Bread upon the Waters

The problem with writing something aspirational is that these posts rarely get any feedback ... and that's reasonable, because when someone places themselves in a position of, "Now I'm going to spew wisdom," what can we say?   As Omar said upon sacking the Library of Alexandria in 642 AD,  if the books agreed with the Quran, they were superfluous, and if they disagreed, heretical.  And thus was all the wisdom in the world destroyed ... representing billions of hours of work accomplished by people wanting to make the world a better place.

Any wisdom I have receives the same fate; if the reader agrees, then it doesn't need to be said.  If the reader disagrees, then it doesn't need to be read.  There's blogging in a nutshell.  But part of this blog's core agenda is to write about things I believe, and why I believe them, and how I feel the world can be made a better place.  So if this seems a waste of time for the reader, too bad.  I'll write something aspirational today and then tomorrow, or the day after, I'll take a swing at another series of posts on worldbuilding.

Among the more aggravating of human traits is the continued resistance, especially from artists, against people improving themselves or their lives.  Nearly all of this has to do with perception.  Individuals either talk themselves into believing that the effort won't do any good, or that it's somehow not for them, or that it certainly has to be some kind of scam.

Take, for example, Patreon.  During my time in Montreal, I met the couple who were among my absolute best friends in the 1990s, with whom I collaborated on several artistic works.  Jesse was the director behind 2001's Coil ... and for those who may wonder, I have acquired a copy of the film on disc, given to me by Jesse.  These last two decades, he's continued to write and produce, he's doing very well for himself with projects he's getting paid for without getting official credits and he's every bit the fiery, passionate companion that I knew when we put on plays together and wrote together.  He learned that I have lost none of my passion, either.

Yet while Jesse had heard of Patreon, he knew nothing about it.  I don't understand how that's possible.  Patreon has been ongoing for 10 years now; I've been a part of it for seven and a half.  Patreon has been a strong, steady source of productive income for me.  It's not a scam.  It's not a waste of time.  It's a means to connect and network with others on a level that's never existed for a grassroots artist at any time in history.  And so I found myself, again, in a conversation where I tried to convince a fellow artist to get on board, to embrace this wellspring, to reach out and grab this very easy brass ring ... only to encounter doubt and resistance.  Nor is this the first time.  I know many, many artists.  And in all the time I've been on Patreon, I've convinced none of them.

Which baffles me.

Allow me to explain the secret of doing well in the world.  I won't charge you $60 for the book saying how.  I won't put off the explanation to the end of this post, only for you to discover I haven't said anything.  No, I'll dive right into it, because I care about you.  I care about everyone.  I want you to do well; I want you to find comfort and happiness.  And I think the method to achieve that should be free and available to all.  Because every person who reaches out and takes it will make this a better world.

This comes in two parts.  The first argues that you, Dear Reader, must commit yourself to learning a craft.  Here, I don't mean an art, but simply that you teach yourself how to make something, from scratch.  This could be anything, but the very best sorts of crafts you can acquire are those you can apply in the home ... and by yourself.  Why?  Because then you are dependent on no one else's space, and no one else's commitment.

Let me be clear.  Fixing things is not a reliable craft.  It can do you for awhile; you can sustain yourself on being able to fix things for a long time.  But sooner or later the thing you fix will either be supplanted by something you don't know how to fix, or replaced by something that doesn't need fixing.  The same can be said of any craft that's only a means towards a more core design.  My uncle fell in love with a career in drafting.  In the 1970s, he obtained his certificate and committed himself to a lifetime in which he would happily draw lines and shape things on paper.  Then the 1980s arrived; computer drafting obliterated paper drafting.  The latter simply evaporated.  My uncle couldn't make the leap.  He never understood how to make the things he was drafting; or how drafting was potentially a path to other forms of drawing or design.  He just loved taking spec and applying them to paper.  And when that was pulled out from under him, he found he had nothing, and no where to go.  He never recovered.

A proper craft depends on manipulating something that cannot be supplanted.  A leather-worker may lose work on account of industrial materials ... but these will never have the characteristics of leather.  They will never shape like leather, they will never feel like leather, they will never smell like leather.  Perhaps one day, an industrialised product might be made that is exactly like leather ... but the leather worker is still fine, because the craft is in shaping the material, not making it.

I possess three crafts of this kind.  I can do all three in the home; I rely upon no one else; they will never go away; and as it happens, I've made money from all three.

I am a writer.  Books may go away, this blog platform may go away, but the English language won't and there will always been time for people to spend learning things.  Thus I write, teaching people about what I know, and the manner in which it transfers from me to the reader doesn't matter.  I can commit the written word to voice if need be ... so in truth, I don't even need my hands.

I am a cook.  Food will never go away.  The ability to manage it, master it and feed people food that achieves delight from their taste buds will always be in high demand, even when I'm ninety.  If I were put in prison, sooner or later I'd find my way into the kitchen, and my skills with making even the most unpalatable foods more palatable would assure my security and overall wellbeing.  Putting the cook into the infirmary is not acceptable.  Of course, there might be other cooks.  But I get along with other cooks and I'm always ready to learn from them.

