Resilient, Self-Reliant Life Is Hard

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Every single thing that increases resilience and self-reliance is impossible.

This reader’s email cut through the clutter: “I’m seeing multiple sites and people that give great insight into what’s wrong with our society and economy etc but what I’m looking for is more information regarding how to protect and prepare myself and those that I care about.”

I’ve been addressing how to forge a more resilient, self-reliant life since 2009 when I published Survival+. More recently, I wrote a brief guide to Self-Reliance in the 21st Century.

But quite frankly, talking about a resilient life of self-reliance feels like being a street-corner preacher: few are actually interested in pursuing self-reliance, and even fewer are willing to make the dramatic life changes required to actually become more resilient / self-reliant.

The reason is that it’s hard, and it’s hard for several reasons. One is the work itself is demanding; there’s nothing easy about the work or the learning-by-doing. Second, in a culture and economy devoted to comfort, convenience, novelty, attracting attention (“engagement”) and status signaling, resilience requires swimming against this immense tide of marketing and “well, if everyone else is pursuing all this, it must be valuable, so I’ll pursue it, too.”

My perspective is based on systems and common sense, but it comes across as doom-and-gloom because we naturally want to believe (and be reassured) that everything we depend on is permanent and solid.

So let’s consider every megalopolis / urban sprawl in the nation, where the majority of people live and work. Cities no longer produce much of anything. Their primary economic activities are: tourism, entertainment (amusing ourselves by spending money), real estate (gaming the RE bubble), credit/banking (expanding the debt bubble), healthcare, the higher education industry (that lives off $1.5 trillion in student loans) and a wide spectrum of complexity work: marketing, compliance, work-flow optimization, insurance, forms / payments / applications processing, oversight, issuing credentials and so on, tasks that are necessary in an overly complex system that depends on the ceaseless expansion of debt to fund itself, but which produces little of what we need to live.

This describes my job as a writer, too, of course. As someone wisely pointed out a few years ago, “We can’t eat an iPad,” nor can we eat the words or images on the screen.

If a Carrington Event fried the electronic / digital circuitry running all this, life would go on, albeit with some initial difficulties. But if water, food and fuel vanish, life doesn’t go on.

With writing and all that other stuff gone, I’d revert to doing work that doesn’t require digital assets: repairing stuff with hand tools, growing food, teaching kids how to grow food, preparing food for elderly folks, etc. Life goes on.

This immensely complex concentration of humanity has no more than a few days of actual life essentials such as food and fuel on hand, and the systems of re-supply have been optimized to the point of fragility: the entire system is tightly bound and heavily centralized, i.e. stripped of redundancy and resilience.

Author Charles Perrow invested his career in explaining how such tightly bound centralized systems are vulnerable to what he called normal accidents, not Black Swans or aliens landing, just the everyday routine things that break or fail and trigger consequences. The problem is the more tightly bound, centralized and optimized the system, the more catastrophic the potential consequences.

Once we grasp this, common sense suggests removing ourselves from this nexus of vulnerability. But when I suggest that maybe moving out of the city might be a wise risk-reduction move, the response is as if I’d suggested moving to a penal colony in the asteroid belt.

In other words, every single thing that increases resilience and self-reliance is impossible. Only eating real food? Impossible. Getting healthy without supplements, “wellness” clinics, gyms, etc.? Impossible. Limiting screentime on all devices? Impossible. Reducing expenses? Impossible. Growing some of your own food? Impossible. And so on. Everything’s impossible until there’s no other option. And then it’s too late.

When you’re thirsty, it’s too late to dig a well.

Self-reliance is not self-sufficiency. My definition of self-reliance is: the less you need, the easier it is to get what you need. We all need industrial products: gaskets, valves, saw blades, spare parts, high-grade steel, fertilizer, concrete and a thousand other highly specialized bits and pieces. The point of self-reliance isn’t to attempt self-sufficiency; the point is to reduce risks and vulnerabilities by reducing our needs and increasing our productive capacity for the essentials of life.

