I’ve actually been working on a kids coloring book along these lines where it offers worksheet pages for kids along this theme. For ex. search your neighborhood for 3 things that need to be fixed (presented a bit like a scavenger hunt). What are some ways we could accomplish this? I think if more of us treated our surroundings as somewhat more self-determined like this we would be better primed to attack the bigger things too.

Nice, way to go! I think kids these days have enough bad influence from society, so we need them to be exposed to more of this good stuff.

Anyway I think the things you’re already doing with your family are already helping contribute to this mindset and I’m optimistic that it matters. Perhaps too optimistic but I think some blind hope is important when you’re between a rock and a hard place and the solarpunk dreamers are taking the first important step; imagining something better.

Where are all the optimistic HBO dramas showing what kind of future we should strive for? :(

Congrats on sticking with the renewable field. I was there briefly but became disillusioned with the financing side.

We'll see how long I can keep with it. For now we are not even profitable, and still have some way to go there, so it's all uncertain. Very different vibe in general since the market inflation during COVID vs. now as well in terms of optimism and sense of purpose (much easier to get carried away before). Now it is easier to get hung up on all the internal bullshit and wastefulness.

Books were my weakness, but I accepted I had to cull after two moves and the reality that liberty and sustainability require minimalism. Don’t deprive yourself though. Finish your series. You’ll pry my Calvin and Hobbes and Tintin from my cold dead hands. Whereas I didn’t need a physical copy of 1Q84; there’s no pictures.

I still have my copy of 1Q84, and it does take a lot of space... For now I won't buy new books. I haven't bought much the past two years except for a handful of cooking books (which I do like to have physically). I think books I tend to look up stuff in are where I will draw the line in the future. We'll see about culling - for now there's not really much gain (except maybe some money if I am able to sell them), but if I could reduce it before my next move, that would be beneficial.

I love your self-hosting softeare and one day when I have time, I want to build the same. I’m simply time-poor right now between job and kids. I miss RSS feeds.

I've had a steady journey on this front over the past maybe 3 years - renting a small VPS or getting a SBC like the Raspberry Pi can get you started quickly if you go the route of Docker. I got into this from a privacy point of view. Really disliked being exploited by these big tech companies, and it kinda went from there. I'm my own cloud provider now, my own media streaming service, my own code repository hosting service etc.

Eating healthy makes you feel better and saves money. Kill your high interest debt as quickly as possible and the sodium and saturated fats in instant noodles are terrible. Oatmeal, rice, and pinto beans are cheap in bulk (seal the bags well with binder clips), easy, fast (you have to soak the beans for a day but your labor time is maybe five minutes with a pressure cooker like the InstantPot), and healthier. I target <50% of the daily recommended maximums for salt, sugar, cholesterol, and saturated fats, and my blood work shows it works.

My diet is not really that bad, but my main issue has been finding those really quick meals (like porridge has turned out to be). I would find myself too frequently rationalizing buying takeaway. Spent roughly 100€ a month on this. Turns out to be a much lower hanging fruit than I had anticipated.

One of the most visited pages on my personal site is my notes on how I fixed some crappy cat feeder, not going to foment a revolution but presumably it’s helping people to fix theirs too and stopping some e-waste.

I love this!

The larger streets in my neighborhood have wide sidewalks/bike paths. I can safely cycle to two local grocery stores where I also drop off any plastic bags to be recycled, the post office, our Goodwill (used store), and a strip mall with various shops and restaurants. Florida has a horrendous pedestrian/cyclist fatality rate so bike paths are the true limiting factor. Naples is especially bad. It took time to find a safer neighborhood.

Sounds like you are able to get quite some things done in a bike trip! :)

I also have an e-reader, but there’s something about seeing physical books displayed and handling them that I love. Learn about all your library’s onsite and digital services. Make it part if your weekly routine and get to know your librarians. Solarpunk is community. Here I love the free Consumers Reports when researching larger purchases and interlibrary loans for obscure books.

