Why DIY?

We live with a lot of creature comforts in the modern world. Manufacturing and technology has made it easier for us to get our hands on commodity goods and long gone are the days where you'd have to get up at the crack of dawn to work on a farm and you can keep food fresher without the need for preservation skills. With industry taking care of the basics for living, we could focus on feats like mapping the human genome, developing vaccines, and even travel to space.

So with so much less for us to do ourselves, why would anyone want to DIY (do it yourself)? For me, it's a way to preserve the rich human culture we are becoming more removed from. Farming, pickling, sewing, beer making, etc are done somewhere else and we don't usually see the process. In fact, for us city dwellers, our only ties to manufacturing are in the consumption of those goods. But how is anything made? I'm not even talking about how are computers made or anything really high tech. I'm just looking at the basic stuff that gets us living from one day to the next and that was a regular part of our ancestors lives. I find it unnerving that we don't know how to do the bare minimum for ourselves. So that's where my DIY attitude comes from.

Now is the part where I tell you that I am not an expert in anything and anything I write about here will be an account of what I've done at my amateur level. There are real pros out there that know their homesteading like the back of their hand. Of course, I am still tied to society and need it on a daily basis to get me through life. I'm not naive about my dependence on industry but I think that carving out a little bit of a DIY life gives me a better appreciation and understanding of the work and magic that goes into doing the things that we take for granted. Maybe if everyone had to grow their own food for a season we'd lick our plates clean instead of tossing out food because we've afforded being picky eaters.

So I hope I can interest you in some of the projects I'm going to write about. I'm very excited to get started on this blog since I've been trying to learn about everything and want to share with others. I'm kind of a jack of all trades, master of none, though oftentimes better than master of one.