Careerdom is in freefall. The old corporate edifice, composed of millions of human bricks trying to squeeze themselves into rectilinear slots, is tumbling apart. It’s as if we found ourselves perched on the window ledge of a collapsing office building, about to take a leap. Can we guide our descent?  Where will we land?

Social conservatives may be disappointed, but little cushioning will be provided by the “nuclear family,” a molecular concept that lends itself nicely to dissolution and re-aggregation in the fluid of the marketplace. But neither, contrary to supporters of the welfare state, do we skip over the family to “the village,” which, for its propagandists, has come to mean an assortment of governmental stopgaps doled out in exchange for party fealty. Nor will we find our resting place in “localism,” a rather watery term that avoids assignation to something more specific and solid.[1]

The only viable cornerstone for the sort of economic order we now crave is the household. It and it alone constitutes a specific locus, a discrete set of geographical coordinates, intimate enough to be personal but capacious enough to offer refuge from market forces.  Whether or not members are biologically related, it is a place you can call home. What Aristotle said about community (the polis) can also be said about the working household: it is entered into for the sake of life but culminates in the good life. 

Granted, the life gets even better when the household joins together with other households. The household should be part of something larger than itself: a neighborhood, a community, a nation, a world. These nested relationships bear, directly or indirectly, upon the interests of householding itself — nothing is not organically connected — and inform the householder in choices at the market and the polling booth alike. The savvy Householder isn’t fixated on the household per se. 

***

And that’s the first reason this option is eluding our clutches:  we aren’t so savvy.  We still see life piecemeal.  We still wear our charioteers’ blinders.  The Diseconomy, in turn, is only too ready to make the most of our blind spots.   The family farm is a distant cultural memory.  It was long ago overtaken by the factory farm and, in turn, by the horrific new Human Factory Farm, which herds us into computerized sow stalls and monetizes our every thumb twitch and brain fart.  The high-tech world is too much with us. But this is the only world we know.

How can see beyond our plexiglass cages?  We might try a thought experiment.  What if we reimagined life not as a computer matrix that divides us up into customized cells but as something more down-to-earth and interwoven—something like a garden?  What I call the “Household,” on closer inspection, might be even more aptly termed the “Human Greenhouse” given how it incubates and entwines personal and economic growth. If we swapped the Global Village for the Garden as our reigning cultural metaphor, all of our priorities would ineluctably shift:  mobility would give way to rootedness; productivity to fruitfulness; “making something of oneself” to cultivating the good life.

Things might have gone differently in this country if Thomas Jefferson, an expert horticulturalist who extolled small farming as an incubator of human virtue, had connected the dots. . . and stipulated gardening as a prerequisite for political service.  As it stands, most American politicians get their start in law and business, professions more about dividing and conquering than cultivating the common good.  (Admittedly, the American Solidarity Party seeks the common good, but its candidate for president in the last election won only 35,260 votes.)  Modern politics, alas, like modern economics splinters human interests oppositionally.  The working household is holistic by definition, whereas major parties today feast on widening disparities and grievances endemic to The Diseconomy and fuel its dysfunctions.   (One wedge issue long dangled in front of the electorate but never resolved — even now — is abortion, a sad symptom of a system in which children become economic inconveniences. Another divisive issue is immigration, an area where lack of consensus gives cover to an economy that depends on thinly veiled forms of slave labor performed by the anonymous and undocumented.)

If the stars aligned and the political heavens opened up, what sort of holistic, pro-Householder political platform would unfurl?  To be clear, it would not attempt to micromanage economics from above.  It would, rather, lay down conditions for growth from below.  In this respect, it would converge with free-market capitalists:  a healthy economic system springs from the grass roots.  We merely need adjust the conditions of our economic garden to favor the humble mandrake, not the Jolly Green Giant.  Here are some ways to do that:

1. Cease treating corporations as “persons.” The Supreme Court decision that bequeathed personhood to corporations, Citizens United, needs to be overturned.  That might require a constitutional amendment. But the cause would be worthy.  Why should a company with a net worth of billions be on an equal footing with a household worth thousands?  The ruling poisons politics at the source by allowing corporations to buy Congress with thinly disguised bribes.  This legal travesty says almost all we need to know about what’s wrong with our present system. 

2.  Offer tax breaks and other inducements for (a) cottage industry, (b) neighborhood-level betterment, and (c) bike lanes or dedicated bicycle trail networks promoting local access and cheaper, healthier transit.  The United States Constitution is a remarkably individualistic document.  So why would it favor corporations over households and communities?  By using individualistic language, according to legal rulings, the document enshrines the rights of citizens to form associations that advance their common interests.  If it thus legitimizes corporations, why by the same token can’t it empower smaller, more wholesome entities?  

3.  Slash health care costs. Our cobbled-together medical system, riddled with redundant layers of middlemen and perverse incentives for profiteering, costs us twice as much as it should.  Middle class families now spend about one quarter of their income on health insurance.   Perversely, the deciding factor in opting for an unhealthy career, too often, is the health care package offered by the employer, which offers cheaper group rates. We’re literally killing ourselves to be healthy.  It has been said that the only way to reduce ballooning health care costs would be to switch to single-payer universal health care, but too many people are too content with their employers’ coverage to provide broad-based support.  That still leaves one tantalizing option:  even if we can’t get a single-payer system for everyone, why not establish one for those whose work is based out of the home?  That would bring symmetry to a field now tilting toward employment-based insurance.

4.  Outlaw or restrict house flipping and corporate speculation in the housing market.  The median sales price of a home in the United States now hovers in the upper $400,000 range—an amount that places an ordinary house out of reach of a frugal householder.  This obscenely high entry threshold is at least partly the byproduct of speculation and profiteering. Any guess why homelessness is our country’s most pressing scourge?

5.  Implement or expand urban homesteading programs.  The city of St. Louis, where I live, owns a huge stockpile of derelict and abandoned homes needing top-to-bottom restoration.  Thanks to our urban homesteading program, many are now on sale for a dollar each.  These homes often come with priceless architectural details and rock-solid construction, boasting three courses of brick and ten- or twelve-foot ceilings.  But there are few takers.  Why?  First, the buildings typically sit in marginal, crime-ridden neighborhoods.  Second, ordinary people generally lack the skills to take on major restoration.  Both of these shortcomings could be addressed by adding a provision or two to the program:  (a) cordon off a block at a time as a “householder enterprise zone” with enhanced security and (b) encourage applicants to get in touch with one another and synchronize efforts so that they can collaborate and trade skills.  Everybody wouldn’t have to learn how to do everything from scratch, and urban rehabbing could becoming a community endeavor in the tradition of Amish barn raising.

***

Best not hold our breath while the political deities contemplate these proposals.  The most holistic economic practitioners in America, as it happens, eschew politics and get along fine without any governmental support.  They also happen to be unsurpassed gardeners.   I just identified them:  the Amish.  Most of what I know about the life I lead I learned from these hardy horticulturalists.  Jefferson would no doubt tip his hat if he could see them now.  Serenely aloof from the partisan political fray, they continue to proliferate and spread across the heartland, helped by their own remarkable capacity to self-govern.  Their population approaches 400,000, and at this rate they will constitute a majority of farmers on the continent in maybe a century. Amish testimony to householding principles is eloquent. By living quasi-Amishly during the early years of our marriage, my wife and I laid the foundation for what was to come.

Almost everything I say here about Householding is underscored by the Amish, who may serve as its paragons in America. Mary and I might never have left them had it not been for one thing:  after years of meager progress in yeomanry, we realized that we lacked the knack.  Some people are irredeemably urban.  That is why what follows will track our exploits elsewhere, namely in the city.  But that does not mean others cannot find sustenance in the country.  For them, my book, Better OFF:  Flipping the Switch on Technology, provides a blow-by-blow account of the lessons we learned under Amish tutelage.  To take those lessons to the next level, Shawn and Beth Dougherty’s The Independent Farmstead provides an unparalleled guide to small-scale ecological farming.  Even the Amish consult it. For those interested in an intermediary option, the small town, I recommend Andy Hickman’s revelatory writings at substack.com, “Hickman’s Hinterlands.”

[1]“Localism” is now the favored term for what was once called “Distributism,” an early 20^th Century economic movement popularized by G. K. Chesterton, Hillaire Belloc, and G. D. H. Cole that attempted to strike a sane, middle ground between industrial capitalism and communism or socialism but was overcome by fervor for collectivist solutions.   An excellent new book has come out from the Chesterton Society propounding “Localism” as a better way to frame the cause.  But there is an even better term, I think, as this essay will try to make clear: “Householder Economics.”

Small town proponent Andy Hickman (in overalls) at his June 1 wedding in the woods of upstate New York. Standing next to him are his father-in-law John Lamb (bearded) and me (in straw hat).

After striking out from my Amish apprenticeship, I had little inkling of what would come next. What I now think of as Householding was a concept that emerged after multiple college tries.  I only knew that, like most of my siblings and many other career-phobes, I would wither in a cubicle.  I had been trained as a classical musician who aspired to the concert stage (not unlike Stephen Goist, the violist chronicled in the previous post).  Later I veered into academics.  But I shrank from Big U, not to mention Big Med and Big Tech.  I didn’t want to answer to a committee or a boss. I sought the freedom to dabble in this and that on my own time.  Karl Marx once said that after the fetters of capitalism fell away, he would be able to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, and criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” As a restless grad student who read Marx in school, I realized I wanted the same freedom — something for which I suspect my erstwhile farming relation, Ed (whose career path took him straight to the Big Med treadmill) also pines. But I didn’t want to answer to some version of a Politburo.

Yet how was I supposed to feed a family?  I knew that on my Bohemian income I’d never bring home a fat paycheck.  That left one resort:  self-sufficiency. . . minimizing the need to make income in the first place.  Unknowingly, I was edging again toward the classic meaning of economy.  To be truly economical is to secure life’s needs under one roof.  Without ever having to agitate for class revolt (except from grad school classes), and without having to follow Marx to a rural idyl (not that I didn’t try), I found myself setting up my own means of production in the heart of a capitalist city.  A worker’s utopia gradually took shape, the size of a house.

As this unlooked-for oasis arose from the vocational desert, the terms of true freedom blossomed forth. In my quest for fulfillment, why indeed should I follow the lead of a human bee who narrows all options to a cubbyhole? Work is not an end in itself—not a “sacred calling”—but a means to a larger end.   Vocational fulfillment is not holy; it is holistic.  It doesn’t reduce life to one thing but interweaves many. It is gardenlike.  Marx, with his pastoral fantasy, understood this, but why launch a communist state when 2600 square feet will do?   Admittedly, my spread is supplemented by extra space in the yard, on the roof, and in the neighborhood.  In a jurisdiction smaller than Liechtenstein, my wife and I became co-chairmen of a five-member party.

***

Our first and and most heartening discovery as urban householders will raise eyebrows:  it is easier to be economical in the city than the country.  This must count as another cognitive barrier to the life I now lead. We associate frugality with rusticity, not urbanity. Yet urban density invites foot travel and face-to-face interaction.  Rural spaces, on the other hand, encourage car use, and in fact, inspired Henry Ford’s mass-production of the automobile. Cars are time and money hogs. Rural (and suburban) locales also encourage dependency on social media to the degree that they separate people geographically. For us, cabin fever was an intermittent problem in the long, slow winter when the nearest Amish neighbor was over a mile away.

To be sure, walkability has its own costs: muggings, crowds, the hustle and bustle.  New York, Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Austin, Denver, Seattle and the like suffer from the most crippling symptom of diseconomy of all:  exorbitant housing costs.  That is because the careerists who flock to them bid up the price.   But not every worthy and walkable city is so beset.  Cincinnati, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis and other rust belt left-behinds retain much or all of their bygone charm and vitality at a friendlier pace and more affordable price. And some of them, as noted, even offer urban homesteading deals.  

