Found A Solution

This week I wrestled with the chicken door conundrum from last week and came to a decision. I decided not to automate anything – I want inconvenience, I want to rely on others to help me, I want to be in debt to others, feed the “friendship economy”.  

I buried 1’ long bricks underground all around the coop. Making it so rats and racoons can’t dig into the coop. Now they can survive in the small run underneath their bedroom (not ideal) but it will allow me to leave town for a night if I need to. Longer periods will need help from friends. 

Objects isolate us. 

A new shovel I bought means I do not have to go ask my neighbor for a shovel. It means I don’t have that short conversation/status update on their life. It means that I do not feel inclined to do something nice in return and that they don’t feel the satisfaction of helping someone. It means that they might not know that they can come to me to ask for a favor. It means I don’t get to see inside their house and notice some thing that we may have in common and could bond over. It means that they don’t have an easy topic of conversation asking what I plan to do with the item. I may not get a good piece of advice before I set off on a road that has been traveled before. If we are two strangers in ideas, race, class, we may never connect otherwise.

Capitalism has encouraged us to kit out our tool rooms and buy whatever we need – it is just what you do to be serious. We offer our stuff willingly to others (I am a Dewalt guy, if you need anything let me know!) But do we expect to ever hear from those people? We hope we do, we want to be helpful/useful. Self reliance is both good and not what we want. We got all this stuff from prematurely optimizing our hobbies just laying around doing nothing, a low level noise on our to-do listing minds.