The chosen purpose of my life is to provision well-being in abundance for myself and others. I begin with a definition for well-being and a reasoned strategy for the design and implementation of a regenerative living system. It ends with servitude, as a steward of ecology in my own personal space.
With well-being well-defined I cannot be isolated from others ideologically. I can establish a meaning for well-being that is quantified with number. It becomes a goal state and reaching the goal is an engineering problem, not an ideological problem. The locus of control lies with me and my behavior alone.
This One Life is the concept that I have only one life, this one. I have only one chance to finally align my priorities with my purpose and make a living. The phrase ‘make a living’ means to earn enough income to support oneself. For most this is an ongoing process, a lifelong pursuit to earn enough income today for the privilege to spend tomorrow earning more. What is this income? A proxy to create a scarcity of access to resources. For most, the only kind of living being made is a life of trading time to subsist.
Don’t make a living, make living happen. The locus of control is where I perceive the power over my life coming from. Shifting the locus of control begins with the recognition that I have the most power from my vantage point. It begins by recognizing my own frailties, my own role in the unfolding situation. This is the opportunity I need, to learn and harden these frailties, to hone them through practice. To shift the locus of control, I don’t need anecdotal stories I need the actual blueprints to a regenerative living system. I need the resources, recipes and rituals to operate it.
Marx teaches us to blame the society for our frailties. Freud teaches us to blame our parents for our frailties. Astrology teaches us to blame the universe. The only place to look for blame is within: you didn’t have the guts … to live the life that was your potential.
— Joseph Campbell
This is my one life and here is my One Life Catalog. With a new avatar, and the concept of “one life”, it becomes clear to me that the top priority is to create the final shopping list. To prioritize the acquisition of materials and resources in the correct order and to put them toward the construction of a regenerative living system. An ecological and social design that manufactures an abundance of well-being so that everyone can make living happen.
When designing the ecosystem of my personal space, I seek to organize and structure it in such a way as to facilitate the processes of manufacturing an abundance of well-being. Before I can design this myself or make the designs of others real in my own personal space, I must first understand clearly what well-being is. Once well-being has been well-defined, that is, all of the objectives are expressed categorically and quantitatively I can begin creating a manifest of input resources and modular equipment to be used in factory-like processes that output well-being. These objectives can be mutable, expanding and contracting in real time as the needs of people often do. I can continually improve the efficacy of my factory by comparing the output of those running processes to the objectives of well-being. This is an example of feedback and control amidst imperfect knowledge.
In our personal lives, if we do not develop our own self-awareness and become responsible for first creations, we empower others and circumstances outside our circle of influence to shape our lives by default
— Stephen Covey
The first creations in the regenerative living system are the quantified objectives of that system and the resources , recipes and rituals to fulfill those objectives. My home is kind of like a “spaceship” taking me to the distant future of my old age. If I lived on a spaceship bound for some distant place in time and space I would need to bring everything for the journey with me. A “flight manifest” would be constructed ahead of time and this manifest ought to reflect a deep understanding of mission objectives.
The flight manifest begins with a perspective on ecological design. The word design comes from the latin designare meaning to designate. Ecological refers to living organisms and the relationships between them and their physical surroundings. An ecological design is not just about minimizing an environmental impact, it is a discipline concerned with the integration of living systems with the artifact under design.
My personal space is an ecosystem I can apply design principles to for the production of an abundance of renewable nutrition and material resources. Using the mutual dependence of biology as technology, a flight manifest of this sort should outline a complete life support system: the components for the ecosystem of my personal space.
To construct a flight manifest I should understand roughly how long the mission will last, so that I know the appropriate amount of material resources I will need. Accounting for imperfect knowledge of the future — because un-imagined circumstance or catastrophe is inevitable — the appropriate amount is an abundance in excess of my basic needs.
This “spaceship” will not be operating in isolation from the rest of society. The flight manifest acknowledges that certain resources are cyclically depleted and not locally renewable. It should provision for the access to additional material resources from basic feedstocks. Recognizing that certain resources can be cyclically renewed, it should include the equipment for the harvesting of energy, water and locally sourced materials.
The word viable comes from the latin vita meaning life. Originally used to medically designate an organism that is capable of living on its own after birth, it entered colloquial language with the meaning capable of working or feasible. This kind of flight manifest describes a viable system and provisions for inevitable expansion and contraction of my requirements. It includes the equipment necessary for the repair of existing objects, the construction of new and improved ones or the augmentation of my “spaceship” itself. While simultaneously accounting for the machines and tools that are necessary for recycling old objects to replenish base materials or feedstocks.
The ecosystem of my personal space should not contain just the equipment and resources within a factory, I need the processes or recipes and rituals as well. Sensors, control systems and actuators should automatically operate these processes using high technology to transcend my human limitations. That is, technology applied with mindful purpose and not the mindless consumption of gadgetry and media.
Viewed in a larger context, this is not really a “spaceship” at all. This is my existence here on Earth and my home — poorly made by future and even certain historical standards — retrofitted today to provide basic needs in abundance. Not through the redistribution of someone’s fiscal wealth, but the distribution of the means to create authentic wealth. The distribution of the knowledge and means to construct a machine to manufacture well-being. To move beyond the traditional limitations of humanity, which has historically been the trading of time for basic survival.
To champion an opinion that well-being for all cannot be accomplished is to construct an argument built upon the assumption that regular people cannot learn or that adaptation is permissible for a few but not the many. Equal access is what is being discussed here. Where one needs to be “smarter” to access something then the protocol of equal access demands a recipe be created and shared. To share knowledge openly emphasizes cooperation and accelerates innovation.
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