Building a Tree Fort
This country has been a nation of consumers for like two generations and it’s made us soft.
It’s convenient to buy or rent whatever we need, but a certain quality of resilience is lost when we forget how to make things and do things.
The internet makes it easy for people to relax into becoming a helpless critic of a system perceived as oppressive.
Take your meds: you are a victim of capitalism.
I think this is one of the factors that drives unnecessary panic, which I think is sourced in people’s perception that they are powerless, and this state of learned helplessness is perpetuated because we are surrounded by risk adverse critics who really just want us to be loyal consumers.
I am fond of using the following example to test a person’s willingness to break the spell of learned helplessness:
I say “let’s build a tree fort!”
“I’ll steal a pallet from the lumberyard on my way home from school, and you grab one of your dad‘s hammers and a handful of nails; let’s put it in that tree on that empty lot over there next to the abandoned crack house.”
“At the end of the first day, we will have built the world’s shittiest and most dangerous tree fort.”
“….and on day two we will bring some rope and create a rudimentary safety rail because both of us fell and almost died a couple of times.”
“If somebody doesn’t destroy the tree fort we will add to it (just a little bit at a time), and if we are lucky the tree fort will last for maybe two weeks until some cop or some crackhead tears it down and we are forced to try again.”
The best part of this endeavor has nothing to do with the tree fort 👀
The best part is planning, scheming, innovating, and creatively collaborating on solutions for each emerging barrier, and as we settle into a problem-solving vibe, we find it’s inevitable that we will eventually succeed in building a fort we can call our own.
This is a decent test because it reveals that a lot of people have never built a tree fort.
There are people whose parents hired a contractor to build them a tree fort, or maybe they saw videos of tree forts on Instagram.
But a lot of people have never built a fort, so they don’t really know that success doesn’t exist unless there are a lot of failures.
As consumers they are terrified of failure.
They don’t know that successful tree fort builders are frequently surrounded by well-informed critics who tell them that it can’t be done.
“Just watch this tree fort video on instagram!”
And let’s be honest: it’s a lot more popular to be a person who snidely insults people who builds tree forts.
Think about what it was like in school: the cool kids didn’t build tree forts.
Their parents were rich, and they went on expensive vacations.
During spring break hung out on houseboats on Lake Tahoe, and they could buy what they needed, and if they had a tree fort, it was built for them.
But they stopped playing in tree forts because within their affluent subculture it was more popular to become a little adult, which is to say: a loyal consumer, and NOT a maker or a doer.
Who is panicking?
The loyal consumers (often: administrators and self-ordained critics) are terrified they will be forced to become a maker or a doer.
The people who are terrified of the critics who are on hand to perpetuate a state of ossified mediocrity.
It’s not going to be the “popular kids” who break from this cultural miasma.
It’s going to be the dorks who build tree forts, and they will probably come from families too poor to spend spring break on a house boat on Lake Tahoe.
I think we’ll be fine, y’all are just looking for heroes in all the wrong places.