I am going to structure this how-to manual in three volumes that map to the first three major phases of the journey of Deep Response: the Crowbar, the Moat, and the Open World. These volumes, or phases of the journey, map roughly to the three main pillars I argued for in my first book: autonomy via frugality, polymathy, and internalized systems thinking.
- You need autonomy to be free to do stuff, pursue stoke, and work on the Flotilla. You can’t get anything done if you’re scrambling around all day every day putting out fires and dealing with the chaos you don’t even realize you manifest.
- You need broad and deep skills if you want to be useful to yourself and others, and if you want to cultivate any kind of meaningful resilience.
- And systems thinking applied at the level of your life is the key to tie everything together, to reduce friction and get everything working on a common theme bespoke to you.
Volume 1, The Crowbar is all about putting your own oxygen mask on first and addressing whatever emergencies and serious dysfunctions you may have in your life system. This is all about making big steps towards carving out freedom and resilience for yourself. Reduce your cost of living. Get out of debt. Start saving money. Stock your pantry and ruggedize your home. Stop doing silly bullshit that saps your vital life force. Simplify: cut out the frivolous stuff that doesn’t serve you, and double down on the essential marrow of life. Discover experientially that you don’t need to be living above your means in order to have a good life, that in fact you can consume well below your means and have an amazing life. This is the beginning of the internalization of a post-consumer’s mindset.
Conceptually the crowbar is about optimizing and prioritizing. It’s going to involve asking yourself hard questions that only you have the answer to. It’s going to demand that you start acting in accordance and alignment with what you say your values and visions are.
Volume 2 The Moat is all about stacking skills, knowledge, and experiences. Whereas the Crowbar Era was mostly about cutting and culling, scooping out the unnecessary debris from your life and generally performing demolition, The Moat is a construction phase. You’ll learn new skills and new ways of thinking. You’ll perform constructive or additive lifestyle experiments aimed at increasing personal household resilience. You’re going to ruggedize your life and prepare for any variety of possible future scenarios. You are also going to learn diagnostic ways of thinking that will help you decide what to keep in your life, what to remove, and what to add in.
Volume 3 The Cave is finish work. Sticking with the construction analogy, this is where you make the build yours. You make it something beautiful and bespoke, something that works for and inspires you. You make it a structure for living your life and chasing your dreams.
More specifically it is about internalizing systems thinking. Closing loops, eliminating or lubricating sources of friction, exposing yourself to serendipity, etc.
The linear path implied by the three volumes is a bit of a contrivance. In reality you need to develop some skills while still in the Crowbar phase, and you will benefit by employing insights from systems thinking straight from day one. The volumes are more about what the primary focus and what the bulk of the work is directed towards, and where the proper mindset and attention needs to reside in order to lock in significant changes in your life. So with that in mind I recommend reading ahead (whenever I write enough for that to be possible) and getting a sense for what comes next.
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