Yeah, I agree - I definitely think I will start checking out books I want to read as well, and then perhaps maintain a digital copy I find... ahem.. somewhere.. to bring along if I am going anywhere out of my home. Getting to know the librarians is a good tip - they're some of the most solarpunk individuals out there in the mainstream world :)

As for the physical ownership, I donated over 1,250 books in 2021 that I could easily own digitally or borrow. I don’t miss them. Minimalism is a healthier way to live and a tablet with a backup NAS is a much smaller footprint.

Just thinking about donating my books hurts me inside, so I have something to work on here. But at least I'm not continuing acquiring more physical books at the moment, even though it hurts a little to miss the last three books in the Discworld City Watch series in my shelf...

I would love an herb garden, so good for you, but I suck at maintaining plants. So I grow what is easy in the windowsill above my sink for now.

That's in any case a great start. I am certainly no wizard at maintaining plants, but I try to learn and accept that I will fail at some things. But I am also pleasantly surprised at other things, and I am developing a green thumb for every second I spend tending to them. I just planted some new seeds the other day for basil, cilantro and thyme, and waiting for them to sprout now. Also looking forward to pre-cultivate tomatoes, chilis and peppers in late winter / spring so they're ready to be planted on my balcony when the weather allows it.

Consider used clothing as well. The quality of new has deteriorated to a point where used is often better.

I buy very few clothes, but my main painpoint is pants and shoes - they literally fall apart in no time, and it is infuriating... Previously my strategy was to buy new, but wear them until they fall apart to avoid having to buy much stuff. But when it falls apart within a single season, it is getting ridiculous.

I bought my eldest child a used laptop in 2020 with a chipped case for $250. One $40 new battery last year and a free swap to Linux Mint from Windows 10 and it’s still going strong (glad your mom likes it too!). What do you run on your home server?

Nice! A great favor to your child to introduce them to the world of FOSS :)

On my server I run Nextcloud, Jellyfin, Audiobookshelf, FreshRSS, Forgejo, Kiwix (not much used yet, but I have a downloaded copy of Wikipedia early 2024 somewhere that I will put on it) and I am also playing around with some monitoring services (Grafana with Prometheus, InfluxDB and Mosquitto for some custom sensor projects I am working on). I also have a dedicated RPi4 that runs Home Assistant with Music Assistant (which allows me to use my old Sonos speakers that I bought when I was younger and more naive).

What helps in general is to think in cost per year owned. In the case if the used laptop, I’m at under $60/year. It both encourages wise buying, repairs, and using things longer. It also helps that I block all advertising I can and never read about new electronics. As a result, I’m satisfied with what I have.

Agreed (or in some cases cost per usage) - for me, it makes it much easier to place a proper value on it. When doing the purchases I made (that I described in my original comment), I tried to make a point out of doing proper research and permitting higher cost for higher quality products that should last for a long time or that allows me to repair the device, and avoid any kind of lock-in to some cloud subscription or similar. I most certainly have been fooled in some cases, but I think overall several of the purchases should last me a good while and should minimize that cost per year.

I truly believe sustainability is key to a quality of life that maximizes health and happiness. You are taking great steps. I am a planner so I always make sure I have targets and timetables for the next phases to ensure I hit them. As a result, my life gets better every year.

Cheers! Let's continue on and challenge ourselves on what is really needed for a healthy life. My goals for my next phase is at least very clear: pay down my loans ASAP, and this includes hefty cost control. I had porridge for dinner yesterday, and I felt so incredibly stupid for not realizing that it 1) tastes very good when topped with some nuts, fruits and honey, 2) is dirt cheap and 3) is as fast to prepare as instant noodles. I will be having this at least twice a week going forward.

You are absolutely correct! I want to find such communities myself, but I think that a lot of this has to be built since we are living in a time when such communities are far and few between.

The stuff that I'm meaning to participate in more going forward:

• There's a "local" makerspace I want to visit, but it is so far away that I've yet to go there. But I want to at least check it out, and talk with the people there. It's a too expensive membership considering how far away it is, as I will not be able to utilize it much.
• I went to my local library for the first time this week! I plan to go more often, and I know the host some events from time to time that looks interesting.
• There is a community farm nearby - I tried to join that last year, but I had a very difficult time participating as expected next to my job. Due to lack of skills and experience, I was unable to just start doing things on my own schedule and needed to join up whenever there were common sessions - but those were usually too early for me to get home from work to join. I also missed out on several harvest sessions. This is something I would love to rejoin if I manage to get my work life more flexible again.
• There seems to be not much going on in my neighborhood though, apart from religious stuff (I am not religious). But there certainly is room to join up more with my neighbors.

