On Authenticity, And Starting A Blog
New Year, New Habits: New Blog
“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
― Henry David Thoreau
“Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.”
― Henry David Thoreau
Everybody has dreams and everybody has the potential to develop the character needed to achieve the purpose of their dreams; but few of us have the audacity to go after them. Our fears of failure, rejection, criticism, and our lack of self-worth usually stop us before we even begin. The hard part of dream-work is self-work. The easy part is doing the actual physical work of pursuing our passions. For example, if you have low self-worth, the hard part of starting a business is deciding to start the business in the first place, and then having the fortitude of self-worth to charge enough to stay in business. The easy part is filing the required paperwork, paying the fees, getting the required licensing and learning and mastering the field of work.
I am not a writer, and I am not a blogger; until now, as I am now writing my first blog. Every new year presents a new psychological demarcation with which to set in motion new habits, and an opportunity to let go of old vices or lesser habits. No one has “extra” time or “spare” time just waiting around for them to use for their next stab at self-improvement. From the time we wake, to the time we go to bed, the entirety of our time is allotted for and pre-scheduled by our habits. To initiate a new habit, an old habit must be sacrificed. In my case, I am letting go of aimless scrolling, and will generate content for you to non-aimlessly scroll through.
When I wake up in the morning, before anybody else wakes up, when things are productively quiet, instead of having my coffee and aimlessly scrolling, I now have my coffee and I take care of business. I do my calendar work, any necessary paperwork, and accounting work, and when the loose ends are all tied up, I blog. The goal is at least one good blog post per week.
I have decided to start a practice of blogging for many reasons. Chief among them, is because authenticity within business is vitally important in today’s world, more than ever before. We no longer live tribally and we simply don’t have time to be personally connected to the majority of the people around us. Our hurried lives don’t hardly allow time for community, anymore. One of the best ways to bridge this gap is to put who you are on the internet. To showcase your work as a sort of running online portfolio. To gather reviews so that others can see that your excellence is corroborated by what your clients are saying. And to blog, or to in some way or another, put yourself out there so that people can see who you are and what you are all about.
One all-pervasive challenge with the internet, is AI. Everyone is being encouraged to use it to generate content. CRM’s, social media, and other platforms on which people use to disseminate their message are encouraging their users to use AI built right into their platforms to generate content such as blog posts and social media posts, as if using AI to generate your content somehow doesn’t completely violate the entire reason for generating content (authenticity). For this very reason, it is evermore important to be authentic. How else are we able to sort out the sour grapes from the good ones, without the sour taste? The name of the game is Authenticity. To create an online presence where we Personally regularly post what we are up to, what we have been working on, and where we can share our thoughts without the hindrance of AI confounding the message. The internet is crowded enough with billions of people. With bots and AI generated bullshit, the internet is an endless overcrowded cavern of confusion. Bring in the light. Be authentic.
I am sure you have heard of random number generators. Now imagine a random bullshit generator. It’s something that spins together words into grammatically correct and coherent sentences but the content is conceptually completely random bullshit. Well, AI is like a non-random bullshit generator. But that it is non-random does not at all mean that it can think or is correct. It has no experience of reality nor faculties with which to discern truth from bullshit. That it appears to be accurate most of the time is a result of the Human generated content that it has been fed. And it takes a Human or something that has an experience and can use the scientific method to actually be able to compare false claims against reality to be able to think. AI cannot think, and it especially cannot think for you. If we are to be authentic, we can not dispense with our personal experiences which is exactly what AI generated bullshit does.
We are, I believe, pretty good at discerning the difference between content generated by AI, and content generated by someone, when given enough content. We are idiosyncratic creatures. We are all weird and unique in our own ways. We could feed a bunch of someone’s writing into AI and it could spit out more writing that would be tailored to their idiosyncrasies, but then we would once again be dispensing with our experience. And it is our Experience that we are interested in as humans. We are Humans, not robots, and the Human Experience is what we yearn to connect with. Which is why I promise here not to use AI for any of my content. It seems absurd that this has to be stated, but this is the world we live in. We now have to make guesses as to whether we are dealing with a robot or a human.
This is one of the many reasons I am passionate about homesteading and permaculture. Our inventions are great and have vastly improved our lives, but we always run the risk of flying too close to the sun like Icarus and getting burned in the process. We have to have our feet planted firmly into the earth in order not to lose our fucking minds. We have been around for a long time. We have been around for way longer than we can even begin to imagine, and we spent all of that time directly and unavoidably connected to and completely surrounded by our immediately local earthly environments. And now, all of a sudden, all of our cognition has been stolen away from our regular world of earthliness, and replaced with intangible, dehumanizing fakeness. Our eyes and attention commandeered by screens, and our sense of belonging replaced by total alienation. We don’t know who, or what we are and we definitely don’t know what the hell we’re here for or why we do what we are doing other than to try to get by and to escape the feelings of helplessness. We are estranged from our environments and our senses. We can’t get our wits about us without correcting the reason why we are so alienated. We need to bring the basis for why, where, and how we are here back to within our senses if we are going to feel normal again. Look at the prevalence of unhappiness, psychological disorder, and unease within us. Those feeling aren’t flukes. They are real and they have a legitimate cause based in reality. What we have done to our world and ourselves is why we feel like this. It’s not a psychological problem. It’s a problem with how we have changed our world. The psychological distress is not the problem. It is simply and accurately indicating that there IS a problem. And I believe we can fix most of these problems through homesteading and permaculture.
Authenticity is how we build community again, and it is how we earn the trust of others. Authenticity reveals what we do and don’t know. It reveals our thoughts, and it reveals our character. The more authentic we are, the more capable we are to decipher whether or not someone can be trusted. And being able to trust that a business can and will keep their word, is one of the most important qualities a client can find in a business that will be serving them.
To be able to trust that someone is who they say they are. To be able to trust that they are not up to unscrupulous mischief. To be able to trust that they know what they are doing and are qualified for the job. To be able to trust that they are reliable, but yet if they make a mistake, they will correct that mistake and make it right. And to be able to trust that the job will be completed in a timely, professional manner, and on budget. These issues of trust are the pillars of a lasting business-client relationship, as well as the pillars of civilization itself. It is on trust in each other that we build civilization, and when trust is eroded, so to is the fabric of society and civilization also eroded. Therefore, we need trust. And what better way to build trust than to do good work and procure endless hours of blog posts through which a prospective client can skim through and inspect the brains of the business in question?
This is why I am here now blogging. Through my blogs, I hope to convey the trustworthiness of my business. It is also a way for me to answer the many questions that I get over and over regarding various services that I offer. By answering these questions here, I can reduce the number of times I have to address these questions in person. And, I can address these technical matters more thoroughly than time might otherwise allow when I’m out doing an in-person estimate or consultation. I also hope that perhaps these blogs may become a trove of information for both independent contractors, and DIYer’s alike. And a source of information and inspiration for homesteading, permaculture, and freedom.
Lastly, I don’t know if I’ll ever write a book. But a good way to write one is by making a ritual of writing on a regular basis no matter what. Just like anything else, something small done daily will inevitably eventually become something significant. One day, at least several months ago, an idea for a book popped into my head and I haven’t been able to let go of it. The name of the book would be, “The 5 to 9 Homestead.”
It would be a how-to book with the intentions of educating and seeping the lifestyle of homesteading into the lives of ordinary people; such as people with 9 to 5 jobs. A way of helping them to become familiar with and how to assemble the pieces of homesteading into a functional efficient whole and still have enough time left over to attend to the other demands of life. I don’t yet feel qualified to write that book, but I am living that lifestyle. I have an amazing and beautiful wife and three wonderful kids… soon to be four. I am self-employed, and am working on scaling up my job from self-employment into a legitimate business. We moved from the city, to five acres on the outskirts of a little rural town; and in between work and sleep, we find just enough time to bit by bit piece together our dreams. And in time, with continued daily effort, I will be qualified to write that book, and blogging is a good way to get started.
These blog posts will not be done in any particular order. There is no plan for a running theme. What I will write about in any given blog will simply be determined by what’s on my mind at the time of writing. I don’t consider myself a writer, and I have never made a significant practice of writing. My goal is to simply write at least one good blog post every week to the benefit of me, my business, and hopefully to you, the reader, as well.
I hope you have enjoyed reading this first blog post. The sun is rising, my inordinately large mug of coffee is empty, and my kids are waking; which means my ability to focus and think will vanish, and the activities of the day are calling me to action. I’ve got pigs, goats, sheep, rabbits, chickens, ducks and guineas to feed before eating breakfast and getting ready for a day of work. Life is full of life, opportunities, drudgery, enjoyment, marvel, and gratitude. We just have to go through the motions of our everyday lives with enough awareness and gratitude to see it. Homesteading can be a channel through which magic funnels into our everyday lives, and I hope I can inspire you to etch into the difficulties of life, a channel of your own.
