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Don't be disheartened. Get re-heartened. With a few resources you can create your own micro-utopia. The human species may very well be a lost cause on a global scale, but do not fret, for you can be a part of success stories on a smaller scale.
I'm not talking about the pursuit of wealth and power. Don't make your utopia by externalizing all the harms. Find a way of living that just minimizes the harms. Find joy in helping other beings and learn not to wait for a dopamine hit in return (there are diminishing returns if you rely on that).
Plant some trees. Feed some birds. Repair equipment other people were throwing out. Pick up some plastic crap from a beach.
Detach your mind from the negative words and actions of the haters--they're on a different journey. The most satisfying aspect of mammalian existence is love. Share it and grow it.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 11 2022, @08:32PM (5 children)
Thank you. Anyone have links to low cost project guides? It can be tough to figure out where to start, and few have much money to spend.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday January 11 2022, @08:51PM
This kind of approach covers so many different disciplines that I doubt there's going to be one master guide for how to do it all. Obviously the best way to create stuff without spending much money is to build things out of stuff that other people are no longer interested in. Timber from old furniture, or a scrap boat, sheet metal from a broken washing machine, etc. I'm sure you already know there are plans and video guides to make just about anything available for free online now. I made bird houses from bits of old boat, for example (just basically a rectangular box with a large entry hole drilled, and a sloping lid with bits of inner tube to keep it watertight, and small air holes in the bottom).
If you're lucky enough to have access to a garden area and start to compost your leftover food you can soon build up fertile soil to grow stuff. I wouldn't recommend trying to live off the food you grow but what you can do is grow things with interesting flavors, so you get your basic calories and nutrition cheaply from a grocery store but make your meals more exciting with something home grown. If you live around herbivorous animals like goats, sheep, rabbits, etc, you can also fertilize your plants really easily with their dung and they will grow huge.
Is that the sort of inspiration you were looking for?
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by acid andy on Tuesday January 11 2022, @09:26PM (2 children)
Forgot to say if you search for "regrowing vegetables", you can find that quite a few veg that you buy in the grocery store can be put in water (or sometimes straight into soil) and will grow back even after eating most of it. It's hit and miss but costs nothing.
I've also grown chilli plants from the seeds from a packet of chillies. I created a sort of Darwinian system in a large pot of soil--I just kept sprinkling some chilli seeds in it when I ate the chillies and let the plants compete with one another until the strongest one emerged. As they were obviously bred for commercial farming I found the plant to be incredibly resilient and it's been self-pollinating and producing delicious chillies for at least six or seven years so far (kept on a window sill). Potatoes from the grocery store grow pretty well too--you don't need expensive seed potatoes (you just have to watch out for any catching blight and dispose of those, don't compost them).
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Freeman on Tuesday January 11 2022, @10:30PM (1 child)
Growing your own food can be as simple or complicated as you make it. Usually something like Chili peppers or herbs (essentially, useful weeds) are easy to grow. Dill, Basil, Cilantro/Coriander, Parsley, and other herbs are usually pretty easy to grow. Also, fresh herbs are much tastier than the store bought junk. So, even if you only have a small area that you could grow something, indoors even. You can pick a herb or two and get extremely good results. You may need to do a little research as to when it's best to harvest, etc. Like for Sweet Basil, if you wait until it starts going to seed (flowering and producing seeds) to harvest, the leaves will be bitter, instead of slightly sweet.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Gaaark on Wednesday January 12 2022, @12:28AM
and you can always seek out a community garden and help there. (Make sure it is for eating and not just giving away to food banks, unless you don't care...)
Lots of volunteers making a lot of food and caring for 'your spot of veggies' when you are sick...if you gots da time, you gots some food.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Wednesday January 12 2022, @04:08AM
I guess my point is that there are endless videos that describe just about anything you want to build. A brief selection from my last few years of watching: workbenches, hydroelectric dams, wood joints, greenhouses, radio telescopes, aquariums, roman temples (more an East Asia take on that), vacuum tube electronics, whatever.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RedIsNotGreen on Tuesday January 11 2022, @08:35PM
I've been living this way for a couple of years now, started before COVID.
I'm working on my own dev projects, and I'm much happier than when I was working six-figure jobs and had all the money I knew how to spend and then some.
I would like to add that there is a spiritual component in it for me, which has helped tremendously. I frequently converse with whatever is out there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 11 2022, @10:44PM (2 children)
Too late!
At first I wrote off 2020 as a sabbatical year, figuring that our bright bio-engineering guys would chart us a course out of the pandemic by early 2021. This vision was working until the evangelical vanguard got spooked into mistaking bio-engineering as the machinations of Satan and began actively opposing sane methods of pandemic response. Even now they persist in this misunderstanding while they are dropping like flies.
Meanwhile mother nature and evolution stepped up to complicate the task by spawning new varieties of viruses, until now it seems like we are in a biblical scourge, wherein the seven diseased cows can only survive by devouring the seven healthy cows that came before them.
Yesterday, I got the news that my BFF and his wife are ill with the Omicron. While I expect they will survive - having vaccinated - still there is risk since they are nearly seventy years old with underlying medical conditions. Hospitals are overflowing and the Omicron wave seems nowhere near peaking. And we haven't yet begun to see the "Omega" variant wave.
And I haven't had a sit-down meal in a restaurant in two years!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 11 2022, @11:02PM
I wish we didn't share this pain. It's like WWII at home, but without the little joys. The McRibb came out a few months ago... even it wasn't very good... and it cost $5.50. I made a list of my issues, and then deleted it. I hope your list is shorter.
An 80yo double-vaccinated relative caught Omicron, and was better within two days, without hospitalization. Perhaps that's our hope for the winter.