I’m proud of what we’ve achieved,

You should be, good work!

Drive an electric car when I have to, but bike exclusively within a two mile radius I also drive an electric car (and I got a small one (yay!) but new one (boo...)). I moved from a place where public transport was great, and I had no desire for a car, to a place where I struggle to get by without one (at least as long as I'm a regular, salaried employee - with a more flexible work life I could potentially swap it out with a cargo bike and a membership in a local car pool service). I have recently started to contemplating getting an older, used (electric) car in the mean time.

I went to Florida once in my childhood (Naples) - honestly, it didn't seem you could get to much of anything within a two mile radius of anything, so that you were completely dependent on the car. How much are you able to get done by bike alone these days?

Visit a library once a week

Nice! I just visited my local library for the first time earlier this week! I plan to go there more often. I've had this weird obsession about owning books and displaying them in my bookshelf. Haven't bought a new book since I got an old e-book reader though. Now I just pirate everything.... :)

Grow simple plants (green onions, basil)

Sweet! I set up a cultivation station above a cupboard in my house where I try to do the same. Still some learning curve for different herbs (I planted rosemary from seed, and they are so slow!) and for getting to a sensible cycle where I always have herbs I want available (basil, cilantro, sage, oregano, thyme and rosemary for the most part).

Buy used/refurbished preferentially

I want to get much better at this. I've started this to a degree with computers - I have a refurbished mini-PC as a home server, and I recently got my mom a "new" (i.e. also refurbished) laptop to replace her aging Macbook. I installed Linux Mint on it, and she is having no issues using it.

In other areas, I am really bad at this. I think maybe the consumer laws are so strong in my country that I am afraid of losing out on the opportunity to get stuff fixed when I don't have the proof of purchase? This is definitely a focus area going forward for the things that I do need to buy.

It wasn’t “solarpunk” at the time, but I am vegetarian now for 15 years ish (since my early 20s). I do think better would be to go vegan and I have been trying to reduce dairy

I cut out landbased meat almost 8 years ago now (I still eat fish, and I do plan on continuing, but not farmed fish). I approached it from a animal welfare and environmental impact vantage point, and started by cutting out any "uninspired meat usage". By that I mean whenever I made some kind of stew, instead of putting in a lump of ground beef, I would use beans instead. Same when I had tacos - the flavor was in the seasoning anyway.

I am very much on the dairy train still though, and I don't have the same kind of restrictions holding me back from cutting this out. I have picked up baking again recently, and I plan to experiment more with plant based spreads going forward.

A small solarpunk thing that I am doing now is choosing regional insect friendly plants for my garden and also learning more about ecological aspects there.

Lovely! Me and my partner intends to spend next year systematically learning about the local ecology. Instead of an expensive vacation as we've done before, we will up our hiking game, and learn to be better foragers (berries and mushroom). The systematic learning includes giving each other presentations about a kind of topic of the week. I think it will be fun and educational.

Also while kinda ineffectual, I started editing Wikipedia. IMO shared knowledge building like that is also very solarpunk. It’s also some “direct action” that is suitable for a lazy couch sitter like me who struggles to do “practice” otherwise.

I've come to a realization that this way of thinking ( i.e. "this is ineffectual") is part of what has kept me back from participating more locally and in smaller things before. I think my (our?) generation has been fooled into believing only large contributions are impactful. Like many other millennials, I've been told that "we can do anything" and "we can save the world though our work" etc. So I went to engineering school and started working for a big company that (at least claims to) tries to solve big problems. The result being that I have overlooked many, much more impactful smaller contributions.

I definitely think agree with you that shared knowledge is very solarpunk, and I commend you for contributing to Wikipedia. I think they have plenty of work to do to counteract the abuse of LLMs these days, so having good people contributing is certainly not "ineffectual". I have not done such direct contributions, but I have recently donated to them.

