The Architecture of Effort - Skills
From Thinking to Doing
Zooming In
This year marks 80 years since the end of World War II and nearly 35 years since the end of the Cold War.
With the end of these colossally dangerous conflicts came unprecedented stability. Global war deaths plummeted from previously industrial scales as interstate conflicts were largely deterred. Global GDP per person and life expectancy have increased decade on decade. Although much suffering remained throughout the world, on the whole, humanity thrived.
Recent events, however, suggest that this period of calm and economic growth may be under threat. According to a recent report published by Peace Research Institute Oslo, the year 2023 recorded 59 state-based conflicts across 34 countries, the highest number since 1946, resulting in over 122,000 battle-related deaths, making it the third most violent year since the end of the Cold War. The Russo-Ukrainian war and Israel-Palestine conflicts accounted for most of these deaths, while non-state conflicts accounted for around 21,000. Over 10,000 civilians were killed through one-sided violence in Ukraine, Congo, Haiti, Brazil and Mexico. The sheer number of simultaneous conflicts and multiplicity of violent actors signals a more intricate and perilous global landscape of late. It is in this increasingly “multipolar” world that hitherto unchallenged American dominance appears an open question, especially as China postures for its own superpower status. To be fair - the data provided by this study flies in the face of longer term trends showing demonstrably lower rates of per capita battle deaths since World War II, but the uptick is cold comfort.
It wasn’t until about 10 years ago that I really took interest in learning about these things, and my interest periodically borderlines obsession. While I may learn a lot, though, I seldom translate knowledge gained from monitoring operations in Ukraine or military drills in the Taiwan strait into things that meaningfully impact my family.
Recently I sought to change this.
I’m going a bit out of order from my aforementioned “Architecture of Effort,” but learning new skills is one way, at least in theory, to hedge against instability precipitated from increased global conflict. If supply chains are disrupted and foodstuffs are harder to come by, wouldn’t it be useful to know how to grow and preserve your own food? If people panic and all the toilet paper disappears again, wouldn’t it be nice to have your own “home grocery store” from which you could procure supplies? In the highly unlikely event that shit really hits the fan, wouldn’t it be helpful to know how to use a gun?
Perhaps the world is sleepwalking toward catastrophe. Perhaps not. But in either case I am not a geopolitical expert. I’m a father and a husband with limited time and attention. These finite resources are better spent strengthening the foundations of my immediate world: keeping my family safe, and myself sane. Focusing less on the long arcs of world history and more on learning new skills like gardening, canning, inventory management and shooting, which might actually move the needle in difficult times. Sufficiently developed, skills like gardening and food preservation can still provide economic benefit even if alarmists like me turn out to be crying wolf.
I acknowledge that I might just be trading one poison for another. Perhaps I am deluding myself into a false sense of security pursuing what one could rightly label as simple hobbies. Maybe this pursuit of skills is nothing more than a more animated form of “cope” in the face of a changing world.
Nevertheless, I have found it more grounding to narrow my scope, to zoom in on that which I can control - what I do with my time. I’d rather spend that precious commodity learning something new than gorging on bad news any day. What follows is not intended as a guide for any of these skills, but rather, a chance to share my experience trying things out of my ordinary.
Gardening
“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
Marcus Tullius Cicero
One particularly grounding (pun intended?) skill I have been cultivating (okay I’m done) for the last two years has been gardening.
Last summer we started small and grew some tomatoes and bell peppers on the back porch. We had a few small harvests and later moved the tomatoes indoors. My kids and I learned how to prune tomato plants, and they especially liked hunting for “suckers” to snip. We had to learn the unfortunate lesson of what a hornworm is and how to fight off an invasion of the buggers. We bought grow lights and continued to harvest small amounts of tomatoes throughout most of the winter.
This year we expanded our gardening operation to the front porch. We have a planter with watermelons, two small pots of bell peppers and two 5 gallon buckets of potatoes. Yes, apparently you can grow potatoes in buckets! The kids dutifully check the plants every day, make sure they are watered and excitedly tell me if any new flowers or crops pop up. Our wildflowers appear to attract bees, which our children have developed affection for having reading many books about them with my Wife.
Gardening helps me collect my thoughts while getting my hands dirty. It gives our family a common mission and a reason to spend quality time together. It’s a far cry from the “Victory Gardens” of WWII, but our humble garden has taught me a lot and brought me peace. I plan on expanding the number and volume of crops we raise each year.
Canning
I have zero experience with food preservation. The thought of lacking access to nutritive foods is scary to say the least, especially having children, so I thought it would be a reasonable idea to learn the basics of canning, even if for no other reason than to say I can do it.
