SKIPPING A STEP I lay in bed for ages this morning. Fair enough on a Sunday, but then I did the same thing on Saturday and I had tons of weekend jobs that have been building up over the last few weeks/months/years, few of which are getting done. This indeed is why I haven't been posting here much lately, well combined with me getting into the habit of working late in the evening which is something I need to get out of immediately because I can't function well enough the next day if I then get up as early as usual, then I need to work late to make up for the late start, so it's a vicious cycle. The weekend is my only chance to reset. Gah, anyway while lying awake this morning thinking about everything from sex to whether an OLED television could be adapted to work as a 3D scanner, I wondered once again about my position within my own vague long-term plan for myself. This plan is by no means definite - I have no will to create more rules for myself than are strictly necessary - but of course the current and next steps are more or less defined, as they have been since I left school (a time increasingly distant). First is to secure a reliable yearly income to support the most modest yet comfortable life, by attempting various business projects and finding one/some that make money (unfortunately so far most either haven't made money, or not nearly enough, or not reliably enough). Second is to maintain the business while not spending as much time on new expansion or diversification, instead spending that time on personal projects that aim at improving my own lifestyle and reducing my dependance on money and society. Honestly, the aim of step two is to eliminate the need for step one. The business, I know now, will always be a detriment to my lifestyle because I don't like dealing with people, and one way or other it will always involve dealing with people - or at a bare minimum (investing), the consequences of their actions. They are, after all, the ones who give you the money. The task then is to maintain a vaguely modern and comfortable way of living while not being exposed to significant recurring costs. Basically, life without bills. Before even starting work on step two, I've probably done better than most. Water falls from the sky, so what fool pays for stuff? Indeed I've got the rusty guttering working well enough, and leaky pipes patched up enough, that I'm in no danger of needing to buy in water (I'm a long way from any mains supply anyway). Internet costs at most $30 - $40 a year - they put television over the air for free so I don't know why people insist on paying for the data to download it - 3GB/month is plenty, even including a fair bit of low-res video, well unless you need to install one of these damn huge modern Linux distros that is... For goods, I do my physical best to fix and maintain things myself, and as a last resort most common goods cost trivial amounts to buy second hand at op-shops and garage sales. Online advertisments for free or cheap stuff are another source, though usually involve a long to impractical drive for me. But still many of my living costs are definately significant - food, electricity, fuel, telephone (landline, mobile is cheap but only because I don't use it - it just lives in the car for when it breaks down or hits something), and taxes. Also things that are beyond me to fix myself due to serious (that is to say, even more than usual) lack of skill and special tools - replacing parts in my car's suspension, and repairing the reverse-cycle air conditioner in the house (also the A/C the car, which has been broken for years for this very reason for that matter), are examples [in a related post that I've been not finding time to write for months now, I want to dig into the idea of technology DIY-ability]. I've already described my best approach to running a car without paying for fuel in the ideas section. While it would be within my budget to buy old truck starter motors, the batteries would be a BIG cost whatever you do, and they'd be a recurring one as they wear out every 5-10 years, and I've got no DIY solution for them, so it's not really a solution at all. The best I can come up with is to buy crashed electric cars from the car auctions (I've bought there before), use the battery and sell on the other parts to make up for the cost. But now I'm dealing with people again - plus the people who make the cars are increasing making sure that all of the electronic parts (which is starting to mean all of the parts, because they're putting electronics in everything now) know their serial number and will be rejected if "transplanted" into another vehicle. So I'm stuffed there - those bloody other people would be all tied in with my life again! Then there's where to get the electricity to charge the batteries? But here I have got an idea that I like. Actually I like it enough that I _really_ want to try it, but also publish information about it and possibly even start a business replicating it for others (this may just be an excuse at tying it into step one so that I have a chance of allowing myself to work on it). As such I can't describe it here because I'll ruin my anominity if I publish details later on my website. As a vague outline, it's solar powered and uses water to store energy instead of batteries. Charging an electric car might be a streatch for it actually, but I'd really like to see if it would be practical for powering a house. Material costs would be significant, but not extreme if done economically, and most importantly everything would be repairable - nothing like batteries or solar panels