Two Roads Diverged in a New Humanity.

We live in an age of technology, convenience, and luxury.  Since the industrial revolution in 1760, we have had more available to us every generation than the previous ones. We no longer have to grow our own food, make our own clothing, or even fix the items we own- we can just throw them away and go buy ones.  This has created a new world full of waste, poor quality, and clueless people who have no clue where anything comes from other than the store and a humanity that has no clue how to make anything anymore.  To me, this is disheartening to see.  Before this revolution, we had roughly 3,000 years of having to learn skills to survive, providing a lifestyle from the land around us, and the need for a community of specialized tradespeople.  In about 260 years we have slowly lost our way and become dependent on a society that frankly never cared about us to begin with.  Take the pandemic for example:  supply chains interrupted, monetary loss, and a worldwide shortage of items being mass produced led to people having to go without.  What if this happened on a larger scale? Imagine if our stores and economy crumbled and we were only left with the skills we personally had to survive?  Could you do it? 

In the 5,000 years of recorded human history we have only lived as such for about 260 of those years.  It has become “radical” to grow your own food, to make your own household items or clothing, and to live a lifestyle closer to that of our ancestors.  It is no longer important to so many people to be able to have any applicable survival skills because they are complacent in the supply and the theory of work, money, and reward.  We are now a miserable society of people who work jobs they hate to buy things from stores they don’t want to be at, to give money to our real “governing” bodies (those with more money than us) because that’s just how it goes.  I decided a long time ago that was not a life I wanted personally.  To me, an item is not worth money, it is worth TIME.  If I make $10 an hour, and something costs the same then if I purchase it I am saying “this item is worth one hour of my life.”  I discovered that I could live more like my grandmother and put more time in my garden, grow better and cleaner foods, and work less at things that were not as satisfying.  The intrinsic satisfaction of being able to produce something from your own hands is worth it alone, and the time is better spent. 

These days we want to talk about recycling a lot as well- this is the ULTIMATE recycling and earth saving processes! Learning what you could forage from the land to eat, to use in our home apothecary, and what the earth is giving us eliminates a need for much more harmful practices.  Learning how to sew allows you to reuses every scrap of fabric to lessen your impact and personal waste.  Even food scraps going into home composting will keep them from landfills and renourish the earth.  It always astounds me how many people are amazed when I walk a couple miles instead of driving.  “What’s wrong with your car? Where is it?  How far was it? How long did it take?”  Some people are even as wasteful as driving down their driveway to check their mail instead of taking a pleasant walk.  This is a dual-purpose item as well: it allows us to do something better for our mind and body while using less fossil fuels!  It’s a win from any direction.

I’m not saying that you have to make 100% of things in your home and never drive or fly or use modern inventions; that would be a huge pain and we would be depriving ourselves of innovation. However, if we all did a little better or the best we are able to do then the world would be a different place.  This plays wholly into wellness- spiritual, environmental, physical, emotional, social even! We can learn, teach, inspire, and produce things on a small scale that are reused, recycled, repurposed, home grown, homemade, and it really makes a difference. 

If we all did what we were able to do, gave more value to learning skills and trades, and cut down on our waste by adopting the practices of old with the knowledge of new we could change this world.  This resurgence is seen currently as a new way of life and that’s not the truth at all. Our ancestors were masters at this and we have lost our own way in the subsequent generations.  We consume and create waste at astronomical levels, and this road is actually the road less traveled in the history of humanity.  In our 5,000 year history, we have only been doing so for 260 years or roughly 5% of our existence. A way of life with less waste, more home production, and more personal skill is what we see currently as the road more traveled because more modern people are taking it, however they have lost their way and forgotten a path that was widely traveled for 4,740 years before them.  I choose the road more traveled.