American Heirloom Project: How would you rebuild it all?

Photo by Vicky Hladynets on Unsplash

Let’s play a little game. Let’s say that you and 1,000 other people were told by aliens that you were being transported in a year’s time to a world terraformed to be just like Earth and that you should prepare yourself.

During that time, you need to learn how to do specific things, like grow food. You should also learn any skill or craft that might be useful in your new home.

What would you learn?

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This little thought experiment is just that, a thought experiment. You’re not going to get yoinked halfway across the cosmos next year simply because some alien picked your name out of a hat.

But, God forbid, things happen. Civilizations collapse. Disasters happen. History is filled with the stuff of nightmares.

It might not happen in our lifetimes, mind you. I’m not being all Doomsday Prepper here.

What I will say is that all good things end, and our American experiment will end, and I don’t see that being a particularly enjoyable moment for anyone unfortunate enough to be alive right then.

So, when the end comes, whatever end that might be, we need to ask how to begin again.

The worse the fall, the harder it will be to get back up. That’s where skills and knowledge matter. That’s where the building blocks of society need to be reconstituted.

And, strangely enough, the way to do that is with an artifact of our rise: hobbies.

When people do things for a living, they do it in the most efficient, fastest way possible. To use a woodworking example—because that’s the craft I know best—a professional woodworker is going to use a massive table saw, a bandsaw, a jointer, a planer, maybe a shaper, a CNC, a Festool Domino for joinery, to say nothing of all the handheld power tools they might deploy on a given project.

For many, they might know how to do something without power tools in an academic sense, but they may have no experience with a handplane. I assure you that matters.

As a hobbyist, though, I can screw around with pre-industrial techniques like pole lathes and handplanes.

A professional tailor is going to have a sewing machine plugged into the wall. The hobbyist can hand stitch if they want to, or use a treadle sewing machine.

Someone who works as a blacksmith making iron products for people likely uses some of the most advanced pieces of equipment they can get, like gas forges and power hammers.

The guy doing it in his backyard has lump charcoal, a piece of railroad track, and nothing but free time.

See, there are a lot of skills that are needed if we’re to survive, and while you might never need them in your life, someone might.

Right now, for example, do you know how common it is to know how to make flat panes of glass? Pretty common, right?

Do you know how many people can do it by blowing the glass, then turning it into panes? A tiny handful.

Pottery gives us all kinds of awesome things, but how many know how to build their own kiln old-school or to pitfire it? More common, but most potters don’t know how.

How many people know how to spin thread from loose fibers like sheep’s wool or even dog fur? How many can then turn it into fabric or a blanket? Again, I know people who can do all of this, but a lot more who don’t.

The skills exist, obviously, but they’re rarer than they should be if we’re going to rely on them someday.

Plus, even if nothing happens, there’s something we all need to understand: knowledge is worth preserving, even if it’s unnecessary.

I don’t use hand tools because I’m too pure for power tools. It’s just a preference for me. I don’t like the noise or the health risk. I might still bleed from a chisel being rammed into my thumb, but I’m not likely to lose a finger to the table saw.

That’s where you can come in.

Find yourself a niche. Learn to fill it. Even just growing your own vegetables or herbs is something. You’re building resiliency that might save lives or, at a minimum, put a really nice tomato on your burger; one you can’t get at the grocery store because you are the one who grows that particular kind.

We need to stop trusting a system to keep us safe when that system actually doesn’t care about you, the person. Governments don’t have to protect you as a person, just society as a general concept, and if we’ve learned anything since 2020, it’s how little we should probably trust that.

I remember the empty grocery store shelves in the early days of COVID, after all. Maybe it’s just me, but I’d rather not depend on just-in-time delivery systems that can’t always deliver just in time. I’d rather not go to get meat for dinner and have the clerk tell me I can’t have it all because there’s rationing.

I experienced it all, as did many of you, and it sucked.

Building the skills so, at least in part, you won’t have to is good. Doing it so someone else doesn’t have to is better.

Raise chickens.

Spin fibers into thread.

Turn it into fabric.

Make pots and fire them in the backyard using a method that is cool as hell, and completely irrelevant.

Find your craft. Find your apocalyptic profession. Find your thing.

You may have already. You might be sitting there thinking, “I’ve been knitting since I was 12,” and I’ll say, “Dope. You were already there,” and move on.

What would you do if the world depended, at least in part, on you learning a skill you actually wanted to learn?

Knowledge.

Knowledge is the ultimate heirloom. It’s why certain kinds of books matter. Not because of the subject, but because the knowledge inside will last for centuries, if it’s cared for.

And it should be.

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But you are a knowledge transfer medium, too. Your journals are part of it, but your life and craft can be, too. Learn it, teach it to someone else, either with a Substack or by teaching classes.

Support those who are doing the same in a different regard. Buy their books. Subscribe to their Substacks. Be the reason they share what they know, and then do it, too.

My mother made baskets. She knitted. She sewed. She crocheted. She was a fiber artist, on top of a potter, at times. She may have warped me into seeing these crafts as being important, but that doesn’t make her wrong.

We don’t know where the world will go. Maybe this is all for naught, but the “worst-case” scenario (which is the opposite of the actual worst-case this is supposed to prepare civilization for) is that you get a cool hobby, make some cool stuff, and might make a nice little side hustle doing something you enjoy.

Maybe it’s just me, but there are worse fates in life.

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