From among the aging beauties, we chose St. Louis.  Once the fourth largest city of the United States and far older than Chicago (which only bumped it from its spot as commercial hub of the Midwest a century after it was founded), St. Louis enjoys a warmer climate and cheaper prices than Omaha, and far flatter turf for biking than Cleveland, Pittsburgh, or Cincinnati. In St. Louis the prospects for Householding literally plateau.

The original Cathedral of St. Louis, under the Gateway Arch (my bike is parked in front). The so-called “Old Cathedral” rests on a bluff fifty feet above the Mississippi River and demarcates the edge of the riverside plateau across which the city of St. Louis has gradually expanded.

***

Still, even in St. Louis I am one of a rare breed. How do I know? A government official told me. He was a Census Bureau representative, and he knocked on my door one day when I was puttering around the house. I had been randomly selected, he said, for inclusion in a periodic study conducted by the bureau.  I invited him in.

To be honest, I enjoy being interrupted in the middle of the day.  Most people I know who work regular jobs miss out on the pleasure of the mid-day “Knock-Knock.”  Plus, having recently restored most of the first floor of my 115-year-old St. Louis brownstone, I was eager to give the nickel tour.  If you’re gonna work from the home, ya’ wanna have a place to be proud of.

When I set eyes on this 2,600-square-foot, two-family fixer-upper on the outskirts of Lafayette Square, a splendid Gilded Age neighborhood near downtown, the carriage house and back porch were practically caving in. The downstairs walls were sloppily papered over with chintzy floral patterns; the upstairs walls covered in cheap, glued-on 1970s paneling; and the kitchens and bathrooms decrepit. But the price was $99,000. On top of that, as a two-family house, it came with live-in tenants upstairs.  The rent paid the mortgage. What was not to like? (We only had to carry the mortgage for a year thanks to proceeds from a rehab we’d already done in a small town where we lived for a few years after leaving the Amish.)

We snapped it up.  I attacked the downstairs bathroom first, acquiring the skills of tiling as I went.  When there was a gap in tenancy, I redid the upstairs bathroom. I salvaged the carriage house and added a clerestory to the second floor, transforming it into a studio-retreat, which I’ve recently expanded into a “historic tiny house,” now rented out to another tenant (replenishing the income that dried up when we eventually took over the upstairs of the main house). I rebuilt the two-story back porch and added a third level on top with a view of downtown and the Gateway Arch. Eventually, I stripped off the old wallpaper in the living room and front hall, and I hung antique chandeliers I’d unearthed in flea markets.

The interior of my rebuilt carriage house, now occupied by a renter, showing the clerestory skylight from below. It adds both light and height to the room. (The stairway railing here also shows dual-functionality of a different kind).

The view of the Arch from my rooftop container garden in early spring.

My living room, after stripping the wallpaper and repairing the plaster. The furnishings and chandelier were obtained at flea markets or antique malls for $100 or less.

The front hall, with a light purchased at “Restore” for $10 and a tapestry purchased at a flea market for $25.

How could we afford to do all this?   By not buying a move-in ready house.

I’d put the difference between a new-home buyer and the rehab buyer this way:  When you first move into your McMansion, you’re on cloud nine, but it’s all downhill from there.  When you move into your junk heap, you hit bottom, but it only gets better on out.

***

There were other frugal steps, too, and they took their cue from Amish precedent. They mostly involved scaling back, or creatively readapting, technology.  Our neighborhood was built long before the automobile was invented, so all of its lovely amenities are within walking or biking distance:  1906 Carnegie library, locally owned restaurants, farmer’s market, family-run hardware store, family-run grocery, beautiful tree-lined streets and historic architecture, and perhaps the most beautiful urban oasis in America:  Lafayette Park.  You can get the country in the city, but you can’t get the city in the country.   In our precinct of St. Louis, frugality is not a penance.  It is a pleasure.

