Just what is self sufficiency??? Updated.

Anyway, what is self sufficiency?

To me    Self Sufficiency would be total Independence from everything and everybody. You would be self sufficient in power, food production, transport and housing, security, welfare, in total, Everything.

What does it mean to you? 

I personally believe that it would be intolerable and lonely to be "totally Self Sufficient" because you would need no one else in the whole world and to me, not being a Buddhist Monk in solitary contemplation yet, means I would be missing out on a whole load of interaction. Also I truly believe that no one person can totally be self sufficient.

You may have heard of the saying "Jack of all trades, master of non".This is usually a disparaging remark aimed at people who are not very good at anything and especially any trade but if you were to take this concept further with the thought of Self Sufficiency then it would be quite apt. When Neanderthal man decided to move into a group living set up rather than live a solitary life in a cave he started the path we are on now where we become social creature.

Besides, we cannot in one life time master all of the trades required to live as we do today. Think of your home. Could you dig the foundations, pour the concrete, build the house and then furnish it.
Oh hang on in that simple question ( all be it a leading one) could you find and plant a tree seed and wait maybe 20 years to harvest a piece of wood to make a spade shaft? Could you find the ore to smelt to make metal and then fashion a workable spade design? Then of course there is the concrete you would need to collect the pebbles from a beach, manufacture some cement and collect some sand, as this is a course sand in concreting. Then you wait for it to rain to collect some water and all together you are not even "out of the ground" as they say.

With this simple few paragraphs you can see that you would have insurmountable problems doing everything yourself.
So what could self sufficiently really mean in a more modern context true to the ideas of being self sufficient.

For me it is off grid so I am self sufficient of the power grid and any charges or blackouts that are coming in the near future which may be as early as next year!! To be self sufficient would also mean I had enough food to eat that could be grown or foraged by myself. That in itself would mean my diet would be predominately  vegetarian with perhaps the fresh road kill to supplement the veggie diet.

A fresh water supply is paramount and also somewhere to live where I would be warm and safe so that in turn would need fuel for a fire such as gathering wood for a wood fired fire.
When it comes to transport to be self sufficient would probably mean the use of a pedal cycle or horse to get away from the reliance of the fuel companies.

Add to this we would need to do some sort of work or live in a place where bartering or exchange of goods and services were done.

On the whole those who espouse to be wanting to be self sufficient are, in my opinion living in cloud cuckoo land and I say that with a heavy heart as I was one of them until I actually looked at the topic and thought long and hard about the topic and how I would become  self sufficient in the future.

With reference to the future and the ideas of prepping and what we can do if there is an economic and/or a social collapse then all is not lost because if we learn to garden, grow a bit of food, store some water, which can be a few water barrels in the garden and thus become more self sufficient in every day life then if the melt down happens then YOU, I, WE all have tradeable skills and tradeable goods because we wanted to be more self sufficient.