I am a dungeon master.  Now this is odd, nyet?  Will players go away?  Not in my experience.  As with food, if a performance can be given that inspires players to come, and speak excitedly about the game to others, then I will always, always, have players at my table.  This comes from not taking them for granted, but by rewarding them continuously with ideas, humour, intrigue and satisfaction.  Some of these can be achieved by giving the players toys and money, but certainly not all of them.  There's more to being a DM than giving the players what they think they want.  The greatest thing a DM can give a player is to make that player feel smarter, more capable, more successful than they conceived themselves of being.  And since I've always found that players underestimate themselves, this isn't as hard as it sounds.

What do you know?  I don't ask, "what can you do," because "doing" isn't the same as knowing.  If you find yourself in a service job, where you serve people, getting them what they want, finding things on shelves, filling out forms, answering questions, sending tools and transport forward because people need it, these are all things that you can do.  But the "knowing" of these things isn't very much.  Someone can be taught your job, nearly as well as you, in six months.  And some designer can replace your job with a bit of technology, with terrible rapidity.  Plus, jobs that you do rely on companies, which don't care about you, and will cut your hours or your job altogether to suit agendas you have no part in making.  We all know this.  We live with the reality of it, hoping we won't be one of the unlucky ones ... while watching others around us suffer the fate that we know, one day, we'll have to suffer ourselves.

Knowing a craft cuts through that ... not because we can do the craft, but because we know the craft.  That knowledge is at a premium.  I could work restaurants into the ground, watching them close their doors and not worry, because there are always hundreds of restaurants and there are never enough cooks.  Anyone who can demonstrate their knife skills and talents in an hour or two is sure to get plenty of hours and respect; my problem was that, when I was working on some project like a play or a magazine article, I didn't want to work more than 30-35 hours a week.  Kitchen Managers like their best cooks to work 50, 55, and so there was always conflict. 

Moreover, knowing a craft means — and now, more than ever — that you can work for yourself.  That's what Patreon does for us.  It enables people to pay for more than the product we produce; it enables a better business model than exchanging goods and services rendered for income.  It enables us to sell the knowledge itself, bypassing the actual product's manufacture.  You, Dear Reader, would like to know how to dungeon master, yes?  Perhaps you'd like to know how to write, or know how to cook?  And if you felt that someone would take the time and teach you, you'd pay for that, right?  Maybe not a lot; maybe only $3 a month; but then, with knowledge, we can give it to a lot of people at the same time.  I don't need you, specifically, to fill my coffers so that my rent at the end of the month is paid.  I only need a lot of people like you.   And if I couple that with working some job where one of my crafts is also part of my day-to-day, as I am now, then as a craftsman, I'm able to be very comfortable.  I have a chance to get lucky and win trips to Montreal.  I am my own person.  I can't be fired ... because even if the job I have lets me go, I'll find something.  I'll prove my worth to someone.

People in the video above respond to being fired with statements like, "This is what I get for 30 years of service?"  The answer to that is pretty plain.  They received pay for 30 years of service.  And pay without knowledge is a trap.  30 years is slavery, a recipe for making yourself redundant, and useless to anyone except your masters.  When you're let go, you've got nothing ... because you've done nothing to change your stars.  You've not learned to be the master of your own fate, because you've been so comfortable letting someone else be the master.  That is not the path to security.  Your path to security is to learn how to do something ... and to start learning it today.  Sew.  Paint.  Make tiny clay figurines of old men and young boys fishing together.  Learn how to make something beautiful from scratch.  Take a class.  Read.  Practice.  Keep at it.  Find something better and go towards that.  Learn to use your hands.  Learn to shape things.  Learn.

And when you're finished learning, teach.  Because that's the secret of everything, really.  Your value to the rest of society is based upon what you're able to learn, and especially what you learn to do that's either very rare, or possibly completely unique.  New things, after all, come into being.  New songs are written.  Advances are made.  And when they are, the people who brought about the advance get all the laurels.  Somehow, someway, you want to be one of those people.

If you're in your teens and twenties, you've got ungodly amounts of time to go there. If you're as old as I am, or older, and you haven't started yet, you still have time to get able enough that you can teach your grandchildren, and let them carry the torch for you.  And if you've been silly enough not to have children, or so coldly inconsiderate that your children won't speak with you, then find your way to some volunteer organisation that let's you teach what you know to a younger generation.  Because this, my readers, is your path to everything.  Your knowledge is going to die with you, if you don't share it.  And if you are privileged enough to share it, you'll find a state of contentment that's unimaginable.

Now.  I know there are several ex-teachers reading this blog, who have every right to be disheartened by the loss of their chosen profession, and what the world has become, and what the young are like, and a host of other truths that we can't ignore here.  But let me remind those gentle souls that the craft you acquired in your desire to teach was sold, by you, to an institutional master, and not to the children you taught.  You were never paid by the children.  You were paid by your masters.  And it is not your profession, or your love of it, that was compromised, it was the brutality of a system that was never designed to enable learning.  That was the pretense used, to cover up the real design ... a design that you know all too well.

And so ... restore yourselves as teachers.  Find a way to achieve that craft as your own master; investigate Patreon as a means to sell your knowledge.  Choose a medium that works for your needs, that you can employ in your homes.  Teach.  It takes time to find students, but you will.  Because there are always students.  They want to learn, and they're looking for you, right now.  Remake yourself.  You'll want to be ready for them.

The future is going to be very, very cruel towards slaves, much crueller than it has been.  Don't be one.  The internet, and your willingness to learn, will set you free.