Lafayette Park dates back to the 1840s, the beginning of the heyday of urban park design, and turned a flat pasture, used for grazing cattle, into Shangri-La. The land was sculpted, paths and ponds added, trees planted, and the result stands before you.

When our kids were small, we toted them around on “trail-a-bikes,” one-wheeled attachments that turn a standard bicycle into a tandem for a child.   Later, as our kids grew they got their own bikes and we didn’t need to pull them.  After about three or four years of getting our city legs, we divested of the automobile once and for all, only occasionally renting a car for a family trip.   By jettisoning the car, according to the calculations of writer James Howard Kunstler, we became instant millionaires, at least inasmuch as we saved the need to earn a million dollars per car over a lifetime. 

My semi-recumbent bike in the alley, pulling a trailer that I have used to haul soap to the market. (Note: my children have long outgrown the trail-a-bikes so they are no longer on hand). I prefer the semi-recumbent to the regular bicycle because of its broader seat and inwardly contoured back, furnishing both comfort and support to the lower lumbar region of the spine. Standard bicycles require hunching and have been hard on my lower back.

A recent addition to the household, my “PEBL” (Pedal Electric Bicycle Lifestyle), an intermediary vehicle between a car and a bicycle. It goes about 20 mph (combining pedaling and electric-assist motor), seats two, and has a practical range of twenty or thirty miles. Its per-mile operating cost is about ninety percent cheaper than a car’s. For more information, see better.bike.

Our house has five fireplaces. We cut our gas bill in half by installing gas log sets in each. During the winter, we keep the main thermostat at 55 degrees, close off the room we’re using, turn on the fireplace, and snuggle around hearth.  Some austerity measure.

The living room fire place, around which many a book group discussion has been carried on.

With several growing children, our biggest expense while they were still in the house was food, but since we saved so much in other areas, we splurged in this one, devoting perhaps the biggest single portion of our budget to it. There are maybe 60 restaurants within walking distance of our house — a pleasant walk, given the shady sidewalks and architectural eye candy all about.

John D. McGurk’s Irish Pub, only three blocks from my house, features live Irish music six nights a week in a setting perhaps more atmospherically Irish than any pub outside of Ireland.

Nonetheless, my latest big project has been to reduce the food budget by setting up a container vegetable garden on our flat roof, an area made accessible by the new third-story deck.  I’ve covered the roof with TPO plastic, tripling its thickness under the container garden, itself enclosed within a chicken-wire pavilion to keep the squirrels out (and painted to prevent rust).  In our first year, we harvested 16 plump winter squashes from one container alone.  Last summer, a single container yielded 700 cherry tomatoes from one picking. The rooftop vantage point is so beguiling, our garden doubles as an entertainment space on breezy summer evenings.

My rooftop container garden. Again, early spring, but facing the other direction.

Had we stayed in the country, food sufficiency would have been the focus.  In the city, avowedly, growing our own food has not been a priority:  among standard household expenses today, food is probably the greatest bargain and smallest drain on the budget. Buying from the grocery store or the farmers’ market has bought time to mitigate more pressing costs related to technology, mortgage payments, energy, medicine, and education, of which, more in a moment.

***

To return to technology: For all the years we raised our children at home, we avoided monthly outlays for Internet or cell service. We managed to get along fine with a landline, glue-and-paper books, and real life.  Didn’t that put our children out of sync with their generation? Yes, and that might be the best thing about offline living. Jonathan Haidt’s influential expose of social media, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, graphically surveys the massive psychological harm done to young people by smartphones and computers over the last fifteen years.  We were early non-adopters. 

The kids, admittedly, did their share of pouting. But strangely, they never looked unhappy when immersed in The Lord of the Rings, the study of languages, or music. Nor did getting together with friends at the weekly homeschooling cooperative dampen their spirits. And no, bicycling to the library, or later to high school four miles away when our boys outgrew homeschooling, did not stunt their growth. A recent study shows that senior citizens who regularly bike around town have the immune systems of 20-year-olds. Conversely, 20-year-olds who don’t exercise show preliminary signs of atherosclerosis.

