00161 Lifestyle Inventory: How and Why

The Default Excess Consumption System Design

One of the things I learned early on in my experience organizing the Oklahoma Food Cooperative is that most people have no idea how much food their household requires for a month. The food cooperative is on a monthly ordering cycle and this is not the way that most people shop. If you ask someone “how much meat do you need to feed your family during the month?” they won’t know this to any degree of accuracy. Many people buy meat based on sight, not weight. They will look at several roasts and decide which one is enough for a meal for their family based on the volume.

That’s the way the Default Excess Consumption System works.

That plan is for people to just bumble through life accepting things as they are without asking questions because, after all, “this is the way things are.” If this is the way they are — if this is the best of all possible worlds — then there can’t be any other way, right?

A young person can go through 16 years of school and unless they specialize in nutrition, they are unlikely to learn anything about “how to determine how much food you need” in a month, much less why it is important for you to actually know how much food you eat in a month. No one teaches you to monitor how much energy you use in a month — and how much that costs you in time and money. Other questions go untaught — how much clothing do you need each year? How much insurance do you need?

The refusal of our educational system to teach people these important life skills is not an accident. The people in control of the system don’t want you to know what it takes to live your life. They prefer that you remain dependent upon economic elites to feed you only the information they think you need to know.

Two primary principles of the default Excess Consumption System Design are —

• minimal planning and
• impulse purchases,

So it comes to pass that we waste a prodigious amount of food, energy, time, and etc.

Choosing the Red Pill

If we want out of the default Excess Consumption System Design, we begin with an examination, in detail, of our present life activities.

I don’t see any other way to do it.

Even though most of us aren’t used to keeping these kinds of records, they will be helpful to develop the information you need to design a way out of the standard model and into a more sustainable situation. If you don’t keep track of what you do, how can you know anything about your life, at the level of detail that is necessary to begin a systematic change in your life?

Most of us won’t need to keep records at this level of detail “for the rest of our lives.” We do need them “now” to determine our present situation so we can understand how to change it. Going forward, we will need to monitor our activities and resource use to get feedback on our actions.. Paying attention to details like feedback is important to permaculture design.

You can start at the beginning to learn design by designing a way to do this that works for you, whoever you are, in your own unique situation and circumstances and personality traits. You can use the system described below, or develop something different. The specific method isn’t important. The act of observation of your life is what counts.

It’s your life, what can you know about it?

The Life Inventory requires some household discussion.

If you live in a household of one person, your dialogue is with yourself. (Don’t discount the difficulty of “interviewing yourself.”) If there is a spouse or significant other in your life, and/or kids, parents, roommates, hangers-on, wing men, girl friends . . . everyone needs to be involved. The goal is a design for your life and you are not an island. There is a social system in which you live which has a stake in your life. Talk to them to find out about you. It’s a scary thought, I know it is. It can be a liberating experience.

You do design for your life at the household level. If you live with a group (family, household, roommates, etc.) you need to decide if you will do design only for your life or for your family or household. If you design for the household, you involve everyone that lives in your household. That requires talking to everybody and getting their ideas and input into the process. Since the eventual design will require work and cooperation from everybody in the household, get everybody involved early in the process.

If your household is a temporary feature in your life, e.g. a collection of roommates that changes over time, you probably will only do design for yourself. In that case, you don’t necessarily have to interview your roommates, although you can learn some things about yourself by talking with the others who live with you.

But if you expect some participation from your housemates — such as recycling, making a compost pile, etc. — you need their involvement in the design. If there are expectations of participation, then they need involvement in the observation phase. This will build ownership in the end product and they will be more likely to follow through and do their part of the implementation.

The Life Inventory takes time.

Discussion, observation, counting, measuring, all these things take time and few observations benefit by being in a hurry. I know it is counter-cultural to say “take your time” in this era when everybody over-schedules to the maximum and events move at rapid velocities. So what? Permaculture is a counter-cultural activity — TAKE YOUR TIME!

While you’re at it . . . you might as well, perhaps as a thought experiment, glory in this aspect of the permaculture counter-culturality. Don’t think you can rush through this and come back later. The success of your design experience is dependent upon doing a good job of observing your situation and recording those observations so that you can later make better evaluations and design choices as you study your records. We do NOT have time to be in a hurry.

The Life Inventory is not a test.

Permaculture has no police to swoop down upon you if you make a politically incorrect answer. Indeed, the only correct answers are the answers that accurately describe your present life situation. Since I have been known, in my life, to occasionally eat Ramen noodles, don’t expect me or anyone to be shocked if, e.g., your food inventory shows a liking for minced fried mystery fish (“fish sticks”) or even canned Vienna sausages. If that’s where you are, that’s where you are. Permaculture always starts with wherever it is we are in the present. It’s called reality and context and both are essential to good design.

Observing your life will produce beneficial changes in your life.

Here we could insert a long philosophical diatribe about the effect of observation on reality. We’ll dispense with that and just go with the practical. If you write down everything you eat for observation purposes, you will certainly eat better than you do when you don’t pay such close attention to your diet.

