Shhh! I’m Hunting Wabbits!!!

I’m going to be getting into hunting in the fall and thought I’d share a bit of my feelings about this.

First of all, if you’re in the city and can’t raise your own meat animals, but would like to see what it’s like to be the one to kill and butcher your own meat, this might be the best way for you to do that.

“Why on earth would you want to do that though!?” You might ask.

I ride my bike part way to and from work. When it’s raining and dark, I hate seeing smushed worms and frogs on the road (the main roadkill around where I live, which is pretty tame I admit). I go around every single worm on my bike and give the frogs lots of room if I’m going around them, but I often stop to usher them off the road. Only once have I come across a Bullfrog – an introduced, invasive species in my area. I couldn’t just leave it, so… now it’s in a tank at home. I don’t enjoy killing things.

But I do eat meat, and I’m OK with that, though I find it morally disturbing when people who eat meat get disgusted when they think about how they’re actually eating parts of an animal. If you don’t like that reality I think you shouldn’t eat it. In fact, that’s exactly why I think someone who eats meat should, at least once, actually kill and butcher an animal and then eat it. When you’ve done this, you will be either completely grossed out and won’t be able to eat meat again (which is totally fine, and better than lying to yourself about what you’re eating), or you will have a much more profound and deep appreciation for how meat actually gets to your plate. You will feel a sense of gratitude when you eat it and not just take it for granted, as if it just magically appeared nicely wrapped in plastic on its little styrofoam tray with the little diaper thing tucked underneath.

But here’s the thing – everything that lives, dies. The only questions then are: how does it live? And how does it die? If you’re going to eat an animal, I think these are very relevant questions.

“Free range” is a big buzzword these days. People feel warm and fuzzy knowing they’re eating free range animals which themselves are eating a diet that closely mimics what that animal would naturally eat, with no artificial hormones and antibiotics. Well… a wild animal is as free range as you can get and, by default, is organic, eating it’s natural diet and freely expressing its natural behaviour. We’ve all seen the images of factory animals packed into cages, literally fattening up (there’s significantly more protein in wild game meat) on food that they wouldn’t normally eat, giving them diarrhea which they then stomp around in with festering sores from constantly rubbing on the bars of their tiny cages. If you eat meat from this system, it’s very hard to take the moral high ground here.

Further, no one is growing monoculture crops to feed wild game, using machines and diesel and fertilizer and pesticide and fungicide and herbicide, using water pumped from rivers to the extent they no longer make it to the ocean, on land that would be otherwise suitable for human food crops, and then using more machines and diesel to harvest, process and transport that feed to a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO), and then somehow dealing with the concentrated effluent running off of these CAFOs.

So eating wild game is superior in pretty much every way when it comes to looking at how the animal lives.

So that brings us to how the animal dies. Ideally, a factory animal is killed very quickly with little suffering. Is this done consistently? A lot of video evidence from people working in slaughterhouses would suggest otherwise. A well placed shot (and you shouldn’t be hunting unless you can place a shot well) drops an animal where it stands. Is this done every time? No, but the vast majority of hunters strive for this with every shot and when a quick kill is not achieved you pay the emotional cost of watching the animal suffer, you don’t get to just eat the meat in complete ignorance of any suffering the animal may have gone through to get to your plate. This reality is what has me out target practicing every chance I get (I have an air rifle so that I can easily practice in my yard).

What are a wild animal’s alternatives for dying, other than with an arrow or bullet in  the chest? Lying down peacefully in a bed of sweet grass and flowers, sighing a final breath of contentment before closing it’s eyes and crossing the rainbow to the land of endless, green fields? Not really. A wild animal’s options are basically: starve to death, freeze to death, die of disease, or get torn apart by predators. In the area I live there are no predators (a small island) so the deer will keep reproducing until their population surpasses what the island can support, at which point starvation is the only thing besides hunters that will keep their numbers in check. However if hunters keep the number down below what the island can comfortably support, the remaining deer will be well fed and healthy.

So when it comes to how an animal dies, game meat again wins (unless you’re a horrible shot. If so, then please support your local, pastured animal farm).