Our house has so many books, I transferred some of them to the carriage house downstairs closet, which uses old stable doors to showcase its contents.

Growing up without access to the web or TV, the kids had no option but to create their own amusements when they weren’t completing school assignments. Their pastimes often took a cue from their parents’:

Today, my youngest son — overhearing my weekly classical ensemble rehearsals from the womb on — composes music as a freelancer. He attended a private college on a full scholarship that underwrote his teenage hobby. His first album, professionally produced, will be released later this summer.  After trying out a career in finance for a year, he also recently decided to apprentice with me as a soap maker, with the startling difference that he is taking the product wide over the Internet.  He makes and sells soap in his apartment by day in order to compose music by night.

The soap room, where I recently inducted my 26-year-old son in the family trade.

My daughter also entered college on a musical note.  She majored in flute with an eye to a career in music therapy, then pivoted in grad school to a more open-ended field, social work, underwritten by a prize fellowship.  After graduating with highest honors and working as a patient liaison at a hospital for two years, she pivoted again to become a stay-at-home mom, selling used high-end apparel online in her spare time, a gig that complements a longstanding pastime she picked up from her mom:  sewing.  Her husband works alongside his brother in carpentry, a trade also based out of the home. 

My oldest son — the amateur linguist — got the idea of inventing his own language after conjugating Latin verbs as a homeschooler and reading Tolkien’s Silmarillion for fun. Lolling on the sofa with medieval pseudo-chronicles, in turn, paved the way to computer languages and opened an unlikely low-tech path to high-tech success.  But he’s no sedentary slouch.  He took up my own early sport in school, wrestling, and to offset desk-work, lifts weights and practices martial arts at a local dojo. As mentioned in part one of this essay, fresh out of college he was recruited to be the chief technology officer of a startup and designed its signature app.  He works entirely from home.  His education at a private university was fully paid by a presidential scholarship. 

By unplugging we did save on utilities and subscription fees, but as these examples attest, we saved far more on educational and medical fees, perhaps the costliest tolls of careerism. In our worker mini-utopia, a direct connection between the party chairs (Mom and Dad) and the rank and file (our children) catalyzed unforeseen creative interfaces. 

I.e, we rubbed off on them. 

We also all signed onto the cheapest health insurance plan of all: health.

Technology has often been called a two-edged sword, and the metaphor works given how often it undercuts its own promises.  But I sometimes think of it in a different way: as a wild card, a variable with multiple effects no one can foretell. When dropped on the table of our common life, it continually reshuffles the deck. The trick, for those who seek to up their odds, is to heed the lesson of the gambler in a casino who realizes that the only way to win in the long run is to trade spots with the dealer. The fates of the players rise and fall with every new hand. Only the dealer regularly comes out smiling.  Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, smiles perhaps too well, and so do his family members. As his company unleashes a plethora of apps and gadgets upon luckless billions, he publicly admits that he won’t let his own nephew have a smartphone. 

Take a tip from Tim.  You don’t have to take the hand he deals you.  You can deal your own. 

***

I didn’t show or tell the Census person all this, but as we trundled through the rooms, he saw and heard enough. When we took our seats at the kitchen island, after some preliminaries he got to the first real question: How many hours did I work in a week?

The kitchen after adding an island, a paint job, a new floor, closets, bric-a-brac, and enlarged windows overlooking the back porch.

It was hard to answer. I don’t get paid for working on the house, nor did Mary for homeschooling our children. We both have done a little of everything, only some of which is remunerated. I asked him for clarification.  He wanted paid labor only.  I thought a bit, and when I’d arrived at a number, I felt my face redden.

“Fifteen hours,” I said on my own behalf, quickly adding, “I know it seems a small amount, but as you can see, in my spare time I work on my house. I’m also a writer, and that’s mainly a labor of love.” 

