Self-Sufficiency & Critical Thinking

Nowadays you can outsource almost anything. But: the one thing you must do for yourself is critical thinking. That cannot and should not be left to someone else!

Key topics:

✔️ Caveat emptor. If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
✔️ Who fact checks the fact checkers? How did we even get to this place?
✔️ You are free to act as you choose to, but not free from the consequences.
✔️ If ethics are a personal code of conduct, your self-sufficiency should be a code of how YOU will take care of YOURSELF.


Need more? Email me: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/contact-causey/

Transcript

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Unknown Speaker : 0:15

Hello, hello and welcome to today's episode of the Causey Consulting podcast. I'm your host Sara Causey and I'm also the owner of Causey Consulting, which you can find online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com. Today I want to talk about self sufficiency, especially as I contemplate my eventual ascent into the mountains. It's definitely something that's been on my mind. Truthfully, I've been reading books and magazine articles about the pioneer times and in these sort of like worst case scenarios, if you were to get stuck or you had to go a prolonged period of time without power, here's how you would handle it. All of that stuff is interesting to me anyway, but there's a lot to be said for preparation. In addition to that, I've also been reading this book that sort of juxtaposes ethics and morals. And the idea that ethics is like a code of ethics that you have for yourself. And morality is more tribal or more of a civilized thing like this is the collective moral code that we all agree to abide by as a community, a society, a religion, etc. So it's talking about all of this with a friend who's like myself pretty socially, libertarian Live and let live, especially where consenting adults are involved consenting adults behind closed doors that aren't involving me, so much of what they do is none of my business. We were talking about self sufficiency, self reliance, and like who, who fact checks the fact checkers and like, since when do we need fact checkers and whatever happened to doing your own research making up your own mind, it's like we have reached a point now in American society where we just want to outsource everything. Now I'll let the tech companies fact check for me. I'll let Snopes do it. I'll let somebody else tell me if I should believe this advertisement or not. And I, I find it really confounding. I don't understand why you would want to outsource critical thinking to someone else. I mean, I guess from a perspective of the Paradox of Choice, which if you've haven't ever read that book, it's really excellent. We do get analysis paralysis, like if you go down the toothpaste aisle, and you see all of these different choices. Even if you're brand loyal to one particular brand. Well, there's still hundreds of varieties and I get decision fatigue, but some decisions in life are just simply too important to outsource to someone else. My friend was making a really good point that it's like people want to numb out with drugs, alcohol, technology, entertainment, junk food, whatever I can do to just like turn my brain off and let someone else make all of the decisions for me so that my life can essentially be one giant autopilot or one giant computer program. And I, I like I'm furrowing my brow right now and like rubbing my head, you know, like, if you've ever seen any of Gordon Ramsay's programs, where he's just super frustrated, if you like, get his face gets all scrunched together and he's rubbing his eyes. That's that's how I feel about like our loss of critical thinking, our loss of being willing to evaluate for yourself. And from a business perspective, like even the loss of caveat emptor, let the buyer beware. Truly the onus is on you as a consumer or a customer, to do your research and make up your own mind you if somebody is giving you a cheesy sales pitch and your gut instinct is telling you that it's just too good to be true, you should listen to that. But you don't give into the cheesy sales pitch and then come back later and go, Oh yeah, I didn't use any caveat emptor. So now I'm butthurt and mad at the world, like, you know, you learn a lesson from that you are able to evaluate your mistakes, or places where you may have rushed into something prematurely and say, you know, I touched the hot stove and burned my hand. Therefore, I will not do that again, because I will remember that it was a highly unpleasant experience. But so many people want to be bailed out. Like, instead of going, Wow, I touched the hot stove. I burned my hand and now I'm gonna have to have some medication and wear bandages for several days until it heals. It's like they want somebody to be mad at somebody to blame some way of making it someone or something else's fault. You know, like people who say the devil made me do it. Like Well, if you've reached a point where you no longer have any free will And you just cannot think for yourself at all, then you're going to have to be putting in an asylum or someplace away from society if you have completely and totally lost any control or abilities to make any moral judgments for yourself. To return to the juxtaposition from the book that I'm reading, if we think of ethics as a highly individual set of rules, a set of boundaries, where we say this is a certain line that I don't cross, or this is a certain way that I behave in a given situation. And then morality is more of a communal or tribal set of rules, how we all engage together, how we all have decided that we want to interact with one another as a unit. I personally think we need to do the same thing with self sufficiency. Here are skills that I already possess. Here are things that I really believe I am willing and able to learn how to do for myself. By the way, in my mind anything related to basic survival definitely needs to be in there. Now I'm not one of these Doomsday prophets. I'm not somebody that's sitting here saying that I think the zombie apocalypse is upon us. I have known plenty of people like that and I think we've probably all seen the aftermath of like religious cults and you know, in its worst manifestation, you get something like the Jonestown Massacre. So definitely, I'm not sitting here saying like, the end is near the zombie apocalypse is coming, you should just give up and go hide in a cave. Not at all. I'm just talking about basic survival. You know, if someone has broken into your house in the middle of the night, or if you're in a scenario where there's been an ice storm or or you're a hurricane, a post natural disaster, like you have a game plan of what you're going to do to survive, until things get back to some kind of normalcy. So you have a set of objectives or set of goals that you know you could do you things you could do to take care of yourself on that very granular, individual level. And then another set of things that, okay, I know that I would want to hire someone else to help, right if if I didn't have money, I could barter like you, you're going to have things that you can't do for yourself, but you know that someone else could potentially help you out. And I think it's super important not to outsource your own critical thinking. By all means, read, have intellectual conversations, get into a spirited debate. Don't surround yourself with people who all look and act and think the same way that you do. All that accomplishes is your own confirmation bias. You're just going to go out and get more and more information that supports something that you already believe or that you want to believe. Challenge yourself, be open to some new periences take in some new intel and be able to filter things out. The thing that you cannot say, "I just won't do this for myself. I'll outsource it to someone else. I'll let someone else take control, I'll abdicate responsibility" is your own critical thinking.

Unknown Speaker : 8:21

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