A lot of the issues people have with hunting I also share. I don’t see hunting as a sport unless the deer have guns, too. I don’t support trophy hunting at all (I even think taking a picture with the hunter smiling over the carcass is a bit disrespectful). I don’t support baiting or anything like that, nor putting land aside specifically for hunting (where I live, hunting is only allowed on large, private properties/farms). I fully support laws that require hunters and gun owners to take comprehensive safety courses, and set guidelines regarding setbacks from roads, property lines, houses, public buildings etc. for safety. I wouldn’t argue that hunting decreases landscape damage or decreases car strikes. And, yes, if everyone started hunting for all their meat we’d quickly decimate the wild populations (that being said there are some species that could do with a bit more culling! Invasive species definitely come to mind.) My interest in looking at guns is about the same as looking at pruning saws – what’s the cheapest thing I can get that will do a really good job. I’m not planning on building a pruning saw collection or going to pruning saw conventions or join the local pruning saw club, same goes for guns. I don’t subscribe to the belief that society is imminently going to collapse, and if it did, hunting would probably only be a short term way of getting food until the game in your area was completely hunted out. If you think eating any meat is unethical, then don’t eat meat. I fully support people who make that decision and I don’t think people “need” to eat meat. As stated, I don’t like killing things, but for me that’s a reason not to just have someone do your dirty work for you.

However…

When looking the arguments, hunting is the most ethical meat to eat (if you are going to eat meat). This is what drew me to hunting in the first place. It’s also healthier, tastes better (well, I guess that’s subjective but I like it better) and is (potentially) much less expensive than meat from the store (your first season should provide enough value in meat to offset your initial expenses). What’s more, you’re experiencing providing for yourself (and family), growing your skills and being more self-reliant, more “grown up”. And I bet that combination will result in you feeling more satisfaction, enjoyment, and gratitude for that meat than the best steak served in the fanciest restaurant (yes, I’ve eaten in world-renowned restaurants, and while I can’t say that about meat I’ve hunted yet, I do know that that’s the case for my home-slaughtered chickens).

I look forward to moving forward with my goal of becoming more connected in my life and being able to do more things for myself. I’m sure I’ll be writing a followup post in the fall!

“The Fuck”

Years ago, early in my “journey” (gosh that’s an overused word) there started being quite a long list of things I wanted to change in my life, but with many of them I felt thwarted by “the system”. The alternatives were not always highly viable (not affordable, nor practical, nor quick, nor easy).

But the things I wanted to do were so important to me. If they didn’t fit my whole lifestyle, I’d need to change my whole lifestyle to fit them.

I wanted to eat fabulous healthy food. I wanted to be active and fit. I wanted connection with the natural environment. I wanted my needs to have a smaller negative impact on the environment. I wanted to have closer ties to my neighbours in ways that we’re mutually empowering. I wanted to be more spiritual. I wanted a safe place for my kids to grow and learn and thrive. I wanted to feel secure. Etc.

Wait a minute. Aren’t these things most people want? Wouldn’t most people, like you probably did, nod along in agreement with that list? But… I lived a very stereotypical life, one that society promotes as the ideal – go to college, graduate, get a decently well paying job, have kids, live in an apartment in a reasonably safe city near a great school, parks, shopping, hospital, and recreation. Own a good vehicle (but work within an easy bicycle commute), have a big TV, look sharp and trendy, have the latest tech, a home gym, go to meditation classes, eat out regularly… wasn’t I doing and getting everything I was “supposed” to want?

Well, I think the closest way of describing my discontent is that all of this only looked like what people should want. It started to feel like life in our society offered tons of options and opportunities, in the same way as a store having a thousand different flavors and qualities of vanilla ice cream to chose from. “Look at how much choice and freedom we give you! Which flavor of vanilla is right for you!?”

Well, I guess I chose what society might label “Rocky Road”, but I decided that’s what I needed to do!

Because as awesome and convenient and shiney as society’s vanilla seems to be, there’s the fact that it’s pretty superficial and unsatisfying. You don’t actually have much choice and are actively discouraged from making choices that may very well be the best for you, and for people in general, but not society.

But wait a minute… shouldn’t the role of a society be to support the people that make it up? Why is it so hard to eat well, do enough exercise, connect deeply with those around us, feel totally secure, etc…? The best thing for our current society is for you to stay helpless, in debt, working hard, then trading it for all the conveniences (no one makes money when you do things for yourself). But that means that there is a disconnect between what’s best for our current society, and what’s best for individuals…

Well holy shit.