One of the things that disgusted me in academia was the insane system of journal paywalls. I am proud to have had all my publications made open access, and there are some movements in that direction more broadly (Plan S for example, more and more journals allow for open access publishing - but the cost model is still wack...)

Also very much just a point of privilege on my side, but we did manage to build a house and I have literal solar panels on my roof. Not very punk, but very solar wow.

Local electricity production is very solarpunk! Local resilience is in my opinion a very important foundation of a true solarpunk society.

Welcome! Here’s to the “good new days.” Thanks!

I like the solarpunk framing because it drops some of the historical baggage associated with anarchism (and anti-anarchist propaganda) but still has a strong focus on building solutions to purpose while maintaining ideals that I think are fundamental to the kind of world we want to live in including self-autonomy, ecological balance, mutual aid, and global cooperation. It dares us to say “okay how do we accomplish this?” and strike out to actually try one step at a time with an eye always looking towards collective human flourishing.

I gotta admit that I've fallen for the anti-anarchist propaganda, because I've for a very long time equated anarchists with either clueless, immature punk-rockers or conflated them with these liberalist people (private police force for the people.. who can afford it). I understand now that it is not an accurate picture of it at all. This idea of grassroots emergence is beautiful, and I believe a prerequisite for a truly resilient way of life. I still know little of any anarchist theory though, but I would want to read up on it to understand better.

Like anarchism it seems to adopt a “let’s just build a better version to meet all our needs and the existing version, built on many generations of snowballed corruption and bad intentions, will fade” perspective which will continue to face resistance from existing power structures but will eventually prevail. It’s a difficult project from where we perch now, but it’s one that feels worth putting time and effort into.

I like this perspective. I really don't like the prospects of a big, sudden revolution. Even though the intentions behind a revolution are good, i.e. I can fully stand behind the ideals driving it, I think these things tend to leave major power vacuums that are filled in very unpredictable ways by people very adept at exploiting such situations.

But I also think that the rate of change towards this "better version to meet all our needs" is way too slow, and I am uncertain how we accelerate it through just building this alternative world. I wonder if we just end up with a subculture on the fringes of society that the vast majority are clueless about. But we should at least be trying to live that ourselves and at the very least be a good example for others to follow. "Be the change you want to see" and whatnot. I don't know, it's still new to me...

Are we not past the point where we need to fact-check if Trump said something truthful about climate change (or anything else for that matter)?

I am writing this from an extremely privileged position, I know this. But... I have fairly recently found myself in a sort of mid-life crisis (well ahead of its time, mind you, I'm only in my mid-30s), and the origin is the fact that I've so far for the most part constructed my life to fit nicely into the societal mold, at least when it comes to participating in the modern workforce. I was initially very well-adjusted to this world - I easily got good grades in school and was readily admitted to the top engineering university in my country, and have since both worked as a management consultant for some time (as many graduates from this university tend to do) and have later taken a PhD in a STEM-field. Now I'm completely disillusioned, because I am not spending my time in a way that feels useful. I am not employing my acquired skills in a way that actually benefits the world or even my local community. My current job is within renewable energy, so in theory my efforts could go towards something good eventually, but I am but a small cog in a big machine that might not even succeed at what we are trying to do, and as with any other big corporation (and I saw quite a few examples of this when I worked as a consultant), there is so... much.... waste. I could be spending my time on much smaller, but more directly impactful (and local) endeavors.