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Thursday January 13 2022, @01:03AM
Seeing that kind of stupidity and gullibility during this pandemic is exactly what pushed me to openly declare myself a Satanist last year. I've been a member of The Satanic Temple for a while but didn't pay too much attention to it. Now I'll just fucking admit it if someone asks me.
Whatever that "God" and his followers represents, I want the opposite. Hail Satan.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 11 2022, @11:39PM (2 children)
> Plant some trees. Feed some birds. Repair equipment other people were throwing out. Pick up some plastic crap from a beach.
Self-evaluation on a +/- 10 scale:
Trees -- inherited ~100 acres of marginal farmland and woodland, family used to camp there but now it just hosts a section of one of the long hiking trails (beautiful area). So I was happily growing trees...until the gas company came along, cut down 10,000 trees (most quite small) and put in a transmission pipeline for fracked gas. So I say this one is a loss, even though I'm trying = -2
Feed some birds -- we try, but even with one of the hinging-closed feeders, I fear we feed at least as many squirrel-acrobats. But we do feed birds in the winter = +2
Repair equipt -- yes! Some doesn't even need repairing, during the first lockdown the neighbors were cleaning out basements. Found a perfectly good SVGA 4:3 screen and it's still in use with an old Thinkpad that lost it's screen. Neighbors threw out a nice hose reel because it was badly coated in cigarette smoke, pressure washer cleaned it right up. Same for all sorts of other suburban waste. Calling this = +5 [We've met some of the local scavengers who cruise the night before trash day, they are the ones that get a +10]
Beach -- don't live near a beach, but we do recycle and compost more than half our trash (the rest is sent to some unknown landfill) = +3 [Rural artist friends have managed to eliminate nearly all plastic from their house, buying only bulk food, glass and paper packaging, etc, they get the +10]
What's your score?
(Score: 2) by turgid on Wednesday January 12 2022, @08:24PM (1 child)
Talking of trees, last year I planted some trees.
To be more accurate, I planted some seeds from some trees in some pots with compost, in the hope that they will germinate in the spring and then I can plant them out.
I also planted some saplings, or rather transplanted them. They had grown from some other trees in the wrong place and in huge numbers, too close to each other all to be viable in the long term, and likely to be cut down anyway. Wild deer have tried to eat a few of them since, but most are doing fine.
I don't know if it'll work, but I thought I would try scattering some tree seeds, berries and pine cones on some empty ground to see if anything would grow as a result. It wasn't much work, but it got me out of the house in the fresh air.
There are also some oak and chestnut saplings that I need to transplant before the spring. They're from seeds I collected the autumn before last. The only problem is that the wild deer have got to them, so I don't know if they'll recover. There are some I planted ten years prior that have survived, but only just.
Planting trees is good for the environment, it's good for us and it's good for wild birds and animals. It's very calming being among trees.
I might get some guards for some of the saplings to protect them against the deer and I might buy some more of specific species to plant. It would be nice to have some different colours. There are some nice trees with red leaves which would provide a bit of contrast.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 12 2022, @11:43PM
> nice trees with red leaves
This guy could identify them https://www.dravesarboretum.org/ [dravesarboretum.org] and probably tell you about related varieties that you might also have success with...in your climate. Had a tour some years back, while it's a commercial nursery, they maintain the arboretum like a park--it's their business "showroom".
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Thursday January 13 2022, @01:05AM (11 children)
Well thought out, well formulated, but I've had an awful day and feel especially like being a Debbie Downer, so consider the following [imgur.com]. The kind of day where you go to the "Garden of Hope" at your mom's cancer center and there is no garden except for the trees, which are all dead.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Thursday January 13 2022, @01:33AM (5 children)
And before you say "hurr it's winter, they lose leaves in winter", this is Arizona, nobody plants normal trees here.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday January 13 2022, @02:29AM (2 children)
Now that really is sad about that garden. I was going to say they should've gone with cacti but I'm not sure a Garden of prickly Hope is the kind of thing they were going for. And it's pretty easy to kill cacti too I think. Sorry to hear about your mom.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Thursday January 13 2022, @02:47AM (1 child)
Thanks buddy, I appreciate it. She's thankfully in remission for the moment, but I can't say the same about her dementia.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 4, Insightful) by acid andy on Thursday January 13 2022, @03:28AM
If you don't mind me saying, anecdotally it feels like there are maybe signs of more dementia in our parents' generation than their parents, but I can't be bothered to dig for stats right now (found one headline supporting it but that's not science). Maybe we just notice it more now because we're forced to face up to it. I guess our grandparents' generation were better at hiding away the ones that they didn't like to talk about.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 13 2022, @06:17PM (1 child)
In Arizona [healthdata.org], the virus peaked a month ago, even with the snowbird invasion, and so few wearing masks, and kids left free-range at Fry's market here. The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades... and a mask.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 18 2022, @10:19PM
Wanna feel better about it all? Check out the link in the above post. The virus is all over with in May.
Wanna feel even better? It's over in California [healthdata.org] in April.
Wanna feel worse? It'll be over in Arizona, right when it gets too hot to do anything.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday January 13 2022, @02:09AM (2 children)
I wrote it in seconds in a rare bout of optimistic mania.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Subsentient on Thursday January 13 2022, @02:56AM (1 child)
Well at least you still get those. I don't really get those anymore. Just good ol' doom and despair for good ol' sbubby.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 3, Touché) by acid andy on Thursday January 13 2022, @03:18AM
I'll try and be thankful for those small mercies then I guess.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday January 14 2022, @06:59AM (1 child)
In that case, you should definitely rewatch the Debbie Downer [youtu.be] skits themselves.
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Friday January 14 2022, @07:57PM
She's a goddamn lightweight. :^)
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti