I come up here occasionally, to the back half of the hills, where a handful of old buildings sit, mostly worn down and sagging from age and neglect. The buildings aren’t why I come. I come for the butterfly tree.

There’s really nothing particularly special about this tree. It’s just a tree like any other. I don’t even have a photo of it. But it’s pretty, and during the summer it’s usually host to a rabble of butterflies. There’s a small wooden bench a few dozen feet from its base, where I come to sit and relax in the sunshine and breeze. Sometimes I have a book with me, sometimes I have nothing but the butterflies and trees and clouds to watch. And it’s peaceful.

Except now there’s a massive construction project going right through it. The freeway is being extended, rebuilt, redirected, and its new path will take it past here. One of the old buildings will be preserved, the others will be razed. Presumably the giant tree will be left, though separated from the rolling hills and walking paths by a swath of concrete and steel. On my walk out to the hills yesterday, I was blocked by this sight.

And thus my favorite place to sit and clear my head of all the random thoughts of the day is worse than gone: it’s unreachable.

There are similar benches elsewhere on the hills, but none quite like the one under the butterfly tree. The one I can’t get to anymore.

Work weighs more heavily upon our souls than life does; therefore to have a true work/life balance, you need to have more life than work.

why is there no maximum wage?

— ° (@santinodela) April 23, 2013

The maximum wage. The societal acknowledgement that you’ve reached the top of the ladder, and that it is finally time to kick back and relax

— Johanna Drott (@sargoth) #

She continues:

I wonder how many would keep working after the maximum wage limit had been reached. #

The implicit critique of the contemporary labor market found in the last tweet. It astounds, even as it flabbergasts. #

Let’s see. What’s the motto of the labor market as we know it? #

“You work or you die. This has to be, as no one would work if their survival didn’t depend on their working.” #

Funny how work is a right, a duty and a necessity, all three in one. #

“You are free to work if you want, but if you don’t want we will use symbolic violence on your ass until you do.” #

I’m not sure this is a crowning achievement when it comes to sustainable societal designs. #

What’s the reason behind this insistance that everyone absolutely must Have A Job? #

Surely it can’t be because there’s a lack of things in the world. On the contrary – the world has more stuff than the economy can handle! #

If one wanted to improve the moral character of everyone, then one could surely devise a scheme less roundabout than a labor market. #

I have this nagging suspicion that it might have to do with class. #

Imagine class in a society which is not based on everyone working. #

One would have to revamp the structure of social stratification. Find new ways to make it clear to everyone that some are more than others. #

This would – as you are right to point out – include somewhat of a change. And change never comes easy to those who would lose from it. #

We have the technology, production capabilities and the distribution mechanisms in place. A post-work society can be done. #

It’s funny how it’s not the massive unemployment in the West that’s causing the economic crisis. Funny, and quite telling. #

I somehow can’t imagine David Cameron speaking to the people, saying that we must all work to fill this year’s quota of Abstract Work. #

Not any particular work. Just work in the abstract, general sense of something being done in a workplace. #

Cameron: as you all know, our new alien overlords will blast our planet to bits if we don’t all contribute to the Work Effort. #

Not quite feeling it. #

But if we’re not working for an externally imposed will that will kill us all if we don’t-then who, what and why? #

Replacing “evil alien overlords” with “the economy” seems somewhat lacking. In general. #

Never before has the gap between what is and what could be been greater. #

If you want proof that ideology is still at work, then casually mention the possibility of a post-work society. It will manifest itself. #

A post-work manifesto. Brought to you by the forces of industrial overproduction, global communications and labor market oversaturation. #

Let’s call it a [/rant]. #

— Johanna Drott, aka @sargoth

(Full disclosure: yes, this question was inspired by the TV show Revolution, but it’s something I’ve thought about as someone interested in preparedness.)

For the sake of the question, let’s make an assumption here: there’s no magic involved, no conspiracy. Just a massive, worldwide outage of electrical production and distribution systems. Local generators still work, batteries still work, and so on. Just nothing coming from any wall outlet you’ve ever used. Pretend every power plant in the world just shut down – there’s no more public electrical grid to power your home.

Presumably car batteries still work, but they have finite lifespans and probably aren’t up to the task of powering your home. Solar panels would still produce electricity, but as of now they aren’t broadly available to average consumers. They’re an expensive investment that most people aren’t willing or able to make.

No artificial heat or refrigeration. No keeping food fresh in your fridge for weeks, no turning up the thermostat to stay warm, no turning on the air conditioning to stay cool. If you’re in an urban environment, you probably lack the ability or courage to start a fire in your home.

No more computers or automation. Phones will cease to be useful pretty quickly, no matter how smart they may be.

How would you fare?

The 9-5 workday, (combined with poor choices of home and work locations) causes hoardes of people to want to drive cars just before 9 and just after 5 every weekday.

Because everyone is given a fair and equitable choice of where they can find work, and where they can find housing. And every weekday morning, I just can’t wait to go out and experience the thrill of driving my car to work. It’s just so exciting.

After sufficient waiting, we finally earned the privilege of forking over $8.11 for two grande lattes. This is roughly the same amount I normally pay for two pounds of organic fair-trade espresso beans at Costco, which makes over 100 cups of fancy coffee at the MMM Homebrew Cafe, but again, we wanted to see what everyone else likes to do.

At last, we decided to end the experiment, satisfied that the behavior of the masses was not for us.

Bravo, you’ve decided that you are better than everyone else who wants some coffee. You must feel so good about yourself.

[...] an event called “Jeep Week”. In this tragic comedy of an event, people from all over the country tow their ridiculous motorized La-Z-Boys with knobby tires from the comfort of their enormous 20,000 pound motorized RV homes. Once in Moab, they detach the smaller recliners and sit in them, pressing pedals and burning gas to bump around on the red rocks for a while.

Something that other people enjoy is quite obviously a “tragic comedy” and totally the same as sitting in a recliner, because you (presumably) don’t own a Jeep and don’t have the same interests. Makes sense.

Although we tried our best to obey the Off-Peak principle, we also made another major stumble: touring the Hoover Dam.

Rephrased: we’re so much better than everyone else and would never degrade ourselves by lining up for anything, but we’ll totally go to a major tourist attraction and then pretend to be incensed that it might involve being around other people who would like to see some historically significant architecture.

He closes with some brilliant advice, if only the rest of us poor slobs were intelligent enough to grok it:

Crowded roads are eliminated by biking, replanning, or even moving.

OH MAN THAT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE. All I have to do to avoid the morning traffic is sell my house (if I had one, that is – hooray renting!) and buy a new one somewhere else!

It must be amazing to be so enlightened. Probably doesn’t hurt to be rich and an asshole.

Wake up to the bleating of my alarm clock, still tired for some reason. Slap the snooze button to silence that electronic sadist for a few minutes until it gets its courage back and starts its torture again. Repeat once or twice before groaning and rolling out of bed.

Stagger into the shower and stand under water as hot as I can get it for longer than is actually required to get clean, because this is probably going to be the high point of my day. Shut the water off and grudgingly wrap a towel around myself, dreading having to throw back the curtain keeping the colder air from desecrating my Shower Temple.

After the various bathroom rituals assorted with modern hygiene have been completed, get dressed in some combination of clothing that hopefully won’t offend the eyes of any moderately fashion-conscious individuals. Gather my assorted everyday-carry stuff and get out the door. So far I’ve been out of bed for about 20 minutes.

The commute to work isn’t too bad. The traffic is moving relatively quickly and it appears that most of them are reasonably competent drivers, which is a refreshing change of pace. Pull into the work parking lot and find a spot to leave my car all day. I’ve now been out of bed for about 45 minutes.

