The Journey so far
Retrospective
It all started with the Greeks. Not those old guys, though I eventually came back to them as well, but what happened to Greece during the economic crisis of 2010. Watching those events from the comfort of a sofa in front of the TV left me completely clueless. Destroying the welfare system, cutting down on pensions and selling public infrastructure for peanuts, only so they get benevolently granted new loans, only so they can pay the interest on the existing loans... that didn't make any sense at all. And the arrogance displayed by the "Troika" was just unbelievable.
What was going on there? Is the world really as fucked up as it feels? Or is there actually some sense behind it, and those people were actually doing the right thing (or at least fixing the badness a good as possible), and they (or the press in general) were just bad at explaining it?
So I started reading stuff about economics and watched some "Economics 101" class on Youtube. It left me unimpressed and failed to "fix" that feeling that this whole shit is just fucked up. But I did fall down into the rabbit hole, digging deeper and deeper, until I actually did end up with those "old Greeks", i.e. Plato, Aristotle, etc. I always had some interest in philosophy, but never tried to study it in any systematic way. But the feeling emerged that it might now be time to actually do that. Which by the way I'm still not really doing, but I'm slowly getting there, with this website possibly being part of that process.
But studying philosophy, economics, etc. is a journey, which is going to take years, and it is unclear if it could ever tell me how I fit into this whole mess, and which decisions about my own life are sensible. Or what just adds to this pile of disasters that we are building so skillfully. Which is where Permaculture comes in. At some point I saw something on TV about it and just felt "I want to do that, too". Which might be silly, given that I don't understand anything about the "big picture", but I can't just hold my breath, I do have to make decisions right here, right now, and Permaculture feels like a sensible framework to me.
2021
So my two major projects are to a) get an idea of how to live a sensible life, which fits into some positive "big picture" and b) learn and implement a live according to Permaculture principles. If I'm lucky, those two will eventually converge. If not... well, tough luck. And both projects to require me to do something, which I haven't really done in my life before: learn. As in "sit down and systematically work through this list of stuff." Which means I also have to learn how to learn. How to read books and actually extract useful knowledge from it, as opposed to just consuming it. And how to put such knowledge together into something that actually brings me forward.
All this is a pretty big deal for me. Big enough to ditch my job. And buy a house somewhere with some garden or land. The job: check. The house: hmpf... COVID-19, lock-downs and travel restrictions weren't particularly helpful, but I'd like to get this done in the not too distant future (that's a lot of money, which scares me quite a bit).