We have to do this now!

[Music] hey everybody welcome back to the cabin cool morning it's been really uh quite warm for the last few days and it's going to continue to be warm but today not so much i think it's calling for one above zero celsius so it's like 34 35 fahrenheit but clear at least and not too windy yet um got the fire going got uh dinner on cattle on and about to get to work but i was thinking that's i always am but thinking about the uh i don't know the absurdity in society right now and the narrative that we're all kind of pretending to follow along here it's so discouraging and so contradictory to the way i have chosen to live my life now and you know i've talked about many things many remedies to that in the past and and recently and talking about how i've set my life up in a way that i find it is meaningful and and educational i talk about learning and reading um obsessively and and always being curious and finding out what's going on trying to understand the way the world's working current situations historical situations and future and uh i often put that you know kind of into the educational bucket thinking well if we only were to educate ourselves more we'd be able to protect ourselves from false narratives and so on and crowd mentality especially and the meaning i think in life i i really i come back and forth and come between i go back and forth between the educational component and the and the meaning uh meaningful life um component and i'm understanding more and more that finding meaning in life and community is probably the thing um and that's the thing that's missing i read a statistic recently about how we've had a steady and measurable and documented decline in in a status life satisfaction over the last 200 250 years which coincidentally is um goes back to the beginning of the industrial revolution and peaking 200 years ago the industrial revolution and then the progression since then and now the fourth revolution and uh which is technology if you follow the uh world economic forum's assessment of where we're headed where we're at anyway uh i see more and more uh discontent well not to see it i know there's documented discontent in the world and that our anxiety levels higher than ever are disconnected from other people is higher than ever or social uh satisfaction and our dissatisfaction with the meaning in our lives is is diminishing and i come back and this is where kind of my thoughts diverge maybe a little bit from where from what i've read although i'm sure the literature's out there but i still think the disconnect from nature and the disconnect from hands-on meaningful uh risk reward and and uh life survival kind of um activities i feel like that the further we get away from that i'm not good at articulating this like i said it's not something i've read it's something i'm trying to put into words myself but um when i do something risky and you guys you know either go from being either respectful or or thinking stupid or crazy or whatever like lifting this log into place for example that's a little thing that i do that is a challenge i overcome that challenge and then i feel satisfied for doing that and there is some risk but i feel always like the rewards greater than that risk and i try to do that at risk assessment before i do anything um you know the cable system where i'm wasting the lugs of the cable could be risky i assess that risk and i feel like uh i'm trying to i've mitigated the risk as much as possible so each of the things everything i do in my life now is kind of i do that risk assessment and then i'd look at the reward and then i'd go either do it or i don't do it based on that and i find meaning in that i find that's created a meaningful life my priorities are are that and family and whenever i do something for my family which is a lot of what i'm doing right now is family driven i'll have for 20 25 years but especially right now despite the fact that it looks like i'm just working on my self-reliance and my independence it's more about my family and my community than myself and i'm going to continue to do that and i find great meaning in that but then the natural connection as well i i feel is part of that now we've talked on this channel a few times about getting back to nature and getting back to doing things hands-on like this now everybody can't do that and i've said yeah of course seven billion people can't move to the country and and get back to our roots but i'm not so sure that's true if you look at uh farmland for example in this let's say the mid um uh north america like uh midwest united states and canada the vast prairies out there that i've just recently visited um those areas are primarily being used for either arranging livestock or for uh crops which is mainly soybeans and corn and and wheat um if you were to take each of those those massive uh farms or massive farm fields and you were to put people in those and to manage those yeah regeneratively and and sustainably and comprehensively so having the full systems like some livestock and some varied crops like vegetables and and other things instead of just mass corn and soybeans i wonder if we could make that land more productive than what it uh how it's being utilized now um keeping in mind also that the primary reason we can grow those crops in those areas is fertilizer which are derived from fossil fuels so a whole bunch of things that we've simplified and we don't necessarily we haven't necessarily improved the system we've just made it more efficient from a very narrow standpoint of calories to feed the population anyway if we were to go back to that sort of community based society where you had little villages everywhere and the villages are emptying like there's some villages near here that essentially have dried up and have become almost ghost towns and if not then very low prosperity and and um yeah just not functioning very well and no services left but if we were to reinvigorate those small communities where we're all also feeling then connected again and supporting one another and also being more efficient because it's local we're looking at the stream i'm not going to pollute that stream when i need it and my neighbors need it to to drink from or to get irrigation for crops and so on i'm not going to do any harm to that because i have it's has a direct negative consequence on me and my family my community so thinking locally i think is would help in that regard help us find meaning but this anxiety that i see in society and i hear the rates of of medication for anxiety and depression and related diseases and illnesses mental issues i can't help but think it's got to be as we become more urban