This means I was busting my butt to support a system that, in many ways, I don’t even want, and which is actively discouraging me from living in line with my values (for now, I’m sticking with having a great phone though).

This could be referred to as “the rub”, or “the fine print”, or whatever. I started calling it “The Fuck”.

This bit from the movie The Matrix kinda sums it up. Here it is, with “the matrix” changed to “the fuck” cuz I’m lazy:

Morpheus: The Fuck is everywhere, it is all around us, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

Neo: What truth?

Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage… born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind. The Fuck.

The more you learn about how everything works – from building codes and zoning, to food production and distribution, to medicine, to technology, to taxes and even the scariest one: to money itself, the more you see different examples of The Fuck.

Here’s one quick example of “The Fuck” that you (if you’re like most people) willingly and actively participate in daily. When you pay by credit card, the bank takes a transaction fee. It’s conservatively something like 1.5% plus 10 cents. So if you buy something from Merchant A for $100, Merchant A only gets $98.40. For this analogy we’re going to say this is that merchant’s only cost (no rent, no staff, no product costs, no monthly fees, no taxes, etc). So he can now buy something for $98.40 from Merchant B, who gets $96.82 and can buy something for that amount from Merchant C. Merchant C would get $95.27. It would then go down to $93.74, then $92.23, then $90.75, then $89.29 and so on with each transaction.

We can see from this that after a certain number of transactions, the credit card company eventually has all the money. Some math whiz can figure out exactly how many transactions that would take, but let that sink in for a moment.

Now consider other ways “the system” takes more money than this, some of them mentioned already – taxes (both on the sale price and on the business’ profits), monthly credit card/bank fees for both the customer and the merchant, service fees, interest if the customer’s balance isn’t paid on time, etc. and it becomes apparent pretty quickly that it actually takes very little time and surprisingly few transactions before “the system” actually has all the money.

This is just one example of “The Fuck” in one area of life of how something we take for granted and which is a total societal norm actually fucks us over big time because no one really thinks about it.

Now I want to be very clear that I am not some high and mighty “holier than thou” guru who has all the answers and lives the perfect life, free from the fetters of The Fuck. I’m working on it, but I still have a decent amount of credit card debt to pay down (though once that happens, I do have a card with no monthly fees, so as long as the balance is payed off every month we don’t give The Fuck hardly anything).

I’ll likely be touching on more examples of “The Fuck” in future posts, or mentioning that term in general, so now you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Now this sounds kinda shitty and depressing, but what I’m interested in going forward is, now that I’m aware of this concept, breaking free from it as best I can and hopefully inspiring and giving ideas to others to do the same.
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Growing up

What would you think of someone who’s 46, intelligent, capable, and healthy, but who still lives at home, and their parents make the meals, do laundry, clean the house, fix anything that needs repairing, etc. etc. etc.?

Not cool right?

What about someone who makes a bunch of money, and pays someone to do their laundry, clean their house, fix anything that needs repairing and eats out or gets delivery for every meal and just throws away the containers (then someone else takes out the trash).

There’s not really a lot of difference there in terms of that person’s ability to take care of themself! But society envies the person who can just pay other people to do everything for them.

Think about growing up and the stages of learning you go through when learning a skill. Baking: at what age would a parent trust you to crack a few eggs, measure the milk, and stir? Maybe 5 or 6 years old? Today, as adults, we don’t need to know much more to bake a cake! Fill a car with gas? Probably 5 or 6 years old. That’s the extent of car maintenance know-how many people have. What about turning a screw and banging a nail? Maybe 6 or 7 years old. Today, that’s all you need to know to build furniture! We don’t even know how to quickly figure out how much change we’re owed since it just goes on visa.

We all have specialties for our jobs and there are certainly things we still need to know to be effective adults,but there are many basic areas of life where we are still, as adults, quite dependent!

What’s wrong with this? I don’t need to be able to build my own furniture and I don’t have time to bake a cake completely from scratch!

Well, when you were a kid and a meal was put in front of you, there were often two main responses – it was fine and we ate it or “Blah! Don’t make me eat that!”

And that’s what we have for adults right now. That’s how I was. With everything!

We started doing more things for ourselves, from scratch (baking bread, building a chicken coop, butchering our own chickens, etc.), two things happened – one, the results were often better (though not always, especially at first), and two, we appreciated what we did ourselves WAY MORE!

If you have kids that don’t like to eat their vegetables or anything with “ingredients”, the best way to get them over this is to get them to make a meal. Why? Because when you make something yourself, when you put the time and effort and intention into making something as good as you can make it, you have much more appreciation for it, much more connection to it. When you eat something you’ve made you pay attention to the different flavors you can now identify because you put them there. You pay attention to texture. You pay attention to the proportions of the ingredients, you pay attention to the portion size… in general, you pay attention! Way more so than when someone else makes it.

And how does it make you feel to produce a delicious meal, from scratch, all on your own? Competent? Capable? Self reliant? How about… Grown up! That’s how you should feel at 7 years old making a meal from scratch, but I had to wait until my 30s before this finally happened to the extent that really triggered that feeling.

In my case, this means the first steps of making a chicken dinner are buying 2 day old chicks and planting seeds in the garden, but I would encourage you to start as far back in the process as you can – that may mean going to local farms and buying straight out of the veggie patch, or, if that’s too far, a local farmer’s market, or the fishing dock, then maybe seasoning with some herbs from your window box, or it may be trying to bake your own bread starting with wheat kernels, make soup stock from scratch, etc. – whatever you can do now/soon and then grow your skills from there.

Growing up is largely about learning how to competently meet your own needs. But, in general, the way we are taught to get what we need is to buy it. There is very little support or encouragement (if anything, there is quite a lot of discouragement) to do more things for yourself. Very few people in cities can afford enough space to grow any more than a token portion of their herbs and veggies, and when they do the environments are very controlled (contrasted to a rural garden). Imagine what your typical urbanite would do if they went to the store to buy chicken… and were handed a live chicken!

Beyond being surrounded by convenience foods, very few things you buy today can be fixed by the average do-it-yourselfer (home appliances, cars, etc. – this is why tinkerers like to buy older models of things!). Basic skills like sewing a button are rare. Fixing a toilet? A drawer that slides funky? Not likely.

I was like this, and didn’t like it. I felt enslaved to a system that treated me like a child (well, I still do but I’m working on it!), because the system creates a completely dependent relationship that, to me, while it feels convenient, is not healthy or beneficial. “Oh no, you can’t do that for yourself, but you can use some of your allowance to get it done for you!”. This goes for spirituality as well, but that’s for a different post.

The point here isn’t to make anyone feel stupid or incompetent or be your grandma tsking away at “kids these days”. The point is to bring awareness to the fact that you very well may be working your butt off to buy inferior products at higher prices, enjoying it less, while feeling helpless, instead of feeling empowered and being truly, deeply grateful for having better things in your life that you could get for less money or free (*gasp* sacrilege!) and feeling less and less dependent, and more and more “grown up”.

I’m not saying I know how to solve all the world’s problems and create a utopia, but it seems to me that such a utopia must have the principle of supporting the maximum potential of each person and do this partly by empowering them to support themselves and each other. I’m also not saying that everyone should know how to sew a button or fix a toilet, but these skills should all be found in every small group of people, so that everyone personally knows someone who can help them out when they need it.

I currently live in such a community (it was a lot of planning and years of executing to get here but it was that important to us!) and it feels great! I can’t wait to learn more, gain more skills and independence, while meeting other fabulous people whose interests are different from mine in complementary ways. I hope this post has opened you up to exploring ways you can start down this path, too, in whatever area of your life interests and excites you. Have fun!

Is everyone happy?

Pretty easy question to answer, right? Why are people not happy? Well, the vast majority of the sources of people’s unhappiness are caused by… people.

Governments and corporations and practices and policies and distribution systems and monetary systems and wars and social injustice and the wealth divide and just plain old day to day interactions and even our own desires and expectations are the source of most of our unhappiness.

That’s great!

It means we have the power to solve the vast majority of the unhappiness in the world!

What are some of the major problems that we are facing and will be facing in the near future? Mounting debt and economic decline, environmental destruction, resource depletion, overpopulation, soil erosion, pollution, etc. again mostly or entirely caused by us. And again, that’s great! Because that means solutions are entirely within our control.

What’s not so great is that you probably can’t fix all (or any) of that by yourself. Even the issues in our own lives feel almost  insurmountable. So what’s one to do?