that last for so long, then have to be junked and bought/installed all over again at great expense. It would take _lots_ of time, ideally I would want to be working on nothing else for up to a year. For food, of course it's not so radical to grow your own. The problem with this though is that I can't just work on it for a few months in a row, get it set up, then go onto something else - it's a constant demand to tend to plants and animals weekly, or daily if doing it properly, for the rest of one's life. I don't imagine balancing that with running a business very well, but again maybe once it's set up and I'm not desperately trying to develop more and more new business/product ideas as the old ones consistently fail to attract any customers. Or of course if I give up on step one altogether. Telephone: Again after I've given up on the business, then I'm free to force everyone left who wants to communicate with me (not a huge crowd as it is - ~70% of my calls are spam) into using email - I always preferred that anyway. Currently my internet isn't fast enough for VoIP to be usable, but that might change. Then there are the two that I don't have an answer for - specialist repairs and, most significantly, taxes. The certainty that the last one will never go away is a real influence on me not pursuing self sufficiency in priority over securing a reliable income. Even if you might be able to scare away anyone trying to collect council rates by building a gate out of scrap and painting crude red swastikas on it, you're pretty much trapped there then. Even if they don't care enough to come down hard on the rates, you won't be paying for car registration or a driver's licence, so you'll eventually get caught by a cop while driving, and living out here while not driving takes things to another level - certainly not compatible with any sort of business that I would want to be involved in. So there I've justified again why I should insist on making the business work, because I'll probably never be able to satisfy the requirements for my ideal self sufficient lifestyle completely. I can work on that afterwards, as step two of life, and see how far I can get. Except step one isn't working either! It could easily soon reach a decade spent trying to reach this mythical steady, sufficient, income, with only hints of things that sort-of worked and mountains of things that didn't come within a mile, to show for it. So as with so many of my plans, there really isn't a good option, both steps won't work whichever way 'round I try to implement them, and the alternatives (working for someone else, or running a business that deals with people more directly) mean committing to a secure, but unhappy, life. I've talked about this before here, at less length, I think. It's not a new doubt, and my answer so far has just been not to think about it. Try harder, compromise my ideals, make step one work if it kills me so that I can save myself later via step two. But my will is fading with that, and mainly because it hasn't worked any better either - maybe worse. I've just got bogged down with complex projects targeting markets (people) that I don't fully understand. And my answer to that is just to not think about it too much, and day-to-day I mostly do alright with that, for now. So with all that on my mind, I was thinking this morning about how step two lingered off on the horizon, never seeming any closer. Is it time perhaps to abandon the plan, all my years of rationalisation, and just try doing both steps at once for hope that one will in parts aid the other, or succeed without needing my effort to be concentrated on it entirely. The ideal would be a week on one, a week on the other, but 2-3 days each week need to be on the business just to keep goods flowing, even assuming that I do daily things like responding to emails and dealing with complaints in the morning and evening (this is where I mentioned in the past how a digital-only business seems ideal, because then only the email/complaint handling part is required). So perhaps I could schedule one or two days dedicated to important personal projects. I'm not sure though, I struggle a lot to get back to things after the weekend because my memory looses track of what I was doing very quickly after a break (I sometime work through a day of the weekend for this reason, just to get to a solid point to pick up from - I make pages of notes, but they don't replace a good memory of things). Sometimes it's not really till Tuesday that I've really understood what I was doing, and Monday's just a waste (I'm quite sure that my memory is abnormally poor). But in spite of this I need to change something so maybe I shouldn't let myself reason my way out of this and just try it. Try the electricity generation I guess - that's the most hopeful part of step two, and might possibly offer a business opportunity as well. Yet didn't I say I really needed up to a year working on nothing else due to all the work involved? Hmm... Yeah it's a serious decision that I'm taking on in this post, really whether to steer in a different direction to where I've been trying to go for many years now, albeit more of a slight bend than a full right angle. I'm afraid I'm not going to satisfy you with a conclusion. I'm thinking about it. I'm also thinking about art, and I've had some plans there too. But you can't make money from art unless you deal a lot with people, and even then... No, I think I'll either be keeping on as it is or building my power plant, and nobody would credit either with much hope of success, least of all me. - The Free Thinker.