To my relief, his eyes sparkled, and he recorded the findings with relish, along with the descriptions of our lifestyle. We were part of a minute but growing sector of respondents who, as he put it, “choose to have less of what other people say you need so you can have more of what you want.” He himself followed the same philosophy. Once a business consultant, he was semi-retired, and one of the ways he made money was by doing Census surveys.   (After the interview, we became friends and still occasionally meet for a drink at the neighborhood brewery).

Questions that followed unearthed my two principal income streams: making soap and driving a pedicab. While the main secret of our livelihood is not to need income in the first place, we still require some. Two-thirds of my earnings come from making soap and selling it at the local farmers’ market on Saturdays. The other third, at least until COVID, derived from hauling baseball fans around the Cardinals stadium during the summer on a pedal-powered chariot.  (Okay, I do my own kind of careering.)  That’s how the time broke down: an average of about ten hours per week on soap, and five hours — if spread annually — on the pedicab. 

The rest of my time is discretionary. As the mood or opportunity has arisen, I have managed to lead a classical/jazz combo in weekly gigs at a restaurant; serve as a volunteer organist at church; launch a book club; spearhead a tree-planting campaign in my neighborhood; successfully petition the state highway department for historic lighting and wrought-iron fences over a nearby interstate bridge; write pedicab regulations for the city; teach classes at my children’s homeschooling cooperative; knock off several articles for national publication; and, last but not least, author a long-term bestseller on my family’s time with the Amish. I’ve skimmed the cream of career satisfactions without the narrowness and precariousness of the career per se. And in mentoring my children in their own vocational pursuits as I go, neither have I missed out on their lives; my work has doubled as a way of raising and educating them. I live the Marxian fantasy without the Marxian eschatology.

My wife’s hours as a telecommuting bookkeeper came to about 20 per week — seemingly more than mine, but still allowing her the same common life with our children and leaving her abundant discretionary time as well.

***

A word must be said about the technological side of so much work from home today:  the Internet.  If anything is a two-edged sword, this is.  Leading the paradoxical factors that urge us homeward is, of course, an electric wire that tethers us to an employer located elsewhere.  Or it patches us into the new “crowd-based capitalism,” as Arun Sundararajan calls it in his book, The Sharing Economy (2016), a massive online emporium for the trade of goods and favors among far-flung strangers.

But the personal computer is a Pandora’s Box. Once opened, what’s to contain the very forces we would escape?  I know a family that, in outward respects, leads the same householding life we do. They reside in an old St. Louis manse the father partly restored.  He, like Mary, works from home with the aid of a computer. But his work is not part-time and flexible. I can’t be too specific, but I can say that it saddles him with heavy responsibilities and involves monitoring and fixing company problems in real time. The problems are both technical and managerial, and they demand his attention many evenings and weekends. Without warning they consume his energies as husband, father, and householder.

Instead of enhancing household dynamics, this sort of electronic connection short-circuits them.   When he’s in the throes of company drama, his wife and children have learned to keep their distance. Dad doesn’t just work in the cloud, he carries his cloud with him. He has become only too aware of the shadow it casts.  But at this stage in his professional life, the fiberoptic cable has tied his hands.   He has little other prospect for a gainful position that can satisfy his present household budget — which, unlike ours, includes outlays for two cars, a hefty mortgage, and huge heating and air conditioning bills.

Mindful of cautionary tales like his, we have observed certain safeguards.  Of course, again, we’ve kept our household costs to a minimum to forestall precisely this sort of vulnerability.   Second, the bulk of our work at home is concrete and sensate, inviting participation and collaboration across all ages.  It doesn’t shut out or exclude.  (If anything, my home-restoration projects have been too inclusive since they’ve often spilled over into our common living space.  Organization has never been my strong suit.)  Mary’s modest online work has been part-time, low-key, and flexible.  So has been my work as a writer.  As needed, we can shut off a room to do our own thing.  Out of an excess of caution, no one but Mary has had the password to the computer, so there’s no opportunity to get sucked in.  If we have to look up something online or send an email, the library computer is three blocks away.