Well, individually we can’t be the solution, but we can be one of a group of people making a collective difference in one, a few, or even all of the areas listed. Where you’re at and what your skills and interests are will determine what your individual options are, but in this blog we’ll look at the general themes in our lives that contribute to the above problems and look at big picture solutions that have nothing but benefits in every area of our lives.

Let’s take a brief look at just one example of an overriding theme, which I’ll be going into more detail in later posts, as well as other similar overriding themes that have positive repercussions in all aspects of one’s life and relationships and society and for the environment. The first overriding theme we’ll take a quick look at is “isolation”. Isolation is at the root of many of the above problems, and being more connected in many areas of our lives is an amazing solution. However you chose to increase connections, it will offer a huge number of rewards on many levels. Society, as it stands, seems to be designed on almost every level to keep us from deeply connecting with each other, our lives, our possessions and our food. Almost everything we do or have, comes from or is managed by some institution, from our entertainment, to the water we drink, to foreign manufacturing companies making everything we buy, to our food growing hundreds or thousands of miles from where we live, to the massive amounts of energy we consume, to the handling of our waste, it’s all handled by people we don’t know, by processes we don’t usually understand, in places we never see. Even the way we communicate is now through artificial interfaces more than face to face. Social media can be a tool to help us connect more (sending frequent updates and photos to your grandma in a different country, and video chatting with her on the weekends), but our hunger for communication now drives many of us to a screen rather than to direct interaction. I’ve texted my wife from the next room, and while I don’t see that as a big deal, I wonder if the very fact that I don’t see that as a big deal says more than the action itself.

Let’s go into a bit more detail in just one area – the production of everyday items in our house. Look around your house at everything you own. Do you actually know where any of it came from? Or what went into making it? Do you think if you learned more about what went into making the things in your house you’d feel really good about it all? And what does any of it mean to you? Most things are judged by utility, aesthetic and how much it would cost to replace.

Pick one thing in your house (not electronics) as your eyes rove across the room you’re in, could be the table or your pot on the stove or  a knitted throw. How would you feel about it if you had a beautiful, handmade version of it, where you knew the person who made it? If you knew where they sourced the material from? If you knew the care and expertise that went into making it? And if you knew it was of such high quality materials, design and craftsmanship that it would last generations? Wouldn’t that be amazing! For many of us these days, this exercise takes some effort and imagination, because many of us don’t own a single item like this! So take your time and really think about how that would make you feel.

We can imagine having that one object be something we are so connected to and that we have such a personal relationship with, and have it be so beautiful and work so well that you’d feel very upset if it was stolen or broken. Even if we had plenty of money to buy a replacement, it just wouldn’t be the same. What if almost everything you owned was like this?

And what would the “knock on” effects be if this was the case for the majority of people for the majority of their possessions? Industrial productivity would shrivel because many items would only need to be bought once every few generations (especially if the population is holding steady or shrinking). What would this do to the amount of resources being harvested? What would that do to the environmental toll of harvesting and production and shipping of the products? In order to know the manufacturer, it would usually have to be someone fairly local, not shipped from halfway around the world. And if a fraction of the amount of products are being made, that means producers/manufacturers have that time needed to make higher quality products, and lower demand on resources would mean quality resources are less expensive. And higher quality products would fetch a higher price so the builder could make a similar amount of money. However, what wouldn’t work as well is corporations running the whole thing and making money off low skill labour and resource exploitation and making crappy products that have a short lifespan, but which owners never care about anyway so are happy to just chuck them in a landfill and get a new one when it fails since it’s so cheap anyway. Call that a downside if you can!

So here is one overriding theme applied to one area of life, that most of us could start doing today, that would have an ongoing, widespread, positive impact on all areas of our life and society and the environment.

We’ll be exploring more of these themes, and how you can start applying many of them, in coming posts. The thing is, the real solution is all of these ideas put into practice and working together in a self-reinforcing system. But a blog, and our brains, can only look at each piece of the puzzle in isolation (which, remember, is not a good thing). So I encourage you to keep reading, and as you do, start to imagine what the “big picture” would look if we all started living according to all these principles and had them working together (though even one of us just applying some of them in some small areas of our lives will still lead to benefits – it’s not “all or nothing”!).
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Welcome to what is essentially blog post #1, as it gives a bit more of glimps into who is writing it, and hopefully sets the overall theme of the site. As I say in the About Me, I just see myself as another person on the internet. There is nothing inherently special about me. But I do spend a lot of time thinking about life and the most sensical ways of approaching it – from the best way to wash and dry clothes, to building a house, to earning money, to structuring a society or economy, to strengthening a relationship, to growing and preparing our food, etc..

