Everything before this Part has the advantage of being organized after the fact.
Ideas have been sorted into chapters. Arguments have been tightened. Contradictions have been reduced. Thoughts that once arrived in no particular order have been arranged into something resembling a coherent story.
Real life doesn’t happen that way.
This Part is where the book returns to the unfinished present, and hands over to the notes I keep writing as it unfolds.
Where the notes live
The notes are published weekly in my newsletter, ReclaimUrLife: Notes from Inside the Human Game, and shared on social media. They’re the scribbles; this book is the pages I’ve rewritten until they made sense.
You’ll find three kinds of notes there:
- The Big Picture: what I’m noticing about where the world seems to be heading.
- Idiocies & Antidotes: fresh examples of the idiocies in Part II, and glimpses of what might have been possible without them.
- Notes from the experiment: the ongoing record of the attempt described in Part IV.
Field notes from the experiment
I’m not writing from the other side of some finished escape. As Part IV admits, I’m not sure a full escape even exists.
I still work, earn, invest, pay bills, support a family, and depend on many of the systems I criticize. I don’t know exactly where this experiment will lead, whether every part of it will work, or even whether the people closest to me will want to come along.
That uncertainty is exactly why these notes exist.
The Compendium holds the evolving map. The notes are the field reports from somebody still walking the terrain.
They may include financial decisions, changes in work, attempts to depend less on the system, experiments in living on less, observations about family and community, things that worked, things that failed, and moments when the whole plan had to be rethought.
Some entries may contradict earlier ones. That isn’t necessarily a problem. A field note records what could be seen from one point in the journey. When reality offers better information, the thinking should change.
And if there’s anything like an escape at all, it won’t be one dramatic moment when I walk away from society and declare myself free. It’s more likely to be a slow accumulation of small movements:
Reducing one dependency.
Creating one more option.
Recovering a little more time.
Learning a practical skill.
Making family life less subordinate to employment.
Discovering that a supposedly essential expense wasn’t essential after all.
Finding a better way to meet a human need.
Changing direction when something doesn’t work.
The notes are where those small movements become visible.
How the book and the notes connect
Throughout this book, chapters link out to related notes, so you can see what has happened since a page was written. In the other direction, the notes that keep proving useful are eventually refined and folded back into these pages. The ones that fail stay in the record, as evidence of what was tried.
This makes the notes the least polished part of the project, and perhaps the most honest. The book is not written by someone who has the answers. It’s written by someone trying to live the questions while the outcome is still unknown.
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Some experiments may succeed. Some may fail. Either way, the notes continue from inside the game.