Why I’m Not Trying to Be Self-Sufficient

I know how to do a lot of things now that I had absolutely no clue how to do when I was 45.

That is one of the things I love most about getting older.

We tend to talk about aging as though it is mostly about losing things, but there is another side to it. If you stay curious, you accumulate skills, stories, confidence, and a kind of practical wisdom that you simply cannot rush.

I did not wake up one day knowing how to raise goats, bake bread, make soap, bottle-feed a calf, preserve food, build things, or figure out what to do when something went sideways.

I learned those things over almost 30 years.

Usually one skill at a time, and quite often because I had already gotten myself into something and now had to figure out how to handle it.

Most of the time, I learned because I had to

There were definitely moments in my life when I bit off more than I knew how to chew.

Getting goats and chickens without really knowing much about either would be a good example.

At the time, I was not sitting around with years of livestock experience behind me. I just had animals that needed food, shelter, care, and somebody willing to pay attention.

You learn pretty quickly when another living creature is depending on you.

My first cow was another one of those experiences.

I had bought him, which meant I was now responsible for knowing what to do with him. We named him porkchop Fortunately, there was a cowboy who lived up the road, and when he saw me struggling, he jumped over the fence and helped me figure out how to bottle-feed him.

I still love that memory because it says so much about how most real-life learning happens.

You do not always master something in advance and then begin.

Sometimes you begin, realize how much you do not know, and find somebody who knows more than you.

Then you learn.

Bread was not an overnight success either

Baking bread has probably been a 20-year journey for me.

That sounds almost ridiculous now because bread feels so ordinary in my life, but I certainly did not begin by producing beautiful loaves.

There were plenty of failures, plenty of recipes that did not work the way I hoped, and plenty of moments when I wondered what I had done wrong.

Over time, though, I learned what dough should feel like. I learned what mattered and what did not. I learned how temperature, timing, flour, and patience all changed the outcome.

None of that came from deciding I wanted to become “a bread baker.”

It came from baking bread again and again.

That is how most useful skills seem to develop.

They become ordinary because you have done them enough times.

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Soap was another adventure in figuring it out

Soapmaking followed a similar path.

It started with curiosity and eventually became one of those things I wanted to know how to do for myself.

And of course, as tends to happen around here, curiosity eventually became a project.

There was no point at which I suddenly became someone who “knew how to make soap.” I learned what I needed to learn, made mistakes, paid attention, and kept going.

Now it is simply another skill I have.

That is one of the things I find so encouraging about learning practical skills. Eventually the thing that once felt complicated becomes familiar.

Not because it was easy from the beginning, but because you stayed with it long enough for it to become part of you.

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Even the camper started with “we could do that”

Building our camper was probably one of the bigger examples of this.

We did not have a long history of professionally building campers. We simply looked at the possibility and thought, “Hey, we could do that.”

So we did.

We figured out what we needed, bought tools, made plans, changed plans, solved problems, and kept moving.

There were absolutely things we had to learn along the way, but that was part of the fun of it.

I think that experience reinforced something I had already been learning for years.

There is a huge difference between saying, “I can’t do that,” and saying, “I don’t know how to do that yet.”

The second one leaves the door open.

I did not know all of this at 45

When I look back now, that is the part that amazes me most.

At 45, I did not know most of the things I know today.

Some of these skills had not even occurred to me yet.

If you had handed me a list back then and said, “Eventually you are going to know how to do all of this,” I probably would have thought you were talking about someone else.

But that is the beauty of learning things slowly.

You do not have to know everything at once.

You just learn the next thing.

Maybe that next thing is how to care for chickens.

Maybe it is how to make bread.

Maybe it is how to preserve fruit, grow something edible, make soap, repair something, or build a camper.

Years later, all of those individual experiences begin to look like a large body of knowledge.

But they did not arrive as a large body of knowledge.

They arrived one problem, one curiosity, and one adventure at a time.

This is why I’m not trying to be self-sufficient

I have never been especially interested in the version of homesteading that says you should be able to do everything yourself.

That sounds exhausting to me.

I do not want to need nobody.

I like the cowboy who jumped over the fence.

I like neighbors who know things I do not know.

I like learning from people who have been doing something longer than I have, and I like being able to help someone else when I happen to know something they do not.

To me, that exchange is part of the whole thing.

There are also plenty of things I could learn how to do that I simply do not want to do.

Just because something can be made from scratch does not mean I need to make it from scratch.

Just because I could become good at a particular skill does not mean it deserves my time.

Homesteading, at least the way I think about it, is not about proving how little you need from the outside world.

It is about having more choices.

It is about knowing that when something interests you, you can learn it.

It is about being less intimidated by the unfamiliar.

And it is about becoming more capable over time. About not feeling like you have to do the thing you learned every day for the rest of your life either. I no longer live on the homestead with goats and chickens - Yes, I've had more chickens in the last few years but decided I'd just rather support a neighbor and buy their eggs.

Capable feels like the better word

Self-sufficient has always sounded a little too isolated to me.

Capable feels different.

Capable means I can grow some of my own food, but I do not have to grow all of it.

I can make bread, but I can also buy a loaf if I want to. I can learn how to make soap and still appreciate something beautifully made by someone else.

I can attempt a project myself or decide that hiring somebody who knows what they are doing is the smarter choice.

Being capable gives you options.

It also gives you confidence.

When you have spent years learning how to figure things out, you stop being quite so afraid of not knowing.

You trust that if you need to learn something, you probably can.

You do not have to become a homesteader overnight

This is one of the reasons I talk so much about homesteading as a mindset rather than a place.

You do not need acreage or livestock or even to suddenly become the kind of person who makes everything from scratch and grows every vegetable your family eats.

You can begin with one small thing.

Bake one loaf of bread.

Grow herbs on a windowsill.

Plant tomatoes in a bucket

Make jam. (super simple recipe no canning required)

Learn how to mend something.

Try making soap. (melt & pour is fun and easy)

Grow microgreens.

Fix something you would normally throw away.

Choose one thing that makes you curious and learn how to do it.

Then move on with your life.

Eventually another thing will catch your attention.

And then another.

Thirty years from now, you may look around and realize you know how to do all kinds of things you once had no clue how to do.

That, more than self-sufficiency, is what Hobo Homesteading means to me.

It is not about knowing everything.

It is about becoming the kind of person who believes they can learn.

Use what you’ve got. Grow what you can. Make a life you love.