Spend the next eight and a half hours working. Without going into the details, this is significantly less pleasant than, say, getting a massage or being stabbed in the face with a jagged piece of plastic from those theft-resistant packages. You know the kind.

Leave work and make my way through traffic in the other direction. By the time I get home, about 9½ hours of this particular day have been spent getting ready for work, getting to work, being at work, and getting away from work. Assuming that I want to wake up tomorrow and not feel any more like reheated death than usual, bedtime needs to happen in about six hours. Some of that time needs to be spent either acquiring or making food.

Let’s do some math real quick. Using nice whole numbers, let’s say 9 hours per day, 5 days a week, is 45 hours per week spent on work-related activities. Then 8 hours of sleep per night, 7 nights a week, that’s 56 hours. That’s 101 hours per week either sleeping or working. In an average week, there are just 67 hours left to do whatever I want to spend my free time doing.

45 hours of work in a week, 67 hours of “life” time. Every hour I work is spent supporting just an hour and a half of real life. That’s a terrible ratio.

I spend the best part of the day inside, sitting at a desk, staring at a computer screen, while outside the sun is shining and the air isn’t being recirculated with a faint background hum. When I get outside, I have only a few hours to enjoy the nice weather (or sulk at the awful weather) and do stuff for me rather than for someone else. That’s depressing, and it’s not how life should be lived.

So how do we fix that? (And don’t say “sleep less”. Those words buy you a one-way ticket to an untimely death.)

The byline of this site has long included "caffeine fiend" as a descriptor of my life. There's a reason for that.

I've said before that I collect a fair amount of data about my life. What movies I've watched, what books I've read, how much I tweet, and so on. I also track how much caffeine gets consumed, because... well, just because.

Now that the books are closed on 2012, I can look back and see just how much caffeine I actually hammered my body with.

Turns out my total caffeine consumption actually went down from 2011 levels, which is probably a good thing (even though I drank a little more Mountain Dew this year over last). My top three drinks of choice stayed the same - Mountain Dew by far (the nectar of the gods), then Monster Khaos (it's basically like fizzy caffeinated orange juice), and Red Bull from the times I couldn't get my hands on one of the other two and needed a fix.

If you do the math, it gets pretty disgusting pretty quickly. 25.5 gallons of Dew, 6.9 gallons of Monster, and 2.1 gallons of Red Bull. *cringe*

When you tally up all the caffeinated drinks I downed, it's not a pretty picture for my health, admittedly. These aren't diet drinks. It comes out to almost 60,000 calories – for some perspective, that's the caloric equivalent of over 26½ pounds of M&Ms – and as much sugar as you'd get from eating 54 pounds of M&Ms. (Based on some quick back of the napkin scribbles, it's actually not too bad – roughly like eating a small handful of M&Ms every day.)

I'm reporting this for science, people, not because I'm proud of it. SCIENCE.

I feel like I should probably go to the gym tonight. And maybe never leave it.

Undoubtedly, if ordinary Western-style ‘consumers’ suddenly found themselves living a lifestyle of radical simplicity, they would feel greatly impoverished and suffer accordingly.

But if people were to accept that the meaning of life does not consist in the consumption of material things, then radical simplicity should be no obstacle to living a happy and fulfilling life.

Radical Simplicity and the Middle-Class: Exploring the Lifestyle Implications of a ‘Great Disruption’ (PDF) by The Simplicity Institute

A worthwhile read about the impacts an eventual ‘Great Disruption’ would have on our consumer-driven society. The basic premise of the paper is thus:

1. Our current insistence on constant growth and consumption is unsustainable.
2. This kind of society relies on a fairly fragile infrastructure, some part of which will eventually break down.
3. Such a break will force us to adopt a ‘radically’ simpler lifestyle – one in which we don’t have unlimited food, water and electricity at our disposal.
4. This is not necessarily a bad thing.

