Solutions return current circumstances to a preferred prior operational dynamic.
Responses engage with current circumstances in a way that moves the system forward to a new operational dynamic.
A comprehensive solution to the polycrisis seeks to return civilization to industrial consumer capitalist pseudo-stability. Critically, seeking a solution to the metacrisis implies no fundamental critique of the structure of that arrangement. Solution-seeking is an affirmation of the basic structural assumptions and mythologies of how we’ve been doing things.
A deep response to the metacrisis begins with a substantial critique of the driving assumptions and mythologies of the current arrangement, proposes alternatives, and seeks to move civilization to a new operational dynamic. Deep response assumes that the fundamental logic of the previous method is inherently dysfunctional and must be phased out for more-functional alternatives.
Solutionism insists that the system is broken and must be fixed. Responsiveness declares that the system is working precisely as intended and must be left behind.[1]
A Protocol for Response at the Personal Level
Among everything else we may have to do to move towards a more harmonious civilization in this time of polycrisis, one of the first things we need to do as individuals is unlearn the implicit operating dynamic of industrial consumer capitalism, begin practicing alternative ways of living, and carve out significant amounts of autonomy from obligate participation in the logic of the inherently flawed system.
The successor societies arising out of the ruins of the 21st century will not find fertile soil in the minds and lives of those who swim as yet unconsciously in the waters of consumerism. And even those consciously aware of and interested in contributing to those successor societies will face great difficulty if the bulk of their life energy remains coupled and devoted to surviving and thriving that system.
The Crowbar Protocol is the first of three stages of Deep Response at the personal level. These stages are the part where you affix your own oxygen mask and get your own house in order. There’s more to responding to the polycrisis than just getting your own house in order. But everything else is a lot harder if your own house is a dumpster fire, so start there.
The Crowbar Protocol is thus not a cheat code for winning the Current Arrangement via clever hacks, and it is not a solution to anything. It is a method for exiting a failing way of life and securing the personal autonomy required to pursue alternatives. It is rough and fast, intended for people who have a burning sense of urgency to get away from the terminal spirit disease of modern culture.
The Protocol is pragmatic and doesn’t bother striving for the illusion of moral purity via ethical consumerism. It’s about:
- reducing expenses while improving quality of life,
- unlearning socialized consumerist habits of mind,
- laying the foundation for radical personal autonomy,
- and pareto decoupling your life from industrial consumer society,
- quickly.
It is effective, yet difficult. The point of the Crowbar Protocol is to make major changes in your life that allow you to pursue other goals with your life.
The Crowbar Protocol is a phase, not a permanent way of life. It should probably last no longer than 18 months. You can execute Crowbar tactics a la carte at any time, but this guide is about how to employ the Crowbar Protocol to your entire lifestyle all at once.
The protocol is presented in a suggested optimum order, but don’t get hung up. You can do them in a different order, and you can do them serially or in parallel.
An Outline of the Deep Response Crowbar Protocol
Track your income, expenses, and accounts. Don’t make a budget, make a tracker. You are gathering information to improve understanding and fluid decision-making, not attempting to run your life according to a spreadsheet. (Side effect: improved financial literacy and numeracy.)
Eliminate exposure to consumer programming as much as possible. Don’t watch or listen to commercials, don’t listen to materialistic music, get off of social media, set up ad-blockers on your computers, etc.
Stop eating out, avoid processed foods and meat, and stop using inebrients (alcohol, weed, etc). Cook all your food at home using mostly plant based whole food ingredients purchased in bulk or at discount grocers. (Side effect: improved diet and health.)
Get rid of extra stuff (sell > donate > recycle > trash). Find your own balance between minimalism and essentialism. Organize what you decide to keep. (Side effect: you need less house now, and moving is cheaper and easier.)
Move close enough to the places you need to go (work, grocery store, friends) that you don’t need to use a car more often than once a month, so you can sell your car(s). (Side effect: you don’t need a car.)
Sell your car and commute via bicycle or walking. Repair and maintain your bike yourself. (Side effect: increased physical fitness.)
If you can’t or won’t move to a place where you don’t need a car, then own a reliable 10-20yo car and do the maintenance and repairs yourself. Don’t own more car than you need. (If you don’t live in a serious winter place, you don’t need awd/4wd. If you don’t haul firewood, horses, or construction materials for a living, you don’t need a full-size pickup. etc)
Downsize your home so that you aren’t paying for more house than you need. Consider roommates and multigenerational housing, tinyhouses, housesitting, vanlife, house hacking, flipping, moving to a LCOL yet desirable-to-you location, exchanging housing for labor (land/property manager, caretaking), and geographic arbitrage.
What to live in and where to live is extremely personal. Expand your Overton Window and find a situation that works well for you. The best option might involve initially spending money, like buying or building a tinyhouse. (Potential side effects: lower/zero utility bill, improved social life, skill acquisition, income, travel experience for “free”.)
Cancel health insurance and move to a health share. Or, reduce your income (possibly via retirement account contributions) to qualify for subsidized health insurance. If you currently receive health benefits through your employer, keep that. Health shares and subsidized health insurance is primarily for people who fall outside of the employer-plan safety net.
Cancel all subscription services (Netflix, Spotify, substacks, etc) and find free alternatives (libraries, CDs, vinyl, etc).
Get psychological/mental health help. See a therapist, a support group, DIY a modality yourself, engage in your spiritual community, whatever works for you. Most of us are struggling in one way or another, and the greatest risk to our own flourishing is emotional and/or psychological dysfunctions. One warning to bear in mind is that ‘it is no sign of health to be well adjusted to a fundamentally sick society’. You may be mad with cosmological grief. Incorporate this understanding into your self care.
Do a No Buy Year, where you only spend money on essentials like bills and groceries. Begin this after Crowbaring your transportation and housing, which may trigger strategic purchases (sell car > buy a bicycle; sell bigger-than-necessary house > buy materials and tools to build a tinyhouse). (Side effect: this is where the real work of unlearning consumerism happens.)
Pursue high-quality leisure activities that don’t cost anything, like reading library books, walking, working out, writing, making art, making social events with friends/your community, fixing/restoring ‘broken’ things, cooking (as a leisure activity it doesn’t require any more money than you need to spend on food to stay alive anyway), etc.
Become a regular at your library. Get a library card and use it. Read anything you like. Find what you like to read, forget what you ‘should’ read, and don’t stop reading. Reading as a way of life is the cornerstone of a life well lived.
Frame difficult changes as 30-90 day “experiments” and “challenges” to overcome fear and doubt with lifestyle change. When you frame it as a time-bound experiment, it removes the social stigma of “failing” and frames it as information-gathering and skill acquisition. It also requires less commitment to do something for 30 days rather than “the rest of your life”. At the end of the challenge you get to make a decision about how to move forward with your life.
Talk about your plans and lifestyle changes as openly as you like, but do it gracefully. It is easy to inadvertently trigger other people’s defenses by implicitly pointing out dissonances in their own decisions. Clumsy evangelizing can alienate friends and family, and you cannot afford to alienate friends and family. Avoid the temptation to talk disparagingly about normies, including the use of the term “normies”. Dwell on compassionate perspectives and only allow yourself to speak in this way out loud around anyone. Refer to your journey in as humble and self-exploratory terms as feels genuine.
Don’t ask people close to you to Crowbar their lives along with you. It’s better to explain what you’re doing, and why, and actively and explicitly seek ways to accommodate your relationship with those people in the context of your Crowbar phase. If they’re interested in joining, let it be their idea. Lead by example, and if they don’t follow, accept that without complaint.
Plan and execute social experiences that are inexpensive or free. Your social circle and family likely has a habit of “how you hang out” that is based to some degree on spending money, like going to restaurants, bars, shopping, expensive vacations, etc. Do not expect your social circle to adapt to your new weird behaviors. Instead, plan and invite people to picnics, bbqs, hikes, potluck/dinner at your place, game nights, etc. Don’t even talk about money or why you’re doing it. Just start making low- and no-cost social experiences happen.
Find allies and talk regularly for encouragement and support. It is unlikely that everyone in your life is going to understand and support what you’re doing. Instead of demanding that those people understand and support you, find people who already understand what you’re doing and can provide moral support. A chat group with like-minded allies can make or break your Crowbar phase.