Last week my children and I went to a local farm stand my Wife had spotted and bought a dozen of some of the heartiest, juiciest tomatoes I have seen in a long time. I spent a few hours reading and watching how to can tomatoes, gathered the requisite gear and went to work!
A few hours of effort yielded six pints of fresh tomatoes! The most anxiety-provoking part of the process for me was making sure the jars were properly sealed, which, according to what I read, couldn’t really be tested for at least 24 hours. The last thing I want, especially as an emergency medicine physician, is to cultivate botulism. Fortunately, our jars were properly sealed, and they now reside in the “home grocery store.” I plan on using these for pizza and pasta sauce this winter. We have another 6 jars to fill sometime this summer.
This has been another excuse to learn something new that is actually useful and to involve my family in the process. The water bath method we used was not terribly complicated. If I can do it, anyone … can (last one I promise). I have a dream of scaling up this process and involving my entire Italian family back home at summer’s end, preserving tomatoes as an excuse for everyone to be together working on a common project.
Inventory Management
One thing that I don’t really have the mind for is food storage. Keeping track of what you have, where it is and making sure to use it up before it expires are all preemptively tedious tasks to me. I can barely come up with dinner ideas most days of the week. How could I even think to store food in an organized way for emergencies or even medium term storage?
So I leveraged the bandwidth I saved by not wasting time on YouTube and picked up a book by Peggy Layton about emergency food storage. Food storage doesn’t have to be as complicated as I thought. “Store what you use and use what you store,” is the mantra. Starting small is the first step.
To determine what we use I wrote down everything that our family ate for two weeks. I gave myself permission for this list to be non-exhaustive, lest I abandon the whole enterprise out of frustration. Next, I picked the things on the list that were shelf stable and had ChatGPT calculate what a 1 month supply would look like and write me a shopping list. I picked up most of these things at Sam’s Club because it is closer to my house, though I think Consumer Reports says Costco is one of the best places in terms of pricing, brought them home and set them up on a single shelving unit I designated as our “home grocery store.” Our children were happy to help me stock the shelves and anxiously await the day we can break into the snack shelf.
There are some tedious tasks left to complete. I have to put expiry labels on the foodstuffs with big, visible labels so we can tell at-a-glance what should be used up first. I have to put products like sugar in more pest-resistant containers. But at least the hard part is done. I started!
Shooting
My experience with shooting has been largely limited to treating people who end up on the wrong side of a gun in the emergency department. Having witnessed how devastating these weapons can be, I have had little interest in being around them, let alone having one in my home. That said, I don’t want to foster unnecessary fear about guns and would like to be familiar with them in the unlikely event they become relevant to me.
As with so many other new skills, I lacked basic knowledge of the topic and had to figure out where to start, so last week I went to a local range and armory and took a handgun safety course. I passed!
I learned that I am left-eye dominant, to my surprise (for some reason I figured I was right “eyed”). I learned the anatomy of a handgun and how to load, aim and shoot one. I handled multiple different guns and found one that felt natural in my hand. I was able to shoot something like 15-18 rounds at a target with a projected overlay that provided real-time feedback so I could adjust my aim. Turns out I am not a terrible shot (at least at 15 yards)!
Today I went back to the range to practice and learned how to clear a jam (the pistol I rented apparently is a crowd favorite and needed to be cleaned). I learned that if I bend my trigger finger at the MCP joint I rock the gun and decrease my accuracy, rather than bending at the PIP joint. I would like to return two times per month to keep practicing (and to prove to myself that I won’t jump every time someone else fires an unanticipated shot).
I have no plans on purchasing a gun and do not want one in my home. Odds are I will never, ever use one in a combat scenario. But at least in exploring this new skill I go to bed having learned something new.
Do what you can, today, with what you have
I am not a general, a diplomat or an economics expert. I am just a human trying to figure out what to do with myself in the face of what I perceive as escalating dangers in the world far beyond my control. Frankly, it would be egotistical of me to posit solutions so far from my own small sphere of influence. I do give myself grace for wanting to hedge against potential economic instability and civil unrest, however. It is my responsibility as a husband and father to consider potential threats to my family and respond accordingly. For too long, though, this simply meant haplessly agonizing over what the news and social media served up to me - perseverative inaction. I failed to translate my concern into tangible progress.
As I refocus my energies into more practical channels, this has changed for the better. I picked a handful of skills that piqued my interest, researched them and tried them out at small scale using whatever I already owned to get started. Time will tell how far I develop them. In the worst case scenario, I know more than I did about growing our own food, preserving and storing it and protecting myself. In the most likely scenario, I simply learned some new activities that I can leverage to foster togetherness in my family.
What about you? How do you respond when the world’s problems feel so overwhelming? What new skills are you trying out? Comment below or message me - I’d love to hear your thoughts. Thanks for reading.