germinate and weed them |
| May | Planting of seedlings, seeding (first batch) |
| June | Weeding and first harvest |
| Juli | Harvest, seeding (second batch) |
| August | Harvesting, processing, preserving (jams, drying, rum topf) |
| September | Harvest and preserving |
| October | Last harvests, cleaning the fields, compost |
| November | readying for winter |
Lots of hands-on work
- Feeling the soil, smell it, analyse it, watch it live, die, and turn (back) into nutrients
- Feel and understand seeds and how seedlings emerge from them
- Learn to keep your own plants alive: attent them
- Shared responsibility
We will use 6-fold rotation of vegetable beds.
- 5 for vegetables: cabbages, beans, leaves, roots, "fruits"
- 1 resting, barely used (except for potatoes)
- multi-year plants (e.g., asparagus)
- flowers
Building
- Structural design & foundations
- Insulation and waterproofness
- Installations (water, electricity, ventilation, stoves)
- Roof and windows
- Outdoor kitchen
-
Compost toilet
- Building materials
- Wood working and wooden structures (wall supports, roofs)
- Straw and cob (walls)
- Bricks and concrete
- Metals
Learning to guestimate
- Always know the approximate answer before the precise answer
- Use your body and other familiar items to measure
Reducing to essences
- Simplify your life
- How much do you use (energy, resources, time, …) versus how much do you need?
- What is sustainable in you life, what definitely not (and is therefore likely to degrade)
How to take command of your own life
- Adapt general insights to personal solutions
- What values do you want to enact versus which values do you enact versus which values can you enact?
- find your own path
- Detect BS in society: challenge the norm.
Develop your own idea
- Fragile form
- Developed form
- Robust form
Electricity
- Make your own bicycle light
- Reduce your wattage: how to make your (tiny) home much more energy efficient
Food & cooking
- Harvesting, cleaning, storage
- Taking care of chickens
- Meat and dairy products
- DIY cooking methods
- Rocket stove
- Sous vide & slow-cooking system (highly energy efficient)
- Haybox (hooikist)
- Winter "refrigerator"
Computers and the web
- Privacy and anonymous surfing
- Simple computers
Clothing
- Determining clothing quality
- Repairs
- Maintenance
Money & Wealth
- Limiting your needs
- Financial resilience
- The money system & financial system
- Different forms of wealth