That’s just fine.

Beneficial changes are beneficial changes, whatever their motivation. Even if you will be the only person reading your observations, you won’t want to embarrass yourself by writing down that you actually ate a fast food burger stuffed with pink slime and drenched in chemicals, so you won’t go to a transnational corporation for your burgers. That’s good. All good decisions are good decisions. All better decisions are better decisions. All best decisions are best decisions. We like all of these.

The Life Inventory is not an evaluation.

Study and Evaluation of your present situation comes later, as you learn/integrate more knowledge.

The Life Inventory does visualize goals.

Part 2 of the inventory is all about where you want to be in the future. Here I think it is best to let your imagination run freely. “Brainstorm” is the key word. As you go into the study and evaluation process, you do some discernment about that constellation of ideas and upon further reflection, you may decide to forgo some of your initial goals. For now, go ahead and cast a wide net. Tell yourself a story about your future. Dreaming and risk-taking can take you to places you can barely even imagine.

The danger of procrastination.

While on one hand we don’t want to be in a hurry, on the other hand, procrastination alas is the thief of time. “Not being in a hurry” does not mean “lay around and do nothing.”

Life Inventory System Design.

How will you accumulate this information? You could start with systematically saving receipts. Every night, put them in a receipt folder and at whatever interval works for you, record them on the spreadsheet. Make notes on the receipts to remind you if there is a question about the expense. Keep a notebook in the kitchen to record meals, cooking time, ingredients, etc. Record prices AND amounts of what you buy.

iPermie comes with a spreadsheet which you can use or adapt. It’s not required that you use that format. If you buy iPermie in an ebook format, go to http://www.ipermie.net to download the Open Document spreadsheets and other pdfs that go with the text.

Areas of Systemic Life Observation

The primary areas of observation correspond to each of the sections. Each section has a document that discusses the observation and inventory tasks for that topic. Some of these topics overlap, so don’t think of these as discrete separate projects. In all of your observations, more is better than less. Some sections have more observation items, others have less. It all adds up to a comprehensive look at your life. From these observations you learn your own story — who and what and where you are.

If you don’t find these kinds of questions useful for your own life inventory, that’s fine. Develop your own way to observe your life. I offer the information on observing your life here and elsewhere to help you, not to bind you into some kind of information straight-jacket. The goal is to do a thorough observation of your life so you know something about where you need to go and where you start and how you will get there.

Basic

Who are you at this moment in your history? This includes information about your family of origin, present household/relationship status, children/grandchildren, ancestors, education, job status. Where are you? Where is your geographic place? What are its characteristics? How long do you expect to be there? If you leave where you are now, do you know where you will go? Where do you want to go? What is the climate? What is the ecology of your area?

Invisible Structures

How do politics, technology, and economics impact your life? Are you a member of any organizations or groups? Do you want to start an organization or group?

Food

What do you eat? Where does your food come from? How much does your food cost you in time, money, and energy?

Energy

How much energy do you use? What do you do with energy? How much stuff do you buy each year? How much do you pay for energy?

Shelter

What kind of building do you live in? How does it meet your needs? (Or not meet your needs, as the case may be?)

Water

How much water do you use in a year? What water sources provide you with water?

Access and Transportation

Where and how do you travel in your life? What methods of transportation do you use?

Community'

What is your cultural ecology? How has it been damaged? What are your interdependencies with your community?

Economics

How much money do you make and spend in a year? What is your debt and to whom do you owe money? What are your future economic prospects?

Resilience/Hazards

What hazards are you at risk of in your present situation? What level of resilience is present in your household or your community?

Designing for Health

How is your health? Do you have chronic health problems? Do you have good access to affordable medical care? If not, what do you do for medical care?

Education

Are you presently enrolled in school? What is the goal of your school activities? Can you earn a living with your present program of study? How will you pay for your education? Are you borrowing money to study?

Your Observation Journal

Besides spreadsheets and observations of the physical aspects of your life, an excellent method for your Life Inventory is to keep a journal as you develop a permaculture design for your life. It could be something as simple as a small notebook that fits in your pocket. You can make notes in it as you go about your day and transfer the contents to a word processing document and/or spreadsheet in the evening.

Or it could be a larger notebook.

Think of it as a scrapbook or diary to record important events, situations, and observations so you can access them later. Pay particular attention to what goes on inside your brain as you develop changes in your life. Watch and observe your emotional reactions, your feelings, about the changes coming in your life.

Other options are voice recorders and video cameras.

The goal is to develop a way to record your stream of consciousness developments and observations as they happen to you. Don’t trust your memory. You may forget just a few hours later what seemed to be important at the time. Write it down! Or record it! Make a note or two or three. You could tweet your observations and update your Facebook status and track that over time.

You need something that works for you. You will record and analyze a large amount of material regarding both the physical world around you and your own inner landscape. Getting your information organized sooner rather than later will be a great help all around.

Tell the story of your live, holistically, comprehensively, as it unfolds before you. That is the essence of the observation phase of permaculture design.