Which is to say:  in the high tech casino of modern life, we’ve mustered enough independence to deal our own hand.  We don’t have to settle for the hand we’re dealt.

The other side of doing it all at home: organization has never been my strong point.

***

How much do we earn, the Census representative next asked. I tallied up the numbers, and when our incomes were combined, I again grew red-faced.  They came to somewhere between $25,000 and $30,000 a year. “I know it doesn’t seem like much,” I burbled, “but our expenses are low, so we still have money for fun.”

Even as I write, something seems fishy about these figures, something too good to be true. If we can live so well on so little, why isn’t everyone rushing to join us?  A moment’s reflection reveals further reasons for a dearth of frugal Householders. A typical modern American raised under Careerdom, encounters certain final stumbling blocks.

Some, again, are cognitive: Take the numbers themselves. Our income places us just above the poverty line. When certain relatives got wind of how little money I earn, they made no secret of their horror. On a family visit, one drew back and roared, “Be a man!  Get a real job!”  Our income was adequate to our needs, but did that matter to this scandalized representative of conventional wisdom?   The number alone carried a stigma.

If a low income can scandalize, what about a lowly job description? I don’t believe my mother ever was able to utter the words “rickshaw driver” in my presence. Under Careerdom, you are what you do. I have been asked repeatedly why, with all my education, I don’t become a professor. To which I respond with Thoreau, “I don’t want merely to ‘profess’ something.”

My rickshaw (or “pedicab”), not in use during or since Covid but once the source of a third of my income.

But if being a rickshaw driver does not sum up who I am, what word does?  I sorted through sundry epithets:  Homecrafter. . .  too precious.  Home ecologist. . .  too scientific.   Urban homesteader. . .  too toilsome.  Lord of the manse. . .   too snooty.  In the end, I come back to the serviceable, if a bit prosaic, Householder.  The word fits.   It probably still won’t win over hardened skeptics.  

Having dispensed with status and semantics, we come to the last and most formidable barrier to this life:  technology itself.  In modern America, automobiles, computers, smartphones, and televisions have long ceased being tokens of affluence. They are now bare necessities.  Bewail their perfidious effects though we do, few of us even think of kicking the habit.  The mere thought of ditching a device conjures a specter of Herculean labors consigned to prehistory:  Harnessing one’s own legs for transportation?  Flexing one’s arms to saw a piece of wood, hammer a nail, or hoist a beam?  Wielding one’s fingers to pen a letter or ply needle and thread?  The mind recoils!  Technological retrogression is akin to narcotic withdrawal.  Marx missed the mark once again:  Religion is not the opiate of the people.  Technology is.  Without it, who can face up to the pain? 

But only therein lies gain.   Drug addicts emerge clean from rehab every day.  So can you, from a home rehab.  Take it from me:  when I got in this business I was as technologically dependent as the next guy.  Probably even more so given the many years I spent sitting in study carrels with my head in books.   I didn’t leave school until age 30.  I’m still not very organized.

 If I can do it, you can.

You—like me, like my relative Ed—perch at the edge of a precipice.  On one side, the relentless, grinding maw of technological advance.  On the other, freedom.  Take some hints from this primer.  And take a leap.

For those interested in garnering home improvement skills before taking “the leap,” let me recommend The Shelter Institute in Bath, Maine, which offers a variety of one- or- two-week courses, and for younger aspirants, the new College of St. Joseph the Worker, in Steubenville, Ohio, a curriculum that combines liberal arts with practical majors in carpentry, electricity, plumbing, and HVAC, as well as a summer course in timber frame construction.

Many thanks to Pieter Vree, who published an earlier version of this article in The New Oxford Review and whose delicate editorial touch helped shape it into its two-part format.  For more of Vree’s handiwork, I would direct readers to subscribe to his illustrious journal.