Principles
Reducing expenses is more powerful than increasing income. Always reduce or eliminate expenses first, before spending energy on increasing income.
Eliminate categories of expenses first, before spending energy reducing category expenses. (The cheapest auto insurance is to own a bicycle instead of a car. The cheapest cuts of meat are to be vegetarian. The least expensive entertainment is to do things that you intrinsically enjoy that do not cost money or that generate money or that contribute to your community: walks in nature, sewing, reading, throwing potlucks and dinner parties, making music, etc).
The most difficult aspect of the Crowbar phase is relationships. Failure is most often a result of overwhelming/unrelenting social pressure to conform to prior patterns, lack of support, and self-doubt in the face of criticism. Do not underestimate how critical supportive relationships are during this Phase. It is much easier to maintain lifestyle change once you’ve made them and kept to them for a period of time, and the people around you accept the fact that this is just how you live your life. Until then, the people in your life will unconsciously demand that you conform to their old understanding of how you lived your life. This makes it incredibly hard to get through the Crowbar Protocol in one piece.
Results to Expect as a result of your Crowbar Era:
- Significantly reduced Cost of Living
- Elimination of debt
- Accumulation of savings (a money ‘buffer’)
- Ability to spend less time earning money (sabbaticals, seasonal work, early ‘retirement’, and part-time work become realistic options).
- A more flexible/agile lifestyle (you can move quickly, you can move anywhere, you’re less encumbered by physical things, etc)
- A healthier lifestyle (more movement, better nutrition).
- More autonomy, either potential (you could quit your job and be fine for months/years) or actual (you move to seasonal/parttime work or do a hybrid approach of house hacking and arbitrage to pay your bills).
- Reduced impulses to buy stuff.
In one sentence, the purpose of the crowbar phase is to decrease (or maintain a low) cost of living while maintaining or increasing quality of life in order to deprogram consumer ideology, and to do so as quickly as possible. This is more radical than it sounds.
If you figure out the trick of maintaining or increasing quality of life despite a lower cost of living, then you have subverted the implicit directive of consumer culture which is to maximize earning and spending in an endless and futile race for More. Not just intellectually or rhetorically, you have subverted it with your actions. Your life becomes living proof that we are essentially indoctrinated into wasting something like 7/8’s of our lives on things that don’t matter to us.
In this process, you will change your brain. You will change how you think, if you go deep enough. Doing the practical day to day work of spending less and living more is extremely rich information about your life and your world that you will incorporate into your thinking patterns. This is a feedback loop. The more you do it, the more you believe it, the more it feels natural to do it.
You only need to believe enough to begin, and to get a few small wins in. These small wins feed back into your belief system and will provide extra motivation and desire to keep going.
If you space your wins out too much, it is easy to get bored or discouraged and lose motivation. This is one reason why I recommend going as fast as you can. Start getting small wins, stack and bunch them, and don’t rest on your laurels. Win and keep going, win and keep doing.
If you tackle something too big and thorny too early, and suffer a loss, you can kill all forward momentum. It is important to not suffer too many or too large of losses, especially in the beginning. You will definitely have some failures (aka learning experiences) and discouraging episodes. This is unavoidable and nothing to be ashamed of. It is the cost of learning. But from a technical perspective, especially in the beginning, seek those early wins to build motivational momentum that can carry you through the thornier ones.
Which actions will be easier to pull a win off with has a lot to do with your unique personality. Something that is breezy and kind of fun for me (e.g. building and tweaking a financial resource tracking spreadsheet) might sound like pure psychological torture for you. Building a spreadsheet is the first thing I did, and it helped me build stoke and guide actions. Maybe it should be the last thing you do after you’ve built up a good head of steam already.
With that understood, grab your crowbar and let’s go.
[1] Another distinction of responsiveness is that it places no faith in a static linear plan or narrative. Deep response is based on process rather than plan, on dynamicism rather than static stability. Solutionism insists that things ought to work according to the Plan and fights to make that so. Responsivism asks if things are working out well or not, and adjusts based on the answer, fluidly through time. Solutionism declares that the purpose of a system is what is intended. Responsivism observes that the purpose of a system is what it does.
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