Here's a concept to make you think about the value of self sufficiency: society is efficient. In other words, it is more efficient for me to spend my time earning money in my trade to pay an expert to fix my car than it is for me to buy a car manual, work out what's wrong with my car, fix it myself, and probably still not do as a good a job as the expert. In purely financial terms, it is (as far as I can work out on a scrap of paper) often more efficient to spend time earning money through the thing I am skilled at and to pay others for their skills than it is to become an expert in everything I could ever need.
Of course, as I attempted to explain in my first post, self sufficiency for us is not just about finance. It is about the environment (it is greener for me to never leave my house than it is to drive to the supermarket and buy food that has travelled half way round the world) and about quality of life (I, personally, prefer to have the satisfaction of growing my vegetables to sitting in an air conditioned office mindlessly staring at a computer to pay someone else to grow them).
The point I am coming to - and I am getting there, I promise - is that when we eventually reach the end of our five year schedule, I will not feel guilty for the things that we are still paying for, or for the fact that Adam is still working (and I am, after a fashion) to pay for certain things. I might feel less than virtuous if we were working purely to fund a round the world cruise, but if it's to pay for a man to come and rescue the mess I will undoubtedly have made of the (A-rated, naturally) washing machine, I won't feel like we have failed at self sufficiency.
I think that this is an important issue to remember - it's easy to blindly think 'Self sufficiency = good' and 'paying for goods and services = bad'. Provided that the goods and services are approached with consideration to the environment and to how essential they are, it is possible to remain a functioning part of society while being appreciably self sufficient.
This is a nice way of saying that I won't be slaughtering my own chickens, but I will be picking my own lettuces.
Of course, as I attempted to explain in my first post, self sufficiency for us is not just about finance. It is about the environment (it is greener for me to never leave my house than it is to drive to the supermarket and buy food that has travelled half way round the world) and about quality of life (I, personally, prefer to have the satisfaction of growing my vegetables to sitting in an air conditioned office mindlessly staring at a computer to pay someone else to grow them).
The point I am coming to - and I am getting there, I promise - is that when we eventually reach the end of our five year schedule, I will not feel guilty for the things that we are still paying for, or for the fact that Adam is still working (and I am, after a fashion) to pay for certain things. I might feel less than virtuous if we were working purely to fund a round the world cruise, but if it's to pay for a man to come and rescue the mess I will undoubtedly have made of the (A-rated, naturally) washing machine, I won't feel like we have failed at self sufficiency.
I think that this is an important issue to remember - it's easy to blindly think 'Self sufficiency = good' and 'paying for goods and services = bad'. Provided that the goods and services are approached with consideration to the environment and to how essential they are, it is possible to remain a functioning part of society while being appreciably self sufficient.
This is a nice way of saying that I won't be slaughtering my own chickens, but I will be picking my own lettuces.
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