Now, that doesn’t mean I’m strictly logical. More accurately, I like to look at ways of living life that make total, perfect sense from a logical perspective, and also feel totally perfectly right in my heart/soul. If something doesn’t jive with both, I keep looking. Being a very… “spiritually in tune” person (or whatever the cheesiest, new age way of phrasing that is) this means I also apply logic to spirituality as well, which I’ve actually found has really enhanced my ability to “go there” and empowered me to move my life towards one of more spiritual fulfillment. And, no, I’m not using the pseudo-logic that people use to justify believing in creationism and I’m not going to use the word “quantum” over and over or stuff like that!

Now I don’t think I’ll be talking too much about myself on this blog, but I thought it’d be good to give a bit of background about where I’m at and where I’m coming from. But, this isn’t what the blog is about ongoing! It’s just to give you a peek at who’s writing it. When you come back and read more posts about the kinds of thoughts I think, you’ll be able to picture how I’m applying things in my own life. So what’s my story thus far?

Just a smidge over two years ago I lived in a big city with a medium family in a small apartment. The work I did benefited others, but wasn’t anything I could use myself (you know, like being a car mechanic means you can do your own car repairs, being an investor helps you invest your own money, etc.). So instead of being able to provide or do anything for myself, I always had to pay others for everything I needed to get or get done. This didn’t feel right at all.

A few years ago I started reading about “Peak Oil” (the idea that oil production will peak soon, or has peaked already, and all the stuff we rely on oil for will rapidly start to get prohibitively expensive – don’t worry, it turns out the planet will be uninhabitable from global warming before we’ve used up all the fossil fuel). Now while I don’t think the world is imminently going to collapse (though it might, I dunno, and even if I did claim to know you shouldn’t take it seriously cuz, well, I’m just somebodyontheinternet) I did start to think about what kind of world we’d live in if we gave up fossil fuel – whether because it ran out or we voluntarily stopped using it…

And I really liked what I envisioned!

In fact, what I envisioned held numerous benefits on many levels, not just dealing with global warming or a spin-down of oil production. It made logical sense, and was a lifestyle that really appealed to me at a core level. I’ve been thinking about it and expanding on it and taking action on it for years now, and it just keeps getting better and better, and has more and more evidence (and my own experience) in support of it. Again, what I’m doing isn’t the focus of the blog, just letting you know where I’m at with my own application of my ideas right now…

So we (my wife and I) came up with a plan. Two years ago we moved to a smaller city where I could still easily find work, and which is closer to the rural areas we wanted to end up living in. Then, 1 year and 7 months later, we moved to a small, rural island community with a lot of progressive “back to nature” types. We rented a house on an acre close enough to the ferry that I could cycle there to commute into the city for work, and close enough to the island’s shopping and school and beaches and restaurants/cafe that we can walk.

Our house is surrounded by nothing but trees and sky. We have a big deck, hammock, hot tub, a nice outdoor fire circle, outdoor kitchen, garden, and playhouse for the kids. The house has a wood stove for heat. We’re on well water and rain catchment with 2000 gallons of currently full water tanks. We have a propane stove/oven as well, so power outages aren’t a huge deal. Plus, we’re actually paying less rent now, and still come out ahead even when you add in commuting costs!

A couple months after moving in we built a chicken coop and bought 8 chicks for eggs… which turned into 5 roosters and only 3 hens… so now we have experience raising and butchering our own meat animals!. (We’re keeping one roo to help build our flock and we’re buying more chicks in the spring, as well as a couple turkey chicks for the holidays).

Remember – less than two years before this we were living in a tiny shoebox of an apartment in the middle of a big city where we’d been born and raised, and working our butts off to afford it. What a change!

We’ve also started integrating more intention, ritual, and symbology in our lives. We don’t subscribe to any religion, but pick and choose what feels right for us from a variety of backgrounds. We’re primarily drawn to paganism, as it celebrates the natural world, but we also pull from Native American traditions, Buddhism, Sami, South American shamanism, Hawaiian, etc. I feel one’s  spirituality should be a deep reflection of who you are and be entirely heartfelt. Obviously, by taking from numerous backgrounds, we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel, but something has to really resonate with us before we do it, and everything is tweaked as needed so that it reflects our values and our core feelings. We don’t do any of it just to pay lip service to something we think sounds cool.