This is why I suggested in my book Global Crisis, National Renewal that maybe it would be wiser to focus on rebuilding and maintaining our national ability to produce these essentials rather than focus on boosting “growth” of throwaway consumption by borrowing more from the future.

The less we need, the easier it is to get what we need. Let’s say one household can get by perfectly well on 10 gallons of gasoline a month and another household needs 100 gallons a month just to survive. Which is easier, getting 10 gallons or getting 100 gallons? The same can be said of water, food and income.

The other part of self-reliance is figuring out how to be productive on our own. In my book Get a Job, Build a Real Career, I lay out an alternative to the credential / accreditation hamster wheel: accredit yourself. Is that easy? No, like everything else in self-reliance, it’s hard–but ultimately rewarding.

In a money-wealth obsessed culture, the “solution” to all problems is to pile up money / wealth. But all this “money” in whatever form is simply a means to buy what somebody else produced. Wouldn’t it be better to be the producer rather than the buyer?

Put another way: gold can be stolen or expropriated. Dirt–no so much, and skills–not at all. Stealing dirt is difficult, and unless the thief knows what to do with the dirt, i.e. how to actually grow food, the dirt is worthless. Food doesn’t grow itself. It takes a lot of work and experiential knowledge. But it’s highly satisfying in ways that few have ever experienced in our Ultra-Processed Life.

My definition of Ultra-Processed Life: Ultra-Processed Life replaces an authentic experience with a synthetic, simulated, commoditized, highly profitable version that’s superficially attractive but destructive / debilitating.

So 70% of our food is now ultra-processed, and we wonder why we’re burdened by chronic lifestyle diseases?

There is nothing easy, comfortable, convenient, novel or status-enhancing about living a resilient, self-reliant life. It’s hard, demands sacrifices and often tedious work with little immediate reward. The system we inhabit makes it difficult on every level.

Now that I’ve offended or pissed off everyone, please excuse my derangement. It’s the meds. Yeah, the meds. I just need some Substance D and I’ll be fine.

“A healthy homecooked family meal and a home garden are revolutionary acts.” (CHS, May 2008)

“You don’t miss what you no longer want.” (CHS, August 2008)

“Food is wealth, health is wealth, energy is wealth; all else is illusion.” (CHS, December 15, 2008)

“Meaningful work and meaningful skills make a meaningful life, even if the work is unpaid.” (CHS, March 6, 2009)

“If you like eating, begin liking dirt.” (CHS, April 6, 2009)

“The Mobile Creative credo: trust your network, not the corporation or the state.” (CHS)

Check out my new book Ultra-Processed Life and my updated Books and Films.

Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com

Subscribe to my Substack for free

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My recent books:

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Ultra-Processed Life print $16, (Kindle $7.95, Hardcover $20 (129 pages, 2025) audiobook     Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

The Mythology of Progress, Anti-Progress and a Mythology for the 21st Century print $16, (Kindle $6.95, audiobook, Hardcover $24 (215 pages, 2024) Read the Introduction and first chapter for free (PDF)

Self-Reliance in the 21st Century print $15, (Kindle $6.95, audiobook $13.08 (96 pages, 2022) Read the first chapter for free (PDF)

When You Can’t Go On: Burnout, Reckoning and Renewal $15 print, $6.95 Kindle ebook; audiobook Read the first section for free (PDF)

Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States (Kindle $6.95, print $16, audiobook) Read Chapter One for free (PDF).

A Hacker’s Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet (Kindle $6.95, print $15, audiobook $17.46) Read the first section for free (PDF).

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?: Profit, Power, and AI in a Traumatized World
(Kindle $3.95, print $12, audiobook) Read the first section for free (PDF).

The Adventures of the Consulting Philosopher: The Disappearance of Drake (Novel) $3.95 Kindle, $12 print); read the first chapters for free (PDF)

Money and Work Unchained $6.95 Kindle, $15 print) Read the first section for free

Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com.

Subscribe to my Substack for free

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Source: http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2025/08/resilient-self-reliant-life-is-hard.html