Home · Articles · 2015 · What to Do When You Can't Do Anything
What can we do?
The question on everyone’s mind. First, I’d say no one can tell you WHAT to do. Second, I think a general, rough, decentralized, leaderless, “plan” everyone can follow their way with their own skills, but that moves us in the same direction, is a good place to look for a “solution”.
The elevator pitch
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If dollars are power, why do we spend them so freely?
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Disengage the thieves’ economy on all non-essential functions.
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Deploy capital today on solutions for tomorrow that require no dollar inputs.
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Spend free-time with loved ones while pursuing quality of life improving goals.
Some details
Every day we pursue a lifestyle that revolves around spending. We go out to eat, see movies, play video games, buy cars, houses, talk on the phones, etc. All of the “middle-class” stuff. These very purchases are what fuels the very corporations (and government which it has corrupted) that most everyone complains about.
While you need a roof over your head and food in your belly, do you really NEED all of the other stuff? We spend so many hours “making money” while complaining about the destruction of the family unit - in the name of “paying the bills” or “putting food on the table”. While there are certainly those in such dire a position that all their money goes to living, many more are living with a lot more niceties than necessities. Would not you rather swap the amount time you spend at your JOB with the time you spend with your LOVED ONES? Of course there is no “career path” that would support this thinking…
If we stop paying for all that middle-class crap and start instead investing in ourselves (sounds cheesy, but it is true), maybe we could build a better life directly, instead of trying to buy one. A simple example of how you could redirect dollars would be to install a garden and/or orchard. You’d be spending dollars and labor to put them in today, but in the future you’d get dollar-free fruits (You’ll need to labor yearly for them though, compost/trim/harvest - see permaculture for details).
If enough people installed gardens, we could bankrupt companies like Monsanto. Every dollar in food you grow is a dollar less that fuels this corruption.
Remember SOPA from a few year back? GoDaddy backed SOPA and reddit started a boycott on GoDaddy. People made “How to Transfer Away from GoDaddy” sites with simple instructions so non-tech people (GoDaddy’s audience) could move to better solutions. What happened? GoDaddy quickly changed their tune, condemning SOPA, (a lie no doubt) the second their bottom line was threatened. Money talks, bullshit walks.
These are just simple examples. Everyone has specific problems in their lives they pay to fix. Find a way to fix it yourself - cut out the middle men.
My neighbor, a handy guy, was about to call the furnace repair guy a month ago when his furnace didn’t come on. I pushed him to investigate it further and he had it working for under $20 and a few hours research online. He was beaming about his accomplishment all day (and little did he know, he sapped the money masters)!
Lastly, with all the time that you aren’t shopping or sitting in front of the YouTube (your time is more valuable than your dollar) you can now spend an increased amount of time with loved ones. Continue working together as a family/community to keep solving problems without dollars.
Maybe we can start this holiday season? What if a lot of us decided that we’d rather spend the whole holiday with our loved ones and not spend any time or money shopping?
I’m already broke/unemployed!
Time is your capital. You can learn online how to do so many things. I mentioned permaculture before, but places like Khan Academy, MIT Open Courseware, The Teaching Company, Gutenberg, bittorrent, and even YouTube have a load of educational material on anything you might be interested in. Forget a college degree, learn something and do it. Build a portfolio to show yourself off if it isn’t something you can do alone.
You’d also better know how to cook and be in good shape.
Ideal Results
As people stop participating in the thieves’ economy, big businesses will start to go broke. There may be government intervention/bail-outs, but there could never be a law forcing you to purchase without revealing the emperor has no clothes. As more companies go broke, people will be out of JOBS (don’t worry, there is PLENTY of WORK to be done). Less economic activity. Basically a depression.
The world is moving away from the dollar already and this will probably play out over a long grind, but I suggest we pull the rug out from under “the eCONomy” today and take our pain, sort of like pulling off a band-aid quickly.
Yes, I suspect there will be extreme unpleasantness, but from this mother, innovation will rise. How many young people are wasting their lives away with MEDIA? What could they do in a real market? You hear about small farms and small business being bullied out of existence all the time. These are the people who are willing to put up with all the regulations. How many more would love to start a small business/farm but can’t because of artificial barriers to entry?
Oh, what if it were OK to sell canned vegetables or run a small restaurant out of your kitchen? What if we didn’t need a permit to handle used tires or accept waste human food (that you might use to feed animals or process into fuel/compost)? Communities taking care of each others’ best interests without the need for permits…
Removing the “elites’” hold on global trade is the only way to even think about loosening their influence. Well, I can think of another, deadlier, way, but that almost assures a new set of “kings”. Plus who are the right heads to remove? Gov? lackeys. Fed? Primary dealers? lackeys. BIS? closer, but lackeys. Further still, if you aren’t willing to give up your Netflix, do you really think you are going to revolt?
Why not organize
The Tea Party and Occupy Wall street are perfect example of how any kind of protest/march will not work. While both organizations had perfectly reasonable “demands” (gov spending reduction/money out of politics), they were spun by the media as gun-toting redneck idiots and hippies shitting up the park. Next some agent provocateurs get the “movement” some bad publicity and our fickle not-paying-attention public is swayed.
Movements like this would likely be more effective if the economy was in shambles and the television couldn’t explain the people’s frustrations away.
Global and domestic
This was written for those in the USA of course. Anyone outside the USA can help by not buying the same stuff mentioned above. From what I see Hollywood and Wall Street have a pretty nice income from their non-domestic operations. Not to mention Lockheed and Boeing. Although the latter are often out of the public’s hands.
tl;dr:
GENERAL BOYCOTT on anything that doesn’t improve the quality of your life and reduce your reliance on dollars.