In the future, our goal is to get our own property that we can farm both for ourselves and commercially. We’d like to be as self sufficient as possible, but do so using the smartest low tech ideas, not loading up on a gazillion solar panels and wind generators and such. We do like our internet and refrigeration and electric lights, so we’re not talking pioneer living!

Now, none of this may be anything you’re interested in, and that’s totally fine. This is not a site that gives precise prescriptions on how to live. The reason I’m giving a bit of a window into my life is so that you can appreciate that this is a site that would encourage you to take action on creating whatever your ideal is (though mainly by changing yourself – not forcibly changing others). The point of this article is to show you that this Somebodyontheinternet character is not someone who talks about making life changes and thinking about ideal ways of living on a purely theoretical level. I’ve spent a long time thinking about what kind of life I want to create, and even though it’s very different from how I was raised, and it hasn’t been easy in the slightest to get here, I’m committed to living my life in a way that works and feels right for me. I hope the information and thoughts on this site help you and inspire you to figure out what kind of life you want to lead, and then take action on that dream.
Thank you for joining me!

[This is a follow-up to “A Logical Approach to the Afterlife“]

How important is a second? Do you worry about wasting a second of your life?

Well, if you are on a sinking boat with a loved one, you might think every second is infinitely precious! Every moment you have together, everything you say, every gesture becomes an act so important as to be sacred.

You are completely in the here and now – you aren’t day dreaming, you aren’t worrying about whether or not the car will be repaired on time, you aren’t about to bring up past wrongs except to make amends – to authentically and sincerely apologize and forgive – to make peace. Peace would suddenly be one of your highest priorities – peace with others and peace with yourself.

But when we have a lifetime ahead of us? Do we worry about wasting a second by not doing any of these things? Not really. A second isn’t important to most people. On average, a second is only 1/2,500,000,000 of a lifetime.

So what if you are going to exist forever? If a second is inconsequential in a lifetime (1/2,500,000,000 of a lifetime), a lifetime becomes infinitely inconsequential in an eternity! (1/infinity).

Further, what about specific events? What happens to their importance over time? How much do you care about the fight you had over the playdough in kindergarten? How much does it still bother a 40 year old that they got turned down when they asked someone to prom? How much does an 80 year old care that their nephew knocked over the cake at their wedding? The further something is in the past, the less important it seems. In an eternity from now, will you still care what you accomplished or didn’t in this life? Probly not!

So an afterlife basically makes this life infinitely unimportant… Conversely… If this is the only shot at existence you have, then this life becomes infinitely important!

If you don’t believe in an afterlife, you are (or should be) more likely to act like someone on a sinking ship than someone with a vast amount of time – instead of this life being infinitely inconsequential, this life becomes infinitely precious. If you don’t believe in an afterlife, every interaction should be sacred. We should strive to live in peace with each other and find peace within ourselves.

Now, if you think your life is infinitely important, then, by extension, since this is the only life everyone else has as well, everyone elses’ lives are infinitely important, too. If everyone’s life is infinitely important, then logically we should be trying to live life to the fullest and deepest extent we can, while helping others to do the same. If you’re right, and there is no afterlife, then you would have made the best of your existence you could.

And what if you’re wrong and there is an afterlife? And what if you had to act a certain way to get into elysium/heaven/valhalla/etc.? If you believe that your life, and everyone else’s lives, are infinitely important, wouldn’t you live in the same way that most religions say you have to live in order to get the penthouse suite in the afterlife?

So if you’re wrong and there is an afterlife, no harm done. If I was the gatekeeper to the afterlife, I would look most favourably on someone who lived life to the deepest, fullest extent they could, while facilitating others to do the same.

If you believe in an afterlife, then generally the only purpose this life serves is to earn your wings. Instead of living life to the fullest, at the highest expression of yourself possible, you live life in whatever way you’re told to live it. If you’re right, hey, you get your wings, just like I would not believing in an afterlife.

If you’re wrong, well… if your right or wrong, either way I think most people who believe in an afterlife will not live their life as deeply and fully as someone who thinks this is the only shot they have at existence, in the same way as someone who knows they’re going to die tomorrow would live their last day more fully and deeply than someone who didn’t know they were going to die tomorrow.