I’ve said before I’m a minimalist at heart, but clearly I still live in a modern consumer culture. I don’t need a microwave to heat my food for me, but I have one because it’s convenient. I don’t need to drive a car to work, but I do because I can afford to own and maintain a car, and because it’s more convenient than getting up early and biking to work in the cold hours of the morning. I don’t need a 10-minute hot shower every morning, but I take one anyway because it feels damn good.

But what if that weren’t the case, and we didn’t have such ready access to food, water, or energy? What if our food supply network failed, and suddenly we can’t get our fancy quinoa and $72 biscuits and had to rely instead on what we could grow locally? Most of us would be out of luck. I live just outside a major metropolitan city, I have neither the resources nor the know-how to grow my own food.

In the absence of an apocalyptic collapse of society where we end up roaming broken roadways and chewing on bark to stay alive, such a breakdown would likely require us to pull together as communities and focus on more immediate concerns than what X-Box game is coming out on Black Friday. And that seems like a good thing to me.

What do you choose? It might be difficult, but there’s probably a lot of variety to be had with just 10 simple ingredients, if you choose wisely.

Let’s set some basic ground rules for this experiment. Assumptions:

• You have water, heat, refrigeration, and whatever tools you require.
• Whatever you choose can be replenished as needed.
• You only require one meal a day – dinner. If you can also use these ingredients for breakfast, second breakfast, elevensies, lunch, whatever, then bonus points to you. (Points not redeemable for cash. Or anything at all.)
• You have salt, pepper, sugar, flour, olive oil, and a handful of other spices of your choosing.
• You may not use any ingredients not specifically listed.
• You aren’t allowed to die of malnourishment. Consider stocking something other than Doritos and Cheetos.

Some responses from Twitter:

@tomhenrich garlic, onions, rice, pasta, tomato, green pepper, black beans, mushrooms, kale, sweet potato.

— ashe dryden (@ashedryden) November 13, 2012

@tomhenrich beans, sweet potatoes, onions, garlic, salt, eggs, cheese, apples, chicken, butter.

— Sarah with an H (@sawaboof) November 13, 2012

I’ll be over for dinner right away, you two.

@tomhenrich a pig, a cow, a lamb, potatoes, butter, garlic. #imgonnadiesooniftrue

— Kevin Ciesielski (@KeVroN) November 13, 2012

I fear for Kevin’s arteries.

@tomhenrich Elbow noodles, rice, broccoli, bacon, red peppers, chicken, red potatoes, eggs, cheese, and wine.

— Kelly Kizer Whitt (@Astronomommy) November 13, 2012

Ah yes, wine, without which the rest of these cannot be truly, properly enjoyed. Good choice.

@tomhenrich 1. Avocado 2. Egg 3. Tomato 4. Potato 5. Lettuce 6. Ground beef 7. Cheese 8. Worcestershire sauce 9. Picante sauce 10. Butter

— senvara (@senvara) November 13, 2012

@tomhenrich quinoa, carrots, spinach, peppers, onion, zucchini,tomato, sweet potato, black beans, avocado.

— Tashi Tachog (@tashitachog) November 13, 2012

I think Sarah and Ashe’s selections are closest to my own list: black beans, sweet potatoes, garlic, chicken, rice, tomato, broccoli, sweet onions, spinach and apples. That allows for a pretty broad spread of meals and flavors – stir fry, tacos, salads (though, with no salad dressing, it’d be a bit dry) – and nutritional combinations of proteins, vegetables and fruit.

Every time I look in my pantry, it always seems like there’s a ton of things I bought at some point under the laughable illusion they’d get used for something eventually. It might be worthwhile actually taking on a challenge like this in real life – restrict yourself to a small number of ingredients and see how far your imagination can take it.

Thoughts? Am I missing anything completely obvious? What would you stock instead? What meals would you make with your list of ingredients? (Feel free to share some recipes.)