So despite hating lock-in in other areas of my life (I have for example spent the last three years ridding myself of all big tech dependencies), I let myself get fooled into one of the bigger lock-ins the modern world has to offer: being a salaried person in the hyper-consumption economy. This realization, that I have in the short term few options to escape the need to have a steady income, is what has dawned on me in the last six months or so. This need keeps me from spending my time in the way I actually want to, because what I actually want to do are things I cannot make much money of (or would not want to make money of, as it would difficult to do so without employing the same exploitative lock-in tactics we see all around us). So getting out of this lock-in is my top priority now. It is well-aligned with solarpunk ideals, because it first and foremost means getting my consumption under control at a well-below average level. While my spending habits are already somewhat under control, in the sense that I have few recurring expenses, I've been haphazardly spending money on items I have convinced myself that I needed, and often bought new instead of used. Looking back at the list of purchases, I am at least glad that there are no stupid trend-purchases, and nothing I've not actually used. We're talking proper cookware, high-quality hiking equipment (backpacks and a good tent), stuff that should last me a while - I can't stand things that easily breaks and needs replacement well before it should. And I am also glad I don't have an insatiable desire for more - I now bought almost all I wanted that I deferred to later as a PhD student, and I feel content - so stopping now should not be much of an issue. I'm now very focused on paying off debt - car loan first (yeah, I know...) and then my student loan. I think I'll be done in about six months. I luckily have no insane mortgage going on - paying rent for the time being, but that also leaves me very flexible for the future changes I am planning.

I've been doing some reading on this whole FIRE (Financially Independent, Retire Early) movement lately as a part of this. I used to scoff at this, partly because I misunderstood what it is about. I thought this was people who would live under self-imposed austerity for ten years to be able to play golf for the rest of their lives, and for some of them it is. The subreddit I stumbled into a long time ago when I first learned of it (and before I got my epiphany) was full of people obsessing over "their number" and trying to optimize strategies to win at the lottery (i.e. stock market). But it's not austerity that (at least the OG FIRE-people) advocate for - it is simply cutting out a bunch of needless excess from your life that allows you to accumulate enough wealth over a much shorter period of time than it would usually take to be able to "retire". I put that in quotation marks, because as I mentioned above, I thought retiring early was all about playing golf and taking cruise ship vacations much earlier than you usually would. But retiring to these people really mean being free from the shackles of the salaried man. I too want that... So while I doubt I can achieve full flexibility in life early (and I don't think I have the fortitude to keep going as now for ten years to achieve this), I instead aim to be in a good position to start something for myself or with only a couple of friends/co-workers I enjoy working with that gives sufficient income to get by and enough time for other activities. I have nothing concrete planned for this yet, except a few untried ideas (that I have some potential partners for), and I anticipate I need to keep going in my current (or similar) work for another two years or so until I have the flexibility to have a go at this.

I mentioned that I have been moving towards solarpunk ideals for some time (albeit slowly), and from the above it doesn't really sound like that. What I meant by this, is that I've done things in other areas of my life that I believe to be well-aligned. One major way is through becoming engaged in the privacy community several years back, and through that the free and open source movement (this is what lead me to Lemmy, and then eventually to this instance where I've been lurking for some time). Something that attracts me to solarpunk is that it is not simply a "back to the stone ages"-approach to sustainable living, but incorporates technology in a sustainable and fair way. As a trained technologist/scientist and recovering Technology Optimist™ I yearn not for the "good old days", but as Corey Doctorow would say, the "good new days", where we can take advantage of the ingenuity of scientific discovery and technological advancement in a way that is a net benefit for everyone, and that is not detrimental to the health of the ecosystem we rely on. I think FOSS is central in a solarpunk future, as it enables us to use technology on our own terms instead of some corporation's whose ideals are far from aligned with yourself, the community or the world at large. In this area I have made big strides the last years (having last year gotten rid of my Facebook, Apple, Google and Microsoft accounts, I only recently got rid of LinkedIn - I hung onto it due to some corporate FOMO of not being able to get my next salaried position... upon retrospection, I realized I had never gotten ANYTHING useful out of being on LinkedIn, and it has turned into one of the most unhinged places on the internet). I have at the same time begun to recover from the learned helplessness I've picked up from previously using Apple-products. I feel much more confident that I can solve things myself (not just in computing), and I've to a larger degree shifted from being a pure consumer to being able to create something as well.

One of the many things I bought (ref above) was a 3D-printer, and there are few times I have felt as solarpunk as when I am working on my balcony garden (another area I've made good progress the last 4 or so years) while my 3D-printer is printing (self-designed in FreeCAD) parts for some gardening equipment, followed by a quick harvest session of arugula and tomatoes that goes on my freshly baked homemade bread.