and less community driven and less than socially connected that those are the foundations of our problems so i don't know i think it's to to the debt not only mildly to the detriment of humanity i think we're in a bit of a catastrophe right now and that we are doomed um as a society i'm not going to say humanity's doomed necessarily but i mean i guess the potential is there but i'm saying it's it's critical i think we're at the critical stage where we need to reconnect and we need to find meaning in our lives and we need to do it now before some other narrative takes us down a dark path that we're not able to recover from or at least anytime soon i don't want that for my my self and my wife and i don't certainly don't want that for my kids and and um you know the following generation so i don't know it's i'm kind of at the point where i'm like we have to get up off our asses and and find something meaningful to do with our lives and maybe stop watching stuff like this and just get out there and do something that makes you feel like you've contributed something to to your life and to your meaning and to your family or your community doing something i don't even know what it is for everybody it's going to be different for everybody for me i i really can't underst i really don't believe that disconnecting from nature is healthy and that i think a reconnection with nature is necessary but also finding meaning in everything i've read another statistic about i think i think it's 30 percent of people actually find meaning in their jobs and everybody else is just going through the paces i believe that's true we have so much disconnect from from when we put our hands on something we don't see the final result and it's not that meaningful i think despite the struggles we had in the past and life was extremely hard for our ancestors just surviving just feeding ourselves and our families and the lack of medical care and the death rate amongst children and and and birthing mothers and so on uh war all those things were extremely stressful but i think overcoming those challenges made us stronger people and uh made us give gave us satisfaction i think that's missing so what i'm taking on voluntarily here seems kind of ridiculous like working alone and working so hard and building something like this when i don't have to at this stage of my life i have to do that for meaning and if i see the satisfaction it's given me and i can imagine what that felt like in the past when your life depended on it and your family's life depended on it that is missing we for the most of us what we do in a day is not that impactful on our survival and survival of our family and community so i don't know it seems like archaic to just think that we're better off going backwards but i'm starting to really believe that's true that that is necessary now the beauty is that we have modern conveniences now to make that transition easier so taking on these challenges and getting back to nature and getting back to doing things hands-on and and uh finding meaning in those things it is so much easier when you have a you know an efficient wood stove like this that i've just installed and the tools that i use and the access to to cheap relatively cheap food and transportation and fuel and all those things to to use those well while uh um getting myself and family as much as possible off reliance on on the success of the overall society and and on uh cheap all those cheap things that i mentioned trying to reduce our our consumption of those things makes us more self-reliant more resilient and i think happier so um i think it and i've kind of said that from the beginning of my self-reliance i don't know how long it's been since i created the websites it was before youtube so six seven years i would say and my thinking at that point was when you have the money and the resources and the opportunity to acquire those things now instead of waiting invest in your the future that may be um smaller and now i couldn't have anticipated the situation we're in globally right now and that there actually is shortage of shortages of things and high inflation so the things that i've done over the last seven or eight years have put me in a better position right now but there's still time to do those things now and setting to me setting your life up and for me setting my life up in a way that i've um i know i can be happy for the next 20 or 30 years doing exactly what i'm doing right now so i've set my life up in a way that i've acquired the resources and the place and and moved to the place that i can do that and find meaning and i can't imagine if i lived in a city for example and i didn't have access to the things that bring me satisfaction not saying everybody should do that not this is the only place to find satisfaction lots of people can find meaning and satisfaction in urban environment but for me i needed to get stop working in the city that was the first step seven or eight years ago um always lived in a village north of the city so accommodation wise i was fine but moved further out got into the wilderness and you know acquired the hand tools and everything else said if i can't get access to fuel for the snowmobile or the atv or whatever then i'm not that impacted i can still live a meaningful life i don't just want to survive in fact i'm not sure i would go through that much effort in the case of an apocalypse and needed to survive in a bunker but uh i certainly um finding a way to maneuver and find satisfaction in these challenging times and uh i would you know continue to do this and find happiness for the rest of my life anyway um it's kind of this is kind of a plea for people to uh try to do that try to find meaning so that we can straighten this world out and stop falling for for the next narrative that might be not so good for us you know i'm gonna leave it at that and get to work before uh you know the weather does change over the next couple days so i'm going to work on these this front wall i've got the fourth course is finished down the side so starting to come up this fifth course is going to take a little bit of time so i've got more cutting to do but one hand the logs are easier to manage because they're smaller sections so this might actually go quicker so i'm gonna get at that um thanks for watching as always appreciate it and i look forward to seeing you back here at the cabin next time take care

Channel: Shawn James

Views: 197,627

Keywords: self reliance, my self reliance, log cabin, off grid, ontario, canada, bushcraft, survival, dog, golden retriever, cali

Id: 7oGoyOhaIrw

Length: 15min 28sec (928 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 15 2021