For me, not believing in an afterlife: 1

In the next post, we’ll talk about being moral, and how believing in an afterlife or not should logically affect how morally one behaves.

Is there an afterlife?

First, if you are one of those people that only behaves because they’re worried about going to hell if they don’t: yes, there is an afterlife. Stop reading right now.

Still reading? OK… The answer is:

Dunno.

We’re not going to answer that question. Instead, this post is going to be one of a few posts looking at some logical conclusions one must accept if they believe in an an afterlife or not. As with my approach to any topic like this, I try to look at everything involved in a particular assumption and follow it to some logical conclusions based on that assumption.

Many people simply look at the main arguments for – I get to live forever, I get to see my loved ones again, when my loved ones die they go to a better place, good people are always rewarded, bad people are always punished, it encourages people to act morally, etc.. Others look at the main arguments against – the biggest being that there’s really no good reason to believe there is an afterlife.

We’re going to try to go beyond just feeling good or just being analytical and see if we can come up with an intelligent approach that satisfies both our spiritual needs and our analytical mind.

If you’re wondering, my personal choice, the one that both makes logical sense and which makes my life feel the most special and sacred and encourages me to live the best life I can, and help others to do the same, is to take the position that there is no afterlife.

The reality is that if there is no afterlife, then nothing we believe will change that. If there is an afterlife, nothing we believe will change that. To date, there hasn’t been enough evidence to really support a belief in an afterlife, but there’s been some anecdotal evidence that there might be. So we can’t really say one way or the other if there is or isn’t one. We can’t really know.

But, if we want to pick a “least wrong” approach, then we would look at the pros and cons of believing or not believing there is one, and what the consequences might be if we are right or wrong. After all, believing in an afterlife isn’t just hypothetical, with no real impact on your life. There are some knock-on effects. Now that we know where we’re starting from, lets take a look with the first one in the next post: Is Life Infinitely Important or Unimportant?

I like to be right.

This is considered by many people to be a pretty egocentric statement, yet most of us can certainly relate to it. But there are both egocentric and humble/honest ways of approaching “being right”.

One approach to “being right” is to pick the position that you like best (for whatever reason) and defend it to the death. In defending it, anything goes – “straw man” arguments, cherry picking facts, quote mining, confusing the debate with twisted logic, keeping on the offensive instead of defending your own position, you name it. The goal is not to actually be right, just feel right.

Another approach, and the one that I prefer, is to scrutinize everything you believe and be constantly trying to disprove yourself. This is not to achieve external recognition or to feel good about yourself or your position. In fact, it can be very frustrating and demoralizing at times! You have to get comfortable with not knowing where you stand on issues that are very important to you. After all, if you want to be honest and be right, sometimes the only truthful, accurate thing you can say is “I don’t know”!

Of course, you have to live life, so sometimes you have to pick what seems like the best answer and just go with it until you figure out something better, but the big difference is that you don’t stop seeking. The goal in this case might more accurately be described as being the “least wrong” you can be.

However, it is this constant searching that has led me to learn about logic, and that has helped me to gain insights into some very fundamental questions of life. Sometimes it’s not an “answer” per se, but it often helps me do a much better job of figuring out what is truly the best position to take on particular matters – usually helping me lead a better, more engaged, more connected, more authentic, more empowered life with more of a sense of the sacred and miraculous.

(And by that I don’t mean of the supernatural variety – I feel the natural world is full of the sacred and miraculous!)

The Big Answer has been my biggest achievement to date, and I believe it is the most important and fundamental discovery possible, especially since it is what underlies truth itself, and therefore forms the basis of any search for truth and makes discoveries of any kind possible. While that has it’s own site dedicated to it at www.thebiganswer.org, this site is my dumping ground for ideas with a similar logical approach.

The big difference you’ll notice between the two sites is that The Big Answer site is impersonal. There are almost no “I” statements. This comes back to my strategy for being “right” – constantly challenging my own position. I feel that leaving the concepts on the stage, and joining my readers in the audience, we can have a more open and objective discussion about them.

This site is still logical, but the topics it deals with are a mix of insights that might help you gain insight when choosing your “least wrong” answers, rather than being answers in and of themselves. If you have specific feedback on one of the concepts, I welcome your input!

Email address: emailsomebodyontheinternet (at) gmail.com

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