Books I love: Mystery edition!

In the past few years, I have had community on my mind.

After leaving my profession, and the workplace, I no longer have a ready-made group of people who are there every day. Sure, I still have coffee with a handful of my former colleagues from time to time. But by and large, my days are spent quietly in my studio or in a corner of my favorite local cafe, where everyone else is working, earbuds in.

I wondered: to fight the creep of loneliness, what can I do? What can any of us do?

But then I sheepishly remembered a lovely little book I read a few years back. The thing is, I had known about this book for much longer (it was published in 2010) before I actually decided to read it because…well…I judged the book by its cover.

The reason why I’ve called this “the mystery edition” is to prevent you from having the same knee-jerk response as I did to the title.

I’m not proud of myself for this, but when I first read the title of this book: Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity From A Consumer Culture, by Shannon Hayes, I felt inner turmoil.

I (wrongly) assumed that this was a book about “traditional family values” that was trying to rebrand itself as “cool” and “revolutionary”. Sort of like the “Christian rap” groups of my youth.

Thankfully, I was wrong.

In the first few chapters, the author outlines the societal concepts of homemaking through the ages. Today, the usual context for conversations on homemaking is in terms of feminism vs. traditional values. But Shannon Hayes deftly creates a new framework. She makes an argument for looking at homemaking, for both men and women, through the lens of production vs consumption.

Shannon recounts her own difficulty in finding a place in the modern world. She was frustrated by the need to “make a living” in the post-modern sense, instead of simply living a life she loved. To do the former felt a lot like she would have to give up the latter.

But the key to a massive paradigm shift was realizing that most modern households require us to “make a living” because they are a unit of consumption.  She realized that she could lived the life she loved if she and her household became a unit of production.

Her idea of a rich life includes farm living, where everyone is contributing to production, and interdependent with each other and the community. Through living an enjoyable life, they provide for their own existence, requiring a much lower level of monetary income. They do this, not through dogged self-reliance, but from strong community interdependence.

In short, she is preaching a slightly different take on old-school financial independence (Not for nothing, the book was endorsed by the Vicki Robbin).

The author, who I should mention, has a PhD. from Cornell, knew that she and her husband couldn’t be the only people living this type of life, and sought to find others doing something similar. This book is a result of countless interviews with people who aren’t afraid to live life according to their own rules.

These people, by and large, found ways to live other than conforming to the expected modern model. Some had grown up that way. Some had left the corporate world. All were living rich lives no matter their income.

How were they able to do this? Through a combination of ingenuity, creativity, and, of course, community.

This book serves to deconstruct societal norms and demonstrates that having and using productive skills takes money and power away from the most destructive norms. For example, if you know how to patch your own jeans or raise your own chickens, you rely less on hyper polluting factories and slave labor for your own existence.

In short, the skills of domesticity, for both women and men, allow us to back away from societal systems that we don’t want to support. Done in community, these concepts could absolutely change the world for the better.

This is where the “Radical” part of the title really starts to kick in.

Shannon, and those like her, have decided that playing by existing rules won’t ever give them the good life as advertised. Only by making new rules, which look a lot like some of the ones our ancestors lived by, can we wrest ourselves away from soulless systems.

Note: After re-reading the book to share, I remembered that Shannon has more recently written a book with a financial focus. I look forward to picking up a copy of Redefining Rich and seeing what other wisdom the author has in store.