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I thought about this a little bit more while milking this morning.
There's nothing wrong with knowing how to milk a cow by hand, make charcoal, dig a root cellar, or shatter drill a well.
There are some possible futures in which these skills could be valuable.
However, the methodologies replicated aren't the most efficient, productive, useful. It's more about preserving 19th c. American culture than cultivating survival skills.
It's about leaning in to the mythology of our past rather than the realities and needs of our present.
It's not about preparation for the future; it's isolation from the present, from society, from progress.
It's fear of your society, not preservation of it.
On a household level, though, it's about creating work.
We all know Mrs. Married-With-Four-Kids isn't washing her laundry in the river.
She's going to the Dollar General, buying Ivory soap and washing soda to spend the afternoon making detergent to put in her Maytag washing machine because she's afraid of Tide.
A lot of the tasks promoted in these communities are totally reliant on modern society.
No one is preserving food in homemade crocks or sealing clay jars with wax.
They're using Mason jars, disposable lids, their STOVES.
They're using Mason jars, disposable lids, their STOVES.
It's faux sufficiency.
I knew a woman who worked in a fairly high-earning professional field and quit due to issues with her managers.
During her stretch of unemployment, she started making her own soap because OMG early puberty from store-bought cosmetics.
I've used quite a bit of handmade soap and hers was fine. It wasn't retail quality, but it wasn't bad.
I've used quite a bit of handmade soap and hers was fine. It wasn't retail quality, but it wasn't bad.
She could have totally afforded a year's worth of handmade soap and lotion and lip balm with one day of professional work.
Weirdly, her husband praised the bejesus out of that soap. It was one of the finest things in life! How had he spent 50 years of his life without this soap!
She experimented with other household goods, got into cooking, gardening...
And, by the time she was ready to go back to work, she only ended up working a few days a week so she could focus on all this household stuff.
Which limited her financial independence, her time away from the house, her interaction with other people.
Which would have been fine if her "liberal" husband didn't listen to Dr. Laura on the DL and start demanding all this weird gendered household caregiver stuff from her.
It was weird and squicky and not okay. You could kind of tell she didn't really like all the things she was doing, but they suddenly became an obligation.
When prepper stuff becomes a job rather than a hobby, you have problems.
