Temporary Jobs vs Permanent Planet
FREE Value Creation Guide (PDF)!
For our Making Ripples column this week in The Free Weekly, I decided to go off the beaten path a little bit and talk about the oil spill in Mayflower, Arkansas, as it relates to job creation. Usually I don’t write about anything that could be seen as political – we just tell our story about our journey off-grid, offer tips, resources, and services, and call it a day here at Ripples. But I had seen this rather fantastic, well-worded argument online about “Temporary Jobs Built Our Country” and how we (as a country) needed temporary jobs from the Keystone XL Pipeline. It made me think of headlines in the future that might read “Temporary Jobs Built Our Country and Made it Inhospitable to Human Life”.
The argument was actually quite good, I thought, for why desperate families needed income no matter what its source, even if it poisoned their own drinking water. That made me realize that this desperation for money to meet basic needs was driving people to actually harm their own best interests in pursuit of this pseudo American Dream.
Real American Dreams Don’t Hurt Americans
Ryan & I created Ripples with concepts like “we can solve any problem eventually” and “creating our own jobs will help us do the most good for the world.” We made this Value Creation guide to try and explain our thinking process, and why we started pursuing self-employment. We’ve spent several years (off and on) editing this guide, but you know, I still think it needs revision – it’s not quite finished. I do not expect people to read this guide and, in the blink of an eye, no longer rely on jobs that harm our planet and each other. This guide is meant to address the psychological process of deciding to pursue the American Dream in a way that isn’t harmful, but helpful to our country, our communities, and our families. And yet, I hope it does inspire action. I hope it inspires anyone who has wanted a different life for themselves to consider taking that first step. The how-to guides are created by expert accountants, businesswomen, consultants, and farmers who know how to sell at a market. This isn’t a how-to guide, it’s a why-to guide.
This is what helped us create Ripples, and we hope it helps you to make ripples in your life, too: