Forgotten knowledge and skills 

Only a few generations ago people could supply for many things themselves. They grew their own food, there were inner city gardens were chickens, bees, and even an occasional cow, or horse were held in tiny gardens. Methods to preserve food like pickling, canning, drying, salting, etc, were common knowledge. Grannies knitted sweaters, mothers sewed dresses, people built their own furniture, mended their own socks, repaired their own cars. 

Why need those skills these days? What a hassle! We now buy fresh or conserved food from the supermarket, from far away countries or large factories, is being artificially grown, ripened or chemically conserved. Who would want to eat canned green beans? Or to stand in the kitchen for days to have jam for the rest of the year? Who needs that? Keeping and therefore feeding a chicken in your garden is much more expensive than buying eggs, new socks are cheaper than a carton of mending wool, a t-shirt costs less than a piece of cotton, mending your shoes isn’t worth it your car and your equipment aren’t meant to be repaired, a new chair will be delivered by Ikea the next day, who would spend a week carpenting for that? 

Doing it yourself is a way back to quality and independence By being able to do things yourself you can achieve a more personal quality. No Ikea will get you a cupboard that fits that crooked corner in your house. Unilever does not make jam out of the strawberries from your garden, and no jam at all without additives that you don’t trust. And remember when the world suddenly needed large supplies of hand sanitizer and you couldn’t buy any face masks?Didn’t you wish you had the skills to make those yourself? What will happen when our oil based infrastructure collapses? By that time we will not have any skills, we will have sacrificed all our local shops and producers to Amazon, who can decide on whatever price they want, and the supermarkets will only have supply for 3 days. More importantly: when you are able to do things yourself, you will feel more competent, stronger, and you will feel you can find a solution for whatever goes wrong. You will be somebody who influences their environment and improve things